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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 7390924" data-attributes="member: 6775031">That was, by a wide margin, the absolutely worst part of 4E. Even worse than minions.The quality of an RPG is in its ability to translate narrative concepts into mechanical language for the purpose of adjudication. The reason why a particular barbarian takes on certain aspects of a bear is because that's how totems work, in the codified reality of the game world. Not every game world works that way, of course, but every game world that can be described using this rule set must work that way. If your barbarian is part were-bear, then that's an entirely different reality which needs to be modeled, so there's no reason to believe it would have similar mechanics associated with it.A wizard uses the rules that it does because those rules are the best attempt to model the in-game reality of the wizard concept. You have someone who learns magic from a book, and can do all of these things with these particular limits, and the rules of the game tell us how to model that reality. If you have a different reality that you need to model, then you use different rules to model that.If you start with the mechanics and then go back to redefine their associated reality based on anything you feel like, then you have two major problems: 1) The mechanics don't mean anything, since they aren't trying to reflect any particular reality; and 2) We have no idea how the world actually works.But if the mechanics don't actually mean anything - if they don't represent any particular reality of the game world - and if we have no idea how their world actually works, then all we're left with is meaningless mechanics for the sake of mechanics. At that point, you might as well be playing a board game, and make up your own story about what you think is going on.</blockquote>

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