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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 5452636" data-attributes="member: 177">Yes, you can certainly do that and not stretch credibility - it is a reasonable justification.  But, it also completely misses the point.  Neonchameleon was complaining that he was driving his DMs batty with spellcasters.  Your justification fails to address, and in fact enables and exacerbates, the stated problem.  It makes it easier for spellcasters to drive the GM batty, especially in the hands of a player that's better at the game math than the GM.Well, if you want a fluff-description: Because the Quarterback doesn't hit it on the nose all the time either.  Only sometimes.  In my version, the QB does still hit it exactly sometimes.  He just doesn't *know* he'll hit it spot on.  There's a bit of tension to be found there that we liked, actually.The point of the exercise was to put some basic guidelines in place to minimize runtime mathematical min-maxing.  In reducing the detailed bean-counting at the table, you reduce the player's ability to hit some of the most egregious combinations so regularly (and you also tend to speed up the rounds, as people are doing less math).The Fireball was only one example - in general we played that the exact info on your character sheet, in terms of numbers, was not to be communicated in discussion between players.  When planning actions, we didn't talk about what our exact bonuses were, how many hit points we had left, and so on.  Much of the detailed math was replaced with educated guesses.  This had an impact on everybody, not just the spellcasters, so we found it to be pretty fair.It did not remove intelligent spellcasting.  When you have less than perfect information, you can still play it smart.  It just changes what the player has at hand to make his choices.  We found that players were still able to develop an intuition for what they needed to do, and the really cool stuff they did pull off was more rewarding, because they had less certainty their plans would work.By no means is this to say that this is the end-all, be-all of gaming.  It is simply a way we found to address something some people find problematic.</blockquote>

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