Quote from: Benoist;388655Actually, yes, but through them, what's really to blame IMO is the end of the 60s onward. Discussed about this yesterday evening on the net, and then extensively with my wife. We were trying to figure out what exactly changed so radically with the 90s, and it's actually my wife who gasped and said "the parents. The age braket. These are the children of people active in the late 60s".

*sigh*
And who let them be this way?  Blame the survivors of WW2, who went through hell.

But that's becasue you can always find a parent to child cause and effect going back to the beginning of time.  I'm more of a 'speed of data transfer/infection' believer.

Quote from: LordVreeg;388670*sigh*
And who let them be this way?  Blame the survivors of WW2, who went through hell.

I shouldn't have emphasized the blame in my post. I didn't mean to claim the problem is simpler than it really is, or even that it has a definite, quantifiable answer.

Quote from: Akrasia;388666I'm curious, then, about cases in which the same group plays two different games, and finds one game to be more 'immersive' (conducive towards immersive experiences, or whatever) than the other.  The only variable seems to be the game mechanics in question, since everything else (players, even the campaign setting in some cases) is constant.

I've had this experience, and a friend of mine in LA noticed this when his group switched systems (in his case to 4e).

I experienced this myself first hand as well when my group switched from 3.5 to 4e DnD.

Quote from: Benoist;388671I shouldn't have emphasized the blame in my post. I didn't mean to claim the problem is simpler than it really is, or even that it has a definite, quantifiable answer.

Have you considered the possibility that irony is:

• Not new.

and

• Not a problem.

Because seriously, we had the entire Cynics movement - people who ironically stopped bathing or wearing clothes - back in Ancient Greece. Also, extreme sarcasm is awesome. And by awesome, I mean totally sweet.

So why do you think that irony is new or problematic? Have you considered that perhaps you have allowed nostalgia to cloud your judgement, causing you to lambaste "kids these days" in a manner which is not only unfair, but laughably so?

-Frank

Quote from: FrankTrollman;388674Have you considered that perhaps you have allowed nostalgia to cloud your judgement, causing you to lambaste "kids these days" in a manner which is not only unfair, but laughably so?

-Frank

I have considered it yes, and ultimately rejected it. Many a time, actually. Just because you want to make a "kids these days" simplified reading of my post doesn't mean that's what my post meant. But by all means, joke away.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;388674Have you considered the possibility that irony is:

• Not new.

and

• Not a problem.

Because seriously, we had the entire Cynics movement - people who ironically stopped bathing or wearing clothes - back in Ancient Greece. Also, extreme sarcasm is awesome. And by awesome, I mean totally sweet.

So why do you think that irony is new or problematic? Have you considered that perhaps you have allowed nostalgia to cloud your judgement, causing you to lambaste "kids these days" in a manner which is not only unfair, but laughably so?

-Frank

There is a cycle, which was my first point.
My second point is that the level of information transfer is unprecedented and increasing, which throws a spanner into the works of the cycle being the answer.  

Irony is not new.  The level that it transfers, the age in which it is learned, the mediums it moves through, and the ubiquity...this is new.

Quote from: LordVreeg;388682There is a cycle, which was my first point.
My second point is that the level of information transfer is unprecedented and increasing, which throws a spanner into the works of the cycle being the answer.  

Irony is not new.  The level that it transfers, the age in which it is learned, the mediums it moves through, and the ubiquity...this is new.

That I can agree with. We are, after all, Running Out of Past.

-Frank

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;388541Yes, it certainly doesn't, because as I've said several times, I don't think there are such things as dissociated mechanics, merely dissociated experiences.

So when you say "dissociated mechanic" you actually mean "dissociated experience". And when you say "dissociated mechanics" you mean "something that breaks immersion" instead of "mechanics which have no association with the game world; mechanics for which the characters have no functional explanations" (which is the definition everybody else in the thread is using).

Well, OK. I can see why you're having difficulty participating in this discussion.

In the future, I recommend not attempting to use radically different definitions of terminology without telling anybody that you're doing it. In fact, I'd recommend against radically redefining terminology just the heck of it in general.

If you mean "something that breaks immersion", just say that. Or make up a new term for it if you feel it's critically important. Trying to redefine another term in the same discussion which means something completely different is just needlessly disruptive and counter-productive.

QuoteAudiences do have immersive experiences as well as actors.

And here you're doing it again. The term "immersion" when applied to roleplaying games has had a rather specific definition for more than a decade now. The experience being described (specifically immersion in the role being played) cannot be experienced by the audience. By definition.

This sort of "I'm deliberately miscommunicating" tactic you're employing combined with your fake-quoting and blatant strawmanning makes you look like a troll.

But I'm going to assume that's accidental. Which means in the future I'm going to assume that when you use a term with a pre-existing definition that you are, in fact, using it according to its defined meaning. If it turns out you are still deliberately trolling the thread by attempting to re-define common terminology, I'm afraid you'll have no one to blame but yourself.

Quote from: CRKrueger;388584The problem is, where don't you read one of these great skill challenges?  In the rulebooks, where they appear highly dissociative.  People can change them, sure, but the 4e crowd want their cake and eat it too.  They want to be able to defend the system by showing how they've altered the RAW, and yet claim that the RAW isn't dissociative because it can be changed into one of their great examples.  :huhsign:

I'll be honest: I have absolutely no idea what the current rules for skill challenges are. I know that within just a few weeks of 4th Edition being released they had been errata'd to create a radically different set of mechanics. I have been led to believe that they have received even more errata since then. I also know that skill challenges as they appeared in the core rulebooks; in the errata; in H1; and in H2 were all radically different from each other.

So for all I know, the current rules for skill challenges require you to head down to the local red light district and buy a prostitute for your DM before the skill challenge can be successfully climaxed.

My general criticism of skill challenges is limited to the version found in the core rulebooks, Keep on the Shadowfell, and the first round of errata.

Insofar as there may or may not be a wider understanding of "skill challenge" to mean "anything we want that term to mean today", my criticism doesn't apply to it. It only applies to the specific mechanics I've looked at (and particularly those mechanics published in the core rulebooks of 4th Edition).

Quote from: StormBringer;388606How is that whole 'engaging with bullshit arguments like they are legitimate' thing going for everyone?  I predict at least another dozen or two posts where 'rules as written' needs to be carefully explained over and over, as well as the reason it is the only way to discuss matters related to the rules.

It's actually been fairly productive for me. In particular, it's helped me to develop some of my ideas regarding roleplaying games vs. storytelling games.

I am, however, beginning to wonder why I'm still participating, however. It seems to be trending back towards cesspool.

Quote from: Akrasia;388666I'm curious, then, about cases in which the same group plays two different games, and finds one game to be more 'immersive' (conducive towards immersive experiences, or whatever) than the other.  The only variable seems to be the game mechanics in question, since everything else (players, even the campaign setting in some cases) is constant.

I've had this experience, and a friend of mine in LA noticed this when his group switched systems (in his case to 4e).

Being unfamiliar with a system is a big obstacle to immersion, especially if you're trying to get everything "correct" from the start. IME, there's usually a period after you switch systems where people are still drawing from the expectations they had for the way things worked in the last system and still need to look things up all the time, etc. I find in a lot of cases, people simply abandon the system rather than develop the familiarity with the new system that they had with the old system.

Frex, my group just jumped from 4e to nWoD about a month and a half ago, and we're still having moments where we're pulled out of whatever we're doing trying to figure out how something works (degeneration rolls remain a point of confusion). It was like that when we started 4e, when we started Shadowrun 4e, when started Iron Heroes, and when we started 3.5 and 3.0. You've just got to spend some time getting used to it, and relax about making "mistakes".

As well, even familiarity doesn't guarantee you'll like a system. And not liking a system can be an important factor in immersion as well. I don't like Shadowrun 4e (too many dice, cover doesn't matter for shit, magic is nuts, etc.), even though I played it a bunch. I certainly found it difficult to immerse myself in a scene because of my distaste for the mechanics. But I don't think that's some inherent property of Shadowrun 4e's system. It derives from my tastes and preferences.

Quote from: J Arcane;388609No one can do anything genuine, anything with substance, just spout lame "memes" that weren't that funny the first time, and get progressively less so with age.  

It's pathetic.

I'm aware of internet-based meme culture and irony. It's just that both stopped being relevant to mainstream culture around the time that Snakes on a Plane and "I'm the Juggernaut" happened.

PS. Disco is still dead. Even irony couldn't bring it back.

Quote from: BenoistActually, yes, but through them, what's really to blame IMO is the end of the 60s onward. Discussed about this yesterday evening on the net, and then extensively with my wife. We were trying to figure out what exactly changed so radically with the 90s, and it's actually my wife who gasped and said "the parents. The age braket. These are the children of people active in the late 60s".

Is there anything we can't blame the baby boomers for? But every generation is responsible for everything in their world by the time they hit 40, if not because they changed it, then because they failed to do so.

A big part of the problem with this whole discussion is that "immersion" is so big and slippery. You want to say that "associative" mechanics are those which map directly to events or effects in the described imagined world, fine, and "dissociative" mechanics are those that don't, or are mechanics that affect the game-world in ways that are impossible for the inhabitants of the game-world to see or understand, okay, also fine.  If you want to build a chain of reasoning using those definitions, I can go with that.

But then you go on to say that dissociative mechanics inherently break immersion, and there I have a problem. It may be true for a definition for immersion that has been provided, "the player making decisions as if the player were an inhabitant of the game-world," but I think that definition sucks. Pseudoephedrine has pointed out that an audience immerses with the characters in a stage play, and he got slapped down for it, but he's right; audiences of fiction do feel immersion with fiction, it's just not immersion by the provided definition. CRKrueger has likened immersion to what an actor feels with a character, but hey--actors don't make any decisions about what their character says or does, unless they are improvising. By the provided definition, actors can not experience immersion (again, unless they are imrprovising.

So "dissociative" mechanics may break a very narrow aspect of immersion, but there's a lot more to immersion than that.

Quote from: LordVreeg;388660To some degree.  We're not that far off.
At it's most basic and most simple, metagaming is defined as, "In simple terms, using out-of-game information, or resources, to affect one's in-game decisions."

"In role-playing games, a player is metagaming when they use knowledge that is not available to their character in order to change the way they play their character (usually to give them an advantage within the game), such as knowledge of the mathematical nature of character statistics, or the statistics of a creature that the player is familiar with but the character has never encountered. In general, it refers to any gaps between player knowledge and character knowledge which the player acts upon."

Level drain is something a character might now about, and a PC can react honestly enough to it.  Conflict resolutions are the physics of combat in a world, so not necessarily.

An example would be Fate/Action Points, as described before.  They can be a fun and interesting game mechanic, deciding to have something happen, or not happen, or to have another shot at something.  Makes the game more cinematic.
But they force metagaming by their use.  "Should I make time go backward and have that spearthrust not hit me?", is not ever an in-character thought (well, for most games).  The PLayer has to decide to use expend a resource that the Player has, that the character does not have and that is not part of the in-game world.  it's not a character skill or spell or item, So this is an example of a rule that forces out-of character use.

Or so I see it.  Am I onto something, or do you think I am merely on something?

I think it's too broad. Basically, any decision made about the mechanics of the game becomes metagaming under the definition laid out above. It also means that important out-of-character knowledge becomes metagaming instead of serving to enrich and inform the characters and the world itself.

My main concern would be in genre emulation games, especially ones that do feature Drama / Fate points. Genre emulation games presuppose an out-of-character knowledge of the tropes of the genre by the players, tropes that the characters themselves don't reflect on (unless it's a comedy game).

What drama points do though, is offer players incentives to follow along with the tropes of pulp games by insulating them from some of the consequences of their actions that would follow from their behaviour in a common sense way, but are inappropriate to the genre being emulated.

For example, it would always be more sensible to plan extensively before approaching a dangerous situation, but in the pulp genre, few heroes do more than mention they have a plan before immediately executing it. Drama points allow players to mimic that, and therefore even though they involve a mechanical resource, they bring player and character expectations about how the world works closer together, rather than pushing them apart. It strikes me that shouldn't be part of a definition of "metagaming" (especially in light of the relatively pejorative use of the term "metagaming").

I'd propose a stricter definition of "metagaming", if we even must use the term, as "the prioritisation of mechanical considerations over the expectations of the players about how the in-character logic of the campaign will operate".

I think prioritisation is an important point because of what I said about drama points above. Prioritisation means that there's some disconnect between our expectations about how the world will work and what the games says to do, and we place the game above the world's logic, which I think strikes closer to both how the term is widely used, and even what your earlier proposed definition is aiming towards.

Extensively edited quote to facilitate dot-connection:

Quote from: Justin Alexander;388692So when you say "dissociated mechanic" you actually mean "dissociated experience". And when you say "dissociated mechanics" you mean "something that breaks immersion" instead of "mechanics which have no association with the game world; mechanics for which the characters have no functional explanations" (which is the definition everybody else in the thread is using).

Well, OK. I can see why you're having difficulty participating in this discussion.

In the future, I recommend not attempting to use radically different definitions of terminology without telling anybody that you're doing it. In fact, I'd recommend against radically redefining terminology just the heck of it in general.


...

And here you're doing it again. The term "immersion" when applied to roleplaying games has had a rather specific definition for more than a decade now. The experience being described (specifically immersion in the role being played) cannot be experienced by the audience. By definition.

...

Insofar as there may or may not be a wider understanding of "skill challenge" to mean "anything we want that term to mean today".

You're dancing around the core design of 4e: "Words mean whatever we want them to mean, and that meaning changes when we mean it to". All of 4e rules are littered with the use of words, that, if they were taken at what they would mean anywhere else, would lead to incredible confusion. Examples are legion, such as "Sand in the Eyes" which doesn't actually involve sand or eyes, or, heck, even the D&D name on the cover of the books, which has confused many a player of 4e.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;388692So when you say "dissociated mechanic" you actually mean "dissociated experience". And when you say "dissociated mechanics" you mean "something that breaks immersion" instead of "mechanics which have no association with the game world; mechanics for which the characters have no functional explanations" (which is the definition everybody else in the thread is using).

I don't say "dissociated mechanic" and mean "dissociated experience". I say "dissociated mechanic" in the context of demonstrating why there is no such thing and otherwise don't use it. I do talk about "dissociated experiences" as experiences at the table that break immersion, yes.

QuoteIn the future, I recommend not attempting to use radically different definitions of terminology without telling anybody that you're doing it. In fact, I'd recommend against radically redefining terminology just the heck of it in general.

I did state repeatedly what I was doing. Once again, you would have to read my posts rather than merely pretending to in order to know that.

Here, let me restate my position on "dissociated mechanics" once again, since you still have not read the multiple previous statements of it, many of which occurred on this thread's first incarnation, which you also appear not to have read:

Mechanics do not inherently possess qualities like being "dissociated", as the term is being thrown around. They only attain that sort of property based on their actual use during actual play by actual people. This means that the proper scope for discussing "dissociation" is not the rules of the game considered in a vacuum, but their use at the table, during actual play.

QuoteIf you mean "something that breaks immersion", just say that. Or make up a new term for it if you feel it's critically important. Trying to redefine another term in the same discussion which means something completely different is just needlessly disruptive and counter-productive.

Your arbitrary terminology is not sacrosanct, I regret to inform you. Especially since it is so damned defective.

QuoteAnd here you're doing it again. The term "immersion" when applied to roleplaying games has had a rather specific definition for more than a decade now. The experience being described (specifically immersion in the role being played) cannot be experienced by the audience. By definition.

Oh gosh, "by definition"! That would almost count for something had I not repeatedly and explicitly stated that the definitions were defective and did not represent actual play and needed to be corrected to account for what actually happens at the table.

I'm amazed I even need to explain why including a line like "the audience can't experience immersion" is incomprehensible in a roleplaying game, but let me give you the short version:

Players are both actors and audience at the same time in a game. If the audience can't be immersed, that it is unclear how anyone can ever be immersed except at the exact moment they are speaking in the first person. That would be an absurd conclusion, but it is entailed by "the audience can't be immersed" since the players are simultaneously audience and actors.

It is the absolutely absurd and silly conclusions that come about from the current terminology regarding immersion that cause me to regard it as defective and state that it does not  describe what actually happens at the table.

QuoteThis sort of "I'm deliberately miscommunicating" tactic you're employing combined with your fake-quoting and blatant strawmanning makes you look like a troll.

Oh, I'm definitely being nasty to Trollman, but I'm not "deliberately miscommunicating". I've repeatedly stated on this thread what I'm doing and why. Should you read my posts, as opposed to whatever you are doing to them now, you would know that.

QuoteBut I'm going to assume that's accidental. Which means in the future I'm going to assume that when you use a term with a pre-existing definition that you are, in fact, using it according to its defined meaning. If it turns out you are still deliberately trolling the thread by attempting to re-define common terminology, I'm afraid you'll have no one to blame but yourself.

"Common terminology" is a stretch. An arbitrary redefinition by a small group of people does not constitute a widespread consensus. This is especially important since, let me repeat once more, since you have ignored the multiple mentions of it in this thread:

The terminology you are using is defective because it does not describe actual play adequately. The terminology ought to be corrected.

I repeat, the terminology you are using is defective because it does not describe actual play adequately. The terminology ought to be corrected.

Quote from: two_fishes;388714A big part of the problem with this whole discussion is that "immersion" is so big and slippery. You want to say that "associative" mechanics are those which map directly to events or effects in the described imagined world, fine, and "dissociative" mechanics are those that don't, or are mechanics that affect the game-world in ways that are impossible for the inhabitants of the game-world to see or understand, okay, also fine.  If you want to build a chain of reasoning using those definitions, I can go with that.

But then you go on to say that dissociative mechanics inherently break immersion, and there I have a problem. It may be true for a definition for immersion that has been provided, "the player making decisions as if the player were an inhabitant of the game-world," but I think that definition sucks. Pseudoephedrine has pointed out that an audience immerses with the characters in a stage play, and he got slapped down for it, but he's right; audiences of fiction do feel immersion with fiction, it's just not immersion by the provided definition. CRKrueger has likened immersion to what an actor feels with a character, but hey--actors don't make any decisions about what their character says or does, unless they are improvising. By the provided definition, actors can not experience immersion (again, unless they are imrprovising.

So "dissociative" mechanics may break a very narrow aspect of immersion, but there's a lot more to immersion than that.

All good points.