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

[Guest 6801328]

"My Uncle Milo told me you have to burn trolls! Get the torches ready!!!!" Simple.

The character not knowing something is perfectly fine at times. But at others, it's just silly. Because the issue is that no matter what you do, the player is acting on the knowledge that trolls die by fire.

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?

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?

 

[lowkey13]

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[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[iserith]

D&D Forum Axiom:

All discussions of "immersion" (whatever the flumph that word means) must necessarily reach a point where the participants discuss falling off cliffs and using fire on trolls.

And "metagaming" means "that thing you're doing that I can't define in any sensible or consistent way which I allow to annoy me for no good reason."

 

[Guest 6801328]

D&D Forum Axiom:

All discussions of "immersion" (whatever the flumph that word means) must necessarily reach a point where the participants discuss falling off cliffs and using fire on trolls.

So true!

And "metagaming" means "that thing you're doing that I can't define in any sensible or consistent way which I allow to annoy me for no good reason."

Also so true. Although usually I put that in the "realism" bucket, where "unrealistic" is simply an attempt to rationalize a general dislike for a rule. That and/or just an excuse to show off imagined expertise in an otherwise useless, fringe hobby.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Every adult human on Oerth ran in a foot race.....and it was a 4 billion way tie!

 

[FrogReaver]

I think the goal of all D&D rules from all editions are meant to create a world similar to ours where magic and monsters exist. My view is that our world is the basis for the D&D world and the rules themselves aren't descriptive of the D&D world, but rather the rules are a limited scope approximation for describing how heroic characters tend to interact with the world. (ie heroic characters of enough stature don't typically die when they are depicted falling from great heights, instead they tend to live to fight another day).

My view cannot co-exist with the view that the D&D rule set is the sole basis for a D&D world. The view that a D&D world is solely based on the mechanics listed in the books makes for some peculiar and nearly unrelatable worlds. For example, it makes a world where it's a known fact where a sufficiently powerful person doesn't ever die from falling great distances. That's different than the world my view creates where the scientific fact is that everyone dies from long falls except for a few really lucky ones (typically the PC's and maybe their Villains).

I can't prove that it should be played one way or another, but I can say that those that view mechanical rules as scientific world facts are missing out on playing in a world like ours, except with monsters and magic. Why do I say that? Because our world is impossible to model with a few hundred pages of mechanical rules. We could probably devote a billion pages to it and that still wouldn't be enough. So instead they will never be capable of playing in the D&D world I play in and I would never want to play in the D&D world they play in.

 

[Guest 6801328]

2. The people within the world necessarily understand the math. This is an especially big leap for me, as I've tried to explain. This is a world that doesn't have printing presses or widespread dissemination of information (most likely- I don't know about your campaign), and is likely lacking high-end math and statistics. Yet the assumption that the people of this world will know minute differences of 5% (1 in 20) because .... I don't get that? We don't get that. In this world, with great statistics and easy-to-use resources, WE DON'T DO THIS very well. Which leads to the third premise I don't understand ...

Although I largely agree with your conclusions, I have a quibble with this point you keep making about "understanding math". Sure, people are bad at the math that applies to problems that appear in the modern world but not in the primitive world where most evolution happens (such as understanding probability as it applies to populations larger than village-sized).

But humans can be really good intuitively at things with complex underlying math, if they get exposed to it over long periods of time. For example, programming a machine to catch a ball requires calculus (or at least a manual integration with small intervals), yet humans learn to do this easily after spending some time observing falling objects. Likewise finding effects of drug compounds that only sorta work sometimes requires statistics, but over the millennia many people have noticed the pattern of "Hey, when people who have this problem east that food, it sometimes helps."

Also, all five of our senses are mostly logarithmic, even though most of us don't understand logarithms (even those who ostensibly studied it...).

Again, I don't think this invalidates your larger conclusion, but I think you're pushing your claims too far on this one point.

 

[lowkey13]

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[Bawylie]

Depends. If that thought is, "I love Paladins," they can just keep it stuffed deep down in the dark where it can't hurt anyone.

Brad.

What? Paladins are great.