ZombieRoboNinja said:
There's been a lot of negative focus on the way 4e seems to damage verisimilitude. Some of the complaints make a lot of sense to me - why should a naked wizard have better AC than a naked fighter, again? - and some of them seem to me like more minor quibbles. But regardless, I think people might be neglecting the ways 4e IMPROVES the "believability" of its gameworld. Here are a few examples I can think of offhand...
I agree on the healing scaling somewhat with the level of the target. I'm going to have to think about that when coming up with my 3.75 rules. The rest however, I don't agree with.
HIT POINTS: Hit point loss combined with things like ability damage give us the ability to abstractly model virtually any injury should be be inclined to do so. Third edition made some comprimises to playability which made the worst case healable injury heal within a few days, but it was still possible to think of a 3E character as injured. Fourth edition characters are by contrast never injured except when dying. Otherwise, they are merely tired. Notice that this condition of 'dying' is rapidly fixed as well. You can have had a mortal wound, and blink you aren't even 'tired' anymore even without magic being employed.
VANCIAN SPELLCASTING: You have I think two problems with Vancian spellcasting. Let's deal with the more general problem before dealing with the problem of divine spells.
My standing explanation for Vancian spellcasting is that no spell can manage to do something as powerful as create a ball of fire, or summon a lightning bolt, or move you from one location to another can in fact be cast in a handful of seconds, with a few words, or a simple gesture. If you want to do anything beyond the simpliest and weakest of magic (cantrips), you must in fact prepare the majority of the ritual ahead of time. The spell is then stored in a potential form within you in very much the same manner that you might store the spell in a staff, wand or anything else (such as a trap), awaiting the portion of the spell that serves as its trigger. To actually cast the spell, you simply finish the ritual, usually by proving what amounts to variables that specify the target of the invocation. This allows magic to be useful in a combat situation where otherwise it would not be.
Generally, preparing and casting a spell weakens the arcane caster in such a way that they cannot perform more rituals until after they have rested.
The situation with divine magic is slightly different. The main thing to keep in mind here is that all the D&D gods are 'small gods' of greatly limited powers and abilities. They are not the omnipotent, omniscient sort of diety familiar from real world monotheism. They can't be on call for mortals all the time even if they wanted to. If you miss your 'appointment' with the divine, then you aren't getting your spells and its rather unlikely the deity will have the time to be listening in if you get into trouble later.
Whether this is or isn't versimilitude depends almost entirely on how you think magic ought to work.
MIN-MAX WEIRDNESSES: Boy are you going to be disappointed.
GREATCLUB SNEAK-ATTACKING: The problem with this is that from what we've seen thus far, for every case of 'the weapon isn't accurate enough to make accurate attacks', they seem to have removed a case where the weapon does seem like its accurate enough. Ok, so I can't sneak attack with a greatclub, but I also can't sneak attack with a shortbow either. If what they were going for was realism, they would have had a more elegant solution.
RESURRECTION, TELEPORTATION, WISH: I don't consider this a versimilitude problem. Quite the contrary, its a versimilitude problem if Teleportation and Wish don't exist, since they exist in the fantasy source material. If you can't rub a lamp and get a genii that grants you wisdom,
that is a versimilitude issue.
But, I can think of one that you aren't listing.
SMALL CREATURES: One of the upshots of making 1st level characters (PC and NPC) have 3HD is that you can better deal with D&D's classic 'house cat' problem. The 1st level commoner (assuming they don't have the bad luck to be a minion) no longer needs to have the same hit points as his cat. You can have cats with 4 hp and commoners with 10 hp because you have more room to model things weaker than a 1st level character than you've had in previous editions. Of course the down side to this is that it highlights the 'nerf world' problem of 4E in as much as 10 hp commoners would be very difficult to kill with a single blow. But since you can still drop one with a critical, I think that overall the tradeoff is pretty good. I can accept that it takes a solid hit from a sword to kill you quickly in exchange for a scratch not being lethal. Of course, this doesn't mean the injury abstraction in general is improved, but taking away the extreme healing rates and adding back in ability damage and other long term effects would deal with that.
