Which is an admission that the spell is working as intended, reliably, each time it's used. So in other words, the effect of the spell unto itself is uncompromised even if you've made its activation cumbersome to the point of lacking utility.
Except that, if we assume that Shield works the way it has for the past fifteen years, the
reason it works is because it is fast. "Hey! I've just been hit. So I'm going to stop, draw a pentagram, light wax, and chant for three minutes to protect myself from the incoming blow" doesn't work.
You can go back to the old "shield is like Mage Armour" paradigm - but that's fundamentally different from the modern Shield spell.
This is an extremely bad-faith take on your part.
No it isn't. It's an attempt to understand a festering garbage-fire of an edition warring article that showed nothing more than that the author was entirely trapped in his own paradigm and invented problems because of it.
To treat that as an attack on you, your likes, and your preferred game is to profoundly misunderstand what it's about, though it rather sadly explains a lot about the tenor of your posts here. I'd urge you once again to look at what's being said not as an attack, but rather to understand why 4E is being held up as an example of what isn't preferred in this regard.
Indeed. And what is being said is "I can't be bothered to understand why 4e does things the way it does so I'm gong to invent edition warring jargon".
The parsing of 3.X between 3E and 3.5E as compared to 4E is largely a moot point,
Meanwhile pretending 3.0 and 3.5 are the same edition rather than 3.0 being the shortest lived edition in history and 3.5 a shameless cash grab is simply false.
in that it insists on comparing 3.0 and 3.5's length's separately to 4E's unified whole, which is largely pointless because 4E itself was bifurcated by the Essentials line, which is a truism that's not undone by pointing out that Essentials wasn't a "point-five" edition the way 3.5 was. To quote D&D historian Shannon Appelcline in his overview of
Heroes of the Fallen Lands:
Applecline is only partly right;
plenty of people (myself included) played using a mix of the two parts at the same table. And you literally could not use 3.0 with 3.5 in the same way with no real issues when the classes had e.g. different skills and literally hundreds of spells were changed. The analogy does not hold.
So no I don't think you were right. I think that this is a rare case where Applecline was outright incorrect. And that the backlash against the different design paradigm in Essentials is comparable to the different design paradigm in The Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords - which was sometimes used with no issues at all in 3.5 games, while a lot of people decried it as "The Book of Weaboo Fitan Magic"
There's even a mini edition-war inside 5e with Tasha's Cauldron of Everything and a group that refuses to accept that and a minor fracture there.
In that regard, the simpler and less pedantic method is to measure the total length of 3.X's life against that of 4E(ssentials)' life, and that's without taking into account the additional time that the former received under the Pathfinder banner.
And the simpler and less pedantic method is to treat the earth as flat. This doesn't make it correct. 3.5 worked (despite selling less than 3.0) because it allowed the 3.5 designers to resell PHBs and all the splatbooks in a way that was incompatible enough. Meanwhile Pathfinder once again worked by allowing the designers to resell PHBs and a collection of new splatbooks.
A better metric would be to say that 3.X got three editions.
Calling it a "proxy" strikes me as disingenuous here, as it again suggests an element of duplicity on the part of people who found fault with that idea. I believe that it's still the case with 5E, just that it's one which people have elected to live with insofar as it's being far less of an issue with regard to its application. Which is to say, it's less of a break in verisimilitude for a fighter to use Second Wind on themselves once per rest (short or long) than it is for the warlord to use their Inspiring Word on other people twice per encounter (i.e shouting other people healed).
Despite the fact that the fighter is literally healing themselves out of thin air - while the warlord is allowing people to spend their own resources. Somehow magical healing out of thin air breaks peoples versimilitude while encouraging people to dig deeply into their own resources and take inspiration from others
to use their own stamina doesn't. And yes, a lot of this problem is that healing surges were poorly explained. While the other part is the "D&D versimilitude" crew almost entirely caring about D&D's tradition and not what people in the real world or in fiction do.
Which is an issue of modeling what's happening when hit points are lost, since the same mechanic is used to present injuries which you can't simply shrug off or ignore. Hence other models such as wound/vitality points. All of which is to say that there's a reason why I originally stated that verisimilitude wasn't an all-encompasing principle back in the OP. However, that caveat seems to have been lost.
Versimilitude was never all encompassing. It was always a proxy for familiarity that never in many of the cases where it was brought up made any sense when compared with the real world. If it had been anything other than a mix of familiarity and feeling then the simple fact that the 4e fighter has to pace themselves when the 3.X fighter is an untiring robot, spamming the same attacks again and again would have had the versimiltiude people on the side of 4e. Those that didn't go over to a different game entirely (like GURPS or Rolemaster or any one of the dozens of other games that did things better this way than D&D).
I don't grant your premise that it did model the real-world effects of fatigue and "non-bonebreaking injuries" better than previous editions; quite the opposite really.
And yet I have demonstrated how and why and a an example. You are not engaging with the example. Simply using "versimilitude" as your excuse with no actual evidence and no tie to real world situations. This is because versimilitude is and has always been a proxy for familiarity.
Phrasing it this way is simply edition-warring, and no, you can't say that you're simply doing so in regard to edition-warring that was lobbed at you first. There needs to be a circumstance under which we can look at areas where 4E didn't do well without its de4Enders coming in to deny all premises and champion the game as the best edition ever in every imaginable regard. And if you find that hyperbole ridiculous, it mirrors the tenor of your posts here.
In short you want a safe space to edition war in peace? And not have your incorrect examples pointed out has being incorrect.
There are
plenty of areas where 4e didn't do well. For one the combat is far too slow. For another it surrendered much of the bonus of a class based system. It wasn't that the characters were samey - but the pacing and type of engagement pre-essentials could be. But when you start claiming versimilitude for the pre-4e video game style hit points with consequence free damage (or even the related "fighters can spam the same moves all day") then you are going to get disagreed with.
So how about dialing it down, okay?
Which makes one wonder why 4E was so ill-received by so many people to the point that it had to be shelved so quickly if it did so well.
Off the top of my head:
- It changed a lot and a lot of people liked the old way - with the most invested in the old way being the most invested.
- It was a complex game with a lot of modifiers and in a different way to 5e. I for one don't really miss hanging five paperclips off a model's sword.
- It was released before it was ready (they had a 24 month development cycle and went back to the drawing board after 10 months because Project Orcus was bad).
- A big consequence of this was that pre-Essentials combat hhad exceptionallly flabby monsters
- A second big consequence was some things were not fit for purpose at launch (Skill Challenges)
- A third was a lot was badly explained
- The first adventure (Keep on the Shadowfell) was a truly awful introduction; once you reach the Keep itself it's 17 chained fights in a row in bland rooms with nothing between them. And you never get a second chance to make a first impression. For that matter most of the early adventures were pretty bad.
- There were two major playstyles missing; the simple "I hit it" fighter (which was fixed by Essentials) and the "I win in prep time" wizard (which was deliberately left out).
And it didn't have to be shelved "so quickly" - it lasted longer than 3.0 and about as long as 3.5. It, like 3.5, had a full round of splatbooks for all the classes and a period nearer the end for weirder splatbooks. It didn't have (the almost certainly lossmaking) two dozen books for each of Eberron and the Forgotten Realms.
If your issue is that people are misrepresenting narrative mechanics, perhaps it would be best to then not turn around and misrepresent verisimilitude in turn.
If your issue is that I am pointing out that you are misrepresenting what you call narrative mechanics, and using versimilitude in a way that appears to be entirely a proxy for familiarity and that makes no sense to anyone not steeped in D&D traditions then perhaps it would be best to stop both.
Or possibly you'd be able to come up with counter-examples where versimilitude leads to you
rejecting the familiar.
I don't believe that to be the case. While there are certain "definitional" characteristics of particular games that, in the minds of their audience, make those games what they are, that can't just be chalked up to "familiarity" with its not-so-vague implication that the alternatives are superior but people are simply too stuck on what they know to recognize that. There are, in fact, other issues of preference in play, and we should be able to talk about those without people who have different preferences coming in and threadcrapping by saying "your preferences are wrong!"
I'm not saying "your preferences are wrong". I'm saying "your description doesn't match your preferences". And your attempt to pretend the two are the same is the threadcrapping.
You can, but that doesn't mean you're correct. There's no "justification" going on here; only an attempt to explain something that a lot of people can intuit but have a hard time explaining. And yet, when someone tries, there's always someone who feels attacked by that and so comes in to sabotage the entire thing.
And I am engaging with your attempt to explain things - and pointing out that they do not actually match what you are saying. Your "explanations" are not Word of God. They are a potential explanation that doesn't actually match up with what you are saying what the issue is. And that you consider your explanations so untouchable that you consider a critique pointing out that your explanations are inaccurate in significant places to be "sabotage" is telling.
People like familiarity. And familiarity helps build shared worlds. This is not complex. Making it something more than that however means that the "more" can be investigated and critiqued.
Just out of curiosity what would have changed about your argument if you'd written "familiarity" in your OP every time you wrote versimilitude? Sections 2-4 would have been identical - and you wouldn't have borrowed and then discarded a dictionary word.
I'm not sure what you think that "soft cap" is that kept wizards to casting fifth-level spells and below, let alone what "problems" are "overwhelming" in that regard.
Is this a question based on not knowing the AD&D experience and hit point charts?
