D&D General The History of 'Immersion' in RPGs

D&D historian Jon Peterson has taken a look at the concept of 'immersion' as it related to tabletop roleplaying games, with references to the concept going back to The Wild Hunt (1977), D&D modules like In Search of the Unknown, games like Boot Hill, and Forgotten Realms creator Ed Greenwood speaking in Dragon Magazine.

Immersion and Role Playing in the 1970s

The idea that role playing involved a property called "immersion" occurred to the early adopters of the 1970s fairly early. The earliest e...

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[Maxperson]

That isn't a replacement. That's a what they said.

Er, no. @Lanefan ask what replaced it and got that answer. That makes the answer what replaced it, except that it wasn't actually a replacement. If the answer had been, "There is no replacement and here's why...," THEN it would have been what @Elfcrusher said.

 

[Hriston]

Dragon article? It's in the 1e DMG p. 15 under description of abilities: "The intelligence rating roughly corresponds to our modern 'IQ' scores. [plus mnemonic, reasoning and learning ability]"

I don't see anything about dividing IQ by ten there, which is the part of your claim to which I was referring.

The notion of taking your IQ score and dividing by ten to get you Intelligence score, as far as I can tell, comes from a small article in The Dragon #8 (July, 1977) , p 23, by Brian Blume, titled "So, You Want Realism in D&D?"

This tongue in cheek article promotes the IQ/10 method of generating Intelligence as part of a system "guaranteed to make a player character conform more to the abilities of the actual person owning them" alongside such methods as:

• The number of consecutive months you've gone without missing a day of work or school due to illness = you Constitution score,
• The number of times you have appeared on TV or had your picture printed in the newspaper times 2 = your Charisma score,
• and my favorite, 20 minus the average number of hours you spend playing D&D or working on your D&D campaign in the average week = your Wisdom score.

 

[jgsugden]

I don't see anything about dividing IQ by ten there, which is the part of your claim to which I was referring.

The notion of taking your IQ score and dividing by ten to get you Intelligence score, as far as I can tell, comes from a small article in The Dragon #8 (July, 1977) , p 23, by Brian Blume, titled "So, You Want Realism in D&D?"
...

No, it goes back to AD&D core books.

See here for a good recap of the evolution: How Does Intelligence Relate to IQ?

 

[Hriston]

No, it goes back to AD&D core books.

See here for a good recap of the evolution: How Does Intelligence Relate to IQ?

Show me where in one of those books it says Intelligence equals IQ divided by 10. The closest the article you just linked gets (you didn't actually read it, did you?) is the article from The Dragon I just cited.

 

[Hriston]

I call them as I see them.

So you're calling me dishonest because I have a different understanding of roleplaying than you. Nice.

 

[Lanefan]

I don't see anything about dividing IQ by ten there, which is the part of your claim to which I was referring.

The notion of taking your IQ score and dividing by ten to get you Intelligence score, as far as I can tell, comes from a small article in The Dragon #8 (July, 1977) , p 23, by Brian Blume, titled "So, You Want Realism in D&D?"

Well, the divided-by-ten bit certainly has to have appeared somewhere else, as Dragon 8 far pre-dates any issues I (or any of our crew, at the time) had read; yet I've known of the Int=IQ/10 formula since before I started DMing in 1984.

This tongue in cheek article promotes the IQ/10 method of generating Intelligence as part of a system "guaranteed to make a player character conform more to the abilities of the actual person owning them" alongside such methods as:

• The number of consecutive months you've gone without missing a day of work or school due to illness = you Constitution score,
• The number of times you have appeared on TV or had your picture printed in the newspaper times 2 = your Charisma score,
• and my favorite, 20 minus the average number of hours you spend playing D&D or working on your D&D campaign in the average week = your Wisdom score.

Heh - I'd be pretty extreme on those three: in order something like 30+, 2, and about 0.

 

[Hussar]

You don't. You play it subjective, and look for patterns. If an Int-7 character comes up with the right answer once in a while, who cares. If that same character comes up with the right answer on a regular basis, there's a problem.

Bingo.

 

[jgsugden]

Show me where in one of those books it says Intelligence equals IQ divided by 10. The closest the article you just linked gets (you didn't actually read it, did you?) is the article from The Dragon I just cited.

You're fixated on the divided by 10? You need that spelled out?

Bell curve for 3d6 attributes. Bell curve for IQ. So .... you can follow the logic, right? It isn't explicit, but it is ... what is the term ... obvious? If it helps you make the leap, the AD&D DMG also notes that Intelligence corresponds to IQ. That says that they match almost exactly (see the definition of 'corresponds'), and if IQ is a bell curve.... and intelligence is a bell curve ... and they match almost exactly...

 

[Guest 6801328]

You don't. You play it subjective, and look for patterns. If an Int-7 character comes up with the right answer once in a while, who cares. If that same character comes up with the right answer on a regular basis, there's a problem.

Yes, the problem is that the DM combined the real world (an actual puzzle) with the game world, and then expected the players to only be in one of those worlds, and solve an intellectual challenge with a make believe brain. Which isn't possible. As evidenced by...

Not sure how anyone else does it, but sometimes if I'm playing a less-than-brilliant character and I-as-player come up with a good idea, I'll roll for myself (using roll-under-stat) to see if my character might have thought of it. Fail the roll, idea gets self-censored.

So, in other words, you didn't actually approach the problem by inhabiting your character. You let the dice...probability...tell you what to do. How is that roleplaying?

 

[Hriston]

You're fixated on the divided by 10? You need that spelled out?

Bell curve for 3d6 attributes. Bell curve for IQ. So .... you can follow the logic, right? It isn't explicit, but it is ... what is the term ... obvious? If it helps you make the leap, the AD&D DMG also notes that Intelligence corresponds to IQ. That says that they match almost exactly (see the definition of 'corresponds'), and if IQ is a bell curve.... and intelligence is a bell curve ... and they match almost exactly...

Fixated? That was like the topic of the side-conversation I was having with @Lanefan. I suppose you didn't read much of that either before you decided to get involved. I can see from your response here that you don't actually have a citation that IQ/10 is something from the "AD&D core books" as you said it was.