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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 9832962" data-attributes="member: 2067">Personally, I don't need to know how much hp a blade of grass or a nearby ant or mycelium has in order to get the gist of "I suck life from nearby to power my magic." I don't need to add decision points or tactical positioning or strategic resource management. I just need to know that when I use spells, I am making the world a little more dead near me, and that if I don't want to make the world a little more dead near me, I'm going to have to expend some effort to avoid that. The decision point there is: Do I do the easy thing that destroys the world, or the harder thing that doesn't? Which is a HUGE character point in a setting based on environmental catastrophe, because it mirrors in a heightened world of fantasy the decision I make every time I drive to the store instead of biking to it. As long as defiling focuses on that decision and doesn't bog me down in exactly how many bacterium I must slay to cast magic missile, it'll be doing the job I want it to do.4e's defiling mechanic was simple, which is wonderful, but it was also opt-in, which made it a problem from the standpoint of that character decision (it wasn't the easy thing to do, it was harder to do, as a player, than not to do).</blockquote>