D&D 5E Game jargon causing unwanted consequences

[Savage Wombat]

Count me as supporting condition buzzwords. I found "bloodied" so useful a concept that I refer to it in my Pathfinder game - we never even really played 4th ed.

In my current game we're having a difficult time with the Alchemist's "Confusion Bomb" power, which says that the target "is affected as if by a confusion spell." This poorly-phrased rule has led to a lot of debate, but if it had read "target becomes confused" or even "target must succeed at a Will save or be confused" we wouldn't be confused about the intent of the power.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

What's so hard about 3e turning compared PF's channeling? On the character sheet, you just need to write

Turn undead: x times/day, turning check d20+y, damage 2d6+z.

The DM, in turn, looks up the Turning Undead table based on the cleric's turning check and compares the damage done to the number of undead adn their hit dice. And aside from that table lookup, I never understood why people whine about turning being confusing in 3e.

That's twice as much work (making the DM look that up) compared to the Pathfinder version. In lots of groups, it's the player's responsibility to know all the rules of their character, even the ones they aren't likely able to memorize. After all, the DM already has their hands full dealing with multiple creatures. So... table groans as player looks up turn undead in the book, or player has some really tiny-lettered notes about how turn undead works, alongside the tiny notes they use to explain this poorly-written spell, and that poorly-written spell... and then finally they find that the creature they tried to turn had too many Hit Dice anyway, so it was as much a waste as if a wizard had cast Sleep on a 12th-level barbarian, only the wizard probably knew not to do that.

It could be worse though. It could be grappling. The Pathfinder version can inflict a Dexterity penalty when the victim is pinned, which just seems like a bad idea in practice. (You're already losing your Dex bonus to AC. Most of the things that a Dex penalty apply to, such as Stealth, aren't going to come up anyway. But your initiative will get hurt. And, of course, your Acrobatics check.) I've seen flowcharts used to try to explain all the steps in grappling. (I'm not talking about calculating CMB/CMD either, that's relatively easy as long as you didn't suddenly get hit by a Shrink Person trap or something.)

 

[Ahnehnois]

What's so hard about 3e turning compared PF's channeling?

I think it's not that it's complicated. It's that it's different. A turning check doesn't have a DC or an opposed value like any other check. Turning damage isn't damage. It's one of the few magical effects where the attacker rolls rather than the defender. The whole point of the d20 system is that everything works the same way (d20 + modifiers vs DC), and this is an odd variation that always threw me for a loop. Also, unless you're playing an undead-focused campaign, it comes up rarely so people are not exposed to it much.

In and of itself, it's true that it isn't very complicated.

 

[giant.robot]

Jargon is simply a fact of life in a game with some form of rules. Even rock, paper, scissors has jargon (words that have special meaning within the context of the game). There's nothing inherently wrong with jargon. It becomes a problem when designers go overboard with jargon or use it to add unnecessary complexity to the system.

For instance look at the list of conditions in 3.5E and Pathfinder. Many of the conditions do very similar things and just have different names because someone during the design said "oh well X spell need a special condition, you know, for flavor". That flavor led to the fear spectrum (shaken, frightened, panicked) which I've personally never seen used as written.

Jargon doesn't need to be the enemy of conciseness however. Next has the (dis)advantage mechanic. There's a whole bunch of abilities that can just confer advantage or disadvantage to characters and give a duration or save. The flavor text can be as creative as the writers desire but the end effect could be a standard condition that everyone knows. In the appendix (and on the DM's screen) there could be a chart labeled "things that cause disadvantage" and another labeled "things that cause advantage". The game uses jargon effectively since it's not adding cognitive load in players needing to memorize a huge list of effects and the DM has some good guidance on making up their own situations on when to use those mechanics.

One of the things I liked the most about 4E was its use of keywords all over the place. Monsters, spells, magic items, and powers all had keywords. If you knew the meaning of a handful of keywords (or keyword categories) you could easily understand any stat block in any of the books. This is something I'm sad to see not have been really carried over to Next as it provided a great deal of clarity. Keywords were a form of jargon but they were far clearer than the clear as mud "natural language" descriptions used in Next.

 

[Li Shenron]

There's nothing inherently wrong with jargon. It becomes a problem when designers go overboard with jargon or use it to add unnecessary complexity to the system.

Yes, this is what I meant, that it becomes a problem when designers starts using the technical terms in ways that make them feel "clever" but are then incapable of foreseeing all the consequences.

In the appendix (and on the DM's screen) there could be a chart labeled "things that cause disadvantage" and another labeled "things that cause advantage". The game uses jargon effectively since it's not adding cognitive load in players needing to memorize a huge list of effects and the DM has some good guidance on making up their own situations on when to use those mechanics.

This is a good example. (Dis)advantage is good jargon because it ends there. You very quickly learn that advantage on a roll always means to roll 2 dice and keep the best, and that's all about it.

Now think of what would happen however if "advantage" or "disadvantage" also implied other things, especially stuff like "when you have disadvantage you cannot do X or you cannot gain the Y condition" or "when you have advantage, others cannot do Z to you", where X, Y, Z are other keywords. This creates chains of rules to remember. Having a list of things that cause (dis)advantage is a good sign, the list itself is actually just a commodity. OTOH, if we also had a list of things caused by (dis)advantage, that might be a bad sign.