I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
Tony Vargas said:I've heard this argument before, and it doesn't hold water for me, because it blows a very small aspect of TTRPG rules out of all possible proportion.
The issue is that the gulf between player and character in a TTRPG is already so vast, that the ability to overcome that gap and achieve immersion cannot possibly be consistently, irretrievably foiled by something as obscure and trivial as a 'dissociated mechanic.'
I mean, if you're trying to get under the exoskeleton of your Thri-Kreen character in Dark Sun - to achieve 'immersion' in the imagined role of a giant insect slowly cooking to death under the brutal heat of an alien sun - while sitting around a table in an air-conditioned FLGS, sipping cold mountain dew, eating twizzlers and rolling dice with your fellow gamer geeks, and you actually /do/ it, you have one kick-ass imagination. And to claim that you /cant/ do so if your ability to unleash a flurry of claw attacks is 1/encounter instead of not existing at all, is more than a little implausible. It's like the suspension of an ATV being wrecked because, between off-roading over huge rocks, it hit a small pothole on a short stretch of paved road.
I understand this phenomenon ("So this little niggling detail collapses your entire construct?") as the vagaries of personal subjective experience. There's no objective threshold for what should or should not collapse an experience, and people view these things very differently. Just because you like numbers and patterns doesn't mean you're obligated to like sudoku, and an otherwise universal hatred of construction toys won't mean you don't enjoy LEGO. If encounter powers kill it for someone, okay, that's real and its legitimate and its acceptable and the useful conversation usually is about how and where and why and in what ways (to tease out the underlying, perhaps subconscious reasons). Conversation about how they're being arbitrary about it is possibly counter-productive (you don't want people getting defensive about their reactions), and at the very least just baldly unuseful (what, people's preferences when viewed in the abstract tend to be arbitrary? Well, sure, mine and yours and everyone else's, too).
Maybe. There are a lot of ways to express yourself in an RPG. If you're playing a pre-gen, it might be through interpreting the character like an actor given a role in a play. The amount of customization doesn't matter.
Though it's a distinctly different kind of fun. If you're big on character gen as a way you enjoy D&D in Expressive mode, pregens are a non-starter for you. There's PLENTY of folks 'round here who will tell you they've never used pregens because making a character is an essential part of playing D&D to them, probably for just this reason.
Given that, it's surprising TTRPGs aren't more popular. By their very nature, they can deliver on either or both of these ideas in a big way.
Most games deliver a LOT of kinds of aesthetics at various different moments of play. D&D specifically has a bit of a problem because there's lots of disagreement over aesthetic should be core (ie, the REASON you play D&D), because it has historically been all over the place and open to individual drift. Some people played it to tell a story, some people played it to be a character, some people played it to face the challenge of monsters or to get surprised by random generation tables. 5e can't even come out and say "D&D is a game about telling stories" without dozens of voices who have never played D&D for that reason going to the message boards in unison.
While I think there's certainly some value in applying a theory like this to RPGs - and in developing RPG-specific theories like DNS - I don't think that value lies primarily in giving people thoughtful-sounding excuses for dumping on games other folks are enjoying. It was sad seeing this sort of stuff abused in the edition war. It'd be nice to see it used more positively in 5e...
Yeah, the primary value I see in the kind of academia I like to apply is that it tends to help me understand what is happening on a design level when someone says something like "4e is too videogamey!" Why that perception occurred, what might be the reasons for not liking that, what might be the reasons for not minding that or embracing that...I feel like I understand the hidden nuances there a little better.
The Forge gets under my skin sometimes because a lot of it just reads like extra layers of obfuscating jargon (which, yeah, academics can, too -- "Abnegative Aesthetics" is hardly neutrally comprehensible) that is kind of incoherent (ask ten different people what Fortune in the Middle is, get ten different responses), and allso tends to come across a little judgy in practice (Oh, you're simulationist, of course you wouldn't enjoy the rarefied air of player empowerment mechanics with your process-sim limitations that just want to turn physics into game mechanics.). But I may be unfairly maligning the group due to an exposure to only some elements of it in certain contexts. I've never felt the need to rely on their explanations, anyway.
Tom Bitoni said:Or from yet another perspective: Realistic or not, ability descriptions provide a model for an imagined world, with a lot of fun to be had adding detail to the descriptions. Then, the descriptions are a key value, together with the mechanical processes behind them. In my view, a lot of what wrong with 4E was that value was diminished.
Sure. If I were to push a little bit into the psychology of it, I'd ask maybe something like "Okay, what happens at the table when the description is radially divergent from the effect? What if D&D had an ability whose description was Divine energy flows into your wounds, knitting tissue and bone and flesh, while a cooling breeze washes over you, and it did 3d10 damage and forced you to save or die?...what would that ruin, if you played a game where that happened?"
In digging into the thing it wrecks, I might get a sense of what you're actively looking for, and I could know if it fits into one of the typical aesthetics and then probably be able to figure out how that game could be better designed to nail the aesthetics you're actually looking for.
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