EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
But that's precisely what "natural language" means in 5e. Don't define your keywords. You don't need to! Just use natural language and everything will be fiiiiiine.If anything, the problem is that the condition and keyword aren't property defined, not that they used natural language.
Spoiler alert: Everything was not fine.
They also weren't promising natural language would fix these problems. 5e did promise that. Again, that was the whole point. Saying that the synthetic part could be dispensed with entirely.This is exactly like the problem in 3e where "dead" doesn't say you're incapacitated, and "dying" ends at -9. So, RAW the only drawbacks to being dead are that you can't benefit from healing and that your soul has left your body. But nothing stops you from taking actions, because they didn't tie the synthetic conditions together correctly. The problem isn't natural language. It's the synthetic language.
According to the 5e designers that's exactly what it means.It's also the same problem why, RAW in 5e, you can't wake up from a long rest. The game says you go to sleep, and that means you're unconscious. But the unconscious condition says you can't take actions while unconscious. So you can't wake up, because waking up is doing something! The problem is in the keyword's synthetic definition is incomplete not the natural language. Just because it's written in English doesn't mean it's natural language.
Uh.....okay. That's not at all what anyone, ever, complained about. The problem wasn't the detail. The problem was that there were keywords at all.Like, I'm sorry, but that's what they didn't like about synthetic language. You had to define everything down to the last little detail, and it was extremely easy to miss some normally self-evident assumption when you do that. That's why too many keywords doesn't work.
4e's keywords work great as keywords. I challenge you to give me a single one that isn't clear and effective at describing what it means mechanically. The thing people hated was that it was synthetic at all.
Verisimilitude has nothing to do with it. I genuinely have no idea why you mention it. People almost exclusively complained about keywords because they were any form of jargon at all.It's difficult to untangle and difficult to imagine all uses for every keyword. Magic The Gathering says, "forget verisimilitude, I want determinism." TTRPGs don't do that. They say, "verisimilitude is king and the rules can't cover everything you could imagine, so we put a referee at the table at all times precisely to deal with what happens when mechanics and verisimilitude conflict."
Except sometimes you can, and "how light works" is actually super complicated without rules clarity. Consider, for example, the weird and not very verisimilitudinous case of Warlock darkvision. If you're a human or dragonborn and you take Devil's Sight, you have crap vision in dim light, but as soon as it becomes pitch-black, you can actually see better than an elf! Even the elf experiences some of this, as their darkvision radius doubles as soon as the light is completely gone.Natural language is, "Light works like light works. You can't try to hide when someone can see you.
Unless you can't, because there are times that that isn't true. For example, the Frightened condition. It does not stop applying simply because a creature closes its eyes, turns away, or in some other way avoids attempting to view the target, even though that (by definition) means the Frightened creature does not actually have line of sight at that moment; the mere potential that it could is enough, even if it isn't using that potential right this second. However, it does stop applying if the creature that caused that condition becomes invisible; the mere theoretical potential that the creature could be looking at the one that frightened it is irrelevant, only the actual, physical ability to see it matters. Both of these cases have been defended by Sage Advice answers as coming from a plain, common sense reading of the term "line of sight," but they conflict. They even leave open a clear conundrum: what happens with a victim creature is afflicted so, the causing creature goes invisible, but the victim creature has opt-in ability to see invisible things?You can see what's in your line of sight.
Hide, line of sight, Arcana, Survival, and check are all synthetic terms here. Arguably, "magical lore" is as well, since I've no idea what counts as "lore" or not, it would need to be explained. They all have to be actually defined, without that they're meaningless fribble. Line of sight is a borderline case, I'll admit, since that's about something that almost verges on how a real world thing works, but I count it because (as noted) it actually isn't as simple as that, due to how it interacts with other rules.You can use an Arcana check to see if your character knows something about magical lore. You can use a Survival check to find food and fresh water in the wilderness." That is natural language. The only synthetic thing there is the word "check" and the names of the skills.