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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 4565619" data-attributes="member: 5143">Forked from: <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showpost.php?postid=4551494" target="_blank"> How to kill a blue dragon? </a>I've decided to fork this to a new thread since it is an interesting topic.  The above quote came from a thread talking about ways to deal with a Blue Dragon that was flying high above the party and someone suggested using Illusionary Pit(the wizard level 1 daily that causes the target to become prone and immobilized from Dragon Magazine) in order to cause the dragon to fall from the sky.  Plane Sailing suggested that if any player attempted to use a spell which created an illusionary pit to cause a dragon who was flying to fall would be laughed out of his game.I've had the pleasure of sitting down with a couple of the people from R&D for a couple hour long talk about adventure design as well as talked individually with some of them at D&D XP and GenCon.  I get the definite impression that the way that they intended the rules to work is quite fast and loose.  The flavor text is purely that, flavor text.  For instance, the way the Illusionary Pit spell should read is:Make enemy fall down and be immobilizedUse an illusion to make the target prone and immobilized.  Usually this is in the form of a pit or hole opening up below them but it can be any illusion that would cause this condition.But the designers separated the game into two sections: Game mechanics and flavor.  They give powers flavor text as a way of allowing people to visualize what their power is doing.  However, the goal doesn't seem to be to restrict powers based on their flavor text.Mostly because this causes a game balance issue, possibly arbitrarily.  Any wizard that took a different daily spell would be able to affect the dragon, but the one who thought it would cool to be an illusionist is screwed.  Also, if they had decided it was cooler to play a ranger, they'd have no trouble at all.  The question is, where does it stop?  Are all undead immune to all powers that use illusion since they don't have minds?  Is it impossible to knock an ooze prone thereby making all those powers useless against it(which the FAQ already rules it IS possible to make an ooze prone, the DM is simply encouraged to reflavor the power so the ooze is knocked off-balance or put into some other situation that gives it a negative until it spends a move action to "stand up")?I think this is pretty much the entire meaning of "the rules are not the physics of the gameworld".  I'm just curious what people hope to gain by restricting powers based on their flavor text.  I certainly wouldn't be very happy at all if a DM suddenly told me "Sorry, your powers simply don't work against this monster", might as well leave the table and wait until the rest of the players finish beating it.</blockquote>

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