gimme back my narration

[Tigerbunny]

Question for the "it's easy to re-imagine stuff" crowd: do you narrate your powers differently each time, or re-write them once and use that instead of the standard description? Also, are there any powers that you've struggled to re-imagine?

So far, I've only seen/done design-time reflavoring in any major ways. I might fool around with minor cosmetic stuff ad-hoc, but nothing that would materially change the look-and-feel of the power once initially set and approved. I improvise a lot more with broad stuff - cantrips and Arcana skill uses are a favorite for "making up cool stuff that I hope the GM will swallow", but I would feel a bit like I was cheating if I just re-fluffed a power mid-encounter. One thing I may do at some point is come up with multiple "versions" of the same power if it seems like a power that would fit. Magic Missile is a favorite for that - why NOT have five or six different flavors?

Irda Ranger's "out of the box" stuff is something I like to do, too - although not to the extent of some, apparently - but anything along those lines would definitely be a Page 42 in any of the games I run/play in currently. The informal standard my main DM and I have worked out is "anything that would impact a die roll or materially change the situation, you can only get a +2/-2 for as a freebie. Anything more than that, it's a Page 42 stunt. Other than that, as long as it seems fun and more or less sensible, go for it."

 

[cr0m]

Maybe this is just a function of me not knowing my powers very well, so that I'm so busy remembering what is what that I don't have time to do a righteous re-brand.

 

[Tigerbunny]

Maybe this is just a function of me not knowing my powers very well, so that I'm so busy remembering what is what that I don't have time to do a righteous re-brand.

That's been my experience playing 4E so far. There was a gradual process where we got more comfortable with the mechanics. It was only once we had internalized how things worked a bit that we started to add more color and detail.

By the way, Righteous Brand is one of those powers that just irks me, too. Would definitely refluff it.

 

[Delta]

All the biting comments about how I need to be more creative aside, doesn't that seem like a lot of extra overhead?

It sure does. I think you've written a very clear, compelling statement of the case.

But 4E has done something to split the D&D community down the middle, and you're not going to get satisfaction or agreement from people that like the direction it went in.

 

[Krensky]

Yeah, this is my problem too. The "old school" spells were like Earth to Mud, where the rule was that you turned earth to mud. That could have effect on movement rates, and that's what it was usually used for, but you could also try to do "out of the box" thinking with the spell effect. In 4E the rule is the movement rate effect, and turning earth to mud is just fluff you can rewrite if you want.

That creates a lot of creative flexibility in some respects (nod to Tigerbunny), but I it think restricts creative flexibility in using the "fluff effects." There are always minor side effects which usually don't matter, but what if a DM rules that the light from Righteous Brand gave away your position on a moonless night? Could the player say "Hey, that's just fluff. I'll rewrite it so that there's no illuminating side effect." Further, if a player decides to use Righteous Brand as a light source (is it At Will? I don't have my books at work), can he? Or does the DM say "That's just fluff. The only effect is the effect it has in combat."

Finding "out of the box" ways to apply the rules is one of the fun things for me in D&D. I like using Earth to Mud to make it easier to dig up a treasure chest or combining Earth to Mud and Fireball to create a smooth 10x10 sheet of ceramic. I've used Wall of Stone's thickness for surface-area tradeoff to resurface a palace outer wall with a 1/4 inch thick sheet of Silver-veined Malachite.

Finding a new tactical power-combo just doesn't have the same appeal. As a matter of personal taste, obviously.

This is just me, but I would say that in Earth to Mud (at least before 4e) the effect of the spell is to turn a volume into mud. Mud has different properties then earth, but none of that is relevant to the spell, although it almost certainly is to people interacting with the Earth transmuted into Mud.

The special effect here isn't the ground turning into mud, it's the what someone witnessing the spell effect sees (hears/smells/whatever). If a person wants to describe it as garden gnomes with rubber hoses or invoking lots and lots of ant sized water elementals, cool. Similarly is they want to describe their fireball as a screaming, flaming skull. No sweat. It still does 1d6/level fire (and starts fires, melts metals, bakes cereamic, turns sand into glass etc, although by and large these are special effects as well).

 

[Imp]

I think what I would do as a 4e player (which I am not, currently) is just write up a little cheat-sheet list of my character's powers and how I visualize them working.

Looking at the Great Wall of Powers from a DM-perspective, and trying to figure out how to rebrand the stupid-sounding ones, is headache-inducing, but fiddling with them one or two at a time as a player should be more workable.

This sort of reminds me of how, in 3rd edition, there was text encouraging players to change the names of their PC's skills to whatever was thematically appropriate, so that Lidda had "Footpaddin'" replacing Move Silently as an example.

Did anyone ever actually do this?

 

[Irda Ranger]

If they gave you a book with no flavor text, you'd make up your own flavor.

Darn tootin'. But watch this:

Step 1: Learn new rules.
Step 2: Narrate their implementation.

vs.

Step 1: Learn new rules with flavor (this is more work).
Step 2: Try to figure out how the oddly disjointed flavor actually works in-game ("Can I summon just the brand but not as part of an attack? Is this detectable magic? How much light does this give off?").
Step 3: Unlearn flavor (another extra step?).
Step 4: Narrate their implementation.

That's the complaint. Further, reflavoring the entire ruleset is a lot of work. I think it's fair to point out how annoying it is.

You have a choice of spending your energy in noting the negative, or in finding a constructive path of thought.

There's only so long one should spend on complaining about the fact that you have lemons rather than oranges. At some point, it is useful to switch to thinking about lemonade.

Indeed. I hate negative threads that add nothing to the discussion. But for the record, it's these types of threads I find the most constructive and useful. Argument (in the Socratic sense) hones thought and sharpens the opinion about what makes a good game and how to run my games. It's endless thread about "Lemonade is awesome" and "Damn, I love this new Lemonade" that I find useless (even if their tone is positive).

By examining 4E's strengths, trade-offs & shortcomings my own games are improved. That's the only reason I'm here.

 

[Derro]

Jhaelen begins to hint at my thought: Haven't we been seeing many discussions about how awful it is that the powers in the MM lack fluff text? Which leads me to three observations.

1.) You can't please everybody.

2.) It's interesting that the retort for complaints about too much fluff is the same as for too little: (re)skinning is easy.

You make a good point. Particularly with 1).

While there is no question that players and GMs can flavor things to their own tastes I think that the presentation in 4e is a bit backward. Players are given a bit of text for every power they have describing the narrative effect. GMs are provided with neither cultural/ecological or power flavor for monstrous antagonists.

It's sort of like the play group shows up to paint a mural and all of the PC's work is done except for cleaning up the working material. Meanwhile the GM has a much larger amount of space to cover and his area hasn't even been primed.

That's a rough analogy so remember what we're talking about here if you respond. I understand the design principle here but I don't necessarily like the implementation. The PHB, as the primary interface of 4e, gets the most attention of almost any 4e player. It needs to be colorful and rich to be engaging. On the same note GMs, as the primary writers of the story and framers of the narrative, need room to work.

However the way things are set up now the players, who have more time to develop personal narrative, have all their work done for them. On the other hand the GM, with less time and energy for individual narratives of antagonists and other NPCs, has had considerably less work done for him by the game. So in the hands of the PCs the narrative tool becomes a crutch while to the GM the narrative space is a bit more wide open than is helpful.

My concern about the flavor of 4e is not for me or anybody else that has done any significant amount of role-playing. I'm done with my investment in this game past the money I put down to buy the three core books. I think of the person, generally the young person, that has not played games like this in the past that starts with this game. What kind of picture does it paint to them? How will this stuff, irrelevant as it is to an experienced player, color a new player's experience? Will they find it as easy to disregard in light of it being the written rules of this game?

 

[Cadfan]

My concern about the flavor of 4e is not for me or anybody else that has done any significant amount of role-playing. I'm done with my investment in this game past the money I put down to buy the three core books. I think of the person, generally the young person, that has not played games like this in the past that starts with this game. What kind of picture does it paint to them? How will this stuff, irrelevant as it is to an experienced player, color a new player's experience? Will they find it as easy to disregard in light of it being the written rules of this game?

Why are these concerns instead of positives?

 

[Scribble]

Step 1: Learn new rules with flavor (this is more work).

Just skip the stuff in italics and read what it does instead... Doesn't that amount to the same idea as just learning the power and narrating it yourself?

Step 2: Try to figure out how the oddly disjointed flavor actually works in-game ("Can I summon just the brand but not as part of an attack? Is this detectable magic? How much light does this give off?").
Step 3: Unlearn flavor (another extra step?).
Step 4: Narrate their implementation.

But this is based on the idea that the game assumes the flavor has an effect on the power. The game does not assume such things. If you want them to have an effect, cool, but the game doesn't assume it to be so.

You don't have to unlearn any flavor, you simply ignore it. It won't have any effect on the rules of the power. (Aside from any rules YOU added to the game.)

This has been a similar case throughout the game's history.

As it stands the rules part of the fireball spells says a fireball summons a 20 foot radius ball of fire that does 1d6 per level. Stop.

Can you summon the fire of a fireball without the ball? How much light does it give off? If I changed it to a purple fireball does the light change?

None of these things are answered by the fireball spell. If I want these answers and feel they are important to my game I need to add them myself.