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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6096939" data-attributes="member: 82106">I think there are 2 things here. The "fireball is for making a ball of fire in the story" is one thing, "knock an ooze prone" is a different thing. The fireball simply involves the concept that the rules are just conveniences to support telling the story. So the 4e fireball and the 2e fireball are equally fine, or they should be judged on the ease of use and expressive power of their rules anyway. I can understand complaints about presentation of this kind of stuff in 4e, somehow or other people read the 4e stuff and mysteriously concluded that all you could do was slavishly ape out the mechanics exactly as written and play some sort of weird board game. I have to say that mystifies me, but it seems common enough that it is hard not to at least suspect that the way the game was written inspired that. The prone ooze thing is different. You could simply put it in the same bin as an underwater fireball (I'm just going to ban that) but it is more cleverly an example of refluffing. 4e chooses, quite rightly, to eschew a vast long list of conditions. The ones that are provided clearly aren't going to cover every situation fluff-wise but can easily provide perfectly good mechanics. Thus there are various solutions including "just use the mechanics of prone and narrate it as something appropriate", "disallow it", and "substitute some other condition like dazed". I'm a bit puzzled as to why this garnered so much attention really. We ran into it around week 3 of our 4e experience and I just said to myself "Oh, look, this is great, there aren't a billion little rules to remember! OK, you plunge your sword into the ooze, pinning it to the ground! (etc)"</blockquote>

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