Quote from: Benoist;388022In other words: yes, dissociated mechanics are the antithesis of immersion. Role playing game systems will have some mechanics that are associated, some dissociated, and will never absolutely reach either extreme of being constituted entirely of associated or dissociated mechanics.

That's what Vreeg means. Right?

close enough.
I was running my online steel isle game at the same time.  Makes me less effective, being in two places at once.
You can't get away from some metagame rules, the game needs some.  It's just when you have a clear choice of a game that promotes in game logic, such as the type of creature that lives some where, or the type of treasure found, you want to use those rules.
Hell, when I used to give GMing pointers over 2 decades ago, i'd try to teach them to have things make sense.

Rules that fly in the face of this are the ones that destroy immersion.

Quote from: Benoist;388008Because... we're talking about role playing games?

Ah... it's a game, that explains why in the world everyone has equal capacity to play chess, go, poker, charades, trivial pursuit... oh wait. :hmm:

Not being able to "play pretend" as a child (especially in a social situation with others) is actually a sign of autism.

Really, in order to not "get" what to do in a role-playing game, you'd have to be fucked up in the head.  Literally.  Not Ron Edwards pseudo-psychology style -- there's medical research into the affects of autism on creativity, imagination, and how those things intersect with common social "play" experiences.

Now, not "getting" what the goal of play is one thing, but if you're handed a character sheet and some personality cues, and someone tells you "you're playing X guy, he's kind of like Y guy from this other thing that you know", and you draw a complete blank and have no idea what to do (to the point where you can't relate to the activity on any level), it's a sign of stunted development.

After all, roles are things we deal with everyday in social situations.  Without knowing how to employ them and "act", your social development really isn't complete.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;387990At this point, I'd like to head off a couple of likely responses at the pass:

(1) "You're saying that dissociated mechanics are bad!" No, I'm not. I'm saying they're inimical to playing a role. That's not the same thing. There's all kinds of things that dissociated mechanics can be useful for. When playing an RPG, most of us have agendas beyond simply "playing a role". (Telling a good story, for example. Or emulating a particular genre trope.) And dissociated mechanics have been put to all sorts of good use in accomplishing those goals.

This becomes even more true when we consider that many things we call roleplaying games would probably be more accurately described as "storytelling games". (Wushu, for example. White Wolf's Storyteller, on the other hand, is an RPG. Which is why this useful distinction of terminology will probably never prove functional.)

(2) "You're saying that 4th Edition isn't a roleplaying game!" No, I'm not. Large swaths of 4th Edition's mechanics are still clearly associative and I feel perfectly comfortable in describing the result as an RPG.

But it's equally true that the plethora of dissociated mechanics in 4th Edition make the game entirely unsuitable for those of us who, at best, want a very light spicing of situational dissociated mechanics. You can't do much of anything in 4th Edition without having your roleplaying disrupted by dissociated mechanics. (Particularly since the core mechanic of skill challenges are inherently dissociated in their design.)

Which is fine if those dissociated mechanics are serving some function you find valuable. In the case of 4th Edition's dissociated mechanics, I don't find this to be true. In the case of Wushu or 3:16 - Carnage Amongst the Stars, I do. To some extent this is because I'm looking for something very different from D&D than I'm looking for in 3:16. But to a larger extent it's because I feel that everything 4th Edition does with dissociated mechanics could just as easily be done without dissociated mechanics (and more usefully so).

But that's a separate debate.

This part of Justin's post sums up my own position on this. Good job, sir.

Quote from: Peregrin;388031Not being able to "play pretend" as a child (especially in a social situation with others) is actually a sign of autism.

Really, in order to not "get" what to do in a role-playing game, you'd have to be fucked up in the head.

I'm not talking about "get" as much as "get into".  Everyone likes music, but some people really get into music and it the music they listen to becomes an important part of their lives.  Some people get into literature more then others.  Some people are avid movie-goers, others will catch the movie on cable if it happens to come on when they have free time.  Even actors have different schools of acting they identify with.

Why is roleplaying any different...it's not.
Some people get into tactical aspects of combat more then others.  Some people get into sandbox play more then others, some people get into dungeoneering more then others.  Some people get into immersion more then others.

If you really get into immersion, 4e and it's highly dissociative mechanics aren't for you.  If you don't get into immersion as much, you probably can't figure out why 4e bothers some people so much.  40,000 threads aren't going to let one side see the other's position.  People are just wired differently.

No one's brain-damaged, no one's autistic, no one's insane, people just experience table-top role-playing in different ways.

Quote from: jibbajibba;387978That some people on here think that those that chose to try and get in the mind of their PC and act in character have some sort of mental illlness?

Nope. However, believing that you can really "become" the character is right up there with thinking you're Napoleon.

Seanchai

Quote from: CRKrueger;388007Does it really surprise anyone that the 4e ideologues seem incapable of understanding immersion?

I think they understand it well enough. They just don't need to shape it into a weapon, thus their use of the term, their definitions of it, etc., aren't colored by said need.

Seanchai

Well, that seems pretty conciliatory, but I still disagree. 4E is just as "immersive" as any game that uses dice and character sheets, and the distinction itself is bullshit.

Skill challenges were held up as the central dissociative theme and implied as mandatory parts of 4E  a second ago, but all they really are is a way arrange plain old skill checks, and (perhaps more importantly) aren't in any way mandatory...I've seen and run plenty of games where no skill challenges took place. Wish lists were held up as a central immersion breaking theme yesterday and those are also completely not mandatory.

The real issue is this: It's D&D, and D&D ain't serious. THAT breaks your immersion.  D&D (without plenty of changes) is not a game of personal introspection, historical reenactment or amateur melodrama. It's a game about adventure, and not particularly realistic adventures either. D&D is the animated series, the action movie, the silver-age comic book. It doesn't try to be anything else, and while some people don't appreciate that and have some other ideas? That's for them to pursue. No excuses for "just not liking it" are even necessary.

Oh by the way, that's at the core of the resentment against video games too.

So..whats the big problem? There actually isn't a big problem. The players like it, the guys who don't like it, aren't being forced to play, so in a mature world we should all be fine.

However some people do like to turn these terms and simple differences into something very hostile, and then feel as if they have to justify a never-ending litany of things they don't like, and are openly resentful of other peoples enjoyment. At that point, any excuse, any bullshit swine term-- will do.

It's tragic in that nobody actually needs an invented excuse not to like anything. People can simply like what they like (and dislike what they dislike..) and there's no need for any conflict.

Quote from: Seanchai;388069Nope. However, believing that you can really "become" the character is right up there with thinking you're Napoleon.

Seanchai

About a year before the end of 3.5 I ran my last major campaign and I advertised in a couple of places and got a number of emails and things from potential new players. One of the guys wrote that he "never broke character" before or after the game, and that he enjoyed wearing costumes, and would need the campaign to have certain details.

Also, he didn't drive, so he'd need a ride, to and from the game.

Ok, so it's funny right now, but whenever I hear about the super immersionists, I still think about that guy. Obviously it's a red flag, (nevermind that I don't have the time to handle some dude's transportation needs) but what struck me most about it is how inward-focused this guy was.

Quote from: CRKrueger;388066If you really get into immersion, 4e and it's highly dissociative mechanics aren't for you.

Or you can recognize the fact that all games are "dissociative" by their very nature, get over it, and do what you've always done while gaming...

But...nah.

Seanchai

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;388074Ok, so it's funny right now, but whenever I hear about the super immersionists, I still think about that guy. Obviously it's a red flag, (nevermind that I don't have the time to handle some dude's transportation needs) but what struck me most about it is how inward-focused this guy was.

Yeah.  That sounds incredibly anti-social.  I prefer playing with the PCs on the character sheets and the human beings at the table.

Quote from: Seanchai;388075Or you can recognize the fact that all games are "dissociative" by their very nature, get over it, and do what you've always done while gaming...

All RPGs have some dissociative mechanics, but some RPGs have more than others. Generally, the more dissociative mechanics I have to regularly deal with, the less likely I am to enjoy playing the game. The more I have to think in game terms while playing, the less I enjoy the RPG. I prefer RPGs where the rules fade into the background most of the time.

For example, I prefer games where I can say my character tries to move to the side, waits for a chance to attack the orc priest when he's not expecting it then charge him, attacking with my axe.  Having to actually move the character's figure on a battle grid, following a number of fiddly movement rules is more "game" than I want in my RPGs as I spend too much time thinking in terms of game rules than thinking in what I'm doing in the world. I also dislike games where game actions do not immediately and obviously map to real world actions without having to think up weird ways it could work.

Some dissociative things bother me more than others. An example of what may seem like a minor one (but bothered me greatly) was Gygax's idea in AD&D that PCs could not buy magic items but could sell them to NPCs (who could buy them obviously). This made no sense in the game world unless PCs worn signs that read "PC" so people in the world would know they could not sell magic items to them. The rule got dropped in my campaigns as it really did not have an in-world way of working and there were other ways to limit PC access to magic items that were not nearly so bluntly dissociative.

Some people have a higher tolerance for dissociative mechanics than others do, of course. To me, they are a huge issue that can, when taken too far for my tolerance,  totally prevent my enjoyment of a game. Older TSR versions of D&D have less than newer WOTC versions. 4e has so many dissociative mechanics (and they come up so constantly), that I have not been able to enjoy playing 4e at all. This does not mean that 4e is a bad game, just that it is a bad game for those without a fairly high tolerance for dissociative mechanics.

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;388074About a year before the end of 3.5 I ran my last major campaign and I advertised in a couple of places and got a number of emails and things from potential new players. One of the guys wrote that he "never broke character" before or after the game, and that he enjoyed wearing costumes, and would need the campaign to have certain details.

Also, he didn't drive, so he'd need a ride, to and from the game.

Ok, so it's funny right now, but whenever I hear about the super immersionists, I still think about that guy. Obviously it's a red flag, (nevermind that I don't have the time to handle some dude's transportation needs) but what struck me most about it is how inward-focused this guy was.

There seems to be a least one of these guys in every local game community.  In some cases there seems to be a running gag within these circles that "X" is someone great to play with...

P.S.  Fuck you to hell, Andy and Tom.

I talked to a guy in a convention in France years ago who actually believed the world as we know it was Mage: the Ascension. He was from the Order of Hermes. His delusions were actually pretty complex and coherent. It was really hard to follow him because he just would not shut up once you got him started. Now, with hindsight, the symptoms he was showing were reminiscent of a schizophrenic person off his meds. That's probably what it was.

Quote from: Benoist;388081I talked to a guy in a convention in France years ago who actually believed the world as we know it was Mage: the Ascension. He was from the Order of Hermes. His delusions were actually pretty complex and coherent. It was really hard to follow him because he just would not shut up once you got him started. Now, with hindsight, the symptoms he was showing were reminiscent of a schizophrenic person off his meds. That's probably what it was.

This isn't just in tabletop rpg games.  Many years ago I met some weird person who thought everything in Star Trek was for real.  Years later I found out this guy was an undiagnosed schizophrenic.