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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7751832" data-attributes="member: 6873517">Yeah they were definitely that way. Interestingly enough, the classic of bizarro world dungeons, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Plume_Mountain" target="_blank">White Plume Mountain</a>, was originally written as a joke. Evidently Lawrence Schick never thought it would be published as-is!  Right, and that's why I really like 4E's approach to concentration better than 5E's. It has a cost built into the system. 5E does, too, but it's essentially an off or on cost, not one that seems like it obeys effects being proportional to cause. Having attunement cost life is similar to how item attunement works in Exalted, although there it works on your essence (aka mana points). The more items you have and want to control the more of your own personal mojo you have to lock up to do that. IMO the 13A icons are great. They have a game mechanical consequence that's also part of the game world and reinforces the flavor of the world. It's even possible you'll become an Icon at the end of your adventuring days! That's cool. The escalation die could be a fantastic way to manifest the dynamics of genre combat without having it just "be there". I'll have to check 13A to see if there is a rationale---it may have one. I'm not sure what that rationale would be exactly, but making it a part of the world helps get the game mechanical effects as well as reinforcing the theme. Like my point of attune at a cost of life, these don't have to be in conflict but WotC seems to miss opportunities to use rules that work game mechanically to reinforce themes. For example, in Pillars of Eternity (aka "what 4E would be if it had a computer managing all the bookkeeping") there are some classes who have a core mechanic that builds in a delay. Three examples are the chanter, cipher, and monk. The chanter is the Pillars bard. They chant to buff the party while fighting. After chanting enough, they can cast spells. The more chanting they do, the more powerful the spells they can cast. This reinforces the fact that their spells take some time to build up. The cipher works similarly but they need to inflict damage before casting spells---their mana pool is filled up by the damage they deal to enemies. Monks have their abilities fueled by the damage they take. In this case the game mechanics are clever but they work harmoniously to reinforce the themes of the characters in question. All three get nastier over time and thus can't just nova right at the start. In other cases Pillars fails on making the game rules align with the world itself, such as hard disallowing summons outside of combat.  Yeah that was Jeremy Crawford's "explanation" for it. Bah. What a lazy rationalization. He annoys me so much that if I see a video of him I know not to watch it.</blockquote>

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