Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 4906992" data-attributes="member: 82106">I think I agree with the OP within limits. It seems perfectly reasonable to rule that a bonfire is not terrain a troll can enter in this particular case. Maybe most "ordinary" type natural monsters wouldn't. Letting the player cause some slightly different result in a very particular case is fine. OK, it isn't the letter of the RAW for that power, but so what? If the player cooks up some easily repeatable way of making one of their powers work better than its intended to, then the DM probably needs to consider play balance and work out something more reasonable. Just like with stunts though, page 42 can usually be applied. You want to have your power do something extra special that makes sense within the story? OK, fine, but its going to impose an extra skill or ability check. Once in a great while you may run into situations where it could even be legitimate to simply rule something to be situationally impossible. The classic example would be a halfling moving through the space occupied by a gelatinous cube. Technically its legal by RAW. In the case of this one monster it really doesn't usually make a whole lot of sense. OTOH it isn't something that will come up often enough to constitute nerfing an ability the PC is relying on all the time.Critics like to take a puritanical stand on 4e rules and make some of them look absurd, but I really seriously doubt the designers of the game intended anything like that. The standard mechanics for powers should work in the standard way, but the reason for this is to make the game reasonably balanced and playable, not to make it absurd or impossible to describe action in a believable way. Exactly how much extemporization is ideal will vary from one group to another of course. What's the worst case scenario? You're no worse off than you were with any other edition of D&D where the DM was still faced with exactly the same sort of questions.</blockquote>

Verification