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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mapache" data-source="post: 5406802" data-attributes="member: 64751">Speaking of failures of presentation, there's the issue of keywords with rules baggage.  Nearly all the keywords of a power don't actually do anything on their own.  If it's Divine, Radiant, & Healing or Arcane & Fire, that only matters for other other effects, mostly Feats, that look for specific keywords.  They're just tags that other parts of the rules interact with.However, there's a few that actually make the power do something, like Rattling, Invigorating, and Stance.  Hiding this important mechanical effect in the pile of easily-ignored keywords makes it hard to see what a power does when you're looking through a list of powers.  People naturally start ignoring the type line very quickly, because it doesn't tell you much you didn't know about a power, except when it's suddenly crucial.Having consistent, named effects like this is very important, but they should be stated in the Effect part of the power where people will see them, not buried in a tag system people ignore unless they're searching for a specific keyword.What's worse is that WotC knows this.  They restructured the rules on Magic: the Gathering cards in 2005 to avoid this exact same problem.  There, creature types are a list of keywords that do nothing on their own, and only act as a tagging system for other cards to interact with.  However, they had two types, Wall and Legend, that did things when on a card, so they fixed that.  The rules text formerly granted by the Wall type became the Defender keyword, and all Walls were errated to have Defender (but now non-walls could have it too, and you'll never miss this crucial limitation in the rules box on the card).  Creatures that were formerly Legends instead gained the Legendary supertype, which is the first word in the type line, even before Creature, where it's much harder to miss, letting them normalize the rules with Legendary non-creature cards.</blockquote>

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