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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9676970" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Agreed. Often, I find high detail does make it easier to believe the thing is grounded. But sometimes, high detail becomes distracting. That can happen by calling attention to itself, especially if it's high detail on things A/C/D and low detail on things B/E/F etc. But it can also happen even if the detail is well-distributed...but clearly nonsensical, which is going to vary a lot from person to person. I'm a physics guy, and to a lesser extent a philosophy guy (though I cannot hold a candle to the actual philosophers here like pemerton). So if I hear of overtly ridiculous physics in detail, it's gonna stick in my craw badly (I often have this happen with societies where their water and/or food sources don't make sense), or if there's a legal system or belief system built on dodgy exploitable rules that were clearly put together by an amateur.I usually try to keep comments about that to myself if it crops up in a game, because I know it's bad form to be the "WELL, AKSHULLY..." unless the problem is truly overwhelmingly egregious (and I try to err on the side of caution for what counts as such).This is one of the reasons why I put forward the notion, previously, that using systems one is unfamiliar with can directly create a feeling of non-verisimilitude completely unrelated to the actual rules themselves or their origin. Until you know a system like the back of your hand, you're gonna be needing to check what the system expects relatively frequently. That pulls one's headspace out of the fiction to deal with the meta, as you put it. Totally unrelated to whether the system is new or old chronologically--it's whether it's familiar or unfamiliar to the user. As a good example, I really really don't grok what people mean when they say that playing old-school games means you stop "thinking with your character sheet". Because on the one hand...that isn't how I played 4e. Yet on the other, when I did play an OSR game (Labyrinth Lord, specifically)....I saw a lot of what seemed to me like playing from one's character sheet, just with things that were bought or carried rather than things that were learned or practiced. And, at least for me, it felt hard to get into my character's headspace (even though I was playing a pretty standard character type for me--the GM was a rock, no complaints about him or his conduct), specifically because I was constantly second-guessing whether stuff I wanted to do made sense within the rules of LL. Not knowing its systems, I often had to check rules again before making any decisions. Further, I was feeling pretty lost with the rules at times because of the...well, if I'm being uncharitable, what felt like intentional obscurantism in the rules, but a more charitable way to put it is the intentional avoidance of unified mechanics and instead creating bespoke ones for each major need.</blockquote>

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