Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sir Robilar" data-source="post: 6007413" data-attributes="member: 75757">Hi Li Shenron, great post, thank you!Concerning the Halflings Fearless trait again and your reaction here:In my opinion a different way of describing this action (and others where I see this problem) would not suffice. If they went this way they would do it how it was done in 4E. In my experience, we had no problem with these descriptions in the beginning. However, as there was no clear connection between the action and the in-world effect, players soon tended to ignore the flavour text. We didn't think about an action as "this action where you focus your inner strength to shake of your fear" but rather "this action that lets you drop the frightened condition".Now when people say this is nit-picky or this is a stupid discussion about realism in an unrealistic fantasy game it makes me a little sad as I feel I wasn't able to bring my point across... I believe that this is one direction of game design that may not look so bad in the beginning, even not after some time has passed and you've been happily playing with the rules. But at some point, this separation of mechanics and the character's actions will lead to a general drift away from immersion with the events of the game. And at that point an RPG loses what makes it so special.I'm absolutely not trying to bash 4E as I respect it for it's many strengths. But these kinds of dissociated mechanics were exactly what turned my group away from it. They didn't disturb me or anyone at my gaming table when we started playing the system. But after half a year of playing weekly we realized that we weren't as immersed in the game as with some other roleplaying games. When the discussions about dissociated mechanics came up, we realized that this was our main problem with the edition and decided to drop it. This is why I was very hopeful when the designers stated their goal not to go down this road again. At one of their Gencon panels they directly adressed this issue and stated that they wanted each rule to directly represent an action in the game world. Now I realize my original post may sound like I am overreacting, but I fear that if we ignore this issue, 5E will be an edition that, again, may seem like the holy grail in the beginning, but will let groups that are sensitive to these mechanics encounter a burnout in the long run. And that would run against their main goal of uniting all players of D&D.</blockquote>

Verification