NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8112057" data-attributes="member: 82106">And I LOVE keywords for exactly the reason you dislike them! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> They provide an instant language, an idiom in which the mechanics of the game can speak. Here's a very simple example. In the 1e DMG there is an item, Flametongue, a sword which burns. It gains a significant bonus against ... (LONG list of specific creatures) plus several general categories of creature. This list was of course obsolete, probably as soon as the game was published. It would have been vastly better to just have had a "vulnerable to fire" trait connected to a fire damage keyword. This is future-proof and it is abundantly clear what you mean. You can STILL have exceptions to this general rule, either by simply not specifying that THIS creature is vulnerable to fire, or by calling out the specific exception in its description. I think what you will find is that games like 5e simply 'hide' their keywords. They still exist, albeit inconsistently and incompletely, but now they are there beneath the surface. 4e was much stronger for having them be explicit. I also tend to adhere to a 'so what' kind of opinion about a lot of objections. Like your complaint about push and turning undead. So what? When this corner case comes up, a few undead take a bit of damage plus or minus, it isn't going to break the game. In fact, it might be interesting to think about what it means. As an example, in my own '4e hack' armor absorbs damage. It provides this function against ALL damage. This is both a rules simplification and a way of avoiding balance issues, but if you think about it, why wouldn't a guy clad in metal plates be less likely to suffer psychic damage? He is just that much more confident! Or maybe 'psychic waves' don't go through metal very well, there's plenty of ways to parse that, but I have no problem with it. It has been little remarked on in play either.</blockquote>

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