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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5628458" data-attributes="member: 42582">Yes. Sorry, I thought that we were all on the same page about this - in fact, I though this was what The Alexandrian had in mind in saying that these mechanics require frequent and pervasive house ruling, because he's calling each of these bits of narration an episode of houseruling.You could be right about this. When I build encounters I'm generally looking at thematic content first, relying on the 4e designers to give me monsters that will (i) work well at the table, and (ii) help express or reinforce the desired themes. So the issue of worrying about the party's tactical abilities isn't normally in the front of my mind.I see the gameworld as built up out of individual scenes. I don't play in a strictly <a href="http://inky.org/rpg/no-myth.html" target="_blank">No Myth</a> fashion - first, because I use the implied setting of the 4e core books, which provides some backstory straight up; second, because I have further worked up some of the core relationships betweens gods, NPCs etc in advance of play (these notes for the campaign, which is now reaching 12th level, are about 4 A4 pages); and third, because 4e rewards at least a bit of GM prep of encounters. But I am a big fan of the approach that Paul Czege sets forth <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=1361.0" target="_blank">here</a>, although my D&D game is nowhere near is hardcore as I think Czege's games would be:when I'm framing scenes, and I'm in the zone, I'm turning a freakin' firehose of adversity and situation on the character. It is not an objective outgrowth of prior events. It's intentional as all get out. . . I frame the character into the middle of conflicts I think will push and pull in ways that are interesting to me and to the player. I keep NPC personalities somewhat unfixed in my mind, allowing me to retroactively justify their behaviors in support of this. . . the outcome of the scene is not preconceived.So what you descibe here is not a problem for me.It hasn't happened yet in the context of tactical combat resolution. That said, my party has two martial PCs, and no warlord (though it would be fun to have one!).We've had fights in which the fighter marked oozes and Footwork Lured them over pits. It didn't cause any trouble - it was just more manifestation of the PC's mastery of the halberd.<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/301282-actual-play-examples-balance-between-fiction-mechanics.html" target="_blank">These two skill challenges</a> caused a bit of a furore online after I posted the actual play report, but didn't cause any trouble at the table as far as the fiction was concerned, and (as best I can recall) the play of them was overwhelmingly in first person narrative (ie player speaking as PC). But not completely, as the actual play report indicates (ie there were some meta-discussions between me and some of the players to help clarify what exactly it was that they envisaged their PCs doing.)I still think that this is the core issue. For those with simulatinist priorities, the potential for "dissociation" is the problem - as Jameson Courage noted upthread.Whereas unrealised potential don't bother me here, any more than (for example) BryonD seems to be worried by the potential, in 3E, for mid-to-high level PCs to reliably survive ridiculously high falls.Well "dissociation" is, by definition, in someone's head! It is the state of having your immersion disrupted - a mental state.It's true that it doesn't show that you don't have your immersion disrupted by certain mechanics. But it's equally true, in my view, that it shows that the mechanics that disrupt your immersion don't have that property in any inherent way - they affect some players some ways, and other players other ways.Well, what exactly "immersion" is when you talk about it I'm not sure. As I said upthread, it's not an analytic category I use very much, but (now that I am starting to) I see it in terms of the player "inhabiting" the PC - speaking in first person, expressing the PC's feelings, acting on the basis of the PC's felt emotions.And I don't think that there are mechanics that tend, in general, to facilitate this or impede it. I mean, maybe we can think of some mechanics that probably would - cook 5 flapjacks for the other players to earn a reroll, for example - but I don't know of any RPG that has mechanics that make you get up from the table like this, and spend a fairly serious effort doing something completely unrelated to the game or to the progress of the fiction.I think it is going to depend on particular participants' prior experiences, their expectations, heck, even their moods on the day. The HeroQuest rules, for example, have this example (I can't remember which edition, and I'm paraphrasing a bit, or maybe even mashing a couple of examples together):Suppose your cowboy PC has Fast Runner 18, and your horse has Gallop 16. That does mean that, in a contest where speed matters, you have a better ability to apply your speed than does the horse, and are more likely to win such a contest. But it doesn't mean that you're faster than your horse. If you try and frame a contest in which you and your horse compete in a race, you just lose (assuming a standard western game, rather than eg superheroic cowboys). So suppose, for example, your horse is running away. You can't catch it. In that situation, look for something else - eg use your Loyal Steed 16, matched against its Fiery Temperament 12, to call it back .Now suppose that a given table is playing a western scenario where this very event crops up. The player knows that his/her PC can't outrun his/her horse, not because the action resolution mechanics says so (the characters in HeroQuest don't have a movement rate) but because genre-based credibility constraints preclude it. Will this produce "dissociation" from the fiction - because the constraint arises from the metagame rather than the mechanics - or reinforce the fiction - because the constraint is inherent within the shared conception of the fiction being created? In the abstract, how can we know?So anyway, the player decides to use Loyal Steed instead, as per the rulebook's suggestion. Does this produce "dissociation"? Well, what is actually happening in the fiction? Is the PC whistling to his/her horse? Or does the horse just have a change of heart, like Snowy sometimes does in Tintin? Is narrating the scene one way or another more or less likely to produce immersion? Some players might find that narrating the horse's change of heart divorces them from inhabiting their PC. Others might feel that it reinforces the inhabitation of their PC, given that the loyalty of his/her horse is such a central feature of the character (a bit like the player of the paladin in my game narrating something the Raven Queen did as part of reinforcing his inhabitation of his religiously devoted PC).Implausibility and untenability are relative, I think.And part of what is causing me to disagree with you is that you haven't produced any actual play examples, or even hypotheticals that treat the participants in the game, and their engagement in the narrative task, in a sympathetic light. (Cetainly, your marking hypothetical does not do this.)So from my point of view, you seem to be jumping at shadows. And as I've said, those shadows matter if you have simulationist priorities, but otherwise don't.As I've said in my exchanges with Jameson Courage, I think that "dissociation" is inherenlty relative - ie "these mechanics get in the way of my immersion". To the extent that you think the notion has non-relative content - ie that there is a genuine class of mechanics that has, for all or even most RPGers, a tendency to disrupt immersion/engagement with the fiction - then I don't agree and still contend that it is a pseudo-concept.As I've said in several posts, what I see in the original essay (where perhaps it is malicious) and also in your posts (where it doesn't seem malicious, but seems to me to demonstrate a lack of familiarity with non-simulationist play), is a complaint against non-simulatonist mechanics. Which is fine - as I said way upthread, a potentially interesting biographical fact about The Alexandrian. But there is nothing objectively meritorious or special about simulationist play.And at least as I'm trying to make sense of immersion, I'm not sure that simulationist play has an especially tight connection to immersion. Ron Edwards has <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/4" target="_blank">this</a> to say about immersion and stance:Immersion is another difficult issue that often arises in Stance discussions. Like "realism" and "completeness" and several other terms, it has many different definitions in role-playing culture. The most substantive definition that I have seen is that immersion is the sense of being "possessed" by the character. This phenomenon is not a stance, but a feeling. What kind of role-playing goes with that feeling? The feeling is associated with decision-making that is incompatible with Director or Author stance. Therefore, I suggest that immersion (an internal sensation) is at least highly associated with Actor Stance. Whether some people get into Actor stance and then "immerse," or others "immerse" and thus willy-nilly are in Actor stance, I don't know.And in the same essay he says this about stance and simulationist vs other priorities:Stance is very labile during play, with people shifting among the stances frequently and even without deliberation or reflection. Stances do not correspond in any 1:1 way to the GNS modes. Stance is much more ephemeral, for one thing, such that a person enjoying the Gamist elements and decisions of a role-playing experience might shift all about the stances during a session of play. He or she might be Authoring most of the time and Directing occasionally, and then at a key moment slam into Actor stance for a scene. The goal hasn't changed; stance has. However, I think it's very reasonable to say that specific stances are more common in some modes/goals of play. Historically, Author stance seems the most common or at least decidedly present at certain points for Gamist and Narrativist play, and Director stance seems to be a rarer add-on in those modes. Actor stance seems the most common for Simulationist play, although a case could be made for Author and Director stance being present during character creation in this mode. These relative proportions of Stance positions during play do apparently correspond well with issues of Premise and GNS. I suggest, however, that it is a given subset of a mode that Stance is facilitating, rather than the whole mode itself. Some forms of Simulationism, for instance, may be best served by Director Stance, as opposed to other forms which are best served by Actor Stance. Similarly, some forms of Narrativism rely on Actor Stance at key moments. I think Edwards is right that Actor stance, while the predominant stance for mainstream simulationist play, is by no means confined to that sort of play. Which suggests that immersion is not going to be confined to simulationist play.I also think he is right about the frequency of shifts in stance. Furthermore, as per my imagined example of playing G2 upthread, some rules - like AD&D's hit point rules - seem able to straddle Actor and Author stance simultaneously. This is probably a feature rather than a bug, at least for those who value immersion. And I think that 4e's metagame mechanics can fairly easily be played in this same sort of straddling way, where the adoption of Author stance does not require abandoning first-person narration or inhabitation of the PC, and therefore need not disrupt immersion.Well, yes. I posted to that effect on a thread about six months ago: Yes. Upthread, I indicated that, contrary to The Alexandrian, I call this playing the game rather than houseruling.Yes. I've posted about this many times in the past (see eg the second of my above self-quotes).Yes. It baffles me that anyone with purist-for-system simulationist priorities would try and make 4e work for them.</blockquote>

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