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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7752732" data-attributes="member: 6873517">Heh, well it does help insofar as things declared "magic" explicitly break the "rules" of mundane reality. I think you've got the intention somewhat wrong, my intention. I really want people to stay in character as much as possible. A sense of mystery is important for that. I will play with the fourth wall a bit, of course, recognizing that it's really a bunch of players sitting around a table/logged into a VTT, but I work pretty hard for it to be there and avoid breaking immersion. This means that games that have a lot of things that break me out of that---lots of tedious arithmetic, bookkeeping, or chart consultation during the course of play would be examples---are problematic. If every turn I have to read the powers for important details, I'm constantly context-switching and not staying in the fiction. Same goes for DMing. I tend to keep track of player desires and the general direction they want their character to go in. I'll throw in opportunities for them of course, often based on conversations we might have had off-line. Players can also mention things they're looking for IC. Say, when entering a new town, the player might say "Hey, I'm interested in seeing if such-and-so merchant is here. I need to get some of that newfangled plate armor." and the bard's player says, "Sure, I'll ask around for you to see if I can get you a good deal." This happens IC. Maybe Ye Olde Towne doesn't have a good armorer... why is that? It might suggest there's an issue, or provide a direction to go. "Ye Olde Towne used to have an armorer, but Baron Sir Duke drove him out, so he moved". Of course, for something really mundane I won't waste table time on it. "I want to buy some standard adventuring gear." No need to keep track of it unless the feel of the game requires that to reinforce it. If I were playing "Fallout: The Low Level Years" then, yeah, buying rope is a problem. "Sourcing the table" gives the DM a ton of information and new directions; a skilled DM knows how to do it to keep the fiction going. You mentioned abstraction up-thread. I don't disagree that a TTRPG is abstract, but the more I'm having to fight with complicated rules (for whatever reason... badly written spells such as 3.X's Dispel Magic to impeccably written and game-balanced powers that require getting the details really right, such as many 4E powers), the more I get pulled into thinking about these things. I'll make a close analogy: I've done a good bit of home musical recording. It's very hard to flip back and forth between "engineer" mindset, which is focused on getting a quality recording free of unwanted noise and "artist" mindset focused on getting a quality performance that hits all the notes right and evokes the desired emotion. This is why it's often helpful not to have to do the engineering when you just want to play. If the tools are really good at getting out of the way, it's possible to handle both roles. If not, it's better to let someone else do part of it. Some scaffolding really helps both the player and DM. For example, one reason I like some item creation rules is that they save me from having to just make things up on the spot... "What goes into a healing potion?" "Uh... <scratches head, what did I say last time?>". As I said in a different post, I totally understand that WotC fears the CharOP/RAW rules lawyer mindset and wants to support DMs trying to avoid that, but IMO their way of fighting it by not publishing anything in certain areas isn't the way I'd go about it and has ended up being one of the more frustrating aspects of 5E. There is, of course, a sweet spot that's different for every person: Enough of the right kinds of detail, but not too much. Insufficiently detailed mechanics become boring. So for me having rules that really support and work with keeping the game IC as much as possible is the thing. Based on your posts, I think you're more of the "it's a game" kind of person. "Roll D20 for d*ck length...." Yes, I've actually heard that. I left.</blockquote>

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