Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5812289" data-attributes="member: 82106">Hmmmm, not sure it really IS unrelated.Here's the thing. If you are going to do a lot of 'off label' type uses of things in say AD&D you have a bunch of spells and equipment and whatnot that has effects that are very much based on "here's the in-world explanation of what is going on" and some obvious mechanics are provided for the straightforward use. The "Horn of Blasting" makes a magically powerful blast of sound. Whatever happens next is pretty much up to the imagination of the DM. There's some mechanics attached that you can generally spin that from.Now, a 4e version of a "Horn of Blasting" presumably will tell you just some specific mechanical effects, and some suggested narrative. The player uses it mechanically as described, but he or the DM could describe it as any number of things that they can imagine.However, I will note that 4e's rules never state anywhere that things "always work a specific way" and that mechanics can't be adjusted to situation. This seems to be a trope that people have developed, but it is not present in the rules. Of course if you want to do that you need to nail down the in-world explanation of how a given item works. As long as the people at the table are OK with doing that themselves, then you can do a lot of interesting stuff with the freedom you have with the 4e items and spells etc since they are LESS nailed down to specific definitions out of the book. My take from the reaction to 4e is not very many players are really interested in doing that, and that 4e really should have had heavier fluff because people seem to run short of ideas without it. They did move in that direction steadily since the game was released, which seems to be an improvement.The other part of that is of course page 42, which is a great resource. It is again rather undersold by 4e, and presumably RoT for this week seems to indicate that they'll sell something like that a lot harder and it will be presented as more of a centerpiece of the game in 5e. I guess the upshot is that people argue about which type of system is better for 'CaW' or 'Cas', but I think it has far more to do with how your group approaches using the rules than anything else. IMHO a more structured system like 4e with 'disassociated' fluff (I don't like that word either really) CAN be a more powerful tool. OTOH it isn't ACTUALLY better for a lot of people from what I can see, and I can only assume they know what works best for them. Relating this to 5e again though, there's a big question here. I haven't seen much in the way of understanding of the 4e approach to this lately. It isn't something that can be 'modular' because it is an overall issue of system presentation. I think it would be sad if 'mechanics first' is considered bad merely because 4e neglected to provide GOOD fluff rather than because the approach is fundamentally flawed.</blockquote>

Verification