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<blockquote data-quote="Tequila Sunrise" data-source="post: 6596817" data-attributes="member: 40398">Yeah, sorry, this is just me being playful with words to talk about D&amp;D's wizards-can't-heal tradition.Agreed on pretty much all counts, and that sounds like a great game design strategy. My point is that dissociative mechanics are only one variety of 'Er, what exactly does this mean in the game world?' stuff that can jar players during actual play.No, I'm quite happy to leave them as open questions, because the answers aren't important. I'm throwing these questions out to demonstrate how full of immersive hurdles D&amp;D has been from the start. Your willingness to invent explanations for -- or to rationalize, as you say -- many of the traditional questions matches the subjective state of things that you point out. Gamers tend to internalize explanations for many of these questions when they're young, when things are fresh and new and before they develop critical thinking skills. Sometimes even to the point of conflating explanations they learned from their first DM with missing textual explanation. I did it, and I'm sure you did too.But then we get older, and we lose a certain amount of adaptability. New questions no more difficult to answer than old questions become deal-breakers because we're comfortable with the familiar, and lack the mental energy to assimilate the new. And this is where 4e overstepped, as you say, with many traditional D&amp;Ders. Too much too soon, as it were.Your acceptance of optional X/day abilities is totally understandable, btw, and your explanation of Stunning Fist being a supernatural ability is essentially how I explain daily and encounter exploits. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="Tequila Sunrise, post: 6596817, member: 40398"] Yeah, sorry, this is just me being playful with words to talk about D&D's wizards-can't-heal tradition. Agreed on pretty much all counts, and that sounds like a great game design strategy. My point is that dissociative mechanics are only [I]one variety[/I] of 'Er, what exactly does this mean in the game world?' stuff that can jar players during actual play. No, I'm quite happy to leave them as open questions, because the answers aren't important. I'm throwing these questions out to demonstrate how full of immersive hurdles D&D has been from the start. Your willingness to invent explanations for -- or to rationalize, as you say -- many of the traditional questions matches the subjective state of things that you point out. Gamers tend to internalize explanations for many of these questions when they're young, when things are fresh and new and before they develop critical thinking skills. Sometimes even to the point of conflating explanations they learned from their first DM with missing textual explanation. I did it, and I'm sure you did too. But then we get older, and we lose a certain amount of adaptability. New questions no more difficult to answer than old questions become deal-breakers because we're comfortable with the familiar, and lack the mental energy to assimilate the new. And this is where 4e overstepped, as you say, with many traditional D&Ders. Too much too soon, as it were. Your acceptance of optional X/day abilities is totally understandable, btw, and your explanation of Stunning Fist being a supernatural ability is essentially how I explain daily and encounter exploits. :) [/QUOTE]

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