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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5736366" data-attributes="member: 82106">Soooooo, instead when you needed a rule you'd look it up in the book! lol.Same can be said about the other way- a game shouldn't force you to learn the rules before being able to use it.(I know I'll get a million people saying that's an entitled gamers of today viewpoint, but who cares.)</blockquote>Here's the problem with putting the rule "wherever it is used", MANY of the rules are used in a LOT of places. Lets just look at ONE simple power, lets say Magic Missile. How many rules does MM reference? Well, first of all it references the general rules on the frequency of use of powers, and the general rules on how to read a power and what is a keyword, what 'range 20' means, the OA rules associated with that, the LoS and LoE rules associated with that, and then it has a fairly involved interaction with the damage rules as well. Overall there are probably 20-30 rules that are relevant to this ONE simple power alone. Clearly there's no way in heck that all the rules related to each power are going to be re-introduced with each one. So, you're going to have to now draw some arbitrary line in the sand and call SOME of the rules "basic rules" that are never recapitulated and which the player WILL have to reference and some part of them which is now deemed for whatever arbitrary reason "power specific" and gets rehashed along with each power. In the case of the OA rule that Monte called out this will have to be done literally 100's of times in any book that contains a modicum of powers. Given that the OA rules themselves are about half a page long I'm thinking that dedicating 50 pages of the book to reprinting them 50 times is a non-starter. OK, you can instead reprint a 'reminder', but isn't that what the attack type entry for the power IS? Beyond that if a rule is rehashed even twice we've clearly created an issue if it is ever getting errata, on top of which just making sure text is identical in multiple places in a book is an added editorial chore that should be avoided.Clearly there has to be somewhere where each rule is definitively established and referenced. I don't know what sort of bud Monte was using when he wrote this column, but it addled his wits... Maybe he just needs more sleep, or maybe he should try playing and running 4e before trying to improve on it! Of course none of this precludes the existence of a beginner's box or a player's book that dedicates 20 pages to describing the rules in the form of an extensive example, but that's a lot different thing from trying to make a rule book where 'everything you need to know' is always on the page you happen to be referencing. I don't think Monte actually means anything like that anyhow, clearly. TBH if he can write an awesome intro book for 4e that guides you through a tutorial and introduces the various rules only when you need them? Great! OTOH from what I can see the RB pretty much did that. The concept of 'only having the more complicated rules at higher level' makes no sense to me at all, as others have said. The vast majority of the general rules of the game apply in situations that come up at all levels and it is undesirable in a whole host of ways to make the rules inconsistent. Nor is that in any way shape or form how even Basic D&D did it. Characters started out simpler, which they don't do as much in 4e, but the rules never did. They were just pretty simple to start with and there were no non-optional general rules that you didn't use at level 1. Some might just not come up until higher levels, which is fine. Level 1 monsters don't need DR, great! They don't ever have threatening reach, or immediate actions, great! There's a bit you can do there, and it might ease the entry into the game a bit for a new player, but it is that even worth an L&L article to talk about? It is a detail of content design for the game is all. It doesn't even have to be universal, complicated stuff can exist for level 1, it could just be marked "more advanced stuff" or whatever. That's fine too![/QUOTE]

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