4e was incredibly rigid, for instance. Most editions when you cast fireball say ‘fireball does specifically this effect, but anything cool you can think of using this effect is fair game’. While 4e was much more ‘fireball does this and only this and even if it would immersion breakingly nonsensical for it to NOT do the other thing it still won’t’.
That was not one of the biggest problems of 4E at all.
I even think that, like the other answer to this comment said, leaving the fluff out of the description is not even a bad thing. It means I can add my own flavor to the spell.
I think that complaint is mostly about the kind of gamer you are. If you expect the game to provide everything for you, or if you like to add your own roleplay flavor on top of cool mechanics.
I think that 4E was doing something similar to what some games like Dungeon World do.
The description of the Fireball spell in 4E is super short. But although it doesn’t say that the spell is supposed to burn stuff, it has the “Fire” keyword, it’s described as fire damage in the “Hit” part, and the fluff description mentions a flame that explodes. So I believe that the idea is to paint a general image of what the spell does, but leaving the actual flavor and consequences up to your gaming table.
Because one of the problems with D&D (be it 3E, 5E, or some other editions) is that they try to describe everything an action can or can’t do. But they can’t possibly list every possible consequence of any action, because they have limited space.
And this kind of rules book creates a mentality (in some players) of rules lawyers saying that if something obvious isn’t described, then it doesn’t happen. And if a game does that enough, it can create DMs that are too rigid instead of interpreting what’s happening in the world.
I remember there was a spell to create bonfire (or maybe it was something else related to fire), and it said that throwing water at the fire will extinguish the flames, or something like that. Do we really need a game to say that?
4E tried having terse descriptions, and leaving the rest up to you. I really like that. So it says that Fireball creates a flame that explodes, engulfing everything in its area. If one of it’s targets is holding an important letter (made of paper) in their hands, it should burn, even though burning things is not explicitly described.
4e was incredibly rigid, for instance. Most editions when you cast fireball say ‘fireball does specifically this effect, but anything cool you can think of using this effect is fair game’. While 4e was much more ‘fireball does this and only this and even if it would immersion breakingly nonsensical for it to NOT do the other thing it still won’t’.
That was not one of the biggest problems of 4E at all.
I even think that, like the other answer to this comment said, leaving the fluff out of the description is not even a bad thing. It means I can add my own flavor to the spell.
I think that complaint is mostly about the kind of gamer you are. If you expect the game to provide everything for you, or if you like to add your own roleplay flavor on top of cool mechanics.
Maybe I just had a very rigid DM at the time as he wouldn’t let us do anything not explicitly within the spell discription.
I think that 4E was doing something similar to what some games like Dungeon World do.
The description of the Fireball spell in 4E is super short. But although it doesn’t say that the spell is supposed to burn stuff, it has the “Fire” keyword, it’s described as fire damage in the “Hit” part, and the fluff description mentions a flame that explodes. So I believe that the idea is to paint a general image of what the spell does, but leaving the actual flavor and consequences up to your gaming table.
Because one of the problems with D&D (be it 3E, 5E, or some other editions) is that they try to describe everything an action can or can’t do. But they can’t possibly list every possible consequence of any action, because they have limited space.
And this kind of rules book creates a mentality (in some players) of rules lawyers saying that if something obvious isn’t described, then it doesn’t happen. And if a game does that enough, it can create DMs that are too rigid instead of interpreting what’s happening in the world.
I remember there was a spell to create bonfire (or maybe it was something else related to fire), and it said that throwing water at the fire will extinguish the flames, or something like that. Do we really need a game to say that?
4E tried having terse descriptions, and leaving the rest up to you. I really like that. So it says that Fireball creates a flame that explodes, engulfing everything in its area. If one of it’s targets is holding an important letter (made of paper) in their hands, it should burn, even though burning things is not explicitly described.