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

[lowkey13]

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[Satyrn]

I think we are very good at calculating the probabilities of things we encountered during the first few hundred thousand years of evolution

Unless spiders are involved, right? I'm terrible at guessing the odds that any given spider is gonna eat me.

 

[Manbearcat]

[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.

 

[lowkey13]

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[Manbearcat]

Actually, that's pretty much what I've been saying.

I might be a little more into the biological basis (instead of the "unconscious mind," I would say that there is a specialized section of the brain that processes this prior to reaching a liminal, or conscious, stage) but otherwise agreed.

Then I guess the only real daylight between our positions is on the questions of “what does that mean for the conscious actor in terms of their probability/opportunity cost evaluation” and “how does the answer to the question interface with RPG PC build + action resolution mechanics.”

Yeah?

 

[lowkey13]

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[The Crimson Binome]

I was mostly bemused by your use of the label as a term of opprobrium, given Tolkien's thesis. But even if you change your terminology to "dream story" (and maintain that there is a hard distinction between fairy stories and dream stories, a point on which I differ with Tolkien)... still a lot of dream stories out there, and a lot of people who seem to enjoy them.

You can enjoy them, sure, but that's a far cry from taking one seriously in a role-playing setting. Picking a random cartoon, there's no way that anyone would buy into the world of Spongebob as a consistent and believable world that just happens to have different physical laws. It pretty much just runs on Rule of Funny, like some other settings work on Rule of Drama, or Rule of Allegory.

 

[Bawylie]

You can enjoy them, sure, but that's a far cry from taking one seriously in a role-playing setting. Picking a random cartoon, there's no way that anyone would buy into the world of Spongebob as a consistent and believable world that just happens to have different physical laws. It pretty much just runs on Rule of Funny, like some other settings work on Rule of Drama, or Rule of Allegory.

Counter-point: Wile E. Coyote

 

[Lanefan]

And has been pointed out in many threads, trying to police player thought is both futile and corrosive.

Let's say you have a player who claims to be new, and they immediately use fire on trolls. You ask why and the player shrugs and says, "I don't know. Seemed fun." The DM squints suspiciously. Is he really a new player? But what can you do?

You might think that's an unlikely edge case. But let's say you're in an WotC adventure path, and a player just happens to not only refuse to "use Insight"...despite repeated DM promptings...on an NPC who is secretly the bad guy, but then attacks that NPC before the party can be betrayed. You ask why and the player shrugs and says, "I just didn't trust him." Did the player read the book? Are you really going to confront him/her about it?

If it's the same player who "just happened" to use fire on trolls and "just happened" to come up with a series of other non-obvious answers along the way then yeah, there'll be words...and they'll quite possibly end with "see ya".

A one-off lucky guess can be just that: a lucky guess. Maybe this time the DM let something slip in her role-play of the spy that clued a player in that this person wasn't to be trusted. But if there's a pattern established - and as we've determined, humans are good at seeing patterns - then it becomes bad-faith play if not outright cheating and it's out the door with you, my son.

Not only can you not tell what is going on inside the players head, you really want to avoid teaching your players that they should probably keep their thoughts to themselves because "wrong thoughts" will be punished. Wouldn't you rather have a game where players don't feel they have to hide things?

Doesn't matter what their thoughts are, it's the resulting actions that count.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

So, I just wanted to say that while I cannot, for the life of me, fully understand your point of view, I appreciate the fact that you have taken the time out to explain it in a calm and thoughtful manner.

Upon further consideration, I think I might understand where you're coming from. By any chance, are you considering the context of the game and "rule of fun" to mean that PCs follow different rules than NPCs? That the only reason a high-level PC never dies from a 200' fall is because they're a PC, and that wouldn't be fun for the player?

Maybe a better model for how the game world works is that you take the damage, and then you would also have to make a Constitution save against a DC equal to the number of dice rolled; except we assume that PCs always succeed in that second roll (because save-or-die is no fun), in the same way that a vorpal sword does an extra +6d8 damage to PCs instead of killing them outright.

Maybe PCs never break a leg, because they're PCs, but NPCs might break a leg from falling out of a tree!