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

[Crazy Jerome]

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

Predates both by quite a bit. Basically, there was a strong push to deny that what I'm calling "deep immersion" was even possible, and that the ones making such claims were edging up to or even leaping whole hog into psychological disfunction. Given that people with real psychological issues playing D&D were apt to have a handful of surface characteristics that matched such play, if you looked at it from the sensational press shallow point of view, it was one of those charges easy to make, more difficult to refute. (That's part of the root of my dislike of such shallow criticism, even to this day, no matter whether I agree with the deeper point or not.)

So I can't really blame strong immersionsists for being irritated about this stuff, no matter what you want to call them or how you describe what they do. There's somewhat of a residual, light bias against that playstyle that can creep into all kinds of niche rule assumptions. OTOH, that same irritation can lead to some rather knee jerk opposition to opposite playstyles.

 

[Underman]

OTOH, that same irritation can lead to some rather knee jerk opposition to opposite playstyles.

I guess, although there's so much irritation and victim complexes going around from all the sides of the fences (it's like the Hundred Stooges around here), I'm not sure what's the chicken and egg anymore. Otherwise, thanks for the summary.

 

[Emerikol]

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.

False.

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.

They are written very process sim. And here is where so many who don't understand dissociative mechanics go wrong. The level of abstraction has nothing to do with it. So keep studying. When you understand the difference between abstraction and dissociation we can continue our talk. If you can't then we can't progress further. Those of us with dissociative mechanic issues know the difference all too well.

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.

If you read the fireball spell it is very explicit. What the caster is thinking and the player is identical.

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.

I based my opinion on the result not on his stated intentions. In fact if you parse your quotes right you can construct about any opinion you want from Gygax. The wrote a process-sim game with abstractions. No contradiction there.

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>" .

Your style of roleplaying would lead me to just give up roleplaying. My group dropped 4e like a rotten stink bomb after playing it for a while. We gave it a good chance but we couldn't stop laughing at it. Hard to get immersed that way.

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.

One of my favorite houserules was a scatter die location on a successful save. I never said that every single earlier edition had no dissociative issues. I just said those games were playable or houserulable to usability. Wherease 4e is not.

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

Yeah I do. I wouldn't mind if it was an at-will power called a taunt. But having it limited to once per day is ridiculous. Either you can do it or you can't. That doesn't even require any exertion so the fatigue argument fails.

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".

And yet all of us process sim people dropped 4e and started playing 3.5e and/or Pathfinder. So I guess it does make a difference. If 5e ignores the process sim aspects of the game it will meet with the same success as 4e which is not much. And I'll probably just look to Pathfinder as the new owners of traditional D&D.

But if aliens arrive and burn all the 1e,2e,3e,3.5e and Pathfinder books and destroy Paizo, and mandate that the only fantasy rpg allowed is 4e then I'll just quit D&D altogether. Of course this silly example is just that. If D&D doesn't meet the demand for process-sim then someone will. And that company will likely surpass D&D. It's happened once already.

 

[Tony Vargas]

They are written very process sim. And here is where so many who don't understand dissociative mechanics go wrong. The level of abstraction has nothing to do with it.

Heh. The only distinction I can see between 'abstract' and 'dissociative' is that the former is a lot less subjective. You can look at a mechanic that says "to determine the outcome of the battle, the judge flips a coin and the commander of the attacking army calls it in the air" and judge it very abstract, for instance, and I doubt you'd get much argument. But, is it 'dissociative?' Well, the /attacker/ is the one calling it, and the attacker has the initiative in a military engagement, therefor it's not. Or, well, the judge is going to describe why the battle went the way it did, including exigent factors that should have been present at the outset of the battle, therefor it's hella dissscociative.

Those of us with dissociative mechanic issues know the difference all too well.

Well, you know what you like.

If you read the fireball spell it is very explicit. What the caster is thinking and the player is identical.

The caster is thinking about the average of 6d6 being 21, and hoping the DM will fail some of those saving throws?

And yet all of us process sim people dropped 4e and started playing 3.5e and/or Pathfinder.

You'd help your arguments if you didn't keep presuming to talk for broad swaths of people in such absolute terms.

From the reactions to 4e on-line, and the attitude of the various Pathfinder player's I've met, if I had to guess, I'd say 'most' those who rejected 4e rejected it sight-unseen, or with very little and very pejudiced examination, and /continued/ playing 3.5, perhaps changing to Pathfinder when that became a source of new material.

I know that was not the experience you have described for yourself, and I'm not saying your experience was unique, but I don't see anything to support your attitude that it was universal, either.

 

[Neonchameleon]

If you read the fireball spell it is very explicit. What the caster is thinking and the player is identical.

It's as close as what the 4e fighter player is thinking to their PC. "I want to get over there and **** him with my sword." And how this happens is what's lined up in the rulebooks. The fighter only starts caring about 'I can't use this daily again' if you step out of character.

There is no difference here. Except that the nice stuff and detailed emulation is no longer restricted to the casters.

I based my opinion on the result not on his stated intentions.

No you don't. You base your opinion on the results of your little gaming group. I base mine on the first hand reports from his. I also base mine on the gaming environment around at the time. And other games that in fact are process-sims.

In fact if you parse your quotes right you can construct about any opinion you want from Gygax. The wrote a process-sim game with abstractions. No contradiction there.

Well, yes. Some people try to make the argument that hp are explicit wounds.

We gave it a good chance but we couldn't stop laughing at it. Hard to get immersed that way.

I'm sorry that you have such limitations.

One of my favorite houserules was a scatter die location on a successful save. I never said that every single earlier edition had no dissociative issues. I just said those games were playable or houserulable to usability. Wherease 4e is not.

Complete and utter nonsense. 4e is playable straight out of the book. If you find it unusable, that merely reflects the capabilities of your group. And apparently, just as you feel able to speak for Gygax and his table, you feel able to speak for all roleplayers everywhere. Rather than accepting that you fail at this when many do not.

And yet all of us process sim people dropped 4e and started playing 3.5e and/or Pathfinder. So I guess it does make a difference.

Indeed it does. 3E was the version of D&D written by non-kinaesthetic process sim people for non-kinaesthetic process sim people.

If D&D doesn't meet the demand for process-sim then someone will.

You mean GURPS, Rolemaster, Runequest, Chivalry and Sorcery, et. al? The way they did in the 1980s? And GURPS certainly does process-sim a lot better than 3.X ever did.

 

[Manbearcat]

@Emerikol
You would do your position less disservice if you addressed the very specific rejoinders of pemerton, Neonchameleon, Mallus, Tony Vargas and Crazy Jerome. I began to engage on this discussion a bit awhile ago but I can add little to the discussion that they have not canvassed.

- Claiming DnD has a Process Sim history will not cut it when the evidence (within the rulebooks, played at the table and by testimony of its developers/designers) is in the extreme that, outside of 3e, it has a rich mechanical premise of Abstractions married to Metagaming married to Gamist conventions.
- All of the systems mentioned by the above posters sunk their teeth into the Process Sim niche market for the specific reason that DnD did not sufficiently fill it/sate the appetite for proper Process Sim.
- You do not have some unique insight into Dissociative mechanics. Everyone here has traveled this road back and forth. When you make pronouncements that you know something that others do not know, rather than articulating it emphatically and clearly, you do nothing to compel those you are pronouncing to.

We understand that 4e turned your gaming group off. You have expressed it an absurdly high number of times at this point while invoking dissociative mechanics and a dozen other negatively connoted descriptors. We get it. If you want to have a proper dialogue you need to have better and more engage answers than what you have given. Saying "No", "False", "I do not like 4e", and "Dissociative mechanics ruin immersion" over and over again is moving this along exactly nowhere.

You could start by dissecting, with serious specificity, your perspective on why the numerous incoherencies built into the DnD implied setting (from a Process Sim) standpoint do not bother you. You could analyze and break down exactly why the other numerous abstractions, Legacy-entrenched dissociative mechanics throughout DnD's history do not bother you. Then, and only then, might we able to better understand each other.

I have excruciatingly analyzed both of these Process Sim deficiencies throughout my DnD (and other) gaming lifetime so I know precisely why my tastes are how they are. My standards are applied universally to the mechanics and "implied setting", Legacy-be-damned, and I cannot cope with DnD from a strict Process Sim perspective due to the amount of scrutiny that I have put it under which has revealed that its Process Sim efforts are extraordinarily unsatisfactory and will not stand up to objective, unversally-applied standards. Most of DnDs mechanics are not Process Sim "task resolution". They are "conflict resolution" by way of abstraction. Therefore, by definition, Process Sim cannot bear itself out with keen fidelity toward what it is modeling. Primarily due to my inability to satisfactorily and reliably capture the genre tropes that I wish to capture with strict, linear, rigid Process Sim, my drift in taste over the years has evolved due to my newfound tolerance for the coherency provided by Narrative and Gamist "in-fills" where (poor-mans) Process Sim fails.

I am wondering how you could have a keen understanding of the history of DnD and the RPG market and how you are able to get past all of these built-in (from 1e onward) "implied setting inconsistencies" and "abstractions by way of obtuse conflict resolution" while still maintaining the position that you are an ardent, acolyte of Process Sim. You can love Process Sim till your hearts content while playing the systems outlined above. You can love Process Sim while acknowledging that DnD has a history that is moderately antagonistic (to put it as friendly as possible) toward strict, rigid, task-resolution oriented Process Sim...and that because of this you house rule and tack sub-system after sub-system onto it to drift it toward Process Sim (this is what I did from 1e onward until I waved the white flag). But the position that DnD was premised upon strict, rigid, task-resolution oriented Process Sim and has evolved under those auspices is completely untenable...and all of the posters mentioned in my initial post have canvassed this thoroughly at this point...yet, inexplicably, you are as unmovable as you were when this started.
http://www.enworld.org/forum/members/emerikol.html

 

[Tony Vargas]

Also let me emphasize that I operate under the assumption that the group is unified. So playing various styles in a single campaign is no concern of mine.

I don't agree with those that think the game can only support one style.

But, your assumption of a unified group would mean that it need only support one style /at a time/, which, as far as I understand the 'support only one style' position, is pretty close. The 'game can support only one style' crew are OK with a game, in effect, supporting a variety of styles, one at a time, through modules or whatnot, again, AFAICT...

I don't see how if the warlord ruins the game that I can sit down with someone playing the warlord.

A matter of tollerance, I suppose. As I've said before, I can't abide psionics. But, when I finally played in the odd 4e game that included psionics, I found them tollerable, not because they weren't still fish-out-of-water sci-fi rejects that had no place in a fantasy world, but simply because they didn't jump out and dominate the game the way they sometimes could in 1e. They weren't good or fun or adding to the game, for me, but they weren't destroying it, either.

I'm not sure because I'm sure I'm not even aware of all possible styles. At launch though, 4e removed the simple fighter concept and the complex wizard concept.

Is 'complex wizard' really a concept, or is it a mechanic? The 4e wizard is a bookish fellow who's always adding to his spellbook (it contains his rituals), and memorizes different spells on different days. In concept, he's no different or less complex than the 3e wizard - indeed, conceptually, he's more complex, since he has both quick-recharge, and always-vailable spells, in addition to the traditional fire-and-forget. The mechanics, and thus complexity of the two classes aren't vastly different, but the wizard is certainly the more complex of the two. Similarly, while the fighter has some added mechanical complexity, the range of concepts the fighter covers is actually a bit more focused, ceding archers to the Ranger and a whole host of concepts it could never quite handle to the Warlord.

It also seriously stomped on the simulationist style of gaming. And I am not meaning to offend by saying that. I'm sure 1e,2e,3e as far too simulationist for many.

I certainly don't recall 1-3e as being 'too simulationist,' not by a long piece - imbalanced, sure, especially at high levels, though that's not the same thing. But, I'm not so sure I see the GNS theory as really working well when each is considered an individual and exclusive style, with games necessarily catering to one of the three (or one of the three at a time). Rather, GNS makes some sense when each is considered as an aspect - perhaps even a necessary one - of the RPG experience. RPG /are/ games, for instance, and no game could be totally un-gamist. And, they include Role-playing, which, quite irrespective of the gamist (mechanical) element, will include both some immersive role-assumption and some actor/director-like 'storytelling.'

I believe SOME things could happen at the same table. But when I say playstyle I'm talking more simulationist vs narrativist and those people don't even want to be at the same table.

I don't know, that's a much more extreme view that I can get behind. When I read the various articulations of GNS, I see in each 'style' an emphasis, at most, not something exclusive. In fact, I'd be hard-pressed to pick one and say I play exclusively in that style. I'll make gamist decisions to 'win' a combat, I'll make narrativist ones to move things along or keep from 'de-railing' a plot, I'll make immersed first-person ones when I'm feeling it. Similarly, a game's mechanics are the (gamist) rules of the game, /and/ the (simulationist) 'laws of physics' of the imagined world, /and/ the tools (narrativist) used to build a collective storytelling experience. Some games try very hard in their design to come down as firmly simulationist or narrativist, but they always end up being the other two, as well.

Sure, I could play the simple wizard and you could play the complex one. Nothing wrong with that if nobody at the table minds. Thats probably often going to be true. In other cases, it's likely to be a group decision no matter what. If I hate healing surges, it's not just that I hate them for my character, I hate them for all characters. Getting them off my sheet doesn't solve the problem.

Why can't you manage the same open-mindedness about someone using a fighter with dailies or healing surges as you can using a simple vs complex wizard?

I think the "dream" of uniting everyone at the same table is hopeless.

I agree, but I think that excluding a fairly small set of more extreme "my way or the highway" styles could result in the vast majority being able to sit at one table. In theory. My concern is that said small set of more extreme styles might well constitute a fairly large plurality - if not an outrigh, if un-unifiable majority - of WotC's player base.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I like a bit of good process-simulation play from time to time. It's very much a minority preference as a percentage of my play, but when you want it, nothing else really matches. I simply can't imagine using any version of D&D to scratch that itch. Sure, 3E caters to it noticably more than other D&D versions, but all versions of D&D are so far down the scale compared to Fantasy Hero (drifted slightly) or Runequest or countless other games ... sheesh! To me, arguing D&D version for process-sim is like arguing whether asparagus or Brussel sprouts make better desserts--when there's perfectly good ice cream, cookies, and pie sitting right over there. And I like vegetables ... as vegetables.

 

[Emerikol]

Heh. The only distinction I can see between 'abstract' and 'dissociative' is that the former is a lot less subjective. You can look at a mechanic that says "to determine the outcome of the battle, the judge flips a coin and the commander of the attacking army calls it in the air" and judge it very abstract, for instance, and I doubt you'd get much argument. But, is it 'dissociative?' Well, the /attacker/ is the one calling it, and the attacker has the initiative in a military engagement, therefor it's not. Or, well, the judge is going to describe why the battle went the way it did, including exigent factors that should have been present at the outset of the battle, therefor it's hella dissscociative.

We all know you don't understand it. I think the fact you don't is at least partly why you don't mind it. Thats a theory of course. But just to educate you. Those of us who do get it are on the same page. It's either a precise real thing or its the great collective consciousness event in all history. Call in the parapsychologists.

Well, you know what you like.

True.

The caster is thinking about the average of 6d6 being 21, and hoping the DM will fail some of those saving throws?

Really? And you still get offended when we claim your just playing a board game. Why?

You'd help your arguments if you didn't keep presuming to talk for broad swaths of people in such absolute terms.

I'm not saying all haters of 4e hate it for the same reason. I do think people who have issue with the dissociative mechanics is a large group. Especially the extreme use of them in 4e.

From the reactions to 4e on-line, and the attitude of the various Pathfinder player's I've met, if I had to guess, I'd say 'most' those who rejected 4e rejected it sight-unseen, or with very little and very pejudiced examination, and /continued/ playing 3.5, perhaps changing to Pathfinder when that became a source of new material.

I know that was not the experience you have described for yourself, and I'm not saying your experience was unique, but I don't see anything to support your attitude that it was universal, either.

I admit to not knowing myself and my playstyle as well as I do now. I could definitely reject 4e now without playing it. I in fact did reject 13th Age. Perhaps those who hated the game right from the start just knew their own preferences better than I did.

 

[Emerikol]

I like a bit of good process-simulation play from time to time. It's very much a minority preference as a percentage of my play, but when you want it, nothing else really matches. I simply can't imagine using any version of D&D to scratch that itch. Sure, 3E caters to it noticably more than other D&D versions, but all versions of D&D are so far down the scale compared to Fantasy Hero (drifted slightly) or Runequest or countless other games ... sheesh! To me, arguing D&D version for process-sim is like arguing whether asparagus or Brussel sprouts make better desserts--when there's perfectly good ice cream, cookies, and pie sitting right over there. And I like vegetables ... as vegetables.

One of our issues is terms. I've been using process-sim for the equivalent of anti-plot coupon or anti-dissociative mechanics.

These three things are unrelated and can occur in any degree without the others.
1. Realism.
2. Abstraction.
3. Dissociative Mechanics.

I don't mind abstraction a bit. I prefer realism to a degree but with a high fantasy game I'm ok with cinematic. I can't stand dissociative mechanics and find them shoving me out of immersion at every turn.

So when you use the term process sim I suspect you are purely talking about #3 . I really am only talking about #3 . I perhaps get swept up in trying to use a term that we can all agree on for #3 .