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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Derren" data-source="post: 5757422" data-attributes="member: 2518">So every arcane power with the fire keyword is now a fireball? Even when described as not being one?You can't say that a fireball is always a fireball but a mocking insult can be something totally different. Its either one or the other.But back to the "Nod to realism"Where in my eyes 4E fails is that balanced combat is more important than "realistic" worlds. The "Mocking a skeletton" ties into this but there are many other examples.After 3E turned out to be rather unbalanced, 4Es prime objective and major selling point was balanced combat. To achieve that nearly everything in 4E had to obey the math, the power, the healing or the magic item prices.All those things had to be consistent all the times and there was no room for flavor breaking the math (resulting is situations like Mocking a skeletton or shouting someone healthy). But all this made the game "less real" for a larger group of persons as the mechanical, gamist, construct behind the system was much more visible and required much more effort to ignore and especially in the beginning in 4E there simply were taboo topics you were simply not allowed to mention as they would expose how much had been sacrificed on the altar of balance. (Wanting to be a necromancer was such an issue).The argument that 4E looks like a video game also comes from that. What do video games very well? Balanced tactical combat. What don't they do well? Reacting to player input in a fluid way. Yet 4E for some reason did try to compete with video games in the tactical combat department instead of concentrating on what it does better than video games. Just look at the early 4E WotC adventures. You could practically port them 1:1 into a video game as they were nothing but dungeon crawls.</blockquote>

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