D&D General D&D Evolutions You Like and Dislike [+]

[jmartkdr2]

well, i know that i would rather choose to be less effective in what i wanted to do anyway to spite the fact that the opportunity was given to me by someone else than just take what's being offered.

right everyone?

But now another player has influenced my decision, which is a horrible violation of player agency! /s

 

[SkidAce]

I didn't think wizards could cast command.

 

[Yaarel]

@Maxperson

Re "bossing".

The Intimidation skill is a naturalistic form of mind control, including forced surrender.

But the 4e Warlord flavor is more like a team captain, or football quarterback calling out plays, to coordinate tactics during a combat. 4e fans often use the term "coach" of a boxer to describe the Warlord analogously.

Remember 4e carefully distinguishes mechanical rules described precisely, from flavor typically in a textbox to characterize the mechanics. One Warlord power has a flavor text that uses the word "command" in relation to the name of the power. If it rubs you the wrong way, then as a 4e player, you can and should rewrite the flavor text to personalize your own character concept.

 

[CreamCloud0]

I didn't think wizards could cast command.

the fact i don't know what classes can cast what is besides the point.

 

[CreamCloud0]

Paladin: Your forces are beaten, Eye of Gruumsh. Surrender and I will spare you miserable life.
Eye of Gruumsh: I surrender. ::Falls to his knees in front of paladins::
Warlord: He's too dangerous to leave alive. I use my commander's strike to make the paladin strike the Orc.
Paladin: Sonofabisket! WHY? He surrendered! ::rolls: Does as 17 hit?

anyways, this is a player/table level problem, not a class ability problem.

 

[DammitVictor]

...you...dislike reflavouring? i mean i dislike reflavouring as an excuse to not add content but reflavouring as a whole? really?

My position's a little more nuanced than that... but it's not a lot more nuanced than that.

Game mechanics should reflect something that is diegetically occurring the game's fiction, and the way the game mechanic works should be based on what is diegetically occurring in the fiction. Reflavoring is using the same game mechanic to represent a different diegetic element; when the old mechanic still reflects the new fiction, it's fine. I even think it's clever.

When the old mechanic doesn't reflect the new fiction, it's bad. It's immersion-breaking, and it reduces the narrative layer of the game-- the very thing most of the reskinning advocates value most-- to that of a CCG or a board game like HeroQuest. (Which is a lot more accurate and a lot more damning than comparing them to MMOs.) And in 4e and 5e, we see that spells and powers are increasingly mechanically defined in ways that don't make sense diegetically for gameplay concerns. At the extremes, it leads to thinking about the game mechanics and "flavor text" as separate and unrelated with the latter not actually being part of the rules at all.

Leading to arguments like "I didn't choose Cleric for the obligations, I chose it for the powers" and "the PHB only says druids don't wear metal armor, not that they can't"... which people might argue are subjective playstyle/culture preferences, but which I would argue are objective faults in the ruleset-as-written, and a mindset that is so corrosive to my desired playstyle (regardless of what game we're playing) that I will not countenance it at my table. I don't mind practically any degree of mechanical optimization in my games, but when you combine mechanical legalism with disregard for narrative constraints, the result is something that is no longer a roleplaying game.

My particular bugbear isn't player-level reskinning, though... it's when the "rules matter; fluff is negotiable" mindset is applied to the game design, such as in 4e and moreso in 5e. The Dark Sun Campaign Setting for 4e is the perfect example: it's a really well designed campaign setting for the 4th Edition ruleset, but "reskinning" means that several of its iconic (and less iconic) elements are practically unrecognizable.

Dragonborn would work great as a playable version of draconians in Dragonlance; just note the alignment reversal, add the death throes (scaling by level), and... they're perfect. Not only are they not dray in Dark Sun, but they have no rightful place in the setting of Athas. Templars being Arcane, with their Dragon King as a Patron? Makes perfect sense. But Templars are a leader class, which the 4e Warlock cannot replicate. Goliaths are not half-giants. Druids and Shamans are fine, but the Elemental Cleric themes just... don't get anywhere near replicating the Elemental Clerics of the setting.

I'm very flexible and tolerant when it comes to house ruling and homebrewing and using 3PP to incorporate things my players want to include in the game-- as long as it doesn't violate the logic of the setting, the coherence and consistency of the game we're all agreed to play together. Excessive reflavoring, and overeliance on it, destroys this and misses the point of what the game rules are for.

 

[Remathilis]

My particular bugbear isn't player-level reskinning, though... it's when the "rules matter; fluff is negotiable" mindset is applied to the game design, such as in 4e and moreso in 5e. The Dark Sun Campaign Setting for 4e is the perfect example: it's a really well designed campaign setting for the 4th Edition ruleset, but "reskinning" means that several of its iconic (and less iconic) elements are practically unrecognizable.

Dragonborn would work great as a playable version of draconians in Dragonlance; just note the alignment reversal, add the death throes (scaling by level), and... they're perfect. Not only are they not dray in Dark Sun, but they have no rightful place in the setting of Athas. Templars being Arcane, with their Dragon King as a Patron? Makes perfect sense. But Templars are a leader class, which the 4e Warlock cannot replicate. Goliaths are not half-giants. Druids and Shamans are fine, but the Elemental Cleric themes just... don't get anywhere near replicating the Elemental Clerics of the setting.

All which would be fine if Dark Sun was a separate game with its own PHB, DMG, and MM. But since its part of the larger D&D game, some refluffing is necessary to incorporate elements of the current rules into the setting without three 300 page tomes to catalogue every difference.

 

[Remathilis]

anyways, this is a player/table level problem, not a class ability problem.

Just pointing out why the target being willing is an integral part of the warlord's abilities to work.

 

[W'rkncacnter]

My position's a little more nuanced than that... but it's not a lot more nuanced than that.

Game mechanics should reflect something that is diegetically occurring the game's fiction, and the way the game mechanic works should be based on what is diegetically occurring in the fiction. Reflavoring is using the same game mechanic to represent a different diegetic element; when the old mechanic still reflects the new fiction, it's fine. I even think it's clever.

When the old mechanic doesn't reflect the new fiction, it's bad. It's immersion-breaking, and it reduces the narrative layer of the game-- the very thing most of the reskinning advocates value most-- to that of a CCG or a board game like HeroQuest. (Which is a lot more accurate and a lot more damning than comparing them to MMOs.) And in 4e and 5e, we see that spells and powers are increasingly mechanically defined in ways that don't make sense diegetically for gameplay concerns. At the extremes, it leads to thinking about the game mechanics and "flavor text" as separate and unrelated with the latter not actually being part of the rules at all.

Leading to arguments like "I didn't choose Cleric for the obligations, I chose it for the powers" and "the PHB only says druids don't wear metal armor, not that they can't"... which people might argue are subjective playstyle/culture preferences, but which I would argue are objective faults in the ruleset-as-written, and a mindset that is so corrosive to my desired playstyle (regardless of what game we're playing) that I will not countenance it at my table. I don't mind practically any degree of mechanical optimization in my games, but when you combine mechanical legalism with disregard for narrative constraints, the result is something that is no longer a roleplaying game.

My particular bugbear isn't player-level reskinning, though... it's when the "rules matter; fluff is negotiable" mindset is applied to the game design, such as in 4e and moreso in 5e. The Dark Sun Campaign Setting for 4e is the perfect example: it's a really well designed campaign setting for the 4th Edition ruleset, but "reskinning" means that several of its iconic (and less iconic) elements are practically unrecognizable.

Dragonborn would work great as a playable version of draconians in Dragonlance; just note the alignment reversal, add the death throes (scaling by level), and... they're perfect. Not only are they not dray in Dark Sun, but they have no rightful place in the setting of Athas. Templars being Arcane, with their Dragon King as a Patron? Makes perfect sense. But Templars are a leader class, which the 4e Warlock cannot replicate. Goliaths are not half-giants. Druids and Shamans are fine, but the Elemental Cleric themes just... don't get anywhere near replicating the Elemental Clerics of the setting.

I'm very flexible and tolerant when it comes to house ruling and homebrewing and using 3PP to incorporate things my players want to include in the game-- as long as it doesn't violate the logic of the setting, the coherence and consistency of the game we're all agreed to play together. Excessive reflavoring, and overeliance on it, destroys this and misses the point of what the game rules are for.

...okay...but...i don't really see the problem in, say, reflavouring commander's strike from a command to pointing out a gap in an enemy's defense that ally can exploit, or flavour text changes along those lines.

 

[DammitVictor]

All which would be fine if Dark Sun was a separate game with its own PHB, DMG, and MM. But since its part of the larger D&D game, some refluffing is necessary to incorporate elements of the current rules into the setting without three 300 page tomes to catalogue every difference.

Except my point was that those elements were not incorporated at all because they were replaced with "close enough" alternatives that bear only superficial resemblance to the things they were replaced with. Dark Sun Campaign Setting did not need to shoehorn dragonborn and tieflings in at all, and it didn't need to include dray as a playable race-- but it did, because dragonborn and tieflings were in the PHB.

I just got done arguing that page count is a valid limitation, so I'm not going to argue against it now, but I'd argue that no campaign setting in AD&D or 3.X needed 300 pages-- in one book, not several-- to sort out how its mages and priests were different than the core D&D mages and priests. 4e and 5e didn't alter the setting to fit the system because they had to, they did it because of a conscious design decision that the system was the game and the setting was just stage dressing.

Which is precisely why reskinning undermines the very objectives its advocates use to justify it.