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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5977584" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think the limits on "refluffing", in 4e, are keywords. The rules discussion of keywords is quite inadequate - in the main rules text, they are discussed only in "mechanics to mechanics" terms (eg [Fire] spells interact with [Fire] feats and [Fire] resitance). It is only in an obscure corner, namely, the discussion of the interaction between powers and objects, that you see some reference to what is far more important, namely, that keywords mediate between the rules and the fiction. The reason [fire] damage can set things on fire is because of what [fire] means in fictional terms. Likewise [cold] damage can freeze water.This sort of keywords-to-fiction mediation (i) puts limits on refluffing - for example, whatever a Magic Missile looks like, it has to be the sort of thing that would do [Force] damage and not [Thunder] damage. It also puts limits on how far you can make resolution happen on an AI basis - because the AI would have to interpret the relationship between keywords and fictional properites of things (eg timber hates being burned more than it hates being frozen).Keywords are also the basis for Page 42 stuff: using Icy Terrain to cross a stream by freezing it, for example, or using Twist of Space to free someone from a trapping mirror by teleporting her out. The fact that magical abilities have far more keywords than martial abilities also helps establish and reinforce the difference between magic and martial abilities which many say they feel is elided by the common power structure and notation.Whereas some people are very praising of the 4e DMGs, I think they're rather overrated. Their failure to discuss any of this stuff, to link it into the general approach to adjudication in page 42, etc is a huge gap which I think is partially responsible for some negative percpetions of and negative experiences with 4e. I personally think that refluffing - changing the colour - is less important to a good play experience than action resolution in which fictional positioning matters. And for this, in 4e, keywords are crucial. It would have been better to play them up, while letting the possibility of refluffling the colour around them speak a bit more for itself.I think some of this comes back to keywords. For example, the Deathlock Wight has a Horrific Visage power which is a close blast, attacks Will, has the [Fear] keyword and causes forced movement. From these mechanical features you can tell (without any need for flavour text) that what that power represents is the Deathlock Wight looking at its enemies (the close blast occurs on only one side of the creature, as is appropriate to something looking) and revealing its true undead form, and that the forced movement represents the enemy recoiling in fear.The power is not perfect - it is not a gaze attack, and so works against even a blinded enemy. I can see two ways of going here. One is to treat that as an error, and to house rule in the [Gaze] keyword. Another is to treat this as correct, and take the view that when the creature reveals its horrible form this is metaphysically awful, and can cause even the blinded to recoil as they sense the horror. Even in this case, though, I would regard it as open to the GM to grant a PC a bonus to Will (+2 is the default circumstance bonus in 4e) if his/her player narrates the PC turning away from the Wight (and therefore perhaps taking a -2 to hit in turn).And even if nothing like that has to be adjudicated, and hence all the above analysis of the power provides mere colour to a mechanically determined resolution of the power, it is still a fact in the narrative that the PC recoiled in fear from the horrible true form of a Wight, which is something that can be picked up in later play (eg some social or religious context) and feed into the fiction in that more indirect fashion.I'm not saying this is White Plume Mountain, which at places becomes nothing but free-form mediated fictional positioning (like surfing the doors over the super-tetanus pits). But it's not a complete absence of fictional positioning either. And the other frequent place where fictional positioning comes into resolution (although less so by way of narrative and more by way of simple GM adjudication) is terrain: setting DCs for jumping and climbing, determining the cover provided by walls, tables, hedges, trees, etc.As for the gelatinous cube - it seems to me there are two ways the game could go here. The cube has the ooze kewyord, and I think had the rules said "No ooze may be knocked prone" no one would have complained. But instead the rules go the other way, and say that "prone", when applied to oozes, snakes and the like, means "out of position such that some recovery is needed, and in the meantime it has a harder time attacking and is more vulnerable to melee attacks". On this way, which the actual rules have adopted, there is still one weird consequence - prone oozes and snakes get a bonus to defence against non-adjacent ranged attacks. I don't think it's ever come up in my game. If it did I'd probably apply it by default for simple reasons of simplicity in handling a corner case, but if my players lobbied against it on grounds of incongruity between fiction and mechanics I'd probably relent - it's a corner case, and provided they're prepared to process the additional complexity what do I care!What I see, in comparison to 3E, is an attempt to present a coherent and thematically laden cosmology, with a deliberate design of PPs, EDs, races, classes etc that embed PCs (and therefore players) within that conflict.I also see this as part of the logic of the long lists (of races, PPs, EDs, etc): instead of choosing your Beliefs or descriptors freely (as you might in Burning Wheel or HeroWars/Quest), you pick the ones that grab you off the long list that WotC has sold to you!This theory of the logic of long lists is my own, and maybe it's crazy. But the deliberate rationale for the presentation of story elements (monsters, races, gods, etc) as suitable for a certain sort of approach to play is set out in Worlds & Monsters, a very good GMing book in my view (and unlike Races and Classes not a mere preview). And it is this deliberate attention to the role, in play, of the fiction that the game presents, which I think is indie-influenced. (Also the attention to gameplay consequences, especially narrative pacing, in combat, the approach to scene-framing and the scene as the unit of play more generally, and of course skill challenges.)I would say that I like fairly thematically trite narrativist play (in the Forge sense of that word), but am very happy with the techniques of classic rules heavy systems (D&D, Rolemaster, RQ, etc). I would think that I'm pretty much the target audience for Burning Wheel. And 4e. Whereas something like My Life With Master or The World, The Flesh and The Devil are games that I might admire from afar (and there are some Paul Czege posts on the Forge which have really helped me with my GMing) but I'm not sure I would actually want to play.</blockquote>

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