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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 8134824" data-attributes="member: 6696971">I'm going to meander my way through this, because there are a lot of moving parts to this, so hopefully this comes out somewhat coherently.  If you (or someone else) needs clarification, let me know.  I'm going to call this:D&D THEORY OF MINDD&D's genesis was as a wargame (as we all know).  Over the years it has evolved from those wargaming roots and has attempted to straddle multiple fences (depending on edition).  The most prominent pair of fences it has attempted to straddle is this is this wargaming aesthetic + setting/metaplot tourism = story paradigm.  While this is undeniably the most popular form of D&D, In my opinion, the formulation is incoherent (not as an epithet but as a descriptor) because even a moment's worth of scrutiny reveals it to require an undeniable mental toggle to inhabit these disparate vantages.  However, it just so happens that many (through hard-earned hours and hours and hours of play inhabiting this mental framework) have internalized it to the point that they don't even realize they're engaging in cognitive gymnastics.  Because of this synthesis of these "D&D oddities" (and presumably the enjoyment of the byproducts), there is often a spirited defense of this "state of D&D and its participants' internalized mindset" as "immersive" or "verisimilitude."  When alternatives are proposed or actualized (in the form of game systems that achieve the same genre tropes but through different systemization and attendant cognitive framework), its decried as inherently "jarring" or "immersion-breaking."  The problem is the inherently.  There is nothing inherently jarring or immersion-breaking about changing from the orthodox D&D systematized approach to another one.  In fact, if scrutinized by an outside 3rd party of even a 30+ year D&D player, it may be clear that a newly systematized approach either (a) requires 0 mental toggle to engage in the varying constituent parts of play (because everything is unified mechanically and/or ethos-wise) or (b) it does require a mental toggle but the nature of this new mental toggle isn't objectively more or less "jarring" (therefore the only difference is the prior-earned assimilation of the old mental toggle...so basically people are saying "NO NEW GAME WITH NEW MENTAL TOGGLE BECAUSE I'VE EARNED MY ASSIMILATION OF THE WEIRD MENTAL TOGGLE OF YORE SO NEW ITERATIONS OF THE GAME MUST BE PREMISED UPON IT!")To put it all together:* Torchbearer's brutal Dungeon Crawl Attrition (of mind, body, and loadout) and Logistics Management game is 100 % a more coherent experience (cognitively) than 1e or B/X (the standard bearers for crawls) because of its holistic, tight design and consistent cognitive positioning.* Dungeon World (as a Powered By the Apocalypse "love letter to D&D) runs circles around classic and 5e D&D as an engine that produces emergent D&D trappings and tropes.  The cognitive consistency a player/GM inhabits is approximately a 0 on the "jarring-o-meter" when compared to the toggle-requirement of D&D.* 4e D&D absolutely has the same toggle that D&D historically has but its (let's call it) micro-toggles (of which all D&D possesses) are different than the D&D that has come before it (Noncombat Conflict Resolution - The Skill Challenge - is like Clocks in Apocalypse World/Blades or Conflict! in Mouse Guard or Cortex+ while its Combat Resolution is kindred with classic D&D except that the units weighed and decision-points made have shifted).  But there is nothing inherently "jarring" or "immersion-breaking" with 4e D&D, its just that players that feel that way haven't earned the internalization of those cognitive gymnastics through decades and perhaps they (not consciously) feel their neuroplasticity isn't up to the task to earn new cognitive gymnastics or that its all cost with benefit pending (and they're older now with a different partitioning of time/mental exertion) TLDR - The D&D mental gymnastics that we've all been saddled with makes conversations about "jarring" and "immersion" and "verisimilitude" unbelievably fraught.</blockquote>

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