Garthanos, you have a very nice page with some excellent ideas.
One of my players renamed 'dreadful word' to 'fuzzy bunnies'. As thats the word she wanted to be dreadful. And another of my players renamed 'lance of faith' to 'lance to the face'.
Yes, I agree totally! The players need to be involved in this process in order for it to have the desired effect. (Which is making the game come alive and be more fun for everyone.)I think what is significant is that it is the players who are being encouraged to do the re-visualization. I am inclined to give the wizard free class feature is to allow any power with an energy key word to be swapped out with any other that the class has initially when you take it. Or at the cost of a feat to allow this at-will for a set of energies (I am an elementalist).
Heck not just Wizards, Swordmages, Warlocks just about anybody. Paladins and Priests ought to be locked in closer to whatever there god's feature energy type(s) are and feature weapon type is (but since I allow players to help me build my world a bit we can probably create a god with their favored types.)
For me the energy type has a large impact on visualization, if you are really allowing the players to re visualize I don't think it should be written in stone.
As long as the results are mechanically the same, the fluff aspects of what actually happens can be changed as much as the caster desires, I firmly believe.
Now, applying this to the exploits of a 4E Martial Character is something that adds an entirely new wrinkle to the situation and holds plenty more promise, too! I've not given this adequate thought yet to even try to speak intelligently about it, but I surely hope that I do so very, very soon.
But then, how do you keep up with your different versions of the same powers? It seems like you would need a whole notebook for each class to have adequate room for everything! Not to mention complete tables of contents and very specific word indices to find anything that you were looking for.Great the more hammer's in the imagination forge the better!
One very useful thing I noticed you can freely add a specific situation limit I only describe it "this way" when this condition occurs.... when the sun is behind me ... when my enemy is bloodied etc.
But then, how do you keep up with your different versions of the same powers? It seems like you would need a whole notebook for each class to have adequate room for everything! Not to mention complete tables of contents and very specific wor indices to find anything that you were looking for.
Great idea, but, I tell ya, it sounds like more work than I planned on when the DM bug bit me.One Idea I had was to have the powers on cards and have 8 or 10 flavor texts on the backside of each card ... as readily available reminders.