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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5986801" data-attributes="member: 42582">Ratskinner, one day I'll be able to XP you again.As you say, it's hard to get inside others' heads, but I think you are on to something.One thing I notice quite often is that discussions of reskinning in 4e often take place in disregard of keywords - keywords get treated as if they were just more flavour text.I think that 4e works best if the keywords and mechanical effects are taken very seriously, but the flavour text is otherwise ignored (except where utterly crucial to make sense of what is going on - I'm thinking something like "Charm of the Dark Dream", 15th level wizard daily which dominates the target and removes the wizard from play - the name plus favour text help make sense of what is going on, that the caster physically vanishes and inhabits the target's mind). So brute strike is just a [weapon] attack that deals X hp damage. And hence in the fiction is not inherently different from a basic attack - but at the metagame level gives the player a better chance of a higher damage result. (Crack the Shell is a bit different, because of its OG damage and debuff. I think that that is better incorporated into the fiction than treated as a mere metagame consequence of the attack - otherwise the game really is at risk of becoming a mere tactical skirmish.)In relation to what [MENTION=710]Mustrum_Ridcully[/MENTION] said, it's actual worse than the hidden text for summoning in the 3E PHB. While the 4e books stress the importance of keywords for linking mechanics to mechanics, they say nothing at all about keywords as the central anchor of mechanics to fiction (except obliquely, when the DMG discusses damage to objects). I assume the designers took it for granted. But it's a big gap in the rules.</blockquote>

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