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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="DammitVictor" data-source="post: 9845532" data-attributes="member: 6750908">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.</blockquote>

Verification