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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6013625" data-attributes="member: 42582">There are pacing differences.But this is all arbitrary. I could break the AD&D wizard into more levels - say 3 levels for every current two levels. This would put the wizard onto an XP table more like the thief. I could then adjust the combat, save and spell tables to keep the ration of XP to spells, bonuses etc more-or-less the same. And I could drop hit dice from d4 to (say) d3, or even - at the extreme - 1 per level, plus CON.What would that do to the narrative? Nothing that I can see. All I've done is present wizardry in more fine-grained detail.(Also, your narrative of "wizardry as difficult" ignore the fact that a MU needs fewer XP to reach 11th level than any other class except a thief or druid.)I'm not sure about your position on magic. If magic is magic, why can't a fireball work underwater?Why would you narrate it that way, and introduce absurdity into your fiction? The notion that a fighter with a greataxe wrongfoots a mage armed only with a dagger strikes me as pretty plausible.Why are you adjudicating Come and Get IT as taunts in this sort of case?Nice way to do it.Well, not if Come and Get It is in play. That's the point of the power - it shifts authority over these NPCs' actions, in this context, from GM to player.That's the point. A high Charisma, or a Charm spell, do the same thing - take the GM's power over NPCs away. Slightly orthogonally, Come and Get It also contributes to a fiction that is more like a roleplaying game and less like a boardgame or wargame - sometimes the NPCs act irratitionally (just as happens in the real world).I'm surprised that the person complaining that the "prone" condition, in 4e, doesn't always have that literal meaning, offers a definition of "referee" which is so far from ordinary usage!I am happy with the GM as referee, but "referee" means "rules applier and adjudicator", not "rules adjuster".You seem to be adding in a couple of extra jobs here that you didn't mention in your list of three above: setting/verisimilitude preserver; runner of encounters in a reasonable and challenging way.As for the first of these, I agree that is something the GM has special responsibility for. But given that the players have certain abilities, verisimilitude/genre appropriateness is to be preserved consistently with the action resolution mechanics. Thus, when the halfling with the toothpick uses Come and Get It, a GM preserving versimilitude will narrate it like D'Karr suggestsed, rather than as taunts that fail. When a PC falls over an impossibly high cliff but has enough hit points to survive, a GM preserving verisimilitude will narrate the divine providence that saves the PC, rather than just break the rules and tell the player "Sorry, you're dead."I've not yet encountered an instance where I have to break the rules to preserve verisimilitude.Agreed.My feeling is that the answer to these questions will be very table-specific.There is a tradition in D&D of the GM surprising the players by sprining mechanically unpredicatable monsters on them. If a group plays with that tradition, the answer to your questions is presumably No.There is also a tradition in D&D of ingame options to learn about monsters: ask a sage (in AD&D); draw on your own training as a scholar (monster knowledge checks in 4e - and 3E?). If you give the players full info about monsters in advance, you negate those options. This might be a problem at some tables, depending on the players' expectations for how their PCs might deploy those ingame options.Then there are broader, thematic issues: many players are going to assume a lot of radiant vulnerability for undead, because (i) it is tradition, and (ii) it is mechanically expressed via many divine powers. Changing that, as a GM, is a big enough change that I think for many groups it probably should be called out and discussed in advance. Because now we're not making one ooze immune to "prone" - we're making a big change to an underlying presumption of a whole category of monsters and of PC powers.</blockquote>

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