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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Phasmus" data-source="post: 4294272" data-attributes="member: 1827">For the folks concerned about elitism, what would you suggest as a non-elitist way to succinctly communicate the concept of verisimilitude, without giving wise-crackers an opening for the old "it's got dragons in it!" line?  For the duration of this post, I will refer to this concept with the new monosyllabic nonsense(in English anyway)-word, xun.I tend to visualize the concept of broken xun in two categories.  First is "Stuff that if I read it in a sword 'n sorcery book would make me go 'That makes no sense at all'."  I will call this disruption of conceptual xun or c-xun.  4e elements that break c-xun include the magic item economy, and a cleric beaning a skeleton with a mace to make the fighter's wounds heal up.  It might make sense given enough thought, but it's still a mental speedbump.Alternatively there is, "Stuff that forces me to think about the tactical situation in a way that is jarringly different from how the character would have to be thinking about it."  This is disruption of what I will call mechanical xun or m-xun.  The archetypal m-xun breaker in 4e is the daily martial power, where I think 'Okay, this is tactically the right time to use my best power of the day, so here it goes...' and my character thinks 'What luck! Just when I need my best but least-often possible move, my foe has left me an opening for it!'I think, in terms of m-xun in particular, 4e is pretty much a step down.  It may be possible to come up with plausible explanations for why certain 4e mechanics work in certain ways, but those explanations tend to drive a wedge between character thought and player thought.  I can't think of many powers in 3.5e where you have to be thinking in entirely metagame terms to take a rational action (it's entirely possible they're there and I just got used to them, there's no need to be snide when you point them out to me, which I encourage you to do).  That seems to come up a lot 4e though.A lot of 4e powers, particularly ones that cause shifting at range, remind me of DreamBlade.  There's no xun to break, because it's a board game, and if you really want to imagine the action... it's all happening in a weird dreamscape, where if you can blame anything on a magic-like effect.  It feels to me like they tried to take some of those fun dream-blade-like game elements and use them in an environment where some folks (myself included) want to be able to imagine or describe the action in a cinematic way without having to jump through too many conceptual hoops.  Things may smooth out with time and practice... but for now there's still an awful lot of conceptual hoop-jumping called for.</blockquote>

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