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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mad_Jack" data-source="post: 7036813" data-attributes="member: 6750306">For me, it'd be like watching television or a movie - any suspense or tension is there because I'm viewing the character in the third person. I don't know what's going on with them physically or in their head, and that causes the tension because I don't know how they'll react from second to second except by watching it happen. I can only make guesses.The problem with those rules becomes that, in the game, I am the character, the one making those second-to-second decisions, and not just reacting to what I'm seeing on the screen - it's an entirely different kind of immersion.One is a passive thing - the emotional investment is due to the character's previous actions and decisions (which were determined by someone else) and the tension is because of the uncertainty of what will happen next and the fact that I have no control over it. The emotional investment in the other is due to the fact that I was the one who made all the previous decisions and that is what has brought the character to the current moment. The tension is due to having the responsibility of deciding what the character does next and the possible consequences of it. In D&D you just can't remove the game from the game, no matter how hard you try. Those numbers are my immersion. Now you could argue that the mechanical numbers don't mean anything until I hit zero and drop, but the narrative reason that I don't suffer any penalties is because the character is a Big Damn Hero in a life-or-death situation who's going to keep going 100% and give his all until he literally has no more to give.Is that unrealistic? When I was fifteen, I got into a fight. A guy almost cracked my skull with a tire iron. I knew damn well he'd just given me a concussion and I was about to pass out. I could have just fallen down and laid there on the ground, but he was going to go after my friends next. Friends who weren't as tough as I was, who couldn't fight as well as I could. Instead of falling down, my adrenaline surged and I shrugged off the blow temporarily and took the tire iron away from him - who knows, maybe I've taken a level in fighter or barbarian. Rocky Balboa spends every single fight stumbling around, getting the crap beaten out of him, before he finally remembers in the one-hundred-and-tenth round that he hasn't used his Second Wind and Action Surge yet. I need more than a vague description of how hurt I am to accurately portray my character - "39 out of 60" is a shorthand code worth paragraphs of description to my imagination, but "starting to get winded" doesn't tell me very much about how my character should react... Does that make me fight even harder? Do I consider retreating? If I know for a fact that my character is going to go down on the next hit, I'm a hell of a lot more likely to try something suicidally brave and heroic, or to flee for my life, then if I'm "on my last legs". If I decide to fight defensively or try to withdraw based on my best estimate of how badly I might be hurt, and the opponent simply kills me anyway, it's not nearly as memorable.I look at those numbers and then make my choices based on what my character would do in that specific moment. As an actor, you're taught that you can't play adjectives, only verbs. I can't play "Heroic" (would I just stand there striking a pose?) but I can portray "Struggling Heroically". How am I supposed to honestly portray the scene if I'm not given specific circumstances upon which my characters motivations can act?Now, I'm all for not necessarily knowing precisely how badly other characters or monsters are hurt, since that's something my character can only make an educated guess at. He can't know the precise circumstances of that situation because he's just watching it (like it was on tv) - he can only make an educated estimate based on his own perceptions of it.But not knowing how many hit points my own character has left in a similar situation, not having that crucial bit of detail... It's the difference between an actor in the scene telling me, "I say something that makes you angry.", and him yelling, "Your mother's a ##&$&$*$!!!!"...</blockquote>

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