D&D 1E 5e Play, 1e Play, and the Immersive Experience

lowkey13 said:

One more time. It's a game. More importantly, to the extent that people understand probabilities and heuristics (and, again, look back at our own history to see how people DID NOT understand these things in the past), it is pretty well known and understood that people, yes, even people today, ARE REALLY REALLY terrible at understanding basic things that they should have experience with. So if this doesn't work so hot in actuality, I'm not sure how you could import this into the game? It's seems like a lot of post hoc rationalization.


I'm quite serious! I literally can't understand your argument, and I've seen you make it several times. It is, IMO, the weirdest assertion I have seen on these boards. I've tried, really tried to understand it- and the closest I can come is that you are making it in order to avoid thinking that knowing the math of the game (and optimizing based on the math?) would lead people to say you're metagaming?

Seriously, why do you care? Play in the way that is fun for you! You don't need to come up with the truly ... odd .... arguments about how fictional characters in a game can somehow intuit the basic mathematical properties of their universe.*

EDIT- at the end of the day, you can decide for yourself whether or not you, or your character, "knowing" they they need a 16 to hit is "metagamey" is something that disturbs you or not. But it's all angels dancing on the head of a pin; it's a game. A game we made up. Involving fictional characters controlled by us.


*Seriously, though, that would lead to some really profound and disturbing moments for those characters in-game. Way beyond the whole "free will" thing.

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Totally agree.

In general I'd be inclined to just chuckle and say, "They nutty guy Saelorn, he's got some ideas..." except that so many times, on so many topics, he ends up dismissing other people's view as "not roleplaying" (which he just did again in this thread) on the basis of his completely irrational and untenable definition.

It's just annoying and disrespectful.

lowkey13 said:

I'm quite serious! I literally can't understand your argument, and I've seen you make it several times. It is, IMO, the weirdest assertion I have seen on these boards. I've tried, really tried to understand it- and the closest I can come is that you are making it in order to avoid thinking that knowing the math of the game (and optimizing based on the math?) would lead people to say you're metagaming?

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Given the context of this thread, I wonder how much of this issue is lost in the generation gap between 1E and 2E. Because I grew into role-playing with 2E, never having touched a 1E book until years later, and everything I've said here is from "Intro to Role-playing". You stay in-character, because that's how you play; that's what role-playing is, and that's why you're here. If you didn't care about role-playing, then you'd be playing some other game instead. Meta-gaming is bad, because it's not role-playing.

Call it a justification or rationalization, if that's the only way for you to make sense of it. I don't want to meta-game; I want to see the world how my character sees it. But it's a strange world that they live in, and I'm looking through a fuzzy mirror. There are some traditional game-like elements to what's going on, but if any of those game elements are not visible to my character, then I can't play that game while staying in-character. So I'm going to go ahead and give these characters the benefit of the doubt, because otherwise the game is unplayable.

"You walk into a room, the DM rolls some dice, and then you die," is not a playable game. "You try to climb the wall, the DM rolls some dice, and you die," is not a playable game. There needs to be some level of informed decision-making, if any of these choices are to be meaningful at all.

lowkey13 said:

Seriously, why do you care? Play in the way that is fun for you! You don't need to come up with the truly ... odd .... arguments about how fictional characters in a game can somehow intuit the basic mathematical properties of their universe.

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I don't take you for much of a climber (for the purposes of this post), but do you think that you could intuit your own chance of climbing a wall, just by looking at it? Not as a percentage, but just as a general feeling, whether you probably can or probably cannot? Can you guess how likely you are to be injured, if you fall from that wall? Whether it's likely to require hospitalization? At the very least, if someone was cornering you against that wall, do you think you could evaluate those factors well enough to decide whether you wanted to risk trying to climb it?

Because that's all I'm looking for, here. I need enough information that I can make a semi-informed decision, instead of blindly hoping that I don't just die randomly from something that I could never have possibly foreseen.

lowkey13 said:

I'm not sure I get that? Is it bad to say that you "metagame?" Or for particular cases?

I mean, a lot of the early, Gygax-ian D&D assumed that the player applied gaming expertise to the game that was independent of the character; in fact, many early modules assumed and required this type of play. Heck, it's the theory behind competition modules!

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Exactly. Its literally what "skilled play" is in traditional, (not 2e AD&D) challenge-based D&D.

The idea that with each new character you play you're supposed to willfully pretend like you don't know the embedded challenge tropes of D&D and haven't operationalized rote power plays to defeat them is actually anathema to the spirit of traditional D&D. But somewhere along the line (I've outlined where this "somewhere along the line" is elsewhere), this became verboten as "metagaming" as intentionally derping your way around dungeon-crawling "because your character wouldn't know that" became legit roleplaying.

I'm sorry, but that is absolute rubbish.

Although I've always been staunchly of the opinion that it is a particularly un-interesting form of roleplaying to "pretend" to be ignorant of, for example, the fact that rolls regenerate unless you burn them, the other night we had a Wild Magic surge, which triggered a Confusion spell...which the DM announced...and one of the players who failed his saving throw but got the "Act Normally" result used his action to Dash away from the party. This was before anybody was forced to attack anybody else.

Sure enough, when he got "Attack nearest creature" he was too far away to do any damage.

Somehow that bugged me. Even though I'm not really opposed to metagaming.

Manbearcat said:

Exactly. Its literally what "skilled play" is in traditional, (not 2e AD&D) challenge-based D&D.

The idea that with each new character you play you're supposed to willfully pretend like you don't know the embedded challenge tropes of D&D and haven't operationalized rote power plays to defeat them is actually anathema to the spirit of traditional D&D. But somewhere along the line (I've outlined where this "somewhere along the line" is elsewhere), this became verboten as "metagaming" as intentionally derping your way around dungeon-crawling "because your character wouldn't know that" became legit roleplaying.

I'm sorry, but that is absolute rubbish.

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All of which makes [MENTION=6791261]KenNYC[/MENTION]'s comments/claims even more outlandish.

*Deleted by user*

I agree with many who hate when players calculate the odds and have to know to the % point what each action's chance of success will be. That ruins immersion for me as a DM and a player.

In 1e, there really wasn't any action resolution mechanic. If an attempt seemed reasonable, we'd let it happen. If it was a spell, we'd try to adjudicate the spell. If it was a pick pocket, open lock, bend bar/lift gates, etc. we'd use the chart/listed percentage chance.

In 5e, the DM basically sets a DC for action resolution. For the most part, when I DM and when I play, I like it when the DM allows players to auto succeed on lots of reasonable requests and only uses the dice when it would be more difficult. I agree with those who mention that knowing the DC sometimes suspends immersion, but to counteract that, when I DM, I don't tell the players the DC. I use descriptors like "it will be really hard to fail at that" (basically, don't roll a "1"), "that's a moderately difficult action" (DC 10-15), "that's a difficult action" (18-20), etc. To me, one of the best ways to keep immersion is to encourage players to describe action and intended outcome, and keep the dialogue as narrative rather than numbers.

This does require that the players trust the DM. For me, that is paramount for creating an immersive experience. If the players are constantly needing to check the DM, and they are always trying to look for the mechanical reasons for success and failure, when they question the DM and argue results, the game becomes a quagmire and cannot be immersive.

For me, the less dice rolling, the more immersion I usually have. To be honest, when I DM, a lot of the time, I just keep the game moving without die rolls, until a critical action (or I just use the really hard to fail/don't roll a "1" to keep the action moving along in narrative fashion).

For me skills and proficiencies have always been immersion breaking. Every edition. Hit points, levels, combat not so much. (Don’t ask me why)

In the old days it was “What do you mean I can’t hide because I’m not a thief?”

Or “You mean to tell me I can just decide that I can swim but I need a proficiency to tie a rope?”

Later it was the insanity of “Yeah you know how to use all the weapons on these lists but you have to spend build resources to finish learning how to use it right.” (Weapon Finesse and so much more) “How about I don’t know how to use flails n’ axes and I just really know how to use a longsword since, I am an Elf, and that’s kinda our thing?”

And this gem here. “Can you explain to me,one more time, why am I illiterate?”

I don't think I ever said I was for or against your character not knowing something you know. If you are playing and you run into a puzzle set on a chess table, then by all means, you should be trying to solve the puzzle hopefully and not intentionally playing poorly because your character "doesn't know chess". This is metagaming only to the extent that the player is meta but by role playing this to the extreme and for all intents and purposes "being" your character (trying to solve the puzzle yourself even though you personally are not the one solving the puzzle) you have momentarily immersed yourself in the narrative with no rules in sight.

Then there is another way: You see a chess table puzzle and you say "my character has an INT of 18, can I make a knowledge check to see what I might know about this?". Or the DM invites you to make the knowledge check. Rules in, roleplay out.

I was DMing an encounter a few months back and the party was up against a pretty tough customer. Did they discuss the events in the narrative, or did they discuss the fact that if player A withdraws the creature will get an attack of opportunity but the player withdrawing has a high armor class, wasting his reaction when Player B does something that only a reaction could mitigate (it was such gibberish I might have my terms wrong). Just take a guess which discussion I had the pleasure of listening to. Rules, not roleplaying; metagaming to actually remove you from the narrative and instead boil it down to a math problem.

Rhenny said:

For the most part, when I DM and when I play, I like it when the DM allows players to auto succeed on lots of reasonable requests and only uses the dice when it would be more difficult.

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That's a great point: in 5e not only are you only supposed to roll the dice when the outcome is in doubt, but the DM also sets the DC, and there is nothing requiring the DM to tell the player what the DC is. (In my experience the DM usually doesn't. YMMV.)

In 1e there was a pre-determined chance of anything happening.

Which means...for those who want to argue that one edition or the other encourages computing odds versus "roleplaying"...that 5e would lean more toward the roleplaying end of that spectrum. (I still think it's about who you play with, not the system, but hey whatever.)