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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6256236" data-attributes="member: 37579">Engagement is... subjective? Relative? Too late in the day for me, can't find th right word.Anyhoo, you can be engaged by many different things: the narrative, the plot, a visual, the mechanics, an encounter, the minis, a nice prop. You can be engaged by any type of game, mini or board or tabletop RPG. As terms go it's as vague and unhelpful as "fun". But the narrative, the overlapping combination of fluff meeting crunch is unique to tabletop role playing games, and is important. If the story and flavour stop interacting with the crunch, if what is happening at the table is too divorced from what is happening in the mind's eye, the game has problems. If the rules of the game do not mesh with the rule of th game's worlds there's a disparity that hurts suspension of disbelief, There are alternatives: warlocks, sorcerers, psions, etc. But wizards should act like wizards. There's some flexibility, as a DM should be able to redefine wizards for their campaign setting, but that shouldn't also invoke redefining every spellcasting monster individually. Well, if we're going to do that, why not just ranged AoE attack flavored as fire damage. We could have four spells in the entire game. But that's bland.Similarly, monster powers can't have a lot or flavour. Space is tight. There's a lot of 4e monsters whose powers just aren't well described by the name in the statblock. A couple times I've pulled monsters out of the Monster Builder and done a double take at their powers.Which is a big advantage for using player powers. There's extra space for description. So the monster has all the familiar flavour with none of the needed space.Monsters should of course have unique abilities, so long as they're actually unique. The bugbear has an ability that could very well just be Sneak Attack, and the death knight has a renamed fireball.</blockquote>

Verification