Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5945070" data-attributes="member: 42582">I agree that the keywords are hugely important (and I tend to ignore the italicised flavour unless I'm very confused about what's going on, and I actively loathe the bloated Essentials fluff). I think the rulebooks are really weak on this, because the only place in which keywords are discussed as anchors between mechanics and fiction is in the DMG discussing damage to objects. The main discussion in the PHB and the Rules Compendium is all about mechanics-to-mechanics interaction rather than mechanics-to-world interaction.To try and explain further: the PHB tells met that [fire] keyword powers interact with [fire] keyword feats and other enhancers. But only in the damage-to-objects discussion do they make explicit that [fire] keyword powers mean that the effect is fiery,a nd so will set comubstibles on fire. In the case of a Deathlock Wight, it is the [fear] keyword that tells us that its push effect from Horrific Visage is the victim recoiling in horror.So I don't see it as mechanics first, fluff second because I think the fiction is built into the mechanics via the keywords. And if the rulebooks had been clearer about this, I think a lot of the rather arid debates about whether a power can do cold damage without having the cold subtype, etc, would quickly have gone away. Another example of this is the sorcerer at-will Blazing Starfall. It has both [fire] and [radiant] keywords, but it only deals fire damage if cast by a cosmic sorcerer (it sets up a fire zone). The sorcerer PC in my group is a chaos sorcerer, and so his blazing starfall does no fire damage. To me that makes it obvious that the power has no [fire] keyword, and I have ruled it that way from the get go. I think technically that is a house rule, but I think if the role keywords play in mediating mechanics and fiction were better explained, my ruling would be a consequence of rules-as-written.Agreed. But 5 minutes is (in my view) much easier to adjudicate than 1 hour, just because of the reduced complexity of things to track, the lesser distances that can be travelled, etc. Also, because of the way that healing surge expenditure and encounter power recovery and encounter duration effects are integrated, it is to a significant extent self-balancing: it doesn't matter if, on this occasion, I let the players get away with packing a bit too much, or a bit to little, into their 5 minutes, because while they get to keep their buff they don't get their powers or their hit points back. Conversely, suppose I tell the players, "Sorry, 5 minutes have passed - you've lost your buff" well they can at least rest and get their powers and hp back, and perhaps an action point as well.The problem with the 1 hour buff is that it's on a cycle with no countervailing pressures - for the player it's strictly a purge to have the GM call the hour over. My Rolemaster game used to be full of this stuff - 1 min/lvl and 10 min/lvl durations. I'm really glad to be rid of them.Your preferred suite of durations strikes me as much less harmful: instantaneous corresponds roughly to Luke Crane's "test"; encounter to his "conflict" or "scene"; days/weeks to his "session" or "adventure"; months/years to his "campaign". But I would be surprised if the mainstream anti-encounter power D&D players would sign onto these durations. I think there is a lot of support for reintroducing the fiddly durations that I hate.</blockquote>

Verification