D&D 4E The Zen Of 4e (Forked Thread: How to kill a blue dragon?)

[Mallus]

D&D is now a little closer to being an effects-based system. I like effects-based systems. Yay!

Also... saying there's a "complete and total disconnect between the rules of 4e, and the world in which the game occurs" is overstating a good point to the point it's in jeopardy of being no longer good. In 4e the same mechanical effects can be, and sometimes need to be, narrated in different ways, depending on the context/situation. That's all.

 

[Lizard]

A lot of it goes back to M:TG, which uses the same concept of "keywords". Back in Ye Olden Tymes, when most M:TG players were coming from RPGs, you would see debate -- real, vicious, debates -- about things like "Can you Terror a wall?" (Terror was a card which instantly destroyed any non-Black creature.) You would have people deciding very arbitarily that you could terror a Living Wall, but not a Wall of Stone, because "It just didn't make sense!"

Well, no, it didn't, if you took the card literally. But the card really was "Remove any non-black creature from play" (and walls were 'creatures' with the 'wall' subtype). It could have been called "Black Card #51" for all intents and purposes.

4e applies this sort of system to RPGs. It's not the first game to do so, but it's the most prominent to adopt the "high wall of separation" between the mechanics and the imagined action. Because the rules do not make this very explicit, and because some of the rules veer towards an older style of game play, it can be very frustrating/confusing. The use of flavor text which "describes" what you do, and the way in which terms are used which SEEM to have a common English meaning, but really don't (Prone, for example -- it applies, as noted, to creatures which cannot logically be 'knocked prone'), makes it less than intuitive that the game needs to be interpreted VERY broadly in play.

The 1e DMG had some long essays on what hit points meant, why you got a saving throw no matter what, etc. It made dealing with the disconnects between game rules and game reality much easier -- no, you COULDN'T get stabbed in the heart ten timess and live, high hit points meant you were stabbed in the leg, not the heart. Etc. Hopefully in PHB/DMG/Etc II, this will be amplified and explained. (Another example -- daily/enounter powers should be seen as "the player dictates an opportunity has arisen to use this ability", not "You 'forget' how to kick someone in the balls until tomorrow." However, a lot of the flavor text for powers which let you regain other powers implies your character, in the game, is somehow reinvigorated. (The 'tiredness' or 'strained' model for limited Martial power is, IMO, pretty weak... "So I'm too tired to use a Level 1 Encounter power anymore, but I can easily use my Level 5 Daily power, presumably a more exhausting power?" To quote DM Of The Rings, "That's a very specific level of tired."))

 

[Engilbrand]

This is what I posted in the other thread before realizing that you had forked.

Lizard, I usually read your posts as rather critical of 4th edition. I haven't seen them in a while, though. I hope that your post was not in jest. Because it's exactly how I look at it all.
When I DM, that's the sort of stuff that I do. There's a Swordmage power that roots a guy in place through magical energy. I described the ground coming up around the guys legs. When he teleported away, the ground reformed around him. He was confused, but he got it. There was a point where something hit him hard and said that he would take damage if he moved. I described the guy hitting the ground and causing a chunk of rock to hit him. The other rocks around him were vibrating off of the ground. When he moved, they flew through the air and slammed into him. He thought that it was pretty cool.
It's through reflavoring, as has been said, that people are able to describe Rays of Frost and ghosts causing the person to feel cold, or Cloud of Daggers suddenly having zombie hands burst from the ground.
The mechanics are not the physics of the game world. People only yell the moves they're doing in anime and certain martial arts movies. In D&D, they spin around and hack at someone's neck, or they put a shoulder into a shield and use the proximity to pin a foot to the ground.
It's why the book flat out states that you should feel free to reflavor anything. The powers, the flavor text, and the names are all tied together for the default assumptions of the world, but it's only the mechanics that matter.

 

[Hypersmurf]

This is pretty much what I've been saying for months.

Likewise

With that said, in the interest of narrative consistency, I like Wizards to be fairly consistent with their spells.

Hmm. I have a low-level warlock with Flames of Phlegothos. I'm alternately describing it as setting someone alight with my energy whip, or opening a portal to the Nine Hells to loose a swarm of Fiendish Fire Ants that pour into the enemy's armour and start nibbling, or summoning a little personal raincloud that rains hot hail on the foe, following him around...

-Hyp.

 

[Jhaelen]

As a DM I'm really seeing this on the monster side.[...]Of course the party had already fought a creature with almost identical stats in KotS, but with the description, it was an entirely different monster.

Well, that's really an old hat. Reskinning monsters is something I've done since 1st.ed.

Completely ignoring a power's fluff, though, is not something I'm comfortable with (, yet).

If what Lizard posits was true, why would we need powers at all?

Wouldn't it be a lot easier and more flexible if instead there was just a toolbox of effects, durations, ranges, etc. available at different levels. I.e. basically, an expanded version of DMG p.42.?

Of course such an approach wouldn't allow WotC to sell supplement after supplement. But is that the only reason why they didn't go that way?

 

[Cadfan]

Eh, I think this is really overselling the point.

Like describing Magic Missile as a different effect every time, so long as it deals a set amount of force damage. Yes, you could do this. You could actually do this in 3e as well, though. And the game doesn't require you to do it in order for it to play well.

I'd put this a lot less stridently: There is a narrative in the game. The PCs are trying to accomplish things, like hitting a foe in the head and making them see stars, or knocking them off their feet. To give rules to these things the PCs wish to accomplish, various effects and damage types are defined. To keep things from becoming bloated and unwieldy, these effects and damage types are somewhat simplified and standardized. As a result, there is no perfect correspondence between the narrative and the rules for creating the various effects defined in the rules. Corner cases are ignored. Generalizations are made.

And then the DM is told to use his judgment to make sure things make sense in game, and is also given a general admonishment- tis nobler to creatively allow something than to deny it, so do your best to come up with ways for things to make sense, rather than just forbid them.

Its not THAT different from any other RPG, when you think about it. All of this basically happened in 3e. The rules included more corner cases and details (like stability bonuses for four legged creatures, versus not worrying about such things), and the DMG wasn't quite as much into the whole "find a way to say yes!" thing, but...

You still had the same underlying principles. An effect like "prone" was a small list of status effects. When you used an attack that rendered an opponent prone, those status effects were inflicted. Sometimes it didn't make sense to inflict those effects on that opponent. Sometimes the description "prone" didn't make sense on that opponent. And sometimes the rules didn't answer what to do about that. So when that happened, you went to the same place 4e goes- the DM figured out what to do. And he could do it the same way that a DM in 4e does it- he could forbid the use of "prone" against that foe, or he could come up with a creative way to say yes.

4e might do this a little more than 3e. It certainly has fewer rules for corner cases. And it has a different ethos, maybe, in the DMG (I say this only because I don't remember the 3e DMG taking a stand on this issue, I may be wrong). And perhaps there are more places you encounter corner cases, because there are more ways for martial characters to do stuff to their opponents, and that's usually where these things come up since magic is magic and no one questions it no matter what it does.

But to me this is a shift only in degree, not in kind. So I'd be wary of overselling the OP's point.