gimme back my narration

[Delta]

But, that's not true anymore.

So you concur with my objection to Scribble's assertion that "This has been a similar case throughout the game's history."

Good, that's all I wanted to point out. I'm not going to get into an edition war with you about which of the differing philosophies is better. I like Classic D&D best (and any OGL version thereof), as you already know.

 

[Hussar]

So you concur with my objection to Scribble's assertion that "This has been a similar case throughout the game's history."

Good, that's all I wanted to point out. I'm not going to get into an edition war with you about which of the differing philosophies is better. I like Classic D&D best (and any OGL version thereof), as you already know.

Yes, I'd agree with that. Most of the spells and effects for say, Basic D&D were so baldly written that they had next to no flavour text whatsoever. As a fairly random example (I happen to have my Moldvay Basic book on hand):

Magic Missile
A magic missile is a glowing arrow, created and shot by magic, whic does 2-6 points of damage to any creature it strikes. It will automatically hit any visible target...(Rest of text talks about gaining more missiles)

I suppose this is what Kamikaze Midget is looking for. Pretty much no flavor text to rewrite at all. "A glowing arrow" is the only information we're given. Things like "How much light does it shed, where does it appear? How is it shot? Does it stick around for that full ten minutes (1 turn duration) or what?" are completely absent from the text.

Looking across the page at Charm Person, there's absolutely no flavour text given at all.

So, yes, I agree that there was no division between flavour text and mechanics, because there was next to no flavour text to divide from. The problem came in 1e when they started to add flavour text without making it clear that the flavour text had no mechanical effects and people started abusing it. Making spells far more powerful than they started off with.

To me, 4e is doing it pretty well. They're making it abundantly clear that the flavour text is simply ONE way of narrating the effect, and that the narration, while interesting, and immersive and whatnot, has no additional effects. No more trying to make people strip off their armor with Command spells and that sort of thing.

 

[jdrakeh]

The entire "fluff" discussions regarding 4E shows to me that some people have a hard time ignoring or changing fluff to their preferences.

Actually, I think that this inability to create or repurpose fluff may have more to do with the kind of rote adherence to written rules that D&D 3x appeared to foster. Case in point, many posters on this very board have repeatedly represented the example skill DCs in the D&D 3x PHBs as immutable values in dozens upon dozens of rule argument threads.

I can't even begin to count the number of threads here that revolved around DMs petitioning advice for assigning DCs to skills. . . because there weren't clear values for Action X printed in the RAW. Numerous people were flailing wildly any time that they were froced to think up something on their own that wasn't printed in an official book someplace.

While I think that D&D 3x was an otherwise stellar improvement over many past editions of D&D, I have also long thought that it's emphasis on not deviating from written rules has fostered a reliance on them for many DMs and severely crippled these same people with regard to implementing some solutions of their own during actual play.

 

[Hussar]

jdrakeh - That I'm going to disagree with actually. The idea that you cannot change the rules was certainly there before the advent of 3e. We likely didn't see as many rules discussions due to the lack of internet at the time, more than any lack of discussion.

I remember some very strong arguments back in the day whenever you tried to change the written rule. I had one player flat out tell me that a given monster couldn't be where I put it because it was outside it's climate/terrain entry.

Adherence to the written rule has been present all the way along and I'm not sure if 3e made it moreso or not. What it DID do, though, was present rules written in a much clearer manner, making interpretative arguments much more problematic.

 

[jdrakeh]

I think that your "making interpretative arguments much more problematic" is my "rules are now less likely to be deviated from"

 

[Mouseferatu]

jdrakeh - That I'm going to disagree with actually. The idea that you cannot change the rules was certainly there before the advent of 3e. We likely didn't see as many rules discussions due to the lack of internet at the time, more than any lack of discussion.

While my own experience shows this to be true, my own experience also shows it to have been more prevalent in 3E than in prior editions.

For, you know, whatever my own personal anecdotal evidence is worth.

 

[Hussar]

I just question whether the prevalence is perceptional, rather than actual. In other words, is the fact that we can talk to a much, much larger number of gamers through the internet exacerbates perceived issues. When you're (and by you, I mean in the general sense) talking with your group about some rule, you have only five or six opinions to deal with.

Come on En World and you can have fifty or sixty different opinions. Couple that to the tendency for internet discussions to polarize, and I wonder if its a problem that we just see more often.

Somehow I think the history of the game would have been different if it had appeared in 2004 rather than 1974.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

While my own experience shows this to be true, my own experience also shows it to have been more prevalent in 3E than in prior editions.

For, you know, whatever my own personal anecdotal evidence is worth.

Usually, it's 2 cents, isn't it?

 

[Tigerbunny]

When you're (and by you, I mean in the general sense) talking with your group about some rule, you have only five or six opinions to deal with.

For whatever it's worth, 3E is the first time in 30 years of gaming that I ever had players rebel against non-RAW ad hoc decisions. We argued rules plenty in the Good Old Days, but nobody had a leg to stand on, so "DM is right" carried the day unless the decision was truly awful. With the increase in rules that actually tried to be comprehensive and model everything in detail, it seemed to me that more players would stand and defend some point of interpretation to the death.

As another evidence point, the only other games I ever saw that level of rancor over rulings for was Rolemaster and to some extent Traveller - although those were usually grim exercises in "realism" rather than rules-for-rules-sake.

 

[SkidAce]

I agree.

I have played Champions/HERO for 23 years, and for those that don't know, in the game (for example) you buy X dice of attack. And the player defines what the attack is - Fire, a thrown hammer, mystic bolts of energy, mutant eye beams, what have you. The flavoring of what the character can do is completely up to the player and GM (and is usually set at time of character creation). The term I see for that is "effects based system" - ie the special effects are defined by player.

Ditto...saved me a larger post. We played both games back to back while stationed in Korea. Some of the "describe it as you will" bleed over into AD&D.

p.s. Is your name from the Chronicles of Thomas Covenent the Unbeliever?