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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5883445" data-attributes="member: 58197">I strongly agree. As I've said elsewhere, I think the whole idea of "fluff" and "crunch" as used today is bogus; there is no such distinction. There is just rules text of varying precision and detail.Here's a little game you can play: Open up a pre-4E D&D rulebook, pick a spell, and ask a bunch of gamers to pick out the parts of the spell description that are fluff and the parts that are crunch. You'll find that each person comes up with different subsets. Some people will think that a 3E fireball melting gold and lead is fluff. Others will think it's crunch. Same thing for setting fire to combustibles. Some folks might point out that detonating with a low roar implies it can be detected with a Listen check, which would make the low roar crunch. The reality is that you can't mark a clear cutoff point, because there is none.To take another example, some people say they like the 4E approach because it lets them "re-fluff" powers. So, suppose I re-fluff the 4E scorching burst to say that when I cast it, an ancient dragon swoops down out of the sky and blasts the area with fire, then flies away. It's still a burst 1 within 10 at-will power, doing 1d6 + Int damage, et cetera, so this should be a legitimate re-fluff, right? But if you let me do this, I will start using scorching burst to convince my foes that I have an ancient dragon at my beck and call. Suddenly a simple damage spell has become an extraordinarily powerful illusion. Combine it with a bit of showmanship, some planning, and a good Bluff check, and I can nullify half the encounters we face. It'll be cool and creative the first time I do it. By the twentieth, it'll just be a pain in the neck.The solution, of course, is not to ban spell customization, but to drop the idea that some parts of the spell are Sacrosanct Crunch and other parts are Disposable Fluff. The 4E approach is not giving you permission to customize--you already had that! What it's trying to do is put some things off limits for customization. There's no reason you shouldn't be able to, say, increase the range of a spell while shrinking the area of effect. The DM would need to sign off on the change, of course, but the DM needs to sign off anyway in order to prevent abuses like the "ancient dragon illusion" I described above.</blockquote>

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