Mechanics vs. Flavor text

[MoogleEmpMog]

No flavor text? It brings a tear to my eye.

A happy one.

I'd be happy to have flavor text. Describe how a particular wizard uses Energy Blast III in the most evocative terms possible. Tell me how a sorcerer draws burning energy from his blood, wracking himself with pain until he unleashes it in a wave of fiery fury upon his enemies.

But don't tell me how it has to be.

And don't, above all, change a mechanic to fit a particular flavor.

Give me the numbers, show me how YOU used them - but let me use them as I wish.

Effects-based mechanics are almost strictly better. HERO Sytem FTW.

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

I voted for the middle range. My thought is that cases such as the druid's wildshape should be crunchy as it avoids to mismathed power balance issues with the specific critter version.

It also avoids the 'so I am a small druid and nerfed cause there are no good critter shapes..'


jeez, and now I have another book to go buy

 

[Shemeska]

How so? This is the underlying philosophy of effect based systems like HERO, BeSM, and Mutants & Masterminds. Keeping the description separate from the effects gives GMs and players the ultimate flexibility to generate mechanics for whatever fluff they have in mind.

Worst case scenario:

Because without examples of fluff, by stripping the game down to just crunch, people new to the game begin to approach things without the flavor in mind and just the numbers. You change the expectations and the way people approach the game, and ultimately you breed yourself folks who might as well be playing DDM rather than DnD. Without exposure to fluff, without flavor examples to inspire, you have people who are going to be more prone to not produce good fluff on their own.

 

[LostSoul]

I voted some fluff. I want that stuff to get inspiration, but I don't want to feel streightjacketed to that one description.

I'm in total agreement. I'd like to see one normal example (the Druid changes form into a wolf) and one example that's out there (the Druid gets possessed by his ancestor, who looks human, but has all those predator abilities) - to show how much you can play around with the fluff.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Worst case scenario:

Because without examples of fluff, by stripping the game down to just crunch, people new to the game begin to approach things without the flavor in mind and just the numbers. You change the expectations and the way people approach the game, and ultimately you breed yourself folks who might as well be playing DDM rather than DnD. Without exposure to fluff, without flavor examples to inspire, you have people who are going to be more prone to not produce good fluff on their own.

The Hero Games community (admittedly, more of a niche market than D&D, but nonetheless instructive) hardly bears this out. If anything, my experience has been just the opposite - effects-based systems force the player to come up with his own fluff, just to use the power. In HERO, you can't simply select a spell from a list and leave it at that; you must describe to the GM (and the other players) how and why it works.

Now, your description may not be good... but that's a completely different issue.

 

[The_Gneech]

HERO and D&D are almost completely opposite ends of the spectrum, in terms of the GM's approach, tho. HERO assumes that the players and GM all want to build characters and effects to their own conception, and provides tools for that. D&D assumes that people want to take a precreated set of options and run with it.

While I personally fall into the HERO camp on this, the other GM in my group is entirely in the D&D camp. He can't even create a simple character in HERO, not because he can't understand the rules, but because without a framework he just can't get started. He needs the "class / race" hook to start with, and then develops the character through play. (What he tells me every time he tries to create a HERO character is, "Gawd, I can't think of disads. I don't KNOW what his weaknesses are yet!")

This is one of those issues that every game system has to reconcile; HERO tries to accomodate the "need a hook" players (often with less-than-stellar results) via Package Deals, whereas the current D&D has done a pretty good job of accomodating the "build what I want" players (like me) with skills, feats, and loosened multiclassing restrictions.

The main utility of D&D -- and the main reason it does so well as the "default RPG" -- is that is does have so much "run right off the shelf" stuff. When you pick up a module or an issue of Dungeon magazine, you know the writeups in there will follow a certain set of baseline assumptions, which you can then use or adapt to your campaign as necessary. HERO's spotty record on providing adventure support is probably largely due to the fact that every HERO campaign is so different that there is no real baseline to work from.

-The Gneech

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Gneech,

I agree, D&D's approach generally works better for players who cut their teeth on D&D, Palladium, and the like, or on PC RPGs that are essentially reinventing D&D tropes and systems, like Might and Magic or World of Warcraft.

Possibly it's just a better approach overall from a sales perspective. On the flip side, it's awfully hard to create novel-, movie- or console RPG-inspired characters using even the most flexible version of D&D, and more potential new players read/watch/play those mediums than play PC or tabletop RPGs.

However, I took the poll to ask, 'what do you prefer,' not 'what is more marketable.' I prefer HERO to core d20, but write for core d20.

 

[Gold Roger]

I agree with the gneech to a extend. D&D has it's very own presentation, flavor and mythos. And I wouldn't temper with that either, it's good to have a default game that works and I personaly don't want to do away with a certain amount of baseline flavor (if I want such a game I play M&M, seems to be the best generic system for the kind of game I like).

However, I want freedom on the finer details of my flavor. Having a generic fireball and lightningbolt is great. But as DM I want to feel free to tell my players they can choose coldball and line of flame on level 3.

And a generic druid that turns into an animal is great, but if my player tells me his druid should be all about plants, elements or fey, the new system and a broad spell choice allows his druid to be like that from level one on.

 

[The_Gneech]

I agree, D&D's approach generally works better for players who cut their teeth on D&D, Palladium, and the like, or on PC RPGs that are essentially reinventing D&D tropes and systems, like Might and Magic or World of Warcraft.

Possibly it's just a better approach overall from a sales perspective. On the flip side, it's awfully hard to create novel-, movie- or console RPG-inspired characters using even the most flexible version of D&D, and more potential new players read/watch/play those mediums than play PC or tabletop RPGs.

Believe me, I know it is. I've never once played a satisfactory CRPG version of Conan, for instance, and even my current Legolas-clone has levels in Rogue that I didn't really want but had to take for game mechanic reasons ... but I don't think there's a viable solution to the problem other than to convince the masses how much cooler it would be to play HERO -- which I don't think is going to happen now matter how much I might want it to.

-The Gneech

 

[Lorehead]

Four out of five posters agree: adaptable crunch plus an example of fluff give us the best of both worlds. That's what the shapeshift alternative class feature gives us. As you point out, the predator form can look like a wolf or a panther. I fail to see why this is less flavorful than telling us to use any Medium creature of the animal type with 5 HD or less. What "flavor" does wild shape have that this lacks?

What I particularly like about this alternative is that it removes the biggest headaches of arbitrary-form effects. It's simpler than wild shape. The effects are right there in the stat block. They're additive, so they scale intelligently with both class level and character level. You don't need to look through the eleven books listed on page 41 to compare the game statistics for every possible form. The ability no longer becomes unbalanced the moment any designer publishes an animal that synergizes too well with it. (It needn't even be overpowered as an encounter; it only needs relatively low HD and good abilities that the wild shaping druid gets to use.) Physical stats are no longer dump stats from level 5 on up. And the druid finally gives up Natural Spell for the sake of balance.

This is a very elegant replacement for polymorph-style shapeshifting. In fact, it's a lot more like what I came up with than the polymorph-subschool spells in the book.