D&D 4E Bridging the cognitive gap between how the game rules work and what they tell us about the setting

[Voadam]

The problem with 4e is that you as a pretending aren't supposed to do a lot of pretending. You are just supposed to invoke the powers and do the bookkeeping without worrying about what it represents in the fiction.

I don't agree. People can of course play that way but a big aspect I saw of 4e was explicit advice to reskin mechanics to fit the fiction you wanted, not advice to ignore any skinning or fiction at all.

I know some people took that as the descriptions and fiction are meaningless, it is just the mechanics and roles and numbers that matter since the descriptions can all be changed. An ogre's brute monster stat block can be an Owlbear or a tough dwarf or juggernaut construct, so the descriptions are meaningless, I am not actually fighting an ogre and so it is just the dice and mechanics interaction with a high hp, high damage, low AC brute.

I don't think that is what 4e advocates as the way to play 4e.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Do you want mechanics to represent a certain fiction?

Or do you want to use mechanics to express a certain fiction?

 

[Bagpuss]

I don't agree. People can of course play that way but a big aspect I saw of 4e was explicit advice to reskin mechanics to fit the fiction you wanted, not advice to ignore any skinning or fiction at all.

I remember playing 4E when they were battling on a bridge, in which the fighter used a power that was originally described as a "leg sweep", to cut the wings off a gargoyle and sending it plummeting to its death, as the mechanics were to make it prone.

We had great fun adjusting the description of the mechanics to fit the actual situation making powers logical to the fiction.

Oh and tactically speaking I loved how knocking prone, took flyers out of the air and there were plenty off methods to make an enemy prone, which made flying less common than any other edition, removing the headache of 3D combat.

 

[Alzrius]

Ah so what you're saying is that 4E was actually a better implementation of Gray Gygax's vision for D&D.

Always suspected as much.

Not really, no. While 4E made an effort to have hit points represent a multiplicity of factors the way he said (but, most notably, not the way he had them operate in terms of what the mechanics represented), my personal belief is that it wasn't an oversight on Gygax's part that AD&D had no sources of instantaneous, discrete healing which weren't magical/supernatural in nature, let alone damage on a miss, etc.

 

[Alzrius]

Interesting topic!

That said, to avoid the interminable "hit points, meat or not" conversation ... I'd like to inject a related topic ....

Combat in AD&D (1e) consisted of rounds that lasted one minute each. However, IME, narratively this was often discarded and combat rounds were described as going much more quickly.

@Alzrius - would you say that this has to do with the cognitive gap, with people just not understanding the actual length of the combat round, with people understanding it but ignoring it, or with something else?

Rounds are an interesting one, and I'd say that they're definitely worth examining in terms of the cognitive gap.

In my experience, a lot of people either actively discarded the one-minute duration of rounds in AD&D (which was the official duration in, if I recall correctly, AD&D 1st and 2nd Editions both; the first time I recall seeing an official shorter duration was the "combat round" in Combat & Tactics in 1995, which was ten seconds long; 3E shortened it to six seconds and made it the default), or simply never realized that it was one minute long in the first place. I personally encountered more of the latter case. Heck, I recall telling other people that there was an example of play in the AD&D 2E PHB that said how, when combat started, the game went "from ten-minute turns to ten-second rounds." I'm still not sure where I got that from.

Looking back at how the one-minute round is structured, I'm curious if the use of round segments was meant to divide that time period so that it was actually presented in smaller increments in the course of play, rather than functioning as an abstract...but from what I can tell, most people saw it as an abstraction either way, i.e. that it lent itself to the idea that attack rolls et al weren't meant to be connected to the specifics of what was happening (since the idea of only attacking once or twice over the course of sixty seconds seemed unintuitive on its face), effectively serving to widen the cognitive gap.

Speaking from personal experience, people didn't seem to care for that; even when the one-minute turn wasn't actively rejected, a lot of people who thought it was supposed to be shorter found seemed to find that to be the intuitive presumption. It's notable that I don't think I've ever even heard of an anecdote where someone assumed the opposite (i.e. that rounds were longer than the game said they were).

 

[James Gasik]

I don't agree. People can of course play that way but a big aspect I saw of 4e was explicit advice to reskin mechanics to fit the fiction you wanted, not advice to ignore any skinning or fiction at all.

I know some people took that as the descriptions and fiction are meaningless, it is just the mechanics and roles and numbers that matter since the descriptions can all be changed. An ogre's brute monster stat block can be an Owlbear or a tough dwarf or juggernaut construct, so the descriptions are meaningless, I am not actually fighting an ogre and so it is just the dice and mechanics interaction with a high hp, high damage, low AC brute.

I don't think that is what 4e advocates as the way to play 4e.

"My Son the Fire Archon" comes to mind. 4e developer wanted to play D&D with his son, who looked through the monster manual, saw the picture of a Fire Archon, and said "I want to play that!".

Thinking about it, he had his kid make a Rogue, reskinned Sneak Attack as inflicting bonus fire damage, and away they went, and apparently had a blast.

 

[MichaelSomething]

I feel like the OP highlighted an interesting problem, but not the one they intended to highlight.

If Healing Word and Inspiring Word or whatever have the same exact mechanics, making them two separate powers is increasing the cognitive load the system requires, but it's doing so in a way that isn't helpful at all. If I'm doing the same thing as that person is but with a different line of text, then why does it need to be repeated for every class? What's the actual difference between us if we're achieving the same thing mechanically AND a similar thing in terms of narrative? After all, if "speaking words = heal someone" then Healing Word and Inspiring Word are really just the same thing pretending not to be.

This pretending is rife in 4E, and it turned a lot of people off. 5E does it a bit too, but they decided ultimately to call a spade a spade and to reuse their huge library of spell mechanics for various other mechanics. And that makes sense and does a better job at making the universe feel """"sensible.""""

So when it comes to cognitive gap, this is where it's actually at for 4E. Trying to remember all these different powers that are quite literally the same thing and then translating that into story and fun roleplaying is difficult. Tom is casting firebolt, Brad is throwing firesphere, Amy is praying for an emberarrow, and Mike is slinging a flamebullet. Pretending to be different but actually being the same just feels so much more hollow and inauthentic than just all doing the same thing.

I blame that on 3E. DMs got overloaded when players wanted to play different characters. They would look at all the different concepts, and all the mechanics that represented all the different concepts, and responded, "Core only!"

WOTC saw all those DMs and reduced all the different mechanics into one set of mechanics for those DMs.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don't agree. People can of course play that way but a big aspect I saw of 4e was explicit advice to reskin mechanics to fit the fiction you wanted, not advice to ignore any skinning or fiction at all.

I know some people took that as the descriptions and fiction are meaningless, it is just the mechanics and roles and numbers that matter since the descriptions can all be changed. An ogre's brute monster stat block can be an Owlbear or a tough dwarf or juggernaut construct, so the descriptions are meaningless, I am not actually fighting an ogre and so it is just the dice and mechanics interaction with a high hp, high damage, low AC brute.

I don't think that is what 4e advocates as the way to play 4e.

It might not be, but for a lot of people (certainly everyone I played with at the time or spoke to about it), it is the way play devolved. I personally had and have a very hard time taking any descriptions seriously in 4e, because they could so easily be changed (or ignored) that they felt meaningless to me without an intrinsic connection to the mechanics. Emphasis on felt mind, as I know other folks felt and feel very differently.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Do you want mechanics to represent a certain fiction?

Or do you want to use mechanics to express a certain fiction?

That first one. Every time.

 

[Celebrim]

I remember playing 4E when they were battling on a bridge, in which the fighter used a power that was originally described as a "leg sweep", to cut the wings off a gargoyle and sending it plummeting to its death, as the mechanics were to make it prone.

We had great fun adjusting the description of the mechanics to fit the actual situation making powers logical to the fiction.

Thank you for proving my point.

Sure, you can do this but this means moving fortune to the beginning. You are confirming what I said about the players proposition existing only as a game proposition until after the fortune is determined and the adjudication applied. Only then does the player know what he did. Prior to that point, his proposition existed only as a game mechanic. "Leg sweep" was determined to have nothing to do with sweeping legs, and the adjudication retroactively determined what the proposition was.

As I have said repeatedly in this thread, there is nothing wrong with playing a game that works that way but it's a quantitative shift from everything that came before.