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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 2978741" data-attributes="member: 2067">What's easier to arbitrate? "One word command that is followed," or "A command such as W, X, Y, Z, which is acted out in A, B, C, D ways"?The former is vague, and can be difficult to judge ("fly!" could mean fly straight up, fly into attack, fly away, fly straight down...). The latter has a few definate effects and always possibly more. The former takes time to think of a command, time to consider it's effects, time to enact it, and all must be done with reference to the rules and balance of the encounter. The latter has a few clear-cut effects that are already considered. If you want to do more, you can, but you don't have to take time in consideration because it's already done for you.The same is true of, say the Ogre Mage redesign. It's easier to look at a small list of abilities that have an obvious use -- invisibility is obviously useful, as is lightning bolt, as is being able to melee attack well, as is sneak attack -- than it is to look at a longer, more vaguely defined list and pick something to use. Charm person doesn't need to be in that list -- a high Intimidate skill or a high Diplomacy skill can achieve much the same results without calling attention away from the better tactics of sneaking and attacking in combat. Out of combat, when many skills are their most important, you can look here to find out what would be a good social and campaign scenario for the OM. Effectively, the idea is that combat information and "social"/"ecological" information is seperate, and is easier to read and discern from each other so that when running an OM as a combat, it's easy to see what it would actually do (how to role play it well) and when paging through the MM in search of adventure ideas, you can see how the OM would fare in setting up a plot rather than in combat. The goals seem to be to make it easier to run -- to put more than 20 minutes of fun in 4 hours (indeed, to try to put 4 hours of fun into 4 hours). And so far, they seem to be succeeding at that quite nicely, as evidenced by the new MM4, by the Warlock class, by Mearls's design and development articles. All seem to be steering in the direction of putting more fun in your average span of D&D time, so that you spend less time accounting and considering and arbitrating and discussing and more time beating up things and taking their stuff. Streamlining the ogre mage makes that eaiser. Nerfing the rust ability made that easier. Giving me pre-classed monsters makes that easier. Having PC's who fire spells at will rather than have to do detailed accounting makes that easier.</blockquote>

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