Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8419582" data-attributes="member: 42582">There are also epic destinies and similar player-side PC build stuff that cares about power source.But as you say it is very rare for it to matter to action resolution.And at a certain point - and this is something that has come up in another recent thread (the Evil Gods one) - we have to ask: are we trying to reconstruct this game and its fiction on the model of an axiomatic system? Or are we trying to make sense of it as an aesthetically significant artefact, similarly to how a literary critic might?If the former, then maybe we're obliged to factor in that one lich power as part of our reconstruction. But that's not what I'm doing. I'm asking if I play this game, using a typical range of the published story elements (PC build elements, MM entries, etc) will the game require me to come up with a mechanical notion of magic vs non-magic. And the answer is no.By way of contrast, the game will make us have to think about characters in the fiction who are ready to go all-out and who are exhausted or otherwise far from the peak of their game. And so eg whereas a beholder's central eye is traditionally an anti-magic cone, in 4e - where (at least for the one I used) it stops the use of encounter and daily powers - it is a ray that debilitates the character or suppresses their skill. Some people probably think this is a crappy change that wrecks the play and story of beholders. I thought it was fine - in play it doesn't stop the affected PC(s) participating (they still have their at-wills, unlike an AD&D wizard who can't do anything useful in an anti-magic zone), but it does suggest that the aberrant beholder is distorting reality via its gaze so that those PCs' normal skill and prowess are severely limited.But whether or not one likes it, it's pretty clear what is happening in the fiction, and how the mechanics support this. Insisting that it's incoherent by importing, unargued, the premise that 4e must preserve distinctions that mattered in other editions of D&D just seems silly to me.</blockquote>

Verification