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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 8150791" data-attributes="member: 87792">For me what language is immersive depends on who you are trying to immerse yourself as. A professional chef will use different language in the kitchen to a student who can't cook much beyond an egg cracked into ramen - and part of immersing as one rather than the other involves the difference between the two.For combat and to take Lord of the Rings characters as a touchstone Frodo and Pippin are combat novices who absolutely would think in terms of "ducking behind cover" and "clear shots" but do not have a strategic sight of the battlefield. By contrast Aragorn and Legolas have both been warriors for a long time and both are pretty familiar with magic - and Aragorn is a leader while Legolas is a ranged fighter.Being less overwhelmed by the combat and thinking in cleaner and more abstract and technical terms like "area denial" much of the time (it doesn't matter whether the orcs don't want to come that way because there's Legolas picking them off as they do or because the ground is a raging inferno, but you need to be thinking two steps ahead to avoid getting surrounded and some of that involves strategic streamlining) as well as ducking behind cover and clear shots is much more immersive for me for thinking like a veteran warrior who pays attention to the strategic situation.So which am I normally playing as in D&D? By the time they hit about third level your average D&D character will have been involved in more than a dozen combat encounters. Aragorn was probably involved in about a dozen combat encounters in the entire combined Lord of the Rings - and the hobbits far fewer. Even before that first level fighter in oD&D was explicitly a veteran. D&D characters are almost all veterans at combat - and like veterans in any discipline they have jargon and patterns they see.I therefore find it highly anti-immersive for D&D characters not to have specialised technical vocabularies for combat given the nature and experience of D&D characters and that combat is something they do often and that understanding can save their lives. If I were to isekai myself into D&D land I wouldn't have such an understanding until after I'd gained a few levels - but I'm not playing myself, I'm playing my character. And by third level my character is a combat veteran who should be seeing the battlefield from more than an immediate level and learning and developing jargon.That the D&D jargon and specialised vocabulary doesn't necessarily match the real world equivalent isn't a major problem. If I was roleplaying as a professional chef (despite not knowing my way round the kitchen) I'd probably be completely messing up the use of words like "spatchcocking" and have accidentally invented two types of knife. But that would be one hell of a lot more immersive than roleplaying a professional chef while having to describe each step of the process of cooking the way I'd need to as a very very amateur cook, and to describe knives by length and edge shape.To sum up immersion depends on who you are immersed as. I find having to see combat the way I would have, with only first order terms as described, seriously harmful to immersion as a D&D character rather than as myself in a D&D world. And just as in the kitchen the advanced technical vocabulary exists but I don't have to use it if RPing a novice even if I was a veteran.</blockquote>

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