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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ScottS" data-source="post: 4443605" data-attributes="member: 75465">Yes and no. For Fireball, "I roll to hit your Reflex, X damage if I hit and 0.5X damage if I miss" is clearly more DFE and better than trying to model the explosive shock wave, thermal effects, etc., if all you care about is the bad guy taking damage. 4e Grapple beats 3e Grapple in the "Concise Mechanic for Grabbing and Holding a Guy" contest. Let's assume that simpler is in fact better in both these cases. But consider the following counterexamples: There are at least 3 different ways they do 'poisoning' in the 4e MM:A) attack vs AC, hit does damage and allows secondary attack vs Fort, which then applies the poison effectB) attack vs AC, damage + poison effect on a hitC) attack vs Fort, damage + poison effect on a hitIf I go pure DFE in my rules design, I shouldn't ever use option A to describe being poisoned, because it's the most 'sim' and you have to make two rolls where one would do. However, A gets used rather a lot in the MM. Even worse, there's no 4e 'game physics' or any other explanation as to why A, B, and C all show up in the book. Is there a specific effect the 4e guys were trying to design for, when something spits poison at me and it's just a Fort attack, but something biting me and injecting poison is AC followed by Fort? Spitting is a 'touch attack' and biting is a 'regular attack', so it's probably a holdover/legacy distinction from 3e, but if this is 4e then why are we simming even that much? Same story with falling down. If I set off a pit trap, it makes an attack vs my Reflex, and a hit knocks me in. If a rogue tries to judo-throw me off a cliff with Flying Foe... I make a saving throw to not fall. Why does my Reflex defense help me in the former case but not the latter? They're equally simple fall-avoidance rules, so DFE doesn't tell me why I'm using two different types of rolls. Is the intended effect supposed to be that rogues have an easier-than-normal time of making me fall if my Reflex is high, but a harder-than-normal time if it's low? If the only effect I care about is "you fall and take damage if you don't catch yourself", why am I not either rolling Reflex attacks in both cases, or saving throws in both cases? I'm also using these examples in reference to a related issue from the podcast. Mearls mentioned something about the 4e-doesn't-do-simulation concept leading to the end of 'canonical' rules for describing game situations (don't remember what the exact context/question was). My immediate thought was about rules drift: if you avoid simulation in your design, then you can't use simulation considerations to tell you whether a proposed rule for something 'works better' than another.  So as different people work on your system, you may end up with multiple resolution mechanics for one 'effect' and no clear way to pick between them (as seen above, DFE doesn't necessarily help you at this point).  Long-term result, your system starts to unravel.</blockquote>

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