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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5628849" data-attributes="member: 54877">The wall of fire ping pong scenario probably is a self-reinforcing cycle, though not necessarily one where immersion is a primary factor.  Immersion would, of course, be damaged for a lot of people if such a scenario recurs, but even the shallow immersionist will push back against that, rather than be reinforced by it. For shallow immersion and metagaming to be self-reinforcing, the metagaming has to contribute positvely to the shallow immersion.  I believe this is at least part of what pemerton has aluded to in his actual play examples.  The ping pong scenario strikes me more as a case of:  1) Playing the roleplaying for laughs, or 2) Playing the game as a tactical skirmish game.  As I've said many times, play any version of D&D (or most RPGs) as a board game, and you will get a board game.  In fairness, too, it might be something besides those two.  I'm just guessing from a limited report. I can say that when our high school group played Tomb of the Lizard King, using AD&D 1E, that most of it was roleplaying, but the whole 5th level was a combination of both of those things--farce as skimish game--when the druid player realized that his wall of fire could be maintained indefinitely, with concentration.  All the rest of the group had to do was protect them while they slowly walked through the rest of that level, and burned everything they found, combustible treasure included. <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" /> Depending on the game, it might be a different kind of board game, and some might be more enjoyable than others, but I hardly think it an indictment of AD&D 1E that my high school buddy and I, when limited to just us instead of the whole group, like to roll up random dungeons gradually and explore them with characters, to see how far we could get.  It was, in effect, a pre-computer version of Net Hack or Rogue, with a mere patina of rolepalying. As for any inherent quality of 4E compared to previous versions, it is relatively speaking, very anti-simulationist, considerably more pro-narrative (though, selectively), more unabashed in its use of metagaming options, and prone to stripping the pretense out of its abstractions (in favor of clarity).  All of this is probably going to make it not a good fit for people who value lots of immersion (whether depth or duration), particularly those for whom previous versions of D&D's gamist tendencies had not already driven off into other systems.  For those with some (but not exclusive) narrative and selective shallow immersion tendencies, the opposite is true.</blockquote>

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