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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5570853" data-attributes="member: 58197">It was watching a bard kill three minions in a row with Vicious Mockery that led me to ban bards from every 4E game I ever run*. It's not because I think the class is broken or overpowered or even excessively fiddly... but every time a bard uses a power called "Vicious Mockery" or "Satire of Fortune" or "Disorienting Ditty" to kill something, I start grinding my teeth. Just. Freaking. NO.The good news is, there's actually not too much of this nonsense in 4E. Most of it can be taken care of just by banning bards and artificers, then applying the errata to Come and Get It. That still leaves a bunch of powers that are damned hard to come up with fiction for (mostly divine powers for some reason), but few that just yank me bodily out of whatever immersion I've managed to get going.[size=-2]*When and if they release an Essential-ized bard, I may reconsider.[/size]Yup. I have run into the same issue....You know what? I think I just realized a big reason why I have so much trouble with this in 4E. It's not because of the level of crunch or the battlemat dependence or any of that. It's very simply this: They separated the mechanical text from the flavor text.3E was loaded with crunchy mechanics, but they were woven together with the fiction. You couldn't skip the flavor text and go straight to the rules bits; in order to find out what your fireball spell did in mechanical terms, you had to read the description of what it was doing in the game world. And every time you went back to check on the details, you got it reinforced. 4E strips out the flavor text, and puts it in italics so you know you can ignore it, and puts it up at the top of the statblock away from everything else. It's not in parentheses, capital letters, or quotated, but it might as well be.As a result, I have to make a conscious effort to read the flavor text. If I don't, I just skim right past it to get to the mechanical meat. I would really like to see 4E re-integrate the two.</blockquote>

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