My point was this:
Can you play a game without, in any way, consciously engaging with its rules?
Because picking up a die is engaging with rules. Reading a die is engaging with rules. Writing down a newly found item onto your character sheet is engaging with rules.
Nothing even remotely like this exists when listening to a person tell a story or reading a story from a book. Books and verbal storytelling are part of how we encounter all information, so there is no difference between listening to a friend recount a real event that actually happened to them and listening to a friend tell a completely fictional story. You do not have anything even like the need to interact with a rule.
Unless you believe it is possible to play a game while never even once interacting with rules as rules, it is not possible to achieve this alleged state of perfect, unquestionable Zen union with the experience. You are, of necessity, experiencing rules upon which you project a sense of meaning and value—unless, as stated, you believe that you can play a game while never once actually interacting with a single one of its rules.
Again, no one is advocating for never engaging with the rules. It's a strawman you've brought up twice now.
The point I'm making is just that it makes sense that some players would want those rules to fade into the background. That some players' goal when playing D&D is not
to engage with the rules. And as a corollary, that "wanting to pretend they're not playing a game" is an entirely logical and desirable thing for these players, just as pretending you're not looking at words on a page is an entirely logical and desirable thing for people who read books.
The goal for these players is to move beyond the rules, just as the reader moves beyond the words written on the page.
The thing is: READING the rules of a game is not the same as PLAYING the game! Why should reading the rules of the game need the same level of detachment as playing it? When reading the rules, I'm not in the audience watching the play, I'm the actor reading the script.
Rulebooks should be clear and precise first before they try to enchant you with tales of a made up world. Having the rule book explaining clearly and plainly what a class was designed to do shouldn't diminish the immersion at the table.
I don't really disagree, but I would argue that a class should not be designed to do something so narrowly scoped as "defender." It isn't super relevant for a huge swath of your player base.
Yeah, having good defender mechanics in the game is a good thing, but it is not what the class is
for. So it shouldn't define the design.
Meanwhile what started this tangent was class roles. Class roles have no direct mechanical effect in the game (although they do have indirect effects). Objecting to class roles isn't turning up at the play and having problems because you can see the flying rig. It's turning up at the play and objecting not even to the casting but to the casting sheet.
What started this tangent was the point that some people want to play a game without thinking too much about the
game, and I pointed out that this is a valid way to engage with D&D.
The objection to roles as far as I can tell isn't an objection to having these mechanics in the game. It's an objection to strictly defining a class by these mechanics. Again, the role is not what the class is
for.
It's a little like defining an actor's role by their meta-context.
"In this play you are the Antagonist, and here's some lines that help you be the Antagonist, and your job is to interfere with the Protagonist."
No, in this play I am Iago, or Mercutio, or y'know, a whole PERSON. Yeah, I might be an antagonist as well, but that's not what I'm in this experience for. I'm in it to
role play. To pretend to be someone else. To imagine that I am them, to act as if I am them, to make choices in line with what they would do. The point is not to be an Antagonist, the point is to be someone else.
