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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7640284" data-attributes="member: 996">That's really not "in the fiction," though, that's /in the system/.  In fiction, a creature that the hero has a hard time beating down, one time, might go down quickly, another.  And, IRL, randomness of terminal ballistics and the remarkable resilience and frightening fragility of human life is much, much stranger than fiction. Page 42 could be interpreted that way, if you like.  But it's very clear, in 4e, that you can 'fluff' a spell however you like so long as it doesn't cross the line of changing the mechanics.  You don't /need/ a new arcane power to be published or a vague DM-fiat procedure to create a new mechanic in order to get a 'new' spell, /in the fiction/. You just take your idea for a new spell, pick an existing one with mechanics that fit, and re-skin it to match. It's the same thing 3e did with weapons after trimming the list so heavily and - with the glaring exception of the Katana - that worked just fine.  (Heck, voluminous as the 1e weapon list was, it /still/ used re-skinning equivalency.)IIRC, the 1e spell-research rules specifically said the player wouldn't know whether he failed in his research because the DM deemed the spell impossible (unacceptable) or because he just got unlucky.  Of course, it's been a while... Not ignore in the sense of removing the resource restrictions, just shift the focus away from.  That is, in 4e, if you shift the pacing of play away from challenging PCs on a resource-attrition schedule, the classes remain balanced & contributing alongside eachother, and only the relative difficulty of encounters and other challenges is impacted.  In any other edition, deviating too much from expected pacing quickly makes resource-heavy classes overpowered - or, on the other extreme, overextended - compared to the resource-light classes, and the dynamic of play becomes uneven, with some players wondering why they even show up.Just remember that internal consistency is internal /to the fiction/, not the system.That's fine for you.  1e didn't have crits or fumbles, and did recommend just 'taking the average' to save yourself rolling all those unlikely-to-hit/unlikely-to-miss attacks.  So the precedent for alternate resolution is there.You can have dozens of minions in a high level encounter, and they're quicker & simpler to deal with than dozens of wildly under-leveled monsters, while staying more relevant to the encounter.  That's the point, and it works pretty well.  Classic D&D had a similar point - with fighters 1/level attacks, taking averages, and even falling back on chainmail (or later Battlesystem) - but successive eds were looking for better ways precisely because that didn't work so well. 4e found one.  5e tried something a little different (not /that/ different, for instance, all 5e monsters have a don't-roll-damage option like 4e minions) - BA, and TBH, it retains too many of the original issues, and introduces a new one: being outnumbered telling too heavily.</blockquote>

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