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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 6781913" data-attributes="member: 177">I don't think we need to point to particular games, either.  Oh, I think we have a fundamental misunderstanding here.  My suggestion isn't that D&D made people want to stay in character.  It is that D&D players will find D&D-like mechanisms less disruptive to staying in character.  Basically, folks who have engaged with a particular type of mechanic a lot will be used to it, and be able to smoothly elide over it without disruption to their concentration.  We ignore it when we are familiar with it.  Put a notably different mechanic in front of them, and they will find it disruptive.So, it isn't that any particular mechanic is necessarily more or less disruptive, in any objective (or even statistical) sense.  It is more that anything different from what you're used to will seem more disruptive. Now, this is where we can run into issues of failing to find a real root cause properly.  You can play a given system a couple or a few times, and find some mechanic in it disruptive, and then say that it is the mechanic's fault, or you just prefer other mechanics.  But a game or two really isn't enough to become fully inured to the mechanic.  It is still pretty new to you, so you have not removed a significant potential cause of the disruption.  This is why I wondered, publicly and aloud, about how much time had been spent looking at the rules, as opposed to playing with them.  Personal experience is what we'd call a "confounding factor", which gets in the way of more objective comparison.At this point, it would be perfectly reasonable to say, "I still find this mechanic disruptive, and I don't have the time to invest to get it to where it isn't disruptive, so I'm going to avoid it."  Time is precious, after all.  But if you're going to do that, you probably shouldn't argue against using the mechanic, as you're admitting insufficient experience to really know what it can do.We should expect any mechanic to be disruptive to immersion until such time as it becomes second nature, or until you find a GM that engages you so much in other ways that mechanics are a secondary concern to play.  That's going to generally be a considerable amount of play.  Hurling it back doesn't work if the person you're hurling it at claims to like *lots* of systems and mechanics.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" /></blockquote>

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