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

[Manbearcat]

Against my better judgement, I'll take a shot.

<snip>

Thank you Nagol. That is extremely helpful in understanding the nuance of your position. I appreciate it.

 

[Underman]

I'll ask Underman first: When did the "process sim" label turn out to not be "process-sim"?

Post 743 and surrounding posts.

We seem to be getting nowhere

On Enworld, what's new?

and you've questioned my "good faith" a few times now while I think I've put a lot of effort into being polite to you and trying to clarify our differences...and I seem to be getting mostly snark in return. I even apologized (when I certainly didn't need to)

I gave you an xp and a "thanks, mea culpa" for it!

I think it would probably be best if we just discontinue this exchange.

OK, so won't address the rest of your post.

 

[Emerikol]

In all editions of DnD that rate has probably been sustained for me. About 95% of the "rules" I don't have a problem with. Then there is that "bothersome" 5%.

The "problem", those of us that want to understand where you are coming from have, is that you mention that in prior editions you had no problem, but with 4e 5% of the powers give you a problem.

What did you do in prior editions with "rules" that gave you problems. For me the other 5% I either ignored, modified, or adjusted my expectations for. It's just a game after all, nobody is going to die if I do it "wrong."

This 5% issue was related to realism. If realism was the only issue I had with 4e then I'd just ban the problematic powers. Realism and/or abstraction are not the problems. 4e is rife with dissociative mechanics. Even Pathfinder has a few but they are easily avoided.

If Disassociative Mechanics, according to your definition, are when a character and a player are driven apart, I'd appreciate it if you could explain what function of HP is NOT disassociative, by that definition. The character has no "connection" except mechanically to HP. HP is completely a metagame construct. It's not a resource that he (the character) can use or replenish, like filling up a waterskin. It's not something that he (the character) can decide to expend in any way. What is the "connection" in this case that exists, on the character side? I can understand how a player interacts with HP, but what is the interaction from the character side?

Before I again try to show you the difference, let me just say that there is a recognizable difference that those of my opinion see clearly even if you can't and even if I can't convince you.

Hit points are an abstraction. They represent overall well being. I do treat hit points as wounds that grow in lethality as you approach zero. I do accept (perhaps unrealistically) that my hero is cinematically tough and fights on to the end. So my hero knows that he is hurt. Hit points represent that hurt. Obviously at first it's scratches and bruises and only becomes real wounds when you are really close. So it's not linear but it is still representative of a thing thats real.

By the same token the character doesn't know anything about the metagame construct called a daily or encounter power. The player understands it and interacts with it at the metagame level. In the "game fiction" the character doesn't know anything about daily, or encounter powers, levels, initiative, XP, HP, AC, speed, or any of the hundreds of metagame constructs that the game provides.

We use symbols to represent things. While AC is not a "term" used by PCs in game, the idea of superior armor and defense is. While levels are not used in game, the idea of skillfulness with a weapon is a known concept. While "initiative" is not a term used, it corresponds with landing your blow before the enemy. These are all real world things. Yes they have descriptive terms that relate to the game but they are real. Correspondingly, the limit on a daily power that doesn't have a magical explanation is not real. It's an artificial rule limitation.

It would be quite jarring if the characters talked to each other in the "game fiction" and said things like, "Dude, I just blew my Initiative roll." "Man you really kicked ass when you spent Come and Get It." "That was some awesome Fireball, how many points of damage did you do with that?" Or discussed things as characters such as, "I only have 2 hit points left, come heal me!!" It is assumed that all that "talk" is happening Out of Character. It's happening at the metagame level.

My players don't talk that way. They say stuff like "I'm badly wounded I need healing." or "Way to burn those kobolds" or "Darn I was hoping to beat that guy to the punch"

But even for those groups that don't do such things, it is still a discussion about in game things using symbolic language. Initiative, Hit points, etc.. are real. They have a correspondance in the world. Daily limits don't.

So when someone makes a statement such as "I have no problem telling that a daily martial attack is dissociative and hit points are not", it seems quite strange. If one is disassociative because it drives the player and character apart, I don't see how the other one wouldn't.

I get that you don't see it. I wish I could describe it better. I feel very frustrated that I'm not getting you to understand the distinction. Just realize even if you can't see it that a lot of us gamers do see the distinction and are bothered by one and not the other. I do not think we are being inconsistent. You could make up a bunch of arbitrary examples set in our real world instead of D&D and we'd all still pick the same ones. So we have a consistent internal logical model for our decision making even if some can't see the internal algorithm and we are unable to explain it clearly ourselves.

The key here to remember is that those in my camp on this are all bothered by dissociative mechanics as defined in the article of that name.

Let me give you another example. This time from Monte Cook's game numenera. He has a system where the DM tells the player that something is about to happen. The player can accept the consequence and receive 1 bonus xp. Or they can refuse and they lose 1 xp. His example was the floor opening up beneath your feet. If you choose to accept it you fall and you also gain 1xp. If you insist that you jumped away you lose 1xp.

No whether you like using xp for this (and I don't) it is very clear that this mechanic is super dissociative. The character NEVER wants to fall. If the player though desiring the 1xp allows the character to fall, then the player is not separated from the character. That is a very bad thing in my book.

 

[Manbearcat]

Damn it, I adopted someone else's usage of "process-sim" as it doesn't pertain to D&D and allowed myself to get side-tracked with red herring semantics/labels... stupid, stupid, stupid.

OK, please carry on

I don't even know what to say here. How in the world does this change the definition of "Process-Sim?" It just says that DnD ISN't PROCESS-SIM...which is what I've been saying all along! I absolutely agree with this. I have been disputing the position (that people have taken in this thread and others) that DnD has historically been a Simulation by way of rigid, coupled cause and effect Process-Sim. Which is why I went to so many lengths (as have others) to show examples that it is, as Nagol states, "small-step results-sim" (Outcome-Based Sim by way of leveraging Gamist Abstraction/Mechanics to Resolve Conflict). Its mechanics perform horribly at granular, linear Process-Sim (and don't even attempt it...thus it isn't Process-Sim). I defined "Process-Sim" to show what it is...and how DnD doesn't do it (or at least doesn't do it well). How in the world do we get to "Process-Sim" isn't "Process-Sim" from Nagol basically advocating my position (DnD is primarily Outcome-Based Sim with Gamist Conceits and a few Narrative Conventions)?...not disputing the definition of Process-Sim?

 

[Underman]

I don't even know what to say here.

Just say that you respect my choice not to talk about labels and their respective definitions. You can talk to someone else about labels and definitions. Thank you for respecting my choice not to discuss labels. I appreciate your consideration and understanding.

 

[Emerikol]

I don't even know what to say here. How in the world does this change the definition of "Process-Sim?" It just says that DnD ISN't PROCESS-SIM...which is what I've been saying all along! I absolutely agree with this. I have been disputing the position (that people have taken in this thread and others) that DnD has historically been a Simulation by way of rigid, coupled cause and effect Process-Sim. Which is why I went to so many lengths (as have others) to show examples that it is, as Nagol states, "Outcome-Based Sim by way of leveraging Gamist Abstraction/Mechanics to Resolve Conflict." Its mechanics perform horribly at granular, linear Process-Sim (and don't even attempt it...thus it isn't Process-Sim). I defined "Process-Sim" to show what it is...and how DnD doesn't do it (or at least doesn't do it well). How in the world do we get to "Process-Sim" isn't "Process-Sim" from Nagol basically advocating my position (DnD is primarily Outcome-Based Sim with Gamist Conceits and a few Narrative Conventions)?...not disputing the definition of Process-Sim?

The reason why it's important is that 4e has something that 1e,2e,and 3e didn't have. At least not in any quantity and definitely not in the core. That something is bothersome even if some people refuse to recognize what it is. I too am tired of the term shuffle. I tire of people reverting simulation back to the dictionary definition instead of the GNS definition. I don't think anyone in my camp is all that worried about plain old simulation. And if you don't realize that the S in GNS has NOTHING to do with plain old simulation then I rest my case. The terms are all mixed up jumbled and confusing.

So I'm keep dissociative mechanic because that is specifically what we are talking about. I am dropping the use of simulation and process simulation because I'm not even sure what anyone means even when they discuss these things and I'm sure in many cases I don't care.

 

[Emerikol]

To address both of these simultaneously because I'm clueless how these two paragraphs have come into being.

I think the key here and perhaps I judged your simulation paragraph too harshly. I reread it and I see how you could pull that out of the other paragraph.

The way to think of things is to imagine games like movies. We've all started watching a movie and decided partway in that you just don't buy it. I do this often. Now I watch james bond,superhero, fantasy, and sci-fi moveis all the time. If I have this intolerence how can I so easily accept those genres to begin with.

Let's you the James Bond movie moonraker as an example. The villian Jaws falls into a circus tent and survives. Now we know this is not going to happen in the real world. But we buy it because it's cinematic. There are other things though I can't tolerate. If a guy gets blown out an airlock into space and survives for any length of time, I don't buy it. All this kind of stuff is interesting psychologically but of little relevance to our argument. Because it's not about realism.

Dissociative mechanics have to go a step further than just being a bit unrealistic. I don't mind if my character can climb the wall twice as fast as he really could. Thats not dissociative. I imagine my character in cinematic James Bond fashion scurrying up the wall. No biggie.

But if I could only scurry up the wall once per day? So I just climbed a wall and now I can't? I can't two hours later even if I've been resting on the coach the whole time. I can though do another totally unrelated manuever because I haven't done it yet. Of course if i'd done that other maneuver first then I could still climb but now I wouldn't be able to do it. It's all crazy. It's so easy to see as an issue.

 

[Underman]

I am dropping the use of simulation and process simulation because I'm not even sure what anyone means even when they discuss these things and I'm sure in many cases I don't care.

Ya, what I thought was 'process-sim' turned out to be defined here more stringently than I thought. So I dropped the terminology for myself because I decided it wasn't helping to get caught up in its definition and usage. @Manbearcat took this to mean something about changing the definition of process-sim and re-clarified label definitions. This is ironic because:
1) i found that I sidetracked myself by a semantic red herring
2) i professed my desire to stay away from semantic red herrings
3) this resulted in a communicative red herring
4) this resulted in yet another post about semantics which was a red herring to #1

I understand the theoretical value of using terminology. But pragmatically if it doesn't help by page 78, it probably won't help on page 79 either. I also don't care and find it annoying and nobody is paying me to motivate me otherwise. I think more time and effort is invested defining the labels for everyone than actually using it to find a solution to the OP... which will never happen, of course. As Crazy Jerome might say, it's the journey (and not the destination) that's fun... but not for me when the journey is semantical.

Edit: I may or may not be using the term "red herring" correctly in its strictest sense. I don't care. I'm going to sleep now.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The reason why it's important is that 4e has something that 1e,2e,and 3e didn't have. At least not in any quantity and definitely not in the core.

A number of somethings. From broad things, like class balance, to little things, like Warlords. But, each edition had things that others didn't. 2e had Kits. 3e had modular multi-classing. 1e had randomly-determined psionic potential. OD&D had no Chaotic Evil or Lawful Good. Those are just examples, I'm sure there are myriad differences and commonalities to be found if we look hard enough.

That something is bothersome even if some people refuse to recognize what it is.

Understood. And, in a live-and-let-live world where there had been no 'edition war,' that'd be more than enough.

But, in our post-edition-holocaust survival scenario, the framers of 5e need to know WTF happened, and how to keep it from happening again. You say "dissasociative mechanics happened!" but, upon examination, it's just a meaningless circumlocution, a rationalization, not a reason, for hating 4e. There's no way to keep that from happening again.

I say, the OGL happened. When they went open-source they let a genie out of a bottle, it's not going back in, so they better play ball with it. Make 5e open-source, just like 3e, and the same problem won't manifest. The fan base might remain fragmented, but the industry will rally around the prospect of riding D&D's coattails again, and 5e will have a shot at the same dominance as 3e had (but no, D&D is not likely to repeat it's fad highs).

While we can geek out over the system and theorycraft all we want, I don't think most fans much care about such minutiae. I think the 'silent' (but still wallet-voting) majority of D&D fans care about ongoing support for the system, and I believe that they're a bit change-adverse.

If you give them a new system and no ongoing support for the old one, they change over.
If you give them a new system with an uncertain future and give them ongoing support for the old, they won't.

5e needs to be presented with confidence and a long-term commitment that, no, we are not going to just 'make' you re-buy the core books like we did with 3.5 and 4e and Essentials and, now 5e, for real, this time, 5e is going to be around for a decade and more.
And, 5e needs to have an open-source licence so attractive to 3pps that every currently-rival d20 publisher will leap on the bandwagon and make support for the new game, /not/ the old one.

That's my opinion on what it would really take to re-unite the base in the sense of customers. They might still violently disagree over what makes a great system, and whether 5e is it - but they'll buy 5e, if most of the industry is busily turning out supplements and expansions for it, instead of 4e or 3.5 or Pathfinder. I guess it amounts to getting the industry to buy into a self-fulfilling prophesy that 5e will be The Next Big Thing. 3.0/d20 OGL did that. 4e GSL didn't. 5e must.

 

[pemerton]

Imagine a scenario where the character uses RoB in round one killing his opponent and is stuck on a overlook watching the rest of the combat and resting. Two minutes later, a demon teleports up to him and the character is still too tired from his single action to repeat it, but finds he can still do <insert other heavy strenuous activity like encounter powers, daily powers, or stunts>. The character can't say "I'm too tired" because he can do more intense stuff still. How does the character rationalise his inability to perform that one move?

My preference would have recovery mechanisms that tie into the nature of the power and world fiction rather than simple flat periods

Sticking to some of the parallels I've been trying to draw, I will compare this to a situation in AD&D where, after failing a "life gates" roll, I find some oil and pour it in the grooves of the portcullis. According to the rules, that shouldn't give me a retry. But within the fiction it seems like it should - maybe I wasn't strong enough to lift the gate before, but now it's been lubricated.

My feeling is that the same person who finds the recovery for Rain of Blows (and encounter powers generally) a bit wonky, should be inclined to permit a "lift gates" retry once I lubricate the runners, or an open locks retry once I get a technical drawing of the lock mechanism. Do you agree?

On the tiredness thing, by the way, I think that reinforces my view that hit points are "dissociated" - after all, the player who knows the next hit suffered by his/her PC will probably be fatal, and who therefore has the PC hang back and shoot arrows, can't rationalise the PC's decision not to charge into the fray with "I'm tired" or "I'm wounded", because the PC can do any number of other intense things - shoot arrows, run, climb, jump, juggle, stand on either leg and hop, etc - that would not be possible, in the fiction, were s/he tired and/or wounded.

In my experience (since about 1982) this was unique to 4E play.

<snip>

Roleplaying speaking in character etc waits until the battle is over not by choice or design thats just how the game seems to play. This was never my experience in earlier editions.

I don't know what 2nd ed AD&D has to say about it, but in Moldvay Basic, Gygaxian AD&D and 3E the way in which a player narrates a PC's attack has no effect on action resolution. So I find it interesting that people who were interested in doing that sort of thing in earlier editions weren't in 4e.

As I said, I've always found my players' narration tends to focus on matters that are salient to resolution, such as movement, targets, and the like. Including discussions between them (and from timt to time their PCs) as to who is doing what, and why.

I get that pemerton doesn't need to apply stringent scrutiny in a non-sim game. But just because I aim for sim-oriented play, I hope I'm not being beholden to some ludicrous level of fidelity to realism. Because that would be a failure to understand the sim agenda in D&D.

<snip>

In my ideal "let's pretend" playstyle, the desired fiction or worldbuilding calls the shots and the mechanics are the rules of engagement. Not being able to use the ray of truth would be a feel good moment for me, even if it's self-crippling in a gamist way, because it validates and reinforces the intent of the playstyle.

The desired fiction "calling the shots" is part of everyone's playstyle, I think - everyone here is playing an RPG rather than a board game.

Quite a way upthread I posted this:

Consider Character, Setting, and Situation - and now consider what happens to them, over time. In Simulationist play, cause is the key, the imagined cosmos in action. . .

Clearly, System is a major design element here, as the causal anchor among the other elements. . .

Resolution mechanics, in Simulationist design, boil down to asking about the cause of what . . .

<snip discussion of ingame time>

f Simulationist-facilitating design is not involved, then the whole picture changes. Step On Up is actually quite similar, in social and interactive terms, to Story Now. Gamist and Narrativist play often share the following things:

*Common use of player Author Stance (Pawn or non-Pawn) to set up the arena for conflict. . .

*Fortune-in-the-middle during resolution, to whatever degree - the point is that Exploration as such [ie establishing the content of the fiction] can be deferred, rather than established at every point during play in a linear fashion.

*More generally, Exploration overall is negotiated in a casual fashion through ongoing dialogue, using system for input (which may be constraining), rather than explicitly delivered by system per se.​

​

The difference between simulationist and non-simulationist play doesn't seem to be about whether or not the fiction "calls the shots" or about whether the action resolution mechanics are "the rules of engagement". It seems to be about whether the causal unfolding of ingame events can just be read off the mechanics (this is the ideal at which simulationist play aims, I think) or whether additional narration is needed around mechanical outcomes to ascertain what exactly happened in the fiction.

I think 4e has quite a bit of the latter: Come and Get It is the poster child, obviously (explaining why the NPCs or monsters closed on the PC fighter) but it factors in lots of other abilities too (eg explaining how the bard's Vicious Mockery hurts the ooze).

I also think 3E has quite a bit of the latter - resolving the infliction of hit point loss in combat is probably the most obvious example, but explaining what happens when a PC with Evasion makes a save against a fireball while in a room that is completely filled by the blast would be another example.

I think there is no very special connection between the need for this additional narration, and experience of immersion or loss of immersion. For example, using Vicious Mockery against an ooze, and narrating "I call down a curse on the power of Juiblex, and the ludicrousness of all the faceless things that demon lord has released across the world," doesn't seem like it should hurt immersion. For the right player, it could even be immersion-enhancing, I would have thought, building up the momentum of the PC and his/her disdain for all things ooze-ish.

Likewise with the Evasion example: "I drop to the floor and lie as flat as I can in whatever small indentations I find there, while the fire passes above me". There is a hint of director's stance in this - the tentative narration of "small indentations" in the floor, the narration of the fire (for which the PC is not responsibe) not reaching all the way to the floor - but I would be surprised if this killed immersion for very many players.

Now if someone finds that not being able to use Rain of Blows again (for a purely metagame reason - it's an encounter power) breaks immersion, but knowing not to send his/her PC charging into the fray (for a purely metagame reason - the PC has only 3 out of 73 hit points left, and the enemies are wielding longswords) does not break immersion, who am I to quibble? But if that is meant to be explained by some fundamental difference in the relationship between mechanics, player decision and PC action, I'm missing it.

All I know is that from red box through first edition I didn't have a dissociative problem. I played all those games in a simulationist (GNS) style and had no dissociative mechanics.

I've yet to see a rebuttal.

I'm not trying to rebut your autobiographical claims. I assume that you're sincere in making them.

I don't really have a good handle on the mechanics you have in mind, though, nor how general you think your claims are.

Here is one reason for that: The Justin Alexander essay, which you (as far as I can tell) are endorsing gives the War Devil's "Besieged Foe" power as an example of dissociation. Another power with the same mechanical characteristics is the Human Hexer's "Baleful Polymorph" power - it ends after 1 turn with no ingame explanation for why it ends inherent in the power parameters. I gave an example upthread (the paladin-polymorph example) whereby this "dissociated" mechanic provided an occasion for increased immersion and identification, by a player, with the personality of his PC.

Therefore, this mechanic does not inherently produce problems of "dissociation" between plaeyr and PC. Yet it seems to be an instance of what you call a "dissociated" mechanic. Hence I am unsure of the category of mechanic that you have in mind, unless it is defined simply by the effect it has on your play experience - which obviously is important for you, but may not be generalisable across others.

Dissociative Mechanics <snip parantheses> are about the player and character being driven apart.

It is called dissociative because it dissociates those who agree with the subject at hand. Of course it doesn't for those who disagree.

Unless I've misunderstood, you seem to be saying here that the tendency of "dissociative" mechanics to drive apart PC and character is relative to particular players, and not a general property of those mechanics. In which case we are in agreement. But also, because I am not you, I can't know in advance what mechanics will dissociate you and what will not.

For example, I know that you are not dissociated by hit points, but I don't really know why: after all, when hit points are getting low, how does the PC know that the next blow will probably be fatal, given that so many of the previous ones were not? (The player knows this because s/he can look at the number on the character sheet, and extrapolate from the game's damage mechanics.)

My best guess, though you haven't really confirmed this I don't think, is that you interpret hit points as "meat". Of course, this has other well-known somewhat curious consequences within the fiction, like (i) no physical penalties for having your meat hacked away, and (ii) high level fighters apparently having more meat than elephants (Gygax in particular seems to have been bothered by this second issue).