"Stumbling Around in My Head" - The Feeling of Dissociation as a Player

[GreyICE]

Hmmm, intersting view... I guess some DM's might think consistency makes the world logical and predictable enough that characters can in turn make logical decisions about their actions... But yeah I guess if a DM just does whatever he wants because it's a different scene and story... then yeah he has absolutely no shackles whatsoever. Whether that's a good or bad thing is a matter of perspective.

The players will know what damage the fire will do, because I'll tell them.

They will ALSO know logical consequences of their actions. Fire will hurt them. This is a logical consequence. If they choose to be in a burning building, they will be hurt and burnt unless they take a lot of prep time to make sure that they're safe in the building (or they're a party of tieflings, at which point lolfire).

What they won't know are the MECHANICAL consequences of their actions. In a thread about dissociation, THERE is a great, wonderful screaming example of it.

4E: "Fire is not healthy. It will hurt you pretty badly if you spend time in it, unless you take proper precautions. There might also be problems with smoke, it tends to cut off vision and mess with breathing (although the warforged will be fine there)."


3E: "Fire does 1d6 points of damage per round. If the room has grown hot enough, you take an additional 1d6 points of damage per minute. You have to succeed a DC 15 con check that scales +1 each round you're in the fire, or lose your action."

Seriously, which feels more dissociated to you?

 

[Argyle King]

I don't get your problem here. Is it:

1: That different fires are treated differently?
2: That you have no problem running tenth level PCs through first level adventures? Because that's what a non-scaling world means.

The 4e rules say "All else being equal, you scale the challenge to the PCs level". This is a good starting point.

It might make it clearer for OSR players to put the damage expressions by approximate level of the dungeon as the rule of thumb rather than by level of the PCs. But this is again level scaling, and you don't expect tenth level PCs to mess around in the first level of the dungeon. (I once or twice have had a first level bandit rading party try ambushing high heroic PCs but only for comedy relaxation).



We are discussing
1: Level scaling and how this impacts play.
2: Worldbuilding in a world with hit points
3: Damage inflicted by fire.

Hit points are 100% relevant for all those things and are the clearest indication of how level scaling is built into the assumptions of D&D.



Except it does. For all the reasons I've gone into. The changing of the challenges you should be facing and the stark power differential across levels is baked into the assumptions of D&D and is shown at its clearest through the hit point mechanic.

Level scaling has been one of the fundamental assumptions of D&D right from Gygax and Arneson. And hit points demonstrate this. That you don't like this demonstration doesn't make it irrelevant.

A lot of good points here; especially the last part...

That is part of why I have said in other discussions that maybe I did not realize that some of the problems I had/have with D&D were also in 3rd Edition simply because I did not know any better. At the time -with few brief exceptions- my experience with rpgs was D&D. Once 4th came around, I was at point where I was made more aware that things could be done differently. Some of the changes I liked; some I didn't. Either way, the important thing was that I felt I had more insight into my tastes and what I wanted out of a game because I was given a greater awareness that I had choice and that different options were available.

Oddly, I credit 4th Edition with helping me to discover games that have more of a 'sim' element. While (in the beginning) I generally found 4th Edition to be somewhat at odds with what I wanted out of my experience, there were a few areas in which it seemed to tone down D&D a little bit. In particular, there was less of a power curve between levels; that was nice because my game didn't change all the time. I also enjoyed combats which had more moving pieces.

HP did seem bloated at that time. It always had, but it seemed somehow more. Perhaps it was the weakness of the opposition (monsters.) Still, D&D was what I knew, and I accepted the abstract nature of it. I accepted it until I tried games in which HP was not treated the way D&D treats it. I learned that I preferred a different way of doing it. Likewise, I also learned that I preferred being able to roll a parry, a dodge, or a block far more than having a static defense where I just stand there and get hit.

I think what I am trying to get at is that I often feel there are things in D&D which really do not make sense in any context outside of D&D. This is not meant as a bash against 4E, but, in other threads where I've mentioned some of why I felt 'disassociated' from the game, I think that is part of what I was trying to say. There are a lot of times when my mind really had no connection to what was going on. I had to learn a second version of reality -4E's reality.

As both a player and a GM, I was making decisions based upon that second set of reality. I often felt as though I was making decisions which the game said were right rather than decisions which felt right to me. As a DM, I felt that made it harder to design encounters because I was designing from a viewpoint which was often at odds with my own. As a player, there were a lot of times when I felt as though the right answer according to the game trumped what I felt would be fun.

I don't ask for a perfect simulation. I can and often do accept abstractions in the name of playability. However, as said elsewhere, I like to be in the same general ballpark. I do not view all disassociation as bad. However, if I feel that I often cannot connect with the game, I do view that as bad... at least in so much that I play rpgs to satisfy desires which are not the same desires behind why I would play something like parcheese.

Another place I find issue is when a game is not (imo) consistent with itself, and that is somewhere that I find the "4E Reality" breaks down. In my opinion, a world built upon how 4E works would look nothing like how many of the 4E settings look. Some of the things don't make sense even when I try looking at them from the viewpoint that 4E asks me to look at them from. On that note, I'll repeat something else I said elsewhere by saying that the most successful games of 4E I ran were ones in which I completely ditched to default setting assumptions. Instead, I went with games which embraced the somewhat gonzo nature of certain things. That went exceptionally well, and I was very happy with the results.

Unfortunately; at the end of the day, I feel as though I cannot use the system to tell a lot of the stories I want to tell. That is part of why I find the discussions about 'the narrative' the be somewhat alien to me. I find the system getting in the way of many of the narratives I want to have. I at times find that I have a hard time telling certain fantasy stories because D&D has evolved into its own sort of genre; moving a story from a genre outside of that into it causes the feel to change. The opposite is also something I feel is true and a big part of why I find myself using other systems to play some of the D&D settings.

None of this is intended as a slight against 4E. I do enjoy the game now that I have a better understanding of what to expect from it, and I am aware I have other options for when I want other things. I'm simply trying to give a little insight into why I feel the way I do about certain styles of mechanics.

 

[mmadsen]

Seriously, which feels more dissociated to you?

You raise an excellent point, GreyICE. When the players don't know the mechanics involved, and they can assume that the DM will do something reasonable, everything becomes associated again. The players are thinking through their characters' situation as if it were real and not a boardgame with arbitrary rules.

 

[Imaro]

The players will know what damage the fire will do, because I'll tell them.

They will ALSO know logical consequences of their actions. Fire will hurt them. This is a logical consequence. If they choose to be in a burning building, they will be hurt and burnt unless they take a lot of prep time to make sure that they're safe in the building (or they're a party of tieflings, at which point lolfire).

What they won't know are the MECHANICAL consequences of their actions. In a thread about dissociation, THERE is a great, wonderful screaming example of it.

4E: "Fire is not healthy. It will hurt you pretty badly if you spend time in it, unless you take proper precautions. There might also be problems with smoke, it tends to cut off vision and mess with breathing (although the warforged will be fine there)."


3E: "Fire does 1d6 points of damage per round. If the room has grown hot enough, you take an additional 1d6 points of damage per minute. You have to succeed a DC 15 con check that scales +1 each round you're in the fire, or lose your action."

Seriously, which feels more dissociated to you?

If yo're scaling it by level in 4e then they will know how much damage it does... Like I said if you want to discuss DM Fiat (which this post seems to be borderline claiming you can do with 4e but not with 3.x for some reason)...then fine let's switch gears, but DM Fiat isn't particular to any ruleset. That said we were talking about page 42 and it has definite values by (party) level. In fact I would say a character who knows those values has more information about anything his DM improvises by the rules than he will with the myriad of subsystems in 3.x.

 

[GreyICE]

If yo're scaling it by level in 4e then they will know how much damage it does... Like I said if you want to discuss DM Fiat (which this post seems to be borderline claiming you can do with 4e but not with 3.x for some reason)...then fine let's switch gears, but DM Fiat isn't particular to any ruleset. That said we were talking about page 42 and it has definite values by (party) level. In fact I would say a character who knows those values has more information about anything his DM improvises by the rules than he will with the myriad of subsystems in 3.x.

Will he? What will the player who knows the chart know?

Well he'll know that the DM has baseline values of damage for 'low,' 'moderate,' and 'high' that are appropriate for their level in terms of threatening the party. He'll know that the low damage is not an immediate threat, but it is fairly painful (the fire is just getting started). He knows that the moderate damage is pretty hurtful (the fire is going at a solid pace). He knows that the high damage is not something you want to be taking round after round (the fire is a raging inferno). He also knows the DM can wander outside those boundaries.

As it was said earlier, at the paragon tier things like burning buildings aren't a large concern. So maybe the player can guess that even a roaring inferno is going to be at worst 'low' damage, and thus while it's not nothing, it's not something that the party can't handle for a round or two.

So yes, a player with a firm grasp of the mechanics can better estimate how long his character can survive in a fire (assuming average dice results). That still is a hell of a lot more flexible than 1d6 per round, and also much less gameable (A ring of fire resistance 5 lets you take a nap in a 3E fire). And if the DM tells the party how much damage they'll take in the fire (see: Honesty and openness in DMing) then when this player with all this knowledge sees a roaring inferno, they might be able to guess what the DM tells them - perhaps. But all the other players don't need to guess, because they know.

Thus, system knowledge has rewarded the player with very little, which is good because system knowledge is a nasty little metagame skill that shouldn't affect your character's actions at the table.

 

[Desdichado]

Metagame and disassociated don't mean the same thing to me, if I'm using the word disassociated to complain about a mechanic that I don't like. I accept, and am fine with, the notion that metagame considerations are going to inform some of the decisions I make as a player. Especially since I approach the game with more of a "collaborative author" stance, I can accept that there's stuff that needs to happen mechanically, or needs to be detailed in such a way that it's for me as a player, not me as a character. Disassociation mechanics, on the other hand, are kind of an order of magnitude "worse".

I'm not sure that I can really describe exactly what causes a mechanic to feel disassociated from the fiction to me. Like I said earlier, it's certainly a very subjective thing. It's a mechanic that causes me to pay attention to it in a sense that it breaks my submersion in the game reality. It somehow breaks the fourth wall in a way that metagame mechanics do not.

Granted, I find that I feel more disassociated from the game the more metagame considerations that there are. Maybe all that I mean is that I can accept some metagame considerations, but when there's too many that cross my personal red line in the sand, then I get that disassociated feeling.

But all this talk about "process sim" (whatever that's supposed to mean exactly) and all the hyper-detailed physics examples strike me as completely missing the mark. It's much more simple than that. Mechanics make me feel disassociated with the game when I can't submerge them into my gaming experience. When they repeatedly break the fourth wall and remind me that I'm playing a game, and that as such, it's often arbitrary in silly ways, or in ways that don't make any sense from a character standpoint. When they drive behavior (or at least offer attractive incentives or compelling disincentives, regardless of what I choose to do) in me as a player that's inconsistent with what makes sense to me in my view of the character and the setting.

 

[S'mon]

For immersion, to think as my character does, I need to replicate the OODA loop. Observe. Orient. Decide. Act.

Observe. What is going on around me? This is where AD&D breaks down hard. I update my observations and start a new loop once per minute. Once per six seconds is ... acceptable if not great.

I seem to remember that Boyd put the OODA loop for the individual infantryman at 3-6 seconds, which is close to 3e-4e's 6 second combat rounds, though by far the most of Boyd's work was with aircraft dogfights where OODA is longer, around 6-12 seconds AIR. However tank commander and squad leader OODA is more like 15-30 seconds, still less than the AD&D 1 minute rounds - which I agree are kinda silly - but pre-3e combat rounds could arguably be seen as squad-level OODA (given how initiative works in those games), for which 12-15 seconds or so is quite plausible.

Edit: BTW I came across OODA about 9-10 years ago not from the RPG/wargame angle, but from the political/military side, especially reading William S Lind on 4th generation warfare before and during the invasion of Iraq. Some of what I learned later proved quite useful with the Neighbourhood Watch!

 

[S'mon]

This is always a mistake made by simulationists.

Dunno about that - I think I'm pretty simulationist, but I generally prefer Free Kriegspiel ("3 in 6 the Germans win, high roll favours the Russians") - it usually gives better results.

 

[prosfilaes]

2: That you have no problem running tenth level PCs through first level adventures? Because that's what a non-scaling world means.

My problem is exactly the opposite. I don't like running tenth level PCs through first level adventures, even if we've add a 0 to all the challenges. Instead of a regular Orc, it's an orc with 10 levels of fighter! And it's a 10th level pie, too! You talk about Gary Gygax, but a lot of the rules for scaling first came in in 3rd edition. If you wanted to scale up an AD&D 1 adventure by the rules, you couldn't just slap a PC level on the orcs, or give them the Advanced template; you actually had to swap them out for different monsters.

 

[Imaro]

My problem is exactly the opposite. I don't like running tenth level PCs through first level adventures, even if we've add a 0 to all the challenges. Instead of a regular Orc, it's an orc with 10 levels of fighter! And it's a 10th level pie, too! You talk about Gary Gygax, but a lot of the rules for scaling first came in in 3rd edition. If you wanted to scale up an AD&D 1 adventure by the rules, you couldn't just slap a PC level on the orcs, or give them the Advanced template; you actually had to swap them out for different monsters.

I have serious doubts regarding [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION] in regards to his claims of scaling when it comes to Gygax and Arneson... almost everything I've seen on the matter suggests the opposite. It'd be great if he could provide some proof to back up such a claim...