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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 7391632" data-attributes="member: 6775031">The only valid method of generating mechanics is to look at the reality of the game world and determine how that reality is expressed within the language of the game mechanics. The reason that this is a big deal is because you aren't following the proper order of operations. There's no reason for us to believe that the mechanics of the barbarian rage would be the best or most accurate mechanical representation of an aggressive shifter nature.I don't buy for a second that anyone would have honestly come up with the entire barbarian rage mechanic as an accurate reflection of a shifter bloodline, if they hadn't been attempting to retrofit the existing mechanics into a reality where they were never intended. I mean, come on. Seriously.The common argument in favor of mutable fluff is that fluff doesn't matter, and that keeping the mechanics consistent is important for balance reasons. I'm not saying that you necessarily buy into that, but that's the kind of audience which 4E pandered to. On the extreme end, you had people re-flavoring a maul into a sign post or an uprooted sapling - not because they thought that maul stats were the most accurate reflection of those objects, but because they knew using the stats for an existing weapon would be balanced from a mechanical perspective. (It never occurred to them that trying to fight with a sign post rather than a purpose-built weapon is a ridiculous proposition which should be treated as such.)If you tell me that this treant is a druid, and that it can't do most of the things that a druid in the book can do, then I now know far less about how the world works than I thought I did.Like I said before, the reason I'm buying the book in the first place is because I want to know how the world works, and now you're telling me that the section on druids doesn't even accurately describe what a druid is within the game world. If the rules in the book don't sufficiently describe the game world, then the book you've sold me isn't a finished product.The DM, acting in their capacity as world-builder, already has absolute freedom to change anything they want in their world. That's no excuse for giving them only half of a world to start with.</blockquote>

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