A badly worded example. I meant "why do wizards get to use a spellbook to swap dailies, when other arcane classes don't."
Because they're wizards, and they learn through deep study, not by making pacts with devils (ever try re-negotiating a pact with a devil, I'm guessing you can't do it every day) or being born with innate magic in their blood (what, is the sorcerer supposed to get a transfusion each morning).
All other classes seem to get magical innately without any tools beyond an implement, but the wizard's spellbook should be very important, yet it warrants a paragraph at most.
It's quite a potent feature. It gives the wizard more flexibility than any other class, plus free rituals.
ADDED:
"If you replace a spell because of gaining a level or through retraining, the previous spells vanishes from your spellbook and is replaced by the new spell."
Is it written in invisible ink? Is like a spell scroll?
There's probably some wierd limit to the amount of mojo a wizard can keep in his book... Mages, IIRC, don't have that problem. They don't get free rituals, though.
Again, it doesn't say that anywhere, it just says "...you vanish from one place and appear in another." It doesn't mention if you do this by going to the feywild or back, stopping time for 6 seconds, or having the Enterprise beam you up and down again. Why can they do this? Biology? Magic? IT DOESN'T SAY!
Well, it's a racial power, so if you must have an answer, they're Fey, the feywild is positively steeped in magic, so fantasy-biology /and/ magic.
IT DOESN'T SAY THAT!!! "You call your opponents toward you and deliver a blow they will never forget." It basically tells me my fighter can scream "Get over here" and anyone (mages, bloodied foes, or Orcus) walk over and get their beating.
Yeah. It's a 1[W] attack, I think it'll soon be forgotten. The nice thing about separating fluff and rules is that you can change/ignore bad fluff. I thought you were looking for a rationale, not just obsessing over the bit in the book that the book, itself, told you to go ahead and change at whim.
a.) what these monsters do when not fighting PCs and
Whatever the needs of your story and setting dictate.
b.) what differs an goblin cutter from a goblin dogsmasher beyond numbers?
Choice of weapon and victim, sounds like.
It gave a a nod to description, but cares more about stat blocks. The preview books had wonderful fluff, and little of it made it into the core books. This was the biggest failure of 4e.
I agree, the biggest failure of 4e was not having quite enough fluff text.
Additionally, I never had problem using 3.5 spells to make new ones, or refluffing a hobgoblin to be a new monster.
Really? Ever re-fluffed a dragon into a water elemental in 3.5? No, really. That was one of the things that sold me on the game as a DM. I was already used to the idea of mechanics being divorced from 'F/X' from years of Hero, though. But, I was roped into running 4e, which I'd yet to do, as the ink wasn't even dry on the books (remember that fiasco?), at a pick-up game. I ran a 4-encounter, 4th level game in less than 4 hours with about 5 minutes of prep, that included re-skinning spectres as air elementals and a dragon as a water elemental. That was a 'wow' moment.
Clearer bland rules are no substitute for rich, slightly confusing rules.
Maybe not. If only D&D had ever had rules that were never more than slighlty confusing - or at all balanced.
The 1e AD&D DMG invoke a helluva lot more on the world, the rationales, and the belief behind the game, even if the initiative rules were unusable as written.
Heh. More than just the initiative rules, but really nothing about the specific world, IIRC, some cosmology, and a lot of medieval wargaming stuff - the price and time to build mangonels and whatnot - and a surprising amount of Frued. :sigh: It really was a glorious mess, and in EGG's inimmitable style, quite a read for a kid back in the day...
...OK, nostalgic moment over.
