D&D 5E With Respect to the Door and Expectations....The REAL Reason 5e Can't Unite the Base

[Crazy Jerome]

If you say so, I thought I detected an undercurrent of condescension between the various or certain posters on this subtopic, but I'll take your comment at face value

Well, I'm in no way ripping the playstyle. They've got enough of that in the last 20 years. They don't need any more from me. However, I am speculating on why I think they don't seem to be very good at analyzing their playstyle, expressing it to others, or seeing the opposing playstyles. If I'm crossing some line to condescension in doing so, please keep in mind that I'm trying to understand something that I don't generally do, but that from my perspective the adherents of do not explain well.

My two cents: I don't know where I am on your deep-shallow immersion spectrum. Probably both. Which is to say that it's like watching a movie or reading a book: you're shallowly immersed, quite aware that you're sitting in a room or theatre, and then there's this really compelling scene, and for a few minutes, you've forgotten where you were. I desire mechanics and adventures that encourage the quantity and quality of those moments.

Doing the always risky armchair analysis, I'd say that last part indicates a desire to be doing deep immersion. Whether you are or not, I couldn't say.

Whereas, something like an active and dedicated appreciation for shallow immersion as shallow immersion would be something like simultaneously appreciating the power of the moment while also aware of the factors that make it so. For example, to really get me ripped up about a piece of popular music (even plebian tastes can move along the continuum ), I need for it to have a good melody, poetic lyrics, sung with a voice that fits the style of the music, and generally a good counter-melody and chord structure. When I find something like that--Alison Krause and Union Station's "Paper Airplane" for example, then I'm simultaneously enjoying it as music, but also consciously the interplay of the above parts.

This may tie into the next part below, and you may have given me another piece of the puzzle (thanks!).

Taking this literally, I mostly want to rip the curtain after the magic trick is concluded. I often have an eye out looking for how the trick works, but if overdoing that, it detracts from the show. "Sit back, relax and enjoy the show" is probably an apt phrase here.

Pure speculation: Shallow immersion can be an intermediate step on the way to deep immersion. It's like the appetizer, and while a deep immersionists may enjoy it as that, it's thin as the main course. However, for others, shallow immersion can be the main course, the blend of the immersion, with the conscious awareness and appreciation of what produces it at the time, being the goal.

I wondered about how children immerse themselves when playing with toys. They must be aware that they're playing with dolls or action figures, like a method actor is completely immersed in the role. Yet the child's williing suspension of disbelief must exceed the average adult watching a movie or reading a book. Is that a labelled as a child-like state because adults are usually so rational and controlling over their environment?

Not all adults are like that. I'm not terribly so--and certainly not in my roleplaying. The C.S. Lewis quote about teenagers springs to mind. (Something along the lines that when he was young, he disliked childish things because they were childish. When he was grown, he put away childish things--such as the belief that fairy tales were childish. That's butchered on my part.) Though I certainly think there is a sense of wonder that can be hard to recapture. Chesterton's bit about an 8 year old is astonished that there might be an elf in the garden, but a 4 year old is astonished that there is a garden.

You might say that the capacity of adults to immerse is equal to that of children, but the time to do so may be more limited, and then when they do, what they immerse in will necessarily be different due to experience. Given enough constraints, the adult capacity could atrophy, but this is not predestined. However, now you've got me playing amateur psychologist--never a good thing.

 

[Imaro]

If the character has a high score and still blows it, there's no getting around that either. Luck is luck. The fact that you have higher skill doesn't make you luckier, or less lucky. It just makes you more skilled. When you gamble with the dice the more skilled PC is simply given better odds.

What exactly are you addressing here? I didn't comment on what a character with a high score is. In fact you seem to be agreeing with me... low skill= less skilled, high skill = better skilled... which was my point. What exactly are you arguing for or against here, better odds are exactly what I am talking about?

I can have great knowledge of putting circuit boards together, but if I sneeze as I'm soldering a particular component in place and botch it, that had nothing to do with skill.

Sure it does, with greater skill you are better equiped to deal with adverse connditions... hence the better odds. There are some people skilled enough that even if they sneezed while soldering a component they are able to minimize the effect it has on their work.

The DM that provides a description for a lucky, or unlucky break as luck is not going off script. He's actually maintaining the "script" and the mechanics in sync. The roll of the die is luck, not skill.

Who is talking about going off script, the contention is that narating it as odd circumstance does not in any way guarantee the player will not be embarassed and/or will have a second chance to try.

I would also contend that (at least by 3rd edition rules) that if your skill isn't high enough to automatically succeed at a DC when taking 10 (since this eliminates the luck factor)... then failure is in part or wholly based upon your skill and not just luck. So no, I don't think your assertion above holds up for all skill rolls.

 

[Underman]

Well, I'm in no way ripping the playstyle. They've got enough of that in the last 20 years.

I didn't know that, honestly. Why? From the Forge or the CharOp crowd?

You might say that the capacity of adults to immerse is equal to that of children, but the time to do so may be more limited, and then when they do, what they immerse in will necessarily be different due to experience. Given enough constraints, the adult capacity could atrophy, but this is not predestined. However, now you've got me playing amateur psychologist--never a good thing.

You wanted to understand the immersion mandate, I think you were already half-waiting to put someone on the psychologist's sofa and play amateur psychologist

From a recent post of mine, it might follow that:
Gamist/narrative/shallow immersion = let's pretend we are heroes
In-character/process sim/immersion = let's pretend we can be heroes

Capturing the "can be heroes" works best with an immersive goal. "Sit back and enjoy the show" to see what happens; hope/strive to do great things and a happy ending.

Capturing the "we are heroes and we know it" is predicting a Hollywood ending and it's just a question of pulling the strings to find out how. You can't pull strings and be deeply immersed.

 

[Emerikol]

Here are some exceptions to process simulation in Gygax's AD&D:

I will address each of these in turn...

* Saving throws: you make the save than narrate what happened (ducking, sucking out the poison, the poison not really entering your bloodstream, subtly manipulating the magic so it doesn't affect you, ducking into a cleft in the rocks the existence of which was not established by rolling on a "random cleft" chart, etc.​

That is how YOU interpreted saving throws. I always portrayed the poison going into the bloodstream and the character fighting off it's effects. Perhaps not totally realistic but definitely process-sim.

* Melee attack rolls: these represent the best chance at a hit in a minute of back-and-froth melee.​

But the attack in question is still the attack. It still hits and does damage. Nothing about this is not process-sim.

* Hit point depletion: this can represent injury, or fatigue, or the ablation of luck and divine favour, depending on how much damage is done, how many hp you have left, and what your total hp are.​

Most players I know saw it as progressive wounds but obviously not linear in effect. Meaning early wounds are light and later wounds are heavier. So if a person with 100 hit points is down to 5 he is bleeding badly. If he is down to 95 then he has a scratch. This is why hit points have always worked. The process-sim people can interpret one way and you guys can interpret another. It's why 4e hit points blew things up and made the game unplayable for half or more of the people.

* XP gain: as Gygax points out, XP gain based on actual training or class-relevant learning would be "conducive to non-game boredom". XP-for-gold is a metagame device.​

XP I admit was completely outside the game. It never enters the minds of characters at all. Training is how you got better. I always imagined that the character was always learning and training and that the intense training at level up was when they'd made some kind of breakthrough. This wasn't disruptive though because XP never came up except at the end of the day after the adventuring was over. So the "game" has finished and now the DM and "players" are figuring xp. So it wasn't as disruptive to the actual playing of the game.

* Training time required: players who play their PCs at odds with their "role" (eg deviating from alignment, clerics who don't heal, thieves who engage in straight-up melee, etc) need to have their PCs spend more time in training to level up (as many as 4 weeks, rather than the minimum 1 week).​

To be honest I never used this rule. But give the previous paragraph, advancement is a mystery to the character I agree.

* Opening locks, bending bars etc: thieves cannot retry if they fail to open a lock until they gain a level. Bending bars and lifting gates is under a similar "no retries" restriction (I can't remember the details).​

I believe the process-sim attitude in this case is that the thing in question turned out to be one that could not be handled. Meaning if the gate is too strong to be lifted it's too strong to be lifted. Same for the lock. I do like 3e's approach better sure but this isn't really all that jarring.

I'm not saying that there is no process simulation in AD&D - weapon vs armour, the unarmed combat rules, and the movement rules are some examples that come to mind - but in my view words like "tradition" or "too strong" significantly overstate the case.

I believe the game was playable in 1e,2e,3e for people in my camp. 4e was unplayable. That is all I said. I didn't say that any edition was perfect. The narrativist camp took over at WOTC for 4e. Sadly. They saw D&D as just being behind the times and the narrativist approach as the new "thing". When in reality the narrativist approach was popular in other games exactly because D&D had sucked up all the simulationist players (and dominated the market by the way). It's the classic guerilla warfare attitude of small niche companies. They don't even try to produce a mass market game. They target a niche and do that niche real well in an attempt to peel away a segment of the mass market.

 

[Nagol]

That is how YOU interpreted saving throws. I always portrayed the poison going into the bloodstream and the character fighting off it's effects. Perhaps not totally realistic but definitely process-sim.

In fairness to pemerton, these descriptions come directly from the explanation for saving throw in the 1e DMG. I'm away from my books at the moment so I can't provide a page reference.

 

[Emerikol]

In fairness to pemerton, these descriptions come directly from the explanation for saving throw in the 1e DMG. I'm away from my books at the moment so I can't provide a page reference.

I guess my point, which I didn't really do a good job of making clear, is that old editions allowed for a certain playstyle. I agree that 1e/2e made playing the narrative style easier than 3e did. No arguments there.

But I also believe that the vast majority of players out there played process-sim all the way through. Mainly because the whole narrative philosophy hadn't gotten traction that early in the game. I believe game designers in those days were asking - Is this realistic? and not - Is this balanced? or Is this fun?

4e derailed that train. No longer could the process-sim people have fun with D&D. It went away from that approach so strongly that houseruling really wasn't possible.

So I think the hope for 5e is that it at least allows for the process-sim style. Right now based on the playtest packet, I think healing is still very problematic. I'd have to houserule it in order for the game to be playable for me. Otherwise it's usable so far.

 

[Mallus]

I guess my point, which I didn't really do a good job of making clear, is that old editions allowed for a certain playstyle.

I think it's more fair to say the old editions allowed for many playstyles. One way they did this was by focusing on the results, not on the processes that led to those results.

But I also believe that the vast majority of players out there played process-sim all the way through.

Possibly, though I'm not sure about the 'vast majority' part - but note that saying "we used the rules as if they were a process sim" is a very different from "the rules were intended to be and written as process simulations". They clearly aren't. Which is why D&D combat lacks, and has always lacked, things like hit location rules, or exact descriptions of how saving throws operate. It's also why Gygax himself kept stressing the abstract nature of the rules.

To run AD&D as a process simulation, you have to add those elements to the game, just as you described in your posts above, by deliberately interpreting the results the system provides in a specific way.

In other words, the DM (and players) need to create a specific association between the mechanics and the fiction. The rules/system do not care, and do not make those associations for you. It's up to you.

Which is what I posted in this thread a few days ago. You've been kinda making my point for me.

I believe game designers in those days were asking - Is this realistic? and not - Is this balanced? or Is this fun?

I believe Gygax's own words in the AD&D DMG about the combat system demonstrate this to be false. Realism was never a design priority for him.

No longer could the process-sim people have fun with D&D.

From my perspective, focusing on process simulation makes having fun with any edition of D&D more difficult. It's easier to enjoy if you "let go and let Gygax <insert other designer's name here>" .

A quick example: in 3e, which is usually described as the most process-simulation oriented edition of D&D, what happens when a rogue with Evasion saves against a Fireball centered on them and takes no damage from it? Describes the process.

Does the rogue leap clear of the blast? No, a REF save doesn't grant movement (and exact tactical positioning is important in 3e -- saying the rogue leaped away might have worked in AD&D, which was generally looser about positioning, at least in practice).

Does the rogue take cover? No, cover is not required in order to make a REF save/use Evasion.

What's happening in the fiction? How do you marry the mechanical result with the scene? How do you make this congruent with process simulation? The rogue evaded a giant spherical volume of fire which they were at the center of by not moving.

(and people kvetch about Come and Get It...)

To my mind, all you can do is heed the immortal (and paraphrased) words of the MST3K theme song:

"Say to yourself it's just a game. You should really just relax".

Now I'm criticizing anyone's play style or preferences. Please don't take that away from what I wrote. I'm only to illustrate the complicated, and, well, arbitrary, relationship between the D&D rules and anything that can be meaningfully called "process simulation".

 

[Neonchameleon]

But the attack in question is still the attack. It still hits and does damage. Nothing about this is not process-sim.

Except the fact you only make one attack per minute. Is everyone in a combat automatically under the effects of a slow spell? As I've posted before, this bit of AD&D shattered my immersion, my sense of process sim (if I wanted that GURPS did a much better job), and my feeling I had direct control rather than pawn-stance control of my character. 4e I get to decide not only what he attacks but how he does it and how he keeps track of a rapidly unfolding situation like combat.

One roll for one minute in combat is not and can not be a process sim. It's a massive abstraction.

Most players I know saw it as progressive wounds but obviously not linear in effect. Meaning early wounds are light and later wounds are heavier.

This is normally the case even for those of us who don't see hp as purely physical.

advancement is a mystery to the character I agree.

If it were a mystery, spell levels wouldn't be quite so tightly defined and usable in world.

I believe the game was playable in 1e,2e,3e for people in my camp. 4e was unplayable.

4e was unplayable for you in specific. I like sim elements of games - and bounced hard off AD&D partly because the sim did not match up to the world. I honestly find 4e a much better sim than I do AD&D.

But I also believe that the vast majority of players out there played process-sim all the way through.

1e was written in pawn stance as I've said before. This is not the immersionist game you want to claim. And in pawn stance, minute combat rounds make sense. They are a massive abstraction of something you want to know the outcome of but don't need to be immersed for.

Yes, if you ignore the great glaring problem with 1 minute combat rounds you can claim they are immersive. But calling it a process-sim is ... strange and counterintuitive to me. A process-sim is GURPS with one second rounds. Or at most (and as I handle both 3e and 4e) OODA cycles.

Mainly because the whole narrative philosophy hadn't gotten traction that early in the game. I believe game designers in those days were asking - Is this realistic? and not - Is this balanced? or Is this fun?

You can believe it all you like. But that doesn't make it true. And given statements from Gygax himself on these boards, and Mike Mornard (one of the original players) on RPG.net I'm going to believe them rather than you - they are saying literally the opposite to you.

One hell of a lot of the AD&D ruleset is about balance. Like the differing XP tables and the weapon damage against large creatures being a stealth buff for fighters. Gygax has on these boards stated that he added Weapon Specialisation, the Cavalier, and the Barbarian in Unearthed Arcana specifically to help the fighter's balance.

Mike Mornard/Old Geezer is even clearer. His description of the way D&D started is "We made some up we thought would be cool." It was about cool and fun, not about a sim. (If you're interested in how things actually were in the early days he's answering questions in a current thread on RPG.net). His Ramshorn dungeon was in line with what other people were doing at the time. And when people asked what the monsters ate he simply added a McDonalds on the sixth level.

And really, you only need to look at D&D's roots to tell it's not a process sim. It's a hacked tabletop wargame. And one centered around Dungeons - possibly the weirdest ecosystems ever invented (and for that matter Dragons - how do the things fly?) And utterly absurd monsters - how does the Rust Monster do its thing? (Apparently it was invented on the spur of the moment because it was an odd looking monster that was rust coloured). Such sim elements as there were in pre-3e D&D were there because sometimes PCs wanted to take a closer look at the world, and because interacting directly with the fiction at certain points rather than handling the whole thing abstractly was what separated D&D from the wargames it grew out of.

If you want a process-sim game, go play GURPS. Of course, that's what happened when 3.0 was written. The process-sim crowd took over the game. And I believe that 4e is a better process sim than AD&D - but the difference is AD&D breaks all over the place as a process sim when not engaged with or preventing you engaging, 4e you need to engage.

4e derailed that train. No longer could the process-sim people have fun with D&D. It went away from that approach so strongly that houseruling really wasn't possible.

And by doing so, returned D&D to its roots as something about fun and about the game that the process-sim people had taken over.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

To run AD&D as a process simulation, you have to add those elements to the game, just as you described in your posts above, by deliberately interpreting the results the system provides in a specific way.

One of the first published set of such rules was Arms Law, which later grew into Role Master. It was written because AD&D was not a process-sim, but rather in order to turn D&D combat into a process-sim.

Arms Law was cheap, readily accessible, and most people knew about it. It was certainly popular in some quarters. I would not say anywhere near any kind of "majority", let alone a "vast" one. No doubt in some areas certain styles dominated, but as a whole, D&D play was and is all over the place.

 

[Mallus]

One of the first published set of such rules was Arms Law, which later grew into Role Master. It was written because AD&D was not a process-sim, but rather in order to turn D&D combat into a process-sim.

Good point. Also, Runequest, at least the early edition I have. It was a simple, D&D-ish system designed from a strong(er) process simulation perspective.

No doubt in some areas certain styles dominated, but as a whole, D&D play was and is all over the place.

Yup - D&D's abstract --and dissociated, damnit, they're the same thing!-- rules were much more popular in the marketplace than any of its more process-sim oriented competitors (not that there's anything wrong with them...).