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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7751080" data-attributes="member: 996">Sort of, I guess:  'more consistent' could mean less evident in the sense of conspicuous, but more evident, in the sense of proveable.  When I was running AD&D back in the day, I grokked EGG's hp treatise, but ran up against a serious inconsistency, the 3 Cure..Wounds spells made 0 sense in context.  A scratch representing 1/10th of  a high-level character's hps was surely 'light,' but the exact same 8 hps, delivered to a 1st level character might drop him, or represent 80% of is hps - that's not a 'Light Wound.'  That kind of thing, when the artifacts of the abstraction /don't/ add up, makes it more conspicuous, I think, though it also calls the rationalization into question, I suppose.[spoiler="Back in my day..."](Ironically, the solution I came up with back then, c1984, was to have Cure..Wounds spells have the option of working litterally.  There were 3 of 'em, back then, Light, Serious, & Critical (plus Heal of course - which just cured all your damage).  Not a big leap to call any injury up to 1/4 your total hit points a 'Light Wound,' that way it neatly worked out: up to half your hps was Serious, up to 3/4 Critical - so I let the caster either roll the usual dice, or Cure one Wound of the appropraite type - the wounded player had to track his wounds individually for that to work.)[/spoiler]Of course, familiarity also makes things fade into the background.  After the 1e DMG defended hps, the remaining issues with it were just lived with so long they faded away - to the point that even /fixing/ them, would draw the abstraction of the system back into the limelight, again. OK, we're say'n about the same stuff, really.   They also make your RPG look like M:tG, because they both have the key word, 'keyword,' in the rules, and it means aproximately the same thing, in spite of the radically different the context.  Sure, they just weren't called that, weren't differentiated from words used only for their natural language meanings, and weren't used consistently.  So weren't keywords, really, nor even good examples of jargon.  But, the game did have the kind of concepts that keywords would have been a more efficient way of handling, FWIW.Essentials put back the spell-school keywords, for that matter.  Again, the only plausible explanation that doesn't paint the complainer as blowing smoke while working some nefarious agenda, is the power of familiarity.  When the keywords weren't labeled as such and faded into the baroque mosaic of Gygaxian prose, they were just an unexamined part of broader understanding of the whole game.In another thread, I think, someone mentioned that 4e had so many more conditions than 3e or 5e and that was one of the things that slowed it down.  4e had 18 conditions.  3e has 40, 5e has 15.   A 3.x phrase like "deprived of dexterity bonus to AC" works like a keyword, in that it conveys the same information each time it's used and is important to some other rules, sure.  And 5e has a lotta phrases like that.  But they don't feel like keywords, so if you felt the need to project your hatred of 4e upon it's use of keywords, you can feel immediately comfortable in not hating 5e, rather than having to fume over it for a while before relenting, as you do if you settled on hating Surges, then were confronted with HD. The voiced complaints often revolved around cosmetic differences that could be attirbuted to 'presentation,' sure, but 4e, however differently-presented, would still have a non-trivial degree of class balance baked in, that's robust to variations in pacing  - and 5e would still actually be D&D.   If it were sufficiently baroque and impenetrable in it's presentation - if copy-edited by EGG's Ghost, as it were - though, it might also make the DMing experience more like that of 5e (or even 1e - Gary's Ghost, and all).</blockquote>

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