Prose, Terminology, Fluff, & Presentation: Spreadsheets or Haiku?

[wrecan]

I think mechanical complexity and technical presentation are inter-related. The more complexity you have, the more prose you need to offer to explain these complexities. (Prose that was often lacking even in the prosaic editions.)

By the way, I'm not eschewing prose. I've said repeatedly that I want prose in the PHB descriptions of the spells, and plenty of it. The PHB description is where you are supposed to be intrigued and drawn in.

For the DM, however, the one line would go a long way to making it easy to run a NPC caster without having to have be as good a player of a caster as the player of a caster.

Here's an example. One of the more prosaic spells is animate rope. Seriously. Here's the 3e version.

ANIMATE ROPE
Transmutation
Level: Brd 1, Sor/Wiz 1
Components: V, S
Casting Time: 1 standard action
Range: Medium (100 ft. + 10 ft./level)
Target: One ropelike object, length up to 50' + 5'/level; see text
Duration: 1 round/level
Saving Throw: None
Spell Resistance: None
You can animate a nonliving ropelike object. The maximum length assumes a rope with a 1-inch diameter. Reduce the maximum length by 50% for every additional inch of thickness, and increase it by 50% for each reduction of the rope’s diameter by half. The possible commands are “coil” (form a neat, coiled stack), “coil and knot,” “loop,” “loop and knot,” “tie and knot,” and the opposites of all of the above (“uncoil,” and so forth). You can give one command each round as a move action, as if directing an active spell.

The rope can enwrap only a creature or an object within 1 foot of it—it does not snake outward—so it must be thrown near the intended target. Doing so requires a successful ranged touch attack roll (range increment 10 feet). A typical 1-inch-diameter hempen rope has 2 hit points, AC 10, and requires a DC 23 Strength check to burst it. The rope does not deal damage, but it can be used as a trip line or to cause a single opponent that fails a Reflex saving throw to become entangled. A creature capable of spellcasting that is bound by this spell must make a DC 15 Concentration check to cast a spell. An entangled creature can slip free with a DC 20 Escape Artist check.

The rope itself and any knots tied in it are not magical.

This spell grants a +2 bonus on any Use Rope checks you make when using the transmuted rope.

The spell cannot animate objects carried or worn by a creature.

Whew! That's a lot of words. Here's how I would wrecanify that spell:
ANIMATE ROPE
Wizard 1

Transmutation
Standard Action

Close burst 20
Attack: Int v. Reflex (see below)
With your mastery of matter and motion, you can animate rope to slither around the field like a snake, and to enwine your enemies. You can animate one ropelike object in the burst that is unattended, up to 50' in length, and up to 1" in diameter. If the rope is of greater diameter, decrease the amount of rope that can be animated by 10' per extra inch of diameter.

On your turn, as a minor action, you can cause the rope to travel up to 30' (which can provoke attacks), or to coil around or uncoil from an object, loop or unloop, or to tie a knot. If the target is unwilling, you make an attack to grab the target. Your attack roll determines the DC to break the rope or escape from it. Any damage inflicted on rope will destroy it. The enchantment otherwise lasts as the rope is within 20 squares of you and you spend a minor action each round to command the rope or to sustain the spell.

Animate Rope (close burst 20; Int vs. Ref (sets the DC to escape, break or avoid the rope) animate one 50'-rope; minor action to command or sustain)

There you go. The full description has plenty of prose, and the niggly details a player likes to fool around with, but the one-line text has everything the DM will need to play the spell if it comes up in combat. Everyone wins.

 

[Fallstorm]

I like 2e a lot. Much more than 4E or 3e. THAC0 really isn't that hard and the mechanics overall i find much easier to use and remember than 3E. I don't think THAC0 is coming back though. I used to be one of those people who spoke about thac0 like it was some major stumbling block. Then after a long hiatus from 2E i ran a campaign again last year. Turned out ost of te stuff i thought was going to be difficult wasn't. Ended up prefering NWPs to 3e or 4e skills. Some of the restrictions are arbitray...we just ignored many of them and imposed xp penalties (but we were doing thisback in the 90s anyways). 2e had a pretty plain core, but it easily supported optional setting stuff like ravenloft, darksun and planescape. The phb and dmg were well organized and enjoyable to read certainly could use refinement ere or there. But on the whole nostalgia isn't what makes it good for me (in fact it initially prevented me frim giving the system a second chance). It really is a good game, and lacks most of the major issues i have with 3E or 4E.

THACO may not have been that bad but it wasn't that great either especially when combined with all the other clunky parts of 2E i.,e the lower the armor class the better, the lower the initiative the better (but don't forget to include casting time and Weapon Speed Factor to the roll), multiple attacks had to be staggered in initiative, etc. The system was all over the place on what was needed to obtain X effect. The simple D20 Mechanic of a essentially a target number to hit with higher always being better is much more efficient and streamlined.

Regarding things like racial level limits and being arbitray, well they may be arbitrary but those are the rules for 2E and the groups that I play with today and in the past have always been groups that go by the book as much as possible. Yes, you can ignore a rule but that doesn't fix the problem of the rule being a problem in the edition. Rule zero is not a fix. I will agree though that I can see how the rules of 2E DnD would have made the game better if you just ignored them.

As regarding setting....that is all fluff. I am not saying I didn't enjoy the diversity of settings available in DnD 2E, but as far as background and such again I don't need a rules edition to do that. For example., if I want to run a 4E game in which the spell plague never happened and the realms remain just like it was in 3rd or 2nd edition it is really not that hard to do, especially since I have the setting books for these still. It should also be noted that TSR's overproduction of game worlds was a contributing factor in driving that company into financial ruin and WOTC stepping in and acquiring them. At one point DnD 2E was producing both novel and game material for DnD 2E Core, Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Planescape, Darksun, Al-Qadim, Birthright, Spelljammer, and Ravenloft all at virtually the same time. Multiple products were dropping simultaneously for these every month. How long did you think that was going to last, really? The number of campaign worlds produced was one of the first things that pre-Hasbro WOTC cut down on and for very good reason.

There are some things that DnD Next could take from 2E like a degree of the spell descriptions like what Warunsun and Klaus posted and incorporate in the game though, and maybe the organizational layout of the 2E books. That may not be enough to satisfy someone who is like "I want 2E or else" but like I said that person has probably not being purchasing anything for DnD really since 1989 anyways other than the main new edition PHBs just to try them out and say I don't like them.

 

[Fallstorm]

It took me awhile to put my finger on it, but with 4e the organization is what got to me. I really dislike having all the powers right with the class. It makes sense to have them there (everything you need to play the class), but it really bothered me. But why should it? In prior editions all the spells were together, all the feats and skills were together, so its not like having a big chunk of data together is new.

It dawned on me is I like having more of a synopsis of the classes so I can think about what I want to run before diving into the meat of the character (feats, skills, powers). The first time I opened up the 4e handbook I get to see Cleric (with 5 pages of prayers), Fighter (with 5 pages of maneuvers), Paladin (with 5 pages of maneuvers), Ranger (with 5 pages of maneuvers), Rogue (with 5 pages of maneuvers), and Wizard (with 5 pages of spells).

So I did not even see the class, I saw 30-50 pages of just powers when I thought I was thumbing through the classes.

Eventually I drifted to Savage Worlds but I still kept an eye out for anything 4e that might be interesting. So I bought 4e Darksun - I was always interested in the setting but I never got it back in the day. I sure wish I had looked at it in the bookstore vs. buying online - I would have never got it and just looked for a 2e version. I open it up, a couple pages on what Darksun is about (cool) then about 100 pages of powers and other crunch that added little to the flavor. One has to jump to around page 130 just to get to more Dark Sun goodies.


So its not just what is written and if the mechanics are clear, its also overall organization.

You might have a point on this one. Moving the powers of each class to their own section and just having the classes separately wouldn't bother me too much. The 3rd edition version of Warhammer Fantasy Role-play incorporates playing cards with 4E style power like abilities for all careers and abilities as well as boardgame elements into it (which Fantasy Flight does well) along with the game's own unique dice system, yet when we play and in reading the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay book with it's yellow faux scroll like pages and gritty pictures you definately feel immersed in the setting of the Warhammer world and the book is fun to read despite the abilities being essentially stat block style in design.

 

[Bedrockgames]

THACO may not have been that bad but it wasn't that great either especially when combined with all the other clunky parts of 2E i.,e the lower the armor class the better, the lower the initiative the better (but don't forget to include casting time and Weapon Speed Factor to the roll), multiple attacks had to be staggered in initiative, etc. The system was all over the place on what was needed to obtain X effect. The simple D20 Mechanic of a essentially a target number to hit with higher always being better is much more efficient and streamlined.

I dont dispute d20 is more efficient and streamlined but there were reasons 2e seemed all over the place. Having initiative roll be lower and a d10 makes it easier to keep track of initiative (because you count from 1-10 rather than from 20+ to 1). Lower AC being better was simply a function of how THAC0 operated andone thin THAC0 achieved is the rolls are more contained than in d20 (you dont end up with 35+ ACs or DCs, bonuses are all fairly easy to manage because they are not piled on a BAB bonus). Staggered attacks were a bit harder to track, but better than some of the multi attack nonsense you get in d20. I have been playing 2E quite a bit recentlty and have to say I really prefer it to d20. Having different dice for different things can be a bit more challenging, but it gives the designers a lot more control over the numbers in many cases (NWPs work better for me as roll under the stat than d20 plus skill and attribute modifiers).

Regarding things like racial level limits and being arbitray, well they may be arbitrary but those are the rules for 2E and the groups that I play with today and in the past have always been groups that go by the book as much as possible. Yes, you can ignore a rule but that doesn't fix the problem of the rule being a problem in the edition. Rule zero is not a fix. I will agree though that I can see how the rules of 2E DnD would have made the game better if you just ignored them.

I will not deny this part of 2e bothers me. I get that it was for balance but xp penalties would have been a better way to go.

As regarding setting....that is all fluff. I am not saying I didn't enjoy the diversity of settings available in DnD 2E, but as far as background and such again I don't need a rules edition to do that. For example., if I want to run a 4E game in which the spell plague never happened and the realms remain just like it was in 3rd or 2nd edition it is really not that hard to do, especially since I have the setting books for these still. It should also be noted that TSR's overproduction of game worlds was a contributing factor in driving that company into financial ruin and WOTC stepping in and acquiring them. At one point DnD 2E was producing both novel and game material for DnD 2E Core, Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Planescape, Darksun, Al-Qadim, Birthright, Spelljammer, and Ravenloft all at virtually the same time. Multiple products were dropping simultaneously for these every month. How long did you think that was going to last, really? The number of campaign worlds produced was one of the first things that pre-Hasbro WOTC cut down on and for very good reason.

Not everyone agrees that tsr's woes being a product of too many campaign worlds (general financial misanagement, competition from wotc magic and WW, and other issues are a big part of it). There is a good argument that they both drew people to the ame and ncreased the number of gms (every player in all my groups in the 90s gmd and it was because there was a world for everyone....something out there everyone could get excited about running. But in terms of fluff, i want and like fluff. The sheer amount of availabke flavr material in the 90s made my gaming experience better. As a GM i did needed these things to get better. The van richten guides alone got me to think about monsters and investigations in entirely new ways.

There are some things that DnD Next could take from 2E like a degree of the spell descriptions like what Warunsun and Klaus posted and incorporate in the game though, and maybe the organizational layout of the 2E books. That may not be enough to satisfy someone who is like "I want 2E or else" but like I said that person has probably not being purchasing anything for DnD really since 1989 anyways other than the main new edition PHBs just to try them out and say I don't like them.

I am not "i want 2E or else" (and I honestly don't believe I have met anyone who fits your rather over-the-top description in the 2E camp). In fact i think they would be foolish to model too much of D&D next on 2E because lots of people dont like that edition. But it did do things well and those things are worth taking note of.

 

[Lanefan]

I think mechanical complexity and technical presentation are inter-related. The more complexity you have, the more prose you need to offer to explain these complexities. (Prose that was often lacking even in the prosaic editions.)

By the way, I'm not eschewing prose. I've said repeatedly that I want prose in the PHB descriptions of the spells, and plenty of it. The PHB description is where you are supposed to be intrigued and drawn in.

For the DM, however, the one line would go a long way to making it easy to run a NPC caster without having to have be as good a player of a caster as the player of a caster.

So are you suggesting each spell be in effect written up twice - once in the PH in full prose form and a second time in the DMG in very short one-line form?

This certainly could be an answer, though I'd argue the DMG version needs some prose in order to delve into corner cases and interactions with other spells/effects; the players don't need this stuff getting in the way in the PH.

I've been assuming all along here we're talking about the PH presentation, at least for the spell debate.

And it occurs to me that without realizing it in these terms I long ago sort of did what you're suggesting, only for players and DM alike.

For each class and level of spell I have a one-page chart listing in order in short form the stuff that would usually go in the written "block": range, area of effect, duration, components, casting time, etc., followed by a longer prose-only write-up for when more info is needed. Examples follow (I hope; with a warning that my version of Sleep is perhaps even more of a train wreck than other versions seen here):

TABLE: (Sleep is one line of a 35-line table, sorry about the lousy formatting here)
Spell :|: Area of Effect :|: Range (feet) :|: Duration :|: Comp. :|: Casting time :|: Pages

Sleep :|: 30' diam. sphere :|: 50 + 15/level :|: 5 rounds/level :|: VSM :|: 1 seg. :|: 6

WRITE-UP:
Sleep (MU-1) Makes 4d4 hit dice or levels worth of creatures fall asleep on the spot. Will affect weakest creatures in area unless a single target stated, it then goes for that one first. Targets 3rd level/3 hit dice or lower get a saving throw only if above caster's level but must roll higher than (20 - level difference) to succeed. 4th level/4 hit die creatures save at -6. 5th level/5 hit dice save at +3; 6th/6 save at +8. 7th and higher are immune, as are undead, constructs, and creatures that do not sleep; some creatures (e.g. Elves) have built-in resistance but can still be affected occasionally. Sleeping creatures can be awoken by rough contact or a very loud noise nearby such as a thunderclap. Can be slain 2 per round under ideal conditions but must roll to hit vs. base AC for each. Material components are a pinch of fine sand, or root of Arunya, or rose petals, or a live cricket.

The "pages" entry in the table is because we track how many pages in one's spell book each spell takes up.

Lan-"enter sandman"-efan

 

[wrecan]

So are you suggesting each spell be in effect written up twice - once in the PH in full prose form and a second time in the DMG in very short one-line form?

I thought I was pretty clear in my post that the prosaic and one-line write-ups would be together. More importantly, the one-line write-ups would also be available for any electronic creature builder, so that they could easily be incorporated into stat blocks of NPC spellcasters.

 

[Jemal]

I play with (And occasionally i'm one of them) rules lawyers, so the wording in the Rules needs to be fairly clear.
That being said, I also greatly appreciate if that's not ALL the book is about. I think 3.5 got a great balance of Fluff&Crunch in most of their descriptions, and would like to see something similar.

2e>3e>3.5 was a steady climb, with the game getting steadily clearer and more fun, but 4e kinda dropped the ball.

Here's hoping 5e will pick the ball back up and run the touchdown (Hope I got my foose-ball reference right, y'all know we Canucks don't care about any sport that aint played on the ice. ).
Maybe it'll will be as much of an improvement as I feel 4e was a letdown (Yes I know there's some who like it, but I'm not one.)

 

[nedjer]

Bridging the skills gap between a novice/ potential player and a 25 year GM seems in some ways similar to bridging the gap between a 1st level Magic-User and an Archmage. If the Archmage gives the orc-bait a bunch of 7th level spells as homework the homework ain't going to get done.

 

[Doomsdave]

"Rules presented as an Excel Spreadsheet"

That made me laugh out loud. I remember the first time I looked into a 4e manual, the colorcoded powers and stat blocks looked extremely similar to our mandatory color-codes at work for memoranda by department and powerpoints by topic etc. When I opened that 4e book, all I could think was "Oh no, work".