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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Obryn" data-source="post: 7332551" data-attributes="member: 11821">Yeah, that's a major component - but what's key about 5e here (and most editions of D&D and D&D-adjacent games) is that each individual spell operates as a keyword which can get re-used by monsters, magic items, NPCs, etc. That's what I said upthread - the text of Fireball is as much a rule as, say, the rules for Cover, because it will be referenced by other game content. You don't get a Staff of Fireballs which can hurl X number of 20' diameter orbs, each doing Nd6 damage; you get a Staff which has charges with which you cast Fireball at various levels.  A Gold Dragon doesn't know the following list of tricks with all the game text; she knows all of the following spells and can cast this number of them. And so on.Oh, and since Storyteller came up, upthread...Here's my favorite possibly-apocryphal Greg Stolze story, re: White Wolf and Game design.[sblock]Older White Wolf games have three ways to scale difficulty, IIRC - you change the target number you need for successes on your d10's, or you change the number of d10's you're rolling in your pool, or you set the number of successes needed as something higher than one. So there's three axes along which you can adjust difficulties - or maybe it was just two of those? Hell, it's been forever since I played a WW game.Anyway, when Greg Stolze went to work for them, he asked the designers how they decided which of these options to take, and what the various options meant for the mathematical chances of success on any given task. This is a completely obvious question that any RPG designer nowadays would expect, and should readily answer. But none of them had any idea - they just kind of operated by feel, and didn't see anything wrong with this. They knew what made things harder or easier, but not really by how much.So if all of this is accurate, the Storyteller attitude of being above "roll-playing" went all the way up to the top, where the authors didn't even think the math underlying their dice rolls was important enough to figure out.And that's how the One Roll Engine (the system Stolze used in REIGN) was born.[/sblock]</blockquote>

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