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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5765944" data-attributes="member: 82106">The problem is once you start into pre-4e spells you can't categorize at all because every spell is so fuzzily defined that NO way of using it HAS to be categorized as just &quot;doing the normal thing&quot; and not creative play. Even all the hackneyed ways of using a spell like casting Silence on a pebble and all that stuff was creative thinking ONCE. I'd call the gnome thing 'clever tactics' myself, on a par with using a push in a clever way or something like that. I think a lot of it has to do with the way you think about rules. If you think about rules as a way of just resolving things, so that when a player says &quot;I want to do X&quot; then you find a rule and apply it (and maybe X is using a power and maybe it isn't, it doesn't matter) then whatever is clever is clever. Pushing someone off a cliff is clever. Maybe it is pretty easy to accomplish, but if it was done with page 42, some DM decided way of doing something in some previous edition, some arcane subsystem, or whatever it is equally just executing a plan with whatever is at hand and using whatever rule is there to figure it out. If you look at the rules as describing in-game reality then maybe only cunning gaming of the rules is clever and everything else looks like just pushing pieces around the board. If you play OD&amp;D then almost EVERYTHING looks clever because the rules hardly give you any help at all. In 4e you will just see the exact same actions taken by the PCs and brush it off as &quot;just playing&quot;. Frankly I think the rules are just tools and clever is clever.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 5765944, member: 82106"] The problem is once you start into pre-4e spells you can't categorize at all because every spell is so fuzzily defined that NO way of using it HAS to be categorized as just "doing the normal thing" and not creative play. Even all the hackneyed ways of using a spell like casting Silence on a pebble and all that stuff was creative thinking ONCE. I'd call the gnome thing 'clever tactics' myself, on a par with using a push in a clever way or something like that. I think a lot of it has to do with the way you think about rules. If you think about rules as a way of just resolving things, so that when a player says "I want to do X" then you find a rule and apply it (and maybe X is using a power and maybe it isn't, it doesn't matter) then whatever is clever is clever. Pushing someone off a cliff is clever. Maybe it is pretty easy to accomplish, but if it was done with page 42, some DM decided way of doing something in some previous edition, some arcane subsystem, or whatever it is equally just executing a plan with whatever is at hand and using whatever rule is there to figure it out. If you look at the rules as describing in-game reality then maybe only cunning gaming of the rules is clever and everything else looks like just pushing pieces around the board. If you play OD&D then almost EVERYTHING looks clever because the rules hardly give you any help at all. In 4e you will just see the exact same actions taken by the PCs and brush it off as "just playing". Frankly I think the rules are just tools and clever is clever. [/QUOTE]

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