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Bridging the cognitive gap between how the game rules work and what they tell us about the setting
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<blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9226690" data-attributes="member: 8461"><p>Rounds are an interesting one, and I'd say that they're definitely worth examining in terms of the cognitive gap.</p><p></p><p>In my experience, a lot of people either actively discarded the one-minute duration of rounds in AD&D (which was the official duration in, if I recall correctly, AD&D 1st and 2nd Editions both; the first time I recall seeing an official shorter duration was the "combat round" in <em>Combat & Tactics</em> in 1995, which was ten seconds long; 3E shortened it to six seconds and made it the default), or simply never realized that it was one minute long in the first place. I personally encountered more of the latter case. Heck, I recall telling other people that there was an example of play in the AD&D 2E PHB that said how, when combat started, the game went "from ten-minute turns to ten-second rounds." I'm still not sure where I got that from.</p><p></p><p>Looking back at how the one-minute round is structured, I'm curious if the use of round segments was meant to divide that time period so that it was actually presented in smaller increments in the course of play, rather than functioning as an abstract...but from what I can tell, most people saw it as an abstraction either way, i.e. that it lent itself to the idea that attack rolls et al weren't meant to be connected to the specifics of what was happening (since the idea of only attacking once or twice over the course of sixty seconds seemed unintuitive on its face), effectively serving to widen the cognitive gap.</p><p></p><p>Speaking from personal experience, people didn't seem to care for that; even when the one-minute turn wasn't actively rejected, a lot of people who thought it was supposed to be shorter found seemed to find that to be the intuitive presumption. It's notable that I don't think I've ever even heard of an anecdote where someone assumed the opposite (i.e. that rounds were <em>longer</em> than the game said they were).</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Alzrius, post: 9226690, member: 8461"] Rounds are an interesting one, and I'd say that they're definitely worth examining in terms of the cognitive gap. In my experience, a lot of people either actively discarded the one-minute duration of rounds in AD&D (which was the official duration in, if I recall correctly, AD&D 1st and 2nd Editions both; the first time I recall seeing an official shorter duration was the "combat round" in [I]Combat & Tactics[/I] in 1995, which was ten seconds long; 3E shortened it to six seconds and made it the default), or simply never realized that it was one minute long in the first place. I personally encountered more of the latter case. Heck, I recall telling other people that there was an example of play in the AD&D 2E PHB that said how, when combat started, the game went "from ten-minute turns to ten-second rounds." I'm still not sure where I got that from. Looking back at how the one-minute round is structured, I'm curious if the use of round segments was meant to divide that time period so that it was actually presented in smaller increments in the course of play, rather than functioning as an abstract...but from what I can tell, most people saw it as an abstraction either way, i.e. that it lent itself to the idea that attack rolls et al weren't meant to be connected to the specifics of what was happening (since the idea of only attacking once or twice over the course of sixty seconds seemed unintuitive on its face), effectively serving to widen the cognitive gap. Speaking from personal experience, people didn't seem to care for that; even when the one-minute turn wasn't actively rejected, a lot of people who thought it was supposed to be shorter found seemed to find that to be the intuitive presumption. It's notable that I don't think I've ever even heard of an anecdote where someone assumed the opposite (i.e. that rounds were [I]longer[/I] than the game said they were). [/QUOTE]
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