Mechanics Cross-Pollination Thread

[The1True]

Well, let us know how it turns out. It will be interesting to hear what you decide and what the PC's do about it!

 

[TerribleSorcery]

MWAHAHAHAHAHA He failed his saving throw miserably. It's a full-on body swap! He is in the book now, and an ancient force of evil is unleashed on the world once more.....

 

[TerribleSorcery]

So what I did was, I prepared a few different options based on the wording the player elected to use. I created a 'spread' of results based on the character's save vs. spell (2nd level elf, it's 15+):

“Trade consciousness with Pheldrazash” / “He can use my body” / etc
Lothos save vs. spell: 15 (penalty of 1 due to stat difference - Magic Jar, PHB pg. 81)

01-11 - WORST - full body-swap. Lothos is stuck in the book, Pheldrazash gets his body.
12-16 - PARTIAL FAIL - 80% can’t be done, nothing happens.
20% bodies swap but not knowledge, so Pheldrazash’s spells are still in the book. They need each other. Lothos can peruse the knowledge of the book on his own, but still can’t do anything.
17-20 - SUCCESS - Lothos and Pheldrazash’s consciousnesses can ‘trade’ sometimes. Invoking Pheldrazash takes up 50% of Lothos’ spell-slots, but he can appear for various amounts of time based on the spell-levels used. Pheldrazash also gets some ‘free’ time in Lothos' body based on their level differences. I will need to work this out if he rolls this result.

The player pulled out all the bonuses he could think of, but ended up with a 10. Once I showed him the sorceror's spell-list, he was stoked. But he won't be too happy when Pheldrazash, using his body, dips out with the book (the one his character lives in now), and the PCs have to track him down to get their friend back!! But it will be a fun one for me

Having said that, the sorceror DID avoid activating a teleport trap with a timely casting of ESP. So it wasn't all bad.

 

[Beoric]

I got this link from somewhere, it might even have been here, but since it is an illustration of old school domain play in practice I thought I would mentions it here.

 

[squeen]

It was me. Other thread.

 

[squeen]

To say a bit more on this...I found myself wondering how the heck he normally plays the game. The stuff he indicates about getting the town ready for invasion, or spending a whole game without combat is fairly common in my experience---so I was surprised it felt like a revelation to him. How has the immersiveness been lost?

I do remember vividly, when I first started playing with the youngest daughter, her looking at me after one session, wide-eyed with awe and disbelief, saying: "I can see these places!".

Isn't that norm? I still have visions in my head of the places we explored 30+ years ago.

Has moving more and more of the mechanics into the players hands taken some the immersiveness away, and made it feel detached and game-y? I don't visualize Monopoly: e.g. I am not the Shoe in Depression Era America.

Sometimes, I get the suspicion that many groups do not play the same D&D game at all. Is it possible the whole thing has been railroad-ed/storied-gamed/video-gamed to the point of unrecognizably?

I wonder sometimes, but other than play with them, how can I ever really know?
Is the there a good Live Modern-Game video to watch?

Hey, check-it out! I can actual wander back on topic again:

"What mechanics detract from an immersive game experience?"​

Here's my list:

• players knowing dice modifiers
• difficulty checks/skills
• player's knowing too much about discovered/found magic (e.g. BtB items identified as such)
• BtB "safe" monsters
• rolling die out in the open
• implicit Challenge Levels (all threats are "fair")
• non-lethal
• PCs playing exotic races
• all mundane elements hand-waived away
• boring/no NPCs of note
• PCs not feeling small in a big, open-ended world (e.g. super-hero characters, one-shot dungeons, etc.)
• explicit hex crawling
• PC powerlessness (railroad)
• mass combat/domain play?
• poor DM skill (non-fluid play, quantum ogres/obvious improv/fudging, meta-game content, etc.)

Probably most important is a DM that doesn't expose his hand with loose talk.
The players should always be wondering: "How complex is the game he's running behind that screen?".

 

[squeen]

Another bit of mechanics today: Huso looks at AD&D Aerial Combat

Love this quote at the end:

Still, poor magic-users. The rules hate them. Even with my lenient method of counting casting time from beginning of round, they get interrupted quite frequently. Which is why I propose (for aerial combat) the 1 segment spell allowance. Allowing them to squeeze off only the simplest of spells during flight gives them a modicum of self-reliance outside of magical devices. In AD&D, fighters are KING by default. In my opinion, you have to throw casters a bone now and again, sometimes through encounter design; sometimes with fiat or house rulings.​

 

[Beoric]

To say a bit more on this...I found myself wondering how the heck he normally plays the game. The stuff he indicates about getting the town ready for invasion, or spending a whole game without combat is fairly common in my experience---so I was surprised it felt like a revelation to him. How has the immersiveness been lost?

I do remember vividly, when I first started playing with the youngest daughter, her looking at me after one session, wide-eyed with awe and disbelief, saying: "I can see these places!".

Isn't that norm? I still have visions in my head of the places we explored 30+ years ago.

Has moving more and more of the mechanics into the players hands taken some the immersiveness away, and made it feel detached and game-y? I don't visualize Monopoly: e.g. I am not the Shoe in Depression Era America.

Sometimes, I get the suspicion that many groups do not play the same D&D game at all. Is it possible the whole thing has been railroad-ed/storied-gamed/video-gamed to the point of unrecognizably?

I wonder sometimes, but other than play with them, how can I ever really know?
Is the there a good Live Modern-Game video to watch?

Hey, check-it out! I can actual wander back on topic again:

"What mechanics detract from an immersive game experience?"​

Here's my list:

• players knowing dice modifiers
• difficulty checks/skills
• player's knowing too much about discovered/found magic (e.g. BtB items identified as such)
• BtB "safe" monsters
• rolling die out in the open
• implicit Challenge Levels (all threats are "fair")
• non-lethal
• PCs playing exotic races
• all mundane elements hand-waived away
• boring/no NPCs of note
• PCs not feeling small in a big, open-ended world (e.g. super-hero characters, one-shot dungeons, etc.)
• explicit hex crawling
• PC powerlessness (railroad)
• mass combat/domain play?
• poor DM skill (non-fluid play, quantum ogres/obvious improv/fudging, meta-game content, etc.)

Probably most important is a DM that doesn't expose his hand with loose talk.
The players should always be wondering: "How complex is the game he's running behind that screen?".

This is mostly a list of things you don't like. Clearly, things an individual does not like can be immersion breaking for that individual, because they are annoying to that individual. That does not make them inherently immersion-breaking.

For example, not knowing dice modifiers, or at least an approximation of them, makes it hard for me to become immersed, because I have trouble assessing the difficulty of the task, and that makes it harder for me to imagine the world.

 

[squeen]

No, not intended as a list of personal preferences:

These are things that expose D&D as a game-with-obvious-mechanics break immersion...as does anything that prevents you from imagining yourself as "being there". That's why I threw in things like mass combat and domain play. I like those things, but they just aren't very "first-person".

That doesn't mean they aren't fun or good. Knowing you are playing a game, and strategizing to win can be tons of fun and engaging.
It's just not immersive in the way I'm thinking of it. (visceral?)

To the point: If you want immersion, what to do/avoid?

Counter-point: EOTB argued immersion is over-rated.

So, in he context of the linked post---what pushed his recent experience over the immersion-edge?

For example, not knowing dice modifiers, or at least an approximation of them, makes it hard for me to become immersed, because I have trouble assessing the difficulty of the task, and that makes it harder for me to imagine the world.

I am going to call BS on this. Immersion is not playing from your math-brain....but this works:

You: Can I leap across that gap?
DM: Hmm....looks pretty far. You might make it, if you were lucky.

 

[Beoric]

I am going to call BS on this. Immersion is not playing from your math-brain....but this works:

You: Can I leap across that gap?
DM: Hmm....looks pretty far. You might make it, if you were lucky.

The problem with this is, the DM and the player may have a different conception of what "if you were lucky" means. Or "pretty far". If the player thinks the DM means something like a 35% chance of success, and the DM means there is a 5% chance of success, the DM has not successfully communicated the risk, and the player is making a decision on an erroneous assessment of the odds. The player ends up having to play the DM, not the world. And that is immersion breaking.

You know what fixes this problem? Knowing the odds. Or if you know how far your character can jump, knowing the distance.

 

[DangerousPuhson]

To nobody in particular:

Immersion is healthier when the group isn't stopping play every few minutes to get hung-up on a ruling, it's true.

But on the flip-side, immersion isn't broken just because there are game mechanics at play - the "G" in "TTRPG" means it's a game... by very definition there are rules that demand acknowledgement and consideration. You may as well claim that it's "detracting of the immersion" to have to look over a table at the modern, real-world faces of your fellow players when you reach for your beer.

 

[squeen]

The problem with this is, the DM and the player may have a different conception of what "if you were lucky" means. Or "pretty far". If the player thinks the DM means something like a 35% chance of success, and the DM means there is a 5% chance of success, the DM has not successfully communicated the risk, and the player is making a decision on an erroneous assessment of the odds. The player ends up having to play the DM, not the world. And that is immersion breaking.

You know what fixes this problem? Knowing the odds. Or if you know how far your character can jump, knowing the distance.

Insisting that you "need" this knowledge to operate is kind of obstinately missing the point...which is as follows:

--> If you, as DM, are looking for some "less/more immersive" knobs...what can you try?

You don't have to like the result, and then can adjust things back. But I think there is no denying that (for most people), seeing numbers---and the game as an equation---vs. not seeing numbers (like real life) is likely to affect immensity. Refuting that seems pointless, even if you personally are an outlier with your knob wired the other way.

I personally have played and DM'd it both ways, and noticed a difference for me and my players. I bring it up not because everyone has to play exactly like me, but because it's interesting and noticeable. Certainly the blog-poster noticed something too (and liked it)---even if not for the specific reasons I mentioned. How to achieve that is a good trick to have in your DMing bag.

Literally: Mechanics Cross Pollination

 

[squeen]

ADDENDUM: I think what may have happened in the blog post is that the player had no frame of reference for "domain play". He could not redux what the DM was doing to a mechanic/dice-rolls/numbers and so just had to instead "go with it". That resulted in that immersive feel he craved. The game stopped being just stats. His comprehension broke down, and he was force to just react to his sensory input.

It's hard to achieve this with experienced players, because they can often suss out even a hidden mechanic (or, like Beoric, demand numbers)---useless it's known a priori that you house-rule a lot and enough is hidden. The latter was the case for my DM, when I played in the 70's.

OD&D, with its sparse rules, may have an advantage here.

Of course, if there is no hard-framework/massive-prep behind it---it is in danger of deteriorating into a story-game.

 

[Beoric]

(or, like Beoric, demand numbers)

I don't demand numbers. If a DM's description is vague, I ask questions until either the situation is clear, or it is clear that the DM is never going to be able to describe the situation accurately (and perhaps is a bit fuzzy on it himself). Sometimes it takes a lot of questions to get clarity. In the latter case, a risk I can't assess is a risk I'm not going to take. If the DM does that consistently, he has effectively taught me not to waste my energy thinking outside the box. Wake me up when its my turn to roll to hit.

 

[EOTB]

Counter-point: EOTB argued immersion is over-rated.

I did. And I was talking about the immersion you're talking about.


But I do think a different type of immersion is important: the type where you're so engrossed with the game that time goes by *like that*. You look up and two hours went by and it seems like five minutes.

I don't get that by the game being something where I can imagine being really there. Myself (and this is just myself) that sort of gaming takes me right out of it. I do want the ability to play the odds. I'm a gambler, and I can't manage risk if I don't have a decent (not perfect) idea about the numbers.

Plus - and this is really idiosyncratic to my own experience - nearly every single "bad gamer" game experience I've ever had has been with the guys who crave fantasy to that degree. There's been a lot of guys like that where the gaming has been just fine, too, but its enough of a wild card for me personally that part of why I insist on putting the metagame front and center whenever the game aspect is relevant, is because it screens out that wild card very effectively. And since I don't care about fantasy for fantasy's sake, I don't miss it.

But am I immersed when i'm DMing, as I categorize it? Yes. When I'm playing? It really depends on the tempo of the game.

 

[The1True]

crave fantasy to that degree.

sorry, crave fantasy to what degree?

 

[EOTB]

sorry, crave fantasy to what degree?

To the degree that what drives them to the activity isn't the game aspect, or the social aspect, but overwhelmingly the fantasy aspect of being someone else than they are.

 

[squeen]

I would say:

Being "somewhere else" is immersion.

Being "someone else" breaks immersion.

 

[Beoric]

Being "someone else" breaks immersion.

Excluding alleged encouragement of disruptive players, which has not been my experience, how does it do this?

Quick diversion: does anyone know the intended scale of Judge's Guild village and castle maps? I know the scale of the overland maps.

 

[squeen]

Excluding alleged encouragement of disruptive players, which has not been my experience, how does it do this?

I think if you are play-acting as being someone, then you are one additional step-removed from natural reactions to a scene or situation---and less likely to feel like you are actually there. The more the PC is "like you", the more natural everything will seem. It's just one less obstacle to mentally overcome. Just act naturally, vs. just act as a fey-creature of the opposite gender would react---the latter takes more thought/effort and has a greater chance of triggering cognitive disassociation.

Again, immersion isn't the end-all-and-be-all of a fun time gaming.
It's just...well...immersion.