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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5575073" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think this is a very good point. I'm not sure I agree - part of the mechanics of a 4e fireball is its fire descriptor and its fire damage, which I think are clearly, and by the rules, relevant to the fiction (see eg the discussion of the vulnerability of objects to fire somewhere around p 60 of the DMG).But I agree that there is a tendency to treat descriptors as purely mechanical notions, M:TG style. I don't see any support for this in the rulebooks (cf the aforementioned passage in the DMG, plus related stuff like the immunity of objects to psychic damage). I think it has an external cause.My answer isn't necessarily at odds with your answer - so perhaps we're both right. I think it's to do with a certain conception of what the player is entitled to achieve, in the game, in virtue of having chosen certain powers, and a reluctance to build a fiction that coherently accomodates that - a certain laziness, if you like, of ignoring the fiction rather than working with it. I think this probably has the same external cause.It's hard for me to describe the external cause non-pejoratively, but I think it's to do with a certain view of what RPGing is about - a pretty hardcore and non-Gygaxian gamism. And my view is that if you changed 4e to change the way in which fictional positioning interacts with the mechanics, you wouldn't get all these people suddenly playing fictionally rich RPGs - they'd either drift back to what they're doing now, or find another game/passtime. After all, whatever the authors intended, plenty of people played AD&D and Basic D&D, or for that matter RQ and RM, with less attention to fictional position in combat then occurs in the play of 4e.</blockquote>

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