D&D 4E Bridging the cognitive gap between how the game rules work and what they tell us about the setting

[Zeromaru X]

and some of the marketing and developer comments straight out thumb their noses at such concepts

This I know. I like the Tiefling and the Gnome promo, but the other ones were weird... Even for someone like myself, who had not that much experience with D&D at the time.

Well, this answer do helps me to understand some of the arguments here. It doesn't explain why the necessity of some cognitive realism for the game to be "good" (beyond personal bias).

 

[James Gasik]

This I know. I like the Tiefling and the Gnome promo, but the other ones were weird... Even for someone like myself, who had not that much experience with D&D at the time.

Well, this answer do helps me to understand some of the arguments here. It doesn't explain why the necessity of some cognitive realism for the game to be "good" (beyond personal bias).

That is really it. Some people need the game's mechanics to reflect the narrative and if they don't, they see that as a flaw. Others are perfectly ok with abstraction as long as the gameplay itself is sound.

I've played with systems that really want to model the real world and they generally become tedious (to me) because there's a reason I like fantasy- the real world tends to be rather tedious and unfun at times. If someone feels that it's fun to fly into the air and suplex a Dragon, as long as that option is balanced against others, that sounds good to me.

Similarly, there are many things in the real world that defy belief and would disrupt verisimilitude, but they totally occur, and no system is going to be able to map those sorts of corner cases. That's why D&D has a DM, after all. To balance "fair" and "fun". If "fun" for one group is mechanics that reflect the narrative, it's on the DM to make that happen.

If "fun" for another group is embracing the gonzo, narrative be damned, it's on the DM to make that happen. Always has been, always will be.

 

[bert1001 fka bert1000]

Well, this answer do helps me to understand some of the arguments here. It doesn't explain why the necessity of some cognitive realism for the game to be "good" (beyond personal bias).

Because not only is 4e completely admitting it's a game, for those who enjoy a grittier playstyle with a heavier emphasis on verisimilitude (a word I didn't even know until WotC brought it up themselves!), 4e seems to be actively thumbing it's nose at such playstyles!*

Yeah, I would argue that 4e actually does a pretty good job at a certain type of verisimilitude. When you are talking about "do the mechanics support in game fiction that emulates heroic fantasy".

For some people "roleplaying" and "imerseiveness" is highly tied to characters abilities that directly map to in fiction abilities. So they want to always think like the character POV and have a suit of abilities that the character would fully be aware of. I can see the appeal of this, but it also tends to limit the modeling of certain things (e.g., martial abilities that rely on narrative control, limited use martial abilities, etc.).

I don't think 4e works best under this paradigm. So for some that is a negative.

For others, the paradigm of some abilities functioning at a more abstract and/or meta level (modeling a combination of skill, circumstances, dramatic pacing, etc.) allows for a wider palate of in game fiction to occur. If this in game fiction better or more easily emulates the genre, then it actually more immersive and better for some. For these folks, there is no cognitive gap or it only occurs in rare edge cases where no in fiction explanation can be found and they can "look the other way" and move on, which to them is a small price to pay for better emulation.

 

[GuardianLurker]

This I know. I like the Tiefling and the Gnome promo, but the other ones were weird... Even for someone like myself, who had not that much experience with D&D at the time.

Well, this answer do helps me to understand some of the arguments here. It doesn't explain why the necessity of some cognitive realism for the game to be "good" (beyond personal bias).

Because when its done right, it helps with the roleplaying. Also, if the model is well constructed it enables interesting synergies that make sense in world that don't break the game. Finally, it becomes easier to intuit and handle those edge cases.

Hit points are honestly a bad example. That exact same back and forth has been going on for 40 bleeping years. HP are a bad cognitive mapping, because there's absolutely nothing simulationist in them. They're purely gamist. And to badly mangle a paraphrase, they suck, but they're less painful to the fun than anything else that's been tried.

Bad cognitive rules mappings are the things that when you run into them, just make you go " WTF? " and stop. And then when you try to try to make sense of it, just lead to bigger problems. For me one of 5e's was the changes to the Darkness spell. Plenty of people had no problem with it. But it was for me, because it broke my mental model of the game world, and my immersion in it.

They're essentially games rules that cause cognitive dissonance.

 

[Zeromaru X]

For some people "roleplaying" and "imerseiveness" is highly tied to characters abilities that directly map to in fiction abilities

Well, this is where I get a bit confused, and that's why I used going to the bathroom as an example in my other post. Because nature calls even in the most inopportune situations, and it's even more insisting when you are dealing with dead situations (the "he pissed himself" saying is an example of this). D&D is a combat roleplaying game, so dead or alive situations are expected. But to have a ruling mechanic for something like that would break my immersion entirely. Yet, there is a cognitive gap there if what we want for the game is "realism", verisimilitude and grittyness.

I prefer to think that roleplaying is independent from the rules, and that if you really need the rules for immersion purposes, the rules should be subservient of the roleplaying aspect and not otherwise. Which is why I never felt 4e as immersion breaking, even if it has stuff like martial characters having Daily powers (which some say makes no sense when all you do is swing a sword).

 

[GuardianLurker]

I prefer to think that roleplaying is independent from the rules, and that if you really need the rules for immersion purposes, the rules should be subservient of the roleplaying aspect and not otherwise.

Bingo. And for the most part, they are. But can you imagine a rule that did that so poorly, that the best you could do is ignore it, and the worst that it the RP unfun?

There are sad to say, many ways to achieve that unfortunate state. What the OP was probing for, I believe, are the ones that do so by breaking your mental model of the game(world).

 

[Red Castle]

Funnily enough, for me, when I started playing in 2nd edition, we used to play that every damage was a physical injury, but that’s what brought a logical gap to fill, forcing me to make some mental gymnastic to justify it. For me, making every damage a physical injury didn’t make a lot of sense. I could hardly explain how someone could survive a hit from a giant, a bite from a dragon or multiple sword hit that would have killed ten times a lower level character… so even before 4e clearly went this way, me and my group already started interpreting HP in a more abstract way, that it could be fatigue, morale or many other things instead of just and always physical damage… this abstraction is what helped us make the most sense out of a mecanic that was clearly just there for gaming purpose.

 

[Pedantic]

Yeah, I would argue that 4e actually does a pretty good job at a certain type of verisimilitude. When you are talking about "do the mechanics support in game fiction that emulates heroic fantasy".

For some people "roleplaying" and "imerseiveness" is highly tied to characters abilities that directly map to in fiction abilities. So they want to always think like the character POV and have a suit of abilities that the character would fully be aware of. I can see the appeal of this, but it also tends to limit the modeling of certain things (e.g., martial abilities that rely on narrative control, limited use martial abilities, etc.).

I've pushed for a mechanical understanding of "immersion" based around this for a while. You get to a game's immersion by measuring the distance between player and character decision making. More immersive games have less space, less immersive games have more.

 

[bert1001 fka bert1000]

I've pushed for a mechanical understanding of "immersion" based around this for a while. You get to a game's immersion by measuring the distance between player and character decision making. More immersive games have less space, less immersive games have more.

I'd rather call that connection something else. If that was the definition, I don't think the most immersion is necessarily the best goal.

For me the desired immersion is more about "does the game easily allow for in fiction situations that emulate the type of character actions, situations, genre and world I'm playing in".

So, despite the dissociated mechanics of FATE, I have had many "immersive" games with that system. The characters can do anything they should be able to do, situations occur that reinforce the type of world you are in, etc.

I'm still playing mostly from character POV and the player / character decision making is most of the time fairly tight. But when I step out of that player-character tightness, and as player spend the FATE point to say there is a friend on the inside of this prison we need information from because I have "friends in low places" aspect it doesn't decrease my immersion, it reinforces and bolsters it.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Hit points are honestly a bad example. That exact same back and forth has been going on for 40 bleeping years. HP are a bad cognitive mapping, because there's absolutely nothing simulationist in them. They're purely gamist. And to badly mangle a paraphrase, they suck, but they're less painful to the fun than anything else that's been tried.

I disagree. I can think of a lot of paradigms I find more fun than D&D hit points, but all are aimed at specific types of game. The only thing I find good about hit points is that you can push them to the back of your mind and not think about them.

I've pushed for a mechanical understanding of "immersion" based around this for a while. You get to a game's immersion by measuring the distance between player and character decision making. More immersive games have less space, less immersive games have more.

And I've pushed for two things regarding immersion:

• That it's not a property of the game so much as it is a property of the specific relationship between the player and the game
• And that it's multi-dimensional and different things matter to different people at different times.

For example I find a 3.X fighter to be incredibly un-immersive. I'm thinking about walking up to someone and attacking them with only one type of attack that I've built up and am going to spam. This is not at all the way I think when armed with a sword and in a skirmish (former re-enactor here); AD&D can get away with this by basically fast forwarding, but 3.X can't. Instead hitting someone with a sword is the least of the things I'm thinking about. Instead positioning and movement (both in respect to people and terrain), trying to outflank, pacing, not becoming predictable (unless I'm trying for a trap), and more are all on my list. 4e AEDU martial powers aren't exactly what I think of but contain reasonable elements of these things and so are far far closer than 3.X Whirlwind Trip (or even just spam attack) nonsense. 3.X gets one line, while 4e lands in the vicinity of a multi-dimensional thing.