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Message: <blockquote data-quote="nnms" data-source="post: 5777807" data-attributes="member: 83293">I think the sentence "Do you know what killed the immersion for me?" is the key here.There are things that make people unable to suspend their disbelief any longer.  An enemy can just side step the warrior and walk over the person he was protecting and eat them?A barbarian has certain abilities when he gets angry, but whether or not he is angry has nothing to do with when he gets the abilities?Different people do indeed find these moments of immersion death to happen at different points.  Does this mean that the causes of them don't actually exist and it's just the person's fault?  That Crazy Jerome's disappointment with previous editions in terms of not being able to properly defend people in a believable way was somehow a problem with Crazy Jerome?  Nonsense.  Herschel was totally and completely wrong about that.Fortunately, it looks like the designers of D&D Next don't share his opinion.  They recognize that things about one version of D&D might be deal breakers for some and the favorite thing of others.I think that's why they're going modular on this one.  I think there may end up being some optional subsystems with specific at the table game mode changes being measurements of duration and others without that.As for the specific thing.  That people championing simulation as a priority never get specific about what they want.  I don't think that's accurate.  Because they simply have to point to the type of play produced by most RPGs including most versions of D&D.The specific procedure looks something like this:1 - Participant (often DM) describes something of note.2 - Participant (often player) describes how their character interacts with that something.3 - Check to see if the nature of the interaction requires resolution using the game system.4 - If so, resolve with game system.5 - Return to 1.4E does this for a good portion of its play as well.  Where it breaks away from this traditional approach is when the mechanics produce effects that are disconnected from the narrative (a collection of "things of note" that have been interacted with during play).When the procedures start referencing other procedures rather than a description that is part of the narrative, you can get a massive immersion breakdown.  You've left the traditional RPG procedure and switched the personhood perspective of the player from 1st to 3rd.  And not just a 3rd person perspective on the narrative, but on the entire game procedure itself.I brought this up in another discussion (with Pemerton, I believe) when we were talking about combat being too long.  I noted that when combat gets too long, the first thing that happens to speed it up, is that the procedure that reconnects the results of 4E powers to the fiction (that is, actually narrating it) gets dropped.  Instead the mechanics reference other mechanics and play proceeds like a board game without the mechanics being connected directly to the fiction.So in the above 5 point procedure, at number 4, the number 5 part gets dropped.  A participant does not then return to 1 and narrate the result.  Instead, the game system continues with it's next process and produces more results.  Somewhere along the way, people may remember to reconnect it to the fiction or do so in their heads without expressing it to other players.  However, the ratio of described changes to the shared fiction to system references drops dramatically and entire system call procedures can start, operate and complete without being called by or returning information to the narrative description of the participants.</blockquote>

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