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Thread: A model of immersion
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2021-12-15, 08:45 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A model of immersion
Well kyoryu will have to answer for a) and b) but I can tell you than no, c) is not true. The only thing it calls into question is how biased you are about 4e. And the fact you state below that you don't care about applying the question to other system is further evidence that this is about 4e in the end and not about role-playing games. So no, D&D's status as an role-playing game still isn't in question. Plus you know, I've though about it and figured out reasons why it is.
Strongly disagree with the bolded bit.
Originally Posted by Quertus
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2021-12-15, 08:53 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A model of immersion
I have a brutal, probably evil PC.
20’ away, there is an enemy Cleric, who can heal injured people.
In the middle of us is an injured and dying ally of the Cleric.
My goal is to defeat the Cleric-to do so, I will charge him, and along the way, kick the dying foe’s skull in.
I cannot do that in 3.5, without some major cheese. A big standard Fighter, Barbarian, or other martial cannot manage that. Even an ubercharger cannot manage that, to my knowledge-they could do something else, of course, but not that.
Why doesn’t that break your immersion?I have a LOT of Homebrew!
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2021-12-15, 10:20 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A model of immersion
(Scarab's voice) "if that is all that you have learned of me in our time together, then you have learned nothing."
I'm kinda the patron saint of role-playing. I was taught that metagaming was Evil to role-playing's Good. Yet I've learned to constantly metagame, to evaluate the fun of others, and that My Guy, "it's what my character would do" shouldn't be the path to sainthood.
I hate Railroading. Yet I've come to accept that some people prefer more linear games, and that is the *forced* portion, the *without buy-in*, not the library nature itself that's the issue. My party history will attest to my changes attitude regarding linear storylines upon contact with the Playground.
I much prefer to be wrong. It gives me the opportunity to learn and grow.
If you really think that my feelings about 4e makes my stance immutable, you don't know me at all.
Pity. In addition to being one of the most interesting bits of this thread IMO, I'm thinking I'm not understanding you at all here.
A character of mine met a man at the Inn Between. He had been driven half-mad by realizing that, if you went halfway to your destination, then halfway again, you were but a quarter of the original distance away. Go halfway again, and now but one eighth remained. But, while you would always grow closer, you could never actually reach your destination.
Several children have drawn comics where one character easily - almost effortlessly - defeats another, because the second character never takes any actions.
The answer to both of these is "Time" - and, for the latter, something along the lines of "taking turns" (heh).
I've… done something surprisingly close to what you described, and, having two left feet, I full well appreciate the time that action costs.
Saying "I kick the downed guy while I charge towards the Cleric" is not unlike, "I do both those after I finish my crossword, and annotate the two hour documentary of that crossword" - it's not giving the other actors a turn.
Even "I kick the downed guy while I charge towards the Cleric"? If the GM responds, "as you look up from the mangled pulp that was once McStabby, you find yourself staring into the barrel of Father Gunslinger's pistol. The familiar flash and crack precede a sharp pain in your shoulder…", that doesn't break immersion. Depending on the system, that could happen. Depending on the exact setup in that reality, that could happen.
More generally, a resolution of any combination of [he's dead, he's not dead] + [resolve charge, Cleric acts] does not break my immersion. Any of those could happen. Heck, even "you miss the kick, trample him anyway, but trip and fall prone" or "you slip in the target's blood and skid prone at the Cleric's feet" could be a valid result of that action
Any one of those could make me call foul on following the rules of game, depending upon the system. But that's a separate issue from losing immersion for results not following from actions.
But even *that* isn't as interesting to me as the *decision* phase. That was perfectly reasonable character logic, to kick the target on the way to the Cleric, as would charging the Cleric directly be. The question of whether to finish off the dieing man can be answered either way. Whereas "because I have a whizbang card and two Fate Points, I gain Trample until end of turn, and kill the downed man en passant as I Charge the Cleric", with no in-character reasoning? When the "holding your breath" icon is displayed during the decision-making process? That's what definitionally forces me out of role-playing stance into playing the game.
And, again, role-playing is making decisions for the character, in character. It's fine for action resolution, for "writing down mana spent" to access the game layer, and take me out of immersion. It's fine for writing a 20-page "session summary" or for character creation to take hours, and not be immersive.
It's not fine in an RPG to have to drop to the rules layer in order to make a reasonable decision. Not optimal, reasonable.
"Clerics can heal. Him healing his dieing ally would be disadvantageous. If I just charge the Cleric, can I prevent him from healing the dieing guy?"- I've turned ancient dragons into a thin red mist in a single charge; yeah, the Cleric being dead should stop him from healing his ally.
- I could miss, and it's not worth the risk.
- I'll let the Force decide his fate.
- I'll be between the Cleric and the dieing man; previous experience tells me I can / cannot keep myself between them.
- (in this world) healing can be done at range - only death of one of them will prevent the Cleric healing his ally.
Any of those could be valid in character thoughts. Those mechanics have corresponding in character fiction. Or (presumably non-mechanical) thoughts like, "it's a risk either way, but I hate ____ more" could come into play.
From what I understand of you setting the scene, any of those seem possible to me. That's why none of those results will inherently break my immersion.
Violate the rules (whatever they may be), sure, then those results can break immersion.
Force me to access the rules rather than the fiction to choose my action in the first place, and that not only breaks immersion, it breaks what being an RPG means.
Does any of that make any sense?
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2021-12-15, 11:16 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A model of immersion
Does it make sense?
Yes. It sounds like you’re making excuses for why 3rd rules don’t break immersion for you, but 4th does.
There is nothing wrong with loving 3rd edition. There’s nothing wrong with disliking 4th. If all you had said was “3rd is my favorite system, and I cannot get ANY enjoyment from 4th,” there wouldn’t be such pushback. But you phrase it as an objective truth that 4th doesn’t even count as an RPG. That’s wrong.I have a LOT of Homebrew!
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2021-12-15, 11:27 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A model of immersion
No, because that neither is an outside game distraction nor does it make me view my character as a game piece.
But nor would it break my sense of verisimilitude, which is a different thing from immersion. That's where the rules don't line up with something you'd expect from 'reality', and is counterbalanced by suspension of disbelief. Because I would not automatically expect that stopping a charge long enough to kick in a dying foe's skull is necessarily something that could be done in the time frame the game uses for one round.
OTOH firing a heavy crossbow every 6 seconds does hurt my sense of verisimilitude to some degree. That's something I've learned to tune out by just accepting it as the rules and heroic fantasy, suspending my disbelief.
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2021-12-15, 11:30 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A model of immersion
It seems contradictory that someone-say, a Monk-can move 120’ and cave a man’s skull in with his bare hands in six seconds, but cannot strike two people within 20’, one of whom is dying and is directly in the path of getting to the second guy, in that same period.
The move action being separate is a huge bit of weirdness-something 4th has, but 5th does not.I have a LOT of Homebrew!
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2021-12-16, 07:26 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A model of immersion
Loving 3e?
If all the editions of all games were personified, their spirits incarnated into (demi)humanoid form, and I could kill just one of them? No, it wouldn't be Fatal, sorry. I know that should be everyone's moral imperative, but I just don't hate Fatal enough for it to top the list, and I'd follow my passions here. GURPS would be second on my list, for all the lies that were spread in its name about what it being "universal" meant. But topping my list would be 3e D&D.
3e was the Death of Joy in the name of "balance". 3e was the Death of the concept of the D&D Wizard. 3e was the Death of muggle superiority. 3e was the Death of custom content.
3e was the birth of "the build", and needing to plan for your future. 3e was the birth of the slog of creating content. And, although 3e can't help it, 3e was the birth of internet D&D discussions and the death of people understanding just how clueless those not standing on the backs of Giants can be.
And the litany of sins continues beyond that short list.
If there's one game I truly hate, and would balefire from existence for the damage it did, it's 3e.
Oh, 3e had plenty of good things, too: better systems, clearer writing, more base classes, rules for gaining unique powers (feats, prestige classes) later in the game, and so much more.
But that doesn't excuse the harm it did.
No, I don't love 3e. It's the system I would murder, or strangle in its crib, were that an option.
So the last thing I would be is an apologist for 3e out of love. My *feelings* for it run quite strongly in the opposite direction. I just don't normally let my feelings influence my decisions. If the best doctor in town got drunk and ran over my dog, I might hate him personally, but I'd still respect him professionally, still send my mom there if she asked for a recommendation.
As a game, 3e's not bad. And at least it's an RPG.
Interesting. Much better worded than my response. Kudos!
So… your immersion… is only broken by… things pulling you out of the game, or things forcing you to view the game as a game rather than… as its own reality, maybe? Have I got that right? If so, do you subscribe to *any* of the definitions of "immersion" that have been used in this thread?
Your sense of versimilitude… is counterbalanced by your suspension of disbelief. Does that mechanically work like my "holding your breath" model, or would you describe it differently?
Ah, now *that* example is a bit different than the scene you set earlier. Yes, I expect Action Hero Bruce Lee can hit someone dozens of times, *or* wade a sea of mooks, hitting and moving, in the same timeframe.
But that's different from a brutal warrior (viewed by me, inserting my own failings, "guy at the gym"ing the *floor* of my expectations for his capacities) kicking someone while *charging* (both a game keyword, and something I have nonzero experience with).
So, yes, unlike the original scene you set, das Uber monk being unable to land a single blow on a target of opportunity en route to another target? Still has the "takes time" Truth to it, but tickles at the fidelity of the model to the fiction, in a way that "brutal warrior kicking someone while charging" does not.
Still well within the realm of "spherical sacred cows on a frictionless outer plane" level of abstraction I've bought into to play a game, however.
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2021-12-16, 08:57 AM (ISO 8601)
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2021-12-16, 06:00 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A model of immersion
I recall that others already remarked that it's not necessarily more realistic for someone to be able to perform a physical action multiple times per day. It really depends on the nature of the activity and how strenuous it is.
It's entirely possible to mess something up through a misguided attempt at assistance. (I was going to link the OotS strip where Durkon learns this lesson from his mother, but on reflection it doesn't seem like that would be worth the time it would take to find it.)
Do you mean only specific characters and creatures being "given the ability to do" things that it sees like others ought to also have a chance of accomplishing? Like, say... Battle Master Fighter maneuvers in D&D 5E? Or Thief skills in 1E and 2E? Or, heck, Sneak Attack?
In another thread, you touched on the idea of accepting that things in the game world work the way that the rules say they do, and if the results are unfamiliar, then those differences are just part of the setting. Why not just apply that here? The important thing is that characters understand how marking works, not that they have any understanding of why it works that way. Lighting is a real-world phenomenon that I can only imagine seemed pretty arbitrary before people understood stuff like electromagnetism. We encounter unexplained phenomena all the time, and we assume that those effects have causes that we don't know about.
If the issue is that arbitrary magic stuff is less acceptable than arbitrary non-magic stuff, then seriously just go ahead and call everything magic. Not sure why just using the word "magic" should make anything more believable, but that honestly looks more like an opportunity than a problem if believability is the goal.
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2021-12-16, 08:23 PM (ISO 8601)
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2021-12-17, 09:07 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A model of immersion
Agreed. Note that good examples of IRL muggle dailies were absent from the conversations until just recently. Note also that my tune changed to acknowledge my acceptance of that fact, that only *certain* muggle dailies required mental pretzels.
The brevity of the entry was not indicative of backsliding, merely intended as a call to the original topic header.
FTFY?
This is very intelligent question and commentary.
Hmmm… you're right, at first glance, one would expect that "it's inexplicable, and just accepted as fact" would work. I see exactly where you're coming from.
My response is… complicated. There's a risk of getting lost in chopped up elephant bits. But here goes.
At its simplest, it's that there's friction between "like this world, unless noted otherwise" and "secretly completely unlike this world". My *first* foray into this huge topic was, as was mentioned in the thread you referenced, predicated upon "HP are a 'noted otherwise' exception". Yet even something as ubiquitous and understandable to 7-year-olds as HP can make intelligent, adult seasoned gamers lose their immersion. Wow, right? Yeah, these changes *aren't* things to be taken lightly.
Similarly, people freak out when I talk about the idea of my characters being "not from around here", just cannot grok the idea that the game could possibly be about anything other than my characters and places not here under such circumstances.
How, then, could a game where lightning is simply known by first principles, rather than being understood as being the logical consequences of electromagnetic forces, possibly *not* be about researching how lightning really works? Especially when it's clear that we have tools to manipulate this unknown force, from Call Lightning to Lightning Bolt to Control Weather.
Doesn't it boggle the mind that anyone could ever play a game of D&D where Lightning just exists by first principles, as a difference from this reality, and it *not* be the focus of the campaign to investigate Lightning? By the logic above, shouldn't it make sense to *only* make such a change if you intend it to be the *focus* of the campaign?
...
Sorry, that line of thought might not be very accessible. Let me try another.
Suppose I want to play "a knight in shining armor". What is the purpose of the rules?
The rules are there to make promises, to calibrate expectations. Sure. But they're also there to facilitate gameplay.
HP are so much easier / simpler than reality. They're an abstraction of wounds (or wounds and stamina and skill and luck and…) that is much more accessible, and much easier to grok, than going through med school to play your knight, and understand exactly what being hit by a Dragon's tail means.
Changing Lightning to "first principles", however, has no inherent value (outside Discovery, which was covered above). It doesn't make the game easier to play. It's not "spherical sacred cows on a frictionless outer plane".
When it's something that the Knight is expected to know, it's one more thing you need to learn in order to play your "knight in shining armor". It adds to the distance between "I'm roleplaying a knight in shining armor" and "I'm role-playing a knight in shining armor in 4e".
That distance, that learning curve, is… not identical to, but… related to? Part of? I think I'm going with, "its shadow is part of"… anyway, that learning curve has something to do with the metric I'm calling a game's suitability to be played as an RPG.
Because, when you cannot conceptualize the character independent of the setting, it's an issue. There's terms in software development for this kind of "bad touch" interconnectivity that, maybe after my fever breaks, I'll remember.
I've seen people roleplay "King Arthur" (I almost left the autocorrect "King Author") in systems with HP, systems with wound tracks, systems with little beyond "alive or dead". In systems with group initiative, systems with individual initiative, systems with simultaneous initiative, systems with "time tracks". The idea of "king Arthur" somehow, magically, seems able to transcend the underlying system.
The extent to which a game requires my "knight in shining armor" concept to remember and adapt to the peculiarities of the system is part of how unsuited to being a RPG that system is.
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Or how about from this angle?
IRL, there's people who do things by mindless rote, and people who actually *understand* things.
Which category do you picture the true masters of the art belonging to? Miyamoto Musashi, Sherlock Holmes, Quertus (my signature academia mage for whom this account is named), Batman? Do they feel like people who are reading off the scripted routine that was taught them, or like they do what they do because they have an understanding of the how and why?
How do you picture replacing the low-level physics calls of this world with high-level "just because" calls in theirs impacts such character concepts?
...
Or… I've got a more complicated PoV, that involves explaining things to a 7-year-old, and the difference between what I've dubbed the "naive" and "simplest path" metrics of a game's suitability to be played as an RPG.
But does any of this "beating around the bush" help you see where the bush might be?
Hmmm…
Honestly, I have no idea what you're saying in that paragraph, so I cannot formulate questions (beyond the eloquent, "huh?"). But the notion of combat + role-playing, plus anything *you* would think might be of interest there, certainly means that this bit has my attention.
Let me try a different approach, going back to first principles. Role-playing is making decisions for the character, in character. What does it matter, from a role-playing perspective, if those decisions are *resolved* through a complex combat minigame vs "roll combat" (aside from the number and type of opportunities for expressing the character presented by those systems (EDIT: oh, that reminds me of something I wanted to say in your "response" thread! I may bring this up there soon.))? So long as the resolution of in character choices isn't incoherent, so long as you can play the minigame by playing the character rather than playing the system, how does this impact role-playing? What were you trying to get at with talk of Lancer?
There, 3 questions. Probably not the right ones, but I managed 3 questions.
Now, I full well agree that some tasks, some minigames, like "build optimization" or "after-session write-up" are not role-playing. The *character* might reasonably be trying to increase their power, but that will look different than the build minigame of some systems (although some overlap should exist, even then).
But combat is (or should be) a 100% role-playing minigame, regardless of the underlying resolution mechanics. As should dungeon crawling. That is, the extent to which the system *forces* you to play the rules rather than the roles is exactly what I've been talking about measuring.
Or… if the table is screaming at each other about the latest TPK, and one player is yelling "you should have used Das über's über gun!", while a second is yelling back, "Batman doesn't use guns!"… yeah, OK, maybe not a happy example.
Point is, I have no idea what your point is. Most I've got is that you're referencing role-playing and various minigames, including 2 which a roleplayer should play in role-playing stance (combat, dungeon crawl), and one not (character optimization minigame - "Balance to the table" is a metagame construct, as is character creation).Last edited by Quertus; 2021-12-17 at 09:13 AM.
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2021-12-17, 11:20 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A model of immersion
Again, I go back to the fact that, FOR ME, D&D has enough whoppers in any version that I don't see a categorical difference in 4e compared to earlier editions. It's not a procedural change, it's the same illogic.
I get marking. "I'm fighting you, and if you don't pay attention to me, you're going to create an opening". At the base case, that makes sense. Just like HP makes sense (more or less) for two warriors smacking each other with sticks. And martial dailies make sense (to me) more or less, because of reasons I've said earlier.
There are edge cases to each. There are situations where HP just stops making any sense (the most consistent interpretation is "meat points", which is inconsistent with any of the descriptive material). There are edge cases of marking, often involving multiple marks. There are dailies that are harder to justify.
If someone has me dead to rights with a crossbow, and I'm not wearing armor, and says "don't do the thing you're doing", in almost any fiction (not involving superheroes) the smart thing to do is to stop what I'm doing. In D&D it's not. This isn't even that much of an edge case - I'm not nitpicking commoner railguns or things like that. These are the types of things that made me stop playing D&D for the most part decades ago. Even a 7 year old understands "getting shot with a crossbow is bad," though I think your 7 year old criteria is actually not useful.
i don't doubt that 4e doesn't work for you. I don't doubt that certain of its elements cause that break. I get it. But I don't think it's because of some objective difference. Because there's enough things in D&D that are core to the system that cause exactly those breaks to me - and the way I deal with it is to ignore it, internalize it, and get on with the game."Gosh 2D8HP, you are so very correct (and also good looking)"
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2021-12-17, 03:17 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A model of immersion
This is a good example of tastes varying, because personally, house-rules I've seen to promote that always feel like they're pushing genre/narrative over consistency, which harms my immersion a bit.
It's true that a crossbow is deadly in many pieces of fiction, but it's also true that in that fiction, the protagonists don't ever just "tank" a fireball or a giant crushing them. There'll always be a thing they can dive for cover behind, uneven ground that stops the giant squashing them flat, a distraction right at the moment when they'd otherwise be swallowed, and so forth. In D&D? Not the case. Sometimes you can say it was luck or dodging, but other times the whole room is filled with acid/fire, the giant stomps on you uninterrupted for several rounds, etc.
And for that matter, the fiction isn't always consistent either. Sometime the protagonists go up against, say, a bunch of skeleton archers with no problem - and they're not hiding behind cover either, they're jumping around and fighting them, and any arrows which hit will just be grazing wounds. But then in the cutscene where you get captured, a single crossbow is too much to go against? Worst for this is video games, where you might be trivially tanking a missile barrage from a helicopter in one scene and then surrender to a couple guys with pistols five minutes later.Last edited by icefractal; 2021-12-17 at 03:24 PM.
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2021-12-17, 09:50 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A model of immersion
You know for clarity purposes you should probably focus you efforts a bit more, spend a couple of posts working on an explanation before abandoning it. But this got me laughing.
Still don't get your main point unfortunately.
Honestly, I have no idea what you're saying in that paragraph, so I cannot formulate questions (beyond the eloquent, "huh?"). But the notion of combat + role-playing, plus anything *you* would think might be of interest there, certainly means that this bit has my attention.
But the thing is, some situations/decisions aren't very different in terms of role-playing. Combat (which I will just say instead of "a tactical combat mini-game") has a lot of these. For instance... OK I am having a hard time thinking of some good examples, so let me say that you are attacked at the side of the road by bandits, they could attack you a whole bunch of different ways that will create many different tactical situations. But from a role-playing perspective most are just "a force capable of using 1/4 of your daily resources attacks you, what do you do?" There isn't a lot of interesting ways to express personality, background or drive there. Some yes, you can in fact role-play during combat, but it is very repetitive from a role-playing stand-point.
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2021-12-18, 07:04 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A model of immersion
The general point (underlined by me) you're trying to make is correct, but your example is bad. "A force capable of using 1/4 of your daily resources attacks you, what do you do?" is not "roleplaying perspective", it's a metagame perspective abstracting away all details of the scenario to ask a high level strategic question. The question doesn't give a lot interesting ways to express personality etc. because you are deliberately skipping all the details that would allow answering how to do that.
Let me offer some specific examples to make the point clearer:
Who are these bandits? Does it make a difference to your decision to fight or flee if they're Robin Hood's Merry Men versus Uruk-Hai of Sauron? Starving villagers driven to banditry by desperation? Hired assassins? Does it make it a difference to which of your resources you expend in fighting them? Does which resources you expend make a difference in how you defeat them and what happens to them afterward? So on and so forth. The more attention to detail is paid in every respect, the more variety you can get, and consequently less repetition.
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2021-12-18, 11:59 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2011
Re: A model of immersion
In addition to the excellent reply by @Vahnavoi,
I have a few things to add.
Now, the problem is, I'm not sure if any of my ways of communicating those things will let you (or anyone else) hear them.
Most enjoyable TV characters aren't characters, they're caricatures. They have strongly identifiable, predictable "beats", moreso than a realistic personality.
Different languages have different cadences, different rules for certain subtleties that make a native speaker sound different from a foreign learner - and make different "base languages" result in different sounding accents.
Radio frequencies have a carrier wave, that you vary slightly in order to transmit data.
Reality having general consistency is what allows intelligence.
An RPG having a baseline "cadence" against which your choices can occur is not a bad thing.
To me, those touch on the same concept, as instantiated in 5 different fields.
To me, it's a matter of buy-in. I, personally, accept that when I'm playing D&D, my role-playing will occur to a particular background music, to a particular beat. In that vein, it is in fact highly suboptimal (from a role-playing perspective) to simply abstract that encounter as simply "bandits", and generally detrimental to think of them in terms of resource expenditure (unless, of course, "thinking of human(?) life in terms of resource expenditure" is what you want to say about your character).
Sadly, I have yet to game with a group where "you are my quest" was a line my character got to give, was something that would really fly. Even having a choice of more than one of "kill the bandits", "join the bandits", "be captured by the bandits", "convert the bandits", "take the bandits alive", "some bandit casualties before they flee (possibly with the goods)", "negotiate with the bandits", etc, is really rare. Because most GMs force *even more* of a required beats to the song than just "you will be doing your role-playing in the context of exploration, monsters, and fighting". If you cannot roleplay the character in that context, then the character is poorly suited to being used to play D&D as an RPG.
But if I get to expand my role-playing outside that, well, bonus! In fact, proficiency in the various components of "outside the core expectations" is one of the sources of my desires to roleplay my character under multiple GMs.
How about now? Any of that make sense?Last edited by Quertus; 2021-12-18 at 12:01 PM.
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2021-12-18, 04:02 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A model of immersion
Yes, I said that. And for the rest of your post, yes those can be there, but even if they are and the GM has put thought into it, wading through the tactical combat to reach them (or show how we react to them) still kind of slows the role-playing down.
It does, but you are saying it in a way like I should be happy about it. I'm not. A "rhythm" is fine but it seems like a waste when the beats are "lets spend time not focusing on the reason we are playing".
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2021-12-18, 04:54 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A model of immersion
@Cluedrew: in effort to find a better example, lets talk about player psychology and videogames for a moment.
Every once in a while, you get someone saying that "videogames are boring because you just press buttons". The observation is technically correct but the argument is preposterous - it's equivalent to "play-by-post is boring because you just type letters on a screen" or "drawing is boring because you just put lines on paper".
What's happening here is a sort of myopia where focus on repetitive elements of a control interface prevents observations of the thing being controlled. This relates to the original post and idea of this thread, because often the myopic focus is caused by lack of familiarity with the control interface. All mental effort is spent on learning or handling the controls and little room is left for anything else. This is also why it might be hard to figure out "how to roleplay" in a slow-paced tactical game - if calculating spatial positions or die roll results is taking all available brain power, it's hard to observe how the decions made reflect a person's motives etc.. It's like watching a animation meant to be watched at 60 frames per second play out at 1 frame per second.
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2021-12-18, 07:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A model of immersion
These two are related.
"For me" is subjective.
The point of the 7-year-old is to remove that subjectivity.
I don't care about you, I don't care about me, I care about the simplest, most fundamental breakdown of the game.
I don't care whether you think a 6' human with 18 Dex and 3 Str, or getting wounded without suffering any degradation to your performance is "realistic", I care whether a naive 7-year-old can accept the fiction of, "fighting multiple people can be more difficult, forcing you to divide your focus", for every piece of fiction required to play the game.
That, per the notions of abstraction, "spherical sacred cows on a frictionless outer plane", and game, that anythingillogicalcounter-logical ("the more damaged you are, the more effective you are"), anything that increases complexity (including whole cloth "just because" first principles, and choosing complex wound system abstractions over simple HP abstractions), even anything that diverges from a "known fiction" (which includes the way things work IRL), the designers had best have a *really* good reason for including.
Note that the simplest way to play D&D is "beer and pretzels kick in the door murderhobos", so don't mistake me for saying that simplest/easiest is *always* better.
That… Hmmm… I think I'm straying away from my point, that the point of the "7-year-old" bit is to learn to express things in the simplest terms (like math often teaches you to do), and to test those simplest terms, not your subjective perception on the game.
Or, at least, that's one of the points of the 7-year-old.
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2021-12-18, 07:22 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A model of immersion
Quertus...
You're not asking an actual 7-year-old. You're asking yourself to emulate what you think a 7-year-old would say, if that 7-year-old knew all the things you know. Because that's all you can do. You can't escape subjectivity this way. And even if you were asking a real 7-year-old, all that does is push the subjectivity onto that 7-year-old.
This is not an objective measure by any means.
Oh, and I've played with more than one 7-year-old (and a couple on either side). They (those specific examples, I won't try to generalize) were
a) completely uninterested in mechanics
b) completely unconcerned by ludonarrative dissonance
c) completely unconcerned by anything like realism, internal (or external) consistency, or, in general, things making sense.
If anything, they're way more accepting of things that adults think are weird.Dawn of Hope: a 5e setting. http://wiki.admiralbenbo.org
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2021-12-19, 05:32 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A model of immersion
Yeah, have to echo PhoenixPhyre here.
Using a 7-year-old as a benchmark for how you are designing a game makes sense, if you are interested in making a game to 7-year-olds. If you want to dig deep into it, you can take a look at existing body of research of human development, to see when various cognitive faculties develop and when skills relevant to playing a game are learned.
But the same body of research will rapidly tell you that children don't care about or even notice the same things as adults do. They almost certainly won't care or notice the same things as habitual tabletop gamers. Children will complain when something doesn't match their idea of reality, just like adults, but their ideas of reality are frequently different. When you're adjusting towards children's idea of reality, you are literally adjusting toward naive assumptions.
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2021-12-19, 06:35 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A model of immersion
So, you understand my point, you just don't understood that you understand my point.
Yes, a 7-year-old will accept HP, or "you cannot fire speculative smoke". That's part of the point. Accept the fiction.
You actually are breaking it down as though to explain it to a 7-year-old. Consider it "prime factoring" for rules.
But it's adult minds that are suffering through the incoherence, and evaluating the efficiency of the rules. You're not asking the 7-year-old if they match, you're evaluating the (virtual or actual) 7-year-old play the game using the fiction you have handed them.
If I explain, "hit people, and they get hurt; hurt them enough, and they die", and they get used to the size of their horse's HP bar, do they have their horse charge the line of archers or pikemen, or not, at somewhat reasonable times? Can they make reasonable decisions via the fiction?
If I explain, "spells require concentration to cast; if anything disturbs you while you're casting, you lose the spell", can they make reasonable choices about when and where to cast, and when to hit (or otherwise disrupt) which enemies?
If I explain, "your illusion power will make someone see whatever you want them to see, but it won't fool their other senses; if what they see doesn't make sense to them, they'll try to resist with their will, and possibly break the illusion", can they make reasonable choices about who to target with what illusions? Can they think of ways to test their reality for illusions?
The answer for the 7-year-olds I've played with is "yes".
The fiction matches the rules enough for them to make reasonable decisions when handed the fiction.
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2021-12-19, 06:49 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A model of immersion
A Swordsage using Tornado Throw can attack multiple characters, each some distance apart, by throwing them - they'd move, throw the cleric's ally, move again, and throw the cleric. All in the space of one round.
Not quite what you were describing - but very close.Last edited by hamishspence; 2021-12-19 at 06:50 AM.
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2021-12-19, 08:58 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A model of immersion
Why do I care what those 7-year-olds think? I'm not one of them. I agree with the high level view, without getting caught up in details, is useful. But ultimately what people notice at a high level is different, and you could probably do some statistics if you wanted to (err... and had access to the population to do a proper study) to get which ones people notice the most often. But that doesn't matter because popularity and trends still does not make for objectivity.
So don't worry about the 7-year-olds. Do you like D&D 4e? From what I gather no, you find it's metaphors unwieldy and jarring. This is true. But that doesn't mean it is fundamentally different from other role-playing games.
On Tactical Combat: The issue is mostly about time and energy spent during the game. I have played systems where combat feels very interwoven with role-playing, but the combat there tends not to be tactical. Usually at the level you declare what your character is trying to accomplish and then you roll to see how well you accomplish it. It is more than saying "I combat them to let me pass." (like how some people use social skills) but it also doesn't require tracking of everyone's position over many turns to get the result.
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2021-12-19, 12:33 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A model of immersion
Exactly, you are not a movie action hero, which is exactly what most TTRPG characters are (at a minimum). Not taking a hit from the "dead to rights with a fast projectile weapon" is absolutely something that happens in most hero genres. And remember, in the inception of TTRPGs, characters above 1st level were literally "Heroes" and their primary special ability was to survive more than one "Hit".
I do agree that if that's not supposed to be the genre, if most non-combat-specialized characters are supposed to die from a single well placed gun shot without hero-ablation of any kind, with the only defensive option being investing massively in fast reactions and movement, then yeah generic "hero" defensive things like hit points or fate points or whatever should be left out.
Whereas a heavy crossbow being fired every 6-10 seconds is considerably more than various other movies never running out of ammo, or an action hero dodging a dead to rights gun and killing the attacker. That's an artifact of (specifically D&D) moving from 1 minute rounds to 10 second rounds in 2e C&T, which carried over to 6 second rounds in 3e, while retaining one projectile attack per round.
Regardless, not of this has to do with immersion, either in the broader level of taking you out of the game entirely, or the more narrow level of seeing your character as a thing separate from you. This is all verisimilitude & suspension of disbelief issues.Last edited by Tanarii; 2021-12-19 at 01:05 PM.
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2021-12-19, 12:45 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A model of immersion
An excellent question. Off the top of my head? Three reasons: you’re not a 7-year-old, you’re not me, and I’m not a 7-year-old.
you’re not a 7-year-old
You don’t have the flexibility to just accept HP, or “no speculative smoke” as just being “the way the world works”.
It’s a call to remove personal biases, to look at a theoretical someone else - someone able to accept alternate world physics.
you’re not me
If you were me, I could just say, “write executable code”, and you’d grok my meaning. If you were me, you’d be fully familiar with the examples I use, and what I mean by them.
Instead, I need a lowest common denominator example, something anyone can relate to.
I figure most everyone has encountered a 7-year-old before.
I’m not a 7-year-old
Eh, would you believe I forgot what I was going to say here?
Oh, right - that it isn’t just me saying “this makes sense”, I can point to actual 7-year-olds who have executed the code successfully.
So it’s intended as an approachable example to express the idea of writing the simplest “prime factorization” executable code for the fiction, and evaluating the complexity of that code, the capacity of a being bereft our biases to run said code, and the evaluation by the system of how well said being running said code fares at playing the game. And it’s something I’ve done.
Of course, caveats regarding last time I was foolish enough to answer your questions of “why should one care …”.
Eh, my online persona, as represented by the Quertus account, hates 4e. And I’ll shift back to that caricature of myself shortly. It’s fair to say that I don’t enjoy the gameplay in 4e (although I remain quite interested in the fact that there are those who do - especially muggle players), but I don’t hate it the way I do 3e.
Have you ever played with hidden information, where “what you are trying to accomplish” isn’t known? Or, per my old example about spilling oil drums, do you grok how one can have *many* objectives?
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2021-12-19, 06:59 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A model of immersion
Well, yes. This is my point. This is precisely my point.
D&D, in general, has some big whoppers that people are able to swallow without concern. This makes me very very skeptical that many of the things that are brought out as making immersion possible or making a game "not an RPG" are the actual concern in an objective way, when other things that to me are bigger are handled without blinking.
(THough even in the action hero scene, the hero will, every time, treat the threat as an actual threat, something a D&D character doesn't need to do, because there is no actual danger. The hero responds to it as if it were danger, and the stakes are set that "if the hero screws up, something bad will happen to them." They don't just face-tank the hit.)Last edited by kyoryu; 2021-12-19 at 07:00 PM.
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2021-12-19, 07:21 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A model of immersion
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2021-12-19, 07:34 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A model of immersion
I have a LOT of Homebrew!
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2021-12-19, 09:13 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: A model of immersion
So I have to completely different replies:
- Superhuman durability is my default explanation of HP, I don't push the reflexes/luck view that seems to be the official explanation because... maybe it is less silly or something but it just isn't as consistent. (See JNAProductions about poisoned weapons.)
- If I couldn't do it, and other people playing role-playing can't do it, why is it better to remove that? Especially if you are claiming it is objective (I'm not sure what it we are on right now, is it one of the maybe objective ones?) than we should be able to get the answers considering only the object an not the subject.