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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6096965" data-attributes="member: 82106">Right, so there is also a camp of 4e advocates who are militant about the rules being applied EXACTLY as written all the time without regard to narrative circumstance. The argument being that the referee has no business getting his narrative in their agency. They rail against anything at all vague, open-ended, etc, and consider options like the Linguist feat to be utterly useless because the DM could just have the NPC talk Common if he wants a conversation to happen. So, yes, all of these are pathological. However everyone has their agenda and their game. 4e suites me in the way it does Pemerton, terms are free descriptors, etc. I think the danger though is if you were to adopt overly neutral language then the game comes across as stripped of any character at all. You've removed the problem of people fixating on prone and having an issue with prone oozes, but you've also left them ENTIRELY to their own means to imagine what the authors of the game had in mind when they created the "overextended" condition. One option is the MHRP sort of solution where all consequences are covered by one mechanic, a 'disadvantage'. I notice this is one of the consequences of DDN's Advantage/Disadvantage rule, you could simply use it in this fashion as a universal condition. However, it sounds like the flip side of it in MHRP is that the players are left to decide what sorts of narrative-based restrictions need to apply (IE if the character is restrained he gets a disadvantage, but the players would then have to also decide he can't move, maybe can't use some types of actions, etc). Clearly this will work for some people, but may not for others. At the very least it means that there has to be rich flavor text somewhere to supply the narrative with some material to work on, nor is such a system likely to please the above mentioned 4e "precise interpretations" people. I guess maybe the rules could go into some detail about complications, so a given power might provoke disadvantage but also 'knock prone', which then invokes another set of rules. Or the rules could simply make it explicit that while the condition is 'prone' that even if a creature can't logically be knocked prone it still gets the disadvantage.</blockquote>

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