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

Bawylie · Dec 22, 2018

Saelorn said:
Everyone. Anyone worth consideration. I don't believe for half a second that anyone could take cartoon physics seriously, barring serious delusion on their part.

Mmmmmmm... kind of but no. The suspension of disbelief is often a key component of hitting on moving truths.

Consider a comedy like “The Good Place” or “A Midsummernight’s Dream.” You must take the premise seriously, despite its complete departure with reality, in order to engage with the material.

The same is true for the horror genre, which also heavily relies on cartoonish physics.

Or let’s look at the Action/Adventure/Comedy/Horror like Pirates of the Caribbean. You’ve got a consistent world, but you’ve also got the impossible. And you have to swallow down the impossible to enjoy the thing. I mean, leave the supernatural aside for a second. You get your first Jack Sparrow shot with him on the crow’s nest of a ship moving at a good speed despite being 90% submerged/sunken. It would have stopped by that point without wind to carry it forward - no amount of momentum would allow it to glide through the water at that speed. It’s preposterous. But! Heh heh heh. It’s funny. So we let it slide.

Most of us. I’m not trying to speak for you or your tastes. It maybe made the movie unwatchable for you. That’s fine. However, a lot of people had no problem buying that scene. They liked it. They laughed. It didn’t pull them out of the material or the world. They bought it - even though it’s a total absurdity. People are often fine with absurdity.

And laughing at something or finding the absurd comedic doesn’t mean you’re not taking it seriously. Comedy is serious business, by God. Sometimes comedy is the ONLY way to tell the truth.

The Crimson Binome · Dec 22, 2018

Bawylie said:
Mmmmmmm... kind of but no. The suspension of disbelief is often a key component of hitting on moving truths.

The question is whether you can suspend disbelief enough to actually pretend that it's real. The less you know about any given subject, the easier that's going to be (which is why I think most people are okay with your Jack Sparrow example; and the remainder might be willing to buy into it as a genre convention, because they aren't trying to take it seriously).

For role-playing settings, the threshold for plausibility is higher. Magic goes pretty far into suspending disbelief, as long as that magic is consistent and explainable; but nobody will ever mistake Wile E Coyote's cliff-based escapades for something believable.

Bawylie · Dec 22, 2018

Saelorn said:
For role-playing settings, the threshold for plausibility is higher. Magic goes pretty far into suspending disbelief, as long as that magic is consistent and explainable; but nobody will ever mistake Wile E Coyote's cliff-based escapades for something believable.

Fair enough, but now we’re not talking about “whether or not” but “to what degree?”

TheCosmicKid · Dec 22, 2018

Saelorn said:
Everyone. Anyone worth consideration.

Saelorn said:
...but nobody will ever mistake Wile E Coyote's cliff-based escapades for something believable.

You earlier noted that you found surprising -- I believe your own word choice was "bizarre" -- the degree to which the opinions of others differ from your own. Have you considered the possibility that at least one source for your bafflement might lie in the amount of yourself that you are unduly projecting onto "everyone"?

Saelorn said:
I don't believe for half a second that anyone could take cartoon physics seriously, barring serious delusion on their part.

Saelorn said:
The question is whether you can suspend disbelief enough to actually pretend that it's real. The less you know about any given subject, the easier that's going to be (which is why I think most people are okay with your Jack Sparrow example; and the remainder might be willing to buy into it as a genre convention, because they aren't trying to take it seriously).

You also seem to take very seriously this notion of, well, "taking things seriously". What do you mean by that?

Lanefan · Dec 22, 2018

Bawylie said:
Fair enough, but now we’re not talking about “whether or not” but “to what degree?”

That's the case with about 95% of the discussions in here, isn't it?

Bawylie · Dec 22, 2018

Lanefan said:
That's the case with about 95% of the discussions in here, isn't it?

I will argue with you to the death that it’s 93%, you (personal insult).

Lanefan · Dec 22, 2018

Bawylie said:
I will argue with you to the death that it’s 93%, you (personal insult).

Oh yeah? Well take this, you [insert most effective insult here]; and take that, you [insert second-most effective insult here]!!!!!

And it's 95%, not a drop less!

Lan-"this is already starting to sound like my table during a normal session"-efan

Ovinomancer · Dec 23, 2018

Manbearcat said:
[MENTION=6799753]lowkey13[/MENTION]

Going to attempt to sum up my thoughts on this right quick and put a bow on it. I think you’ll disagree, but here it is.

Lets go with baseball as the case study.

Expert, professional hitters have about .125 seconds (after all the other components of the .4 to .45 seconds it takes from release to plate occur; such as eye hardware to neural software) to determine (a) what pitch this is (typically out of a suite of 3-4, very distinct pitches, including disguise; eg change-up vs fastball vs cutter with the same release), (b) is it a strike or a ball, (c) do I want to swing or take, (d) swing plane/angle of intercept.

There are MRI and EEG studies right now that are gathering data on precisely what is going on (which includes the frontal lobe being active in truly expert hitters…which is a surprise given this short of an interval of time). We won’t have a firm grip for a few more years (which we’ll have to integrate with our growing knowledge of the central nervous system and cognition).

Forget that an expert hitter succeeds at getting a hit only 1 in 3 times. The fact that tail-of-the-distribution humans can make contact, solid contact, at all (with extreme regularity for expert hitters) is borderline superhuman.

My guess is one of two things is happening:

1 - In millions of years of evolution (where so many answers to selection pressures faced were driven by acute understanding of spatial relationships), the unconscious mind of humans has evolved the ability to perform something equating to Euclidian Geometry in obscenely short intervals (eg .125 seconds). The conscious mind cannot and doesn’t interface with this phenomenon at all (therefore cannot explain it or “show its math”).

Or

2 - In millions of years of evolution, humans collectively have dealt with so many spatial relationship selection pressure anecdotes, nearly all relevant data relating to (1) above has been collected and formulae for all iterations of the various parameters have been derived and effectively “macroed”. Therefore, the unconscious mind just parameterizes the equation instantaneously based on sensory information perceived (and sometimes erroneously) so the macro can efficiently be dialed up to deal with the situation (in .125 seconds as is the case with baseball).

Our conscious mind viscerally responds to this with emotion, confidence, foreboding, gut feeling, instinct, etc…but it is basically “bearing witness”, not doing the work.

I think there is something instructive here in that the more expert humans attempt to engage their conscious mind with the processes in play (in the OODA Loop moment), the worse they invariably get.

Sorry, just a side bit here -- this concept of consciousness made the science reporting rounds recently again, so it's fresh, but it's a theory -- in the hypothesis not law sense -- that has no experimental evidence to back it up. The earlier referenced study that says we decide unconsciously and then rationalize the result consciously was from a 10 year old study on 14 people with very bad r squared but a wee p. (That means, for example, that they had a maybe 95% confidence that the observed effect explained 30% of the effect. In this case, they claimed about a 60% chance of predicting the choice. Keep in mind a coin flip is 50%.) It's also had it's methodology strongly criticized as not supporting it's conclusion.

Just saying that you shouldn't take this kind of science reporting stuff as gospel. Science reporting is almost universally bad -- the reporters have no idea what they're doing, almost never look for opposing criticism, and are incentivized to provide catchy stories. The reality is that the tools we had at our disposal are about as good as the first telescopes -- we discovered moons of Jupiter, mountains on the moon, and the phases of Jupiter, but also confirmed that everything went around the Earth because the stars didn't move. We're in about the same place: our tools are insufficent to overcome our ignorance.

Maybe the brain does work that way, and maybe it does, there's no strong evidence either way, and there's a lot of clever guessing in the meantime.

hawkeyefan · Dec 23, 2018

Saelorn said:
The question is whether you can suspend disbelief enough to actually pretend that it's real. The less you know about any given subject, the easier that's going to be (which is why I think most people are okay with your Jack Sparrow example; and the remainder might be willing to buy into it as a genre convention, because they aren't trying to take it seriously).

For role-playing settings, the threshold for plausibility is higher. Magic goes pretty far into suspending disbelief, as long as that magic is consistent and explainable; but nobody will ever mistake Wile E Coyote's cliff-based escapades for something believable.

So in your “rules as world physics” game, don’t your PCs routinely fall off cliffs only to come back minutes later to try again? Or do you handle falling damage differently than it’s described in the books?

The Crimson Binome · Dec 24, 2018

TheCosmicKid said:
You also seem to take very seriously this notion of, well, "taking things seriously". What do you mean by that?

It's kind of a blanket term, and it means different things in different contexts. As far as stories (novels, cartoons, and movies) are concerned, an important aspect is in portraying the subject matter such that it is both consistent and believable. If the writers are taking a story seriously, then things will resolve according to the internal logic of the world, rather than in a way that's funny or dramatic. The most important aspect is in making portraying the events as believable, and hopefully it can be funny or dramatic within those bounds, but stuff shouldn't happen because it's funny or dramatic, at the expense of believability. If a story is taking itself seriously, then when someone asks why something happened, the immediate and sufficient response is due to internal causality (and never "because it's funny" or "because otherwise the story would be over by the third act"). Some people might argue as to whether the Pirates franchise is taking itself seriously enough (or too seriously), but I've never seen anyone argue the point in regards to a Roadrunner cartoon.

With role-playing games, it goes a step further, due to inherent limitations in the human brain. In a movie, you can have good stories that don't take themselves seriously, because the audience isn't actually involved in any way. But with a role-playing game, the critical limit is that the brain of the player works similarly enough to the brain of their character, that you can feed in information about what's happening to the character, and the player's brain will tell you what the character decides. Wile E Coyote does not live in a world of causality, though, so there's nothing that a player's causality-oriented brain can do in order to mimic those thought processes.

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

Bawylie

A very OK person

The Crimson Binome

Hero

Bawylie

A very OK person

TheCosmicKid

Hero

Lanefan

Victoria Rules

Bawylie

A very OK person

Lanefan

Victoria Rules

Ovinomancer

No flips for you!

hawkeyefan

Legend

The Crimson Binome

Hero

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