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

[GMMichael]

That cognitive effort that the players have to do to bridge the gap between what the mechanics are and what they tell us about the in-character state of play is the "cognitive gap."

Sure. There's the state of the story, and the state of the rules. Never shall the twain meet. For some reason, I'm reading quite a bit of "the rules come first, determining how the story must go." Which is odd to me; I like the story to come first, and the rules (whatever they're up to behind the curtain) back up the story...

That's actually rather important, because it reminds us that the bridging the cognitive gap is essentially an order of operations wherein we take what the game's rules are and build upon them until we've reached the desired level of in-character presentation. For instance, using the method described in the actual AD&D 1E game rules (as opposed to the Gygax's mini-essays), a player bridging the gap would go through some variation of the following cognitive process:

1. Determine hit points regained
2. Contextualize this with injuries taken when hit points were lost.

In 4E, which made the mechanics of losing/regaining hit points explicitly acknowledge multiple ideas, there's an extra step added in this process:

1. Determine hit points regained
2. Determine if this means injuries were healed or courage/resilience is restored.
3. Contextualize this with how injuries were taken and/or how courage/resilience was lost when hit points were lost.

...so these examples should look more like:

1. Describe what healing takes place.
2. Determine hit points regained.

It's harder to do this with success/fail rules for attacking, because this doesn't make sense:

1. Decide if you stabbed your opponent.
2. Roll to see if you successfully hit or not.

However, if the rules mechanism doesn't say you "failed to hit," then your stabbing can carry forward as planned:

1. Decide if you stabbed your opponent.
2. Roll to see if the outcome of the stabbing was good or bad.

To that end, it remains to be seen how much 5E 2024 (or whatever it ends up being called), shuffles the gaps around, and how much bridging players will need to do.

24e is a decent contender for the new edition's name, but I'm partial to ODD (One D&D) as well. Anyway, I'd prefer my game rules to let as much storytelling happen as possible - or else "cognitive gaps" appear. I like to see rules support the story - not tell it where it can and can't go.

 

[Alzrius]

Sure. There's the state of the story, and the state of the rules. Never shall the twain meet.

I'd say it's the job of the players (which includes the GM) to find a way to make them meet, connecting the one to the other, though I wouldn't use the term "story" as shorthand for the in-character state of things, simply because that term has a lot of baggage (the link in my previous post talks about this very well). Of course, this can require more or less effort depending on the degree of abstraction, and may not be possible if it passes what someone can countenance, etc.

For some reason, I'm reading quite a bit of "the rules come first, determining how the story must go." Which is odd to me; I like the story to come first, and the rules (whatever they're up to behind the curtain) back up the story...

You do a good job of explaining why I have a hard time with the "in-character process first, and then the rules back that up," simply because the rules very often don't back up a lot of things. Making a declarative statement that you push your enemy off the cliff face, and then roll a natural 1 on your check to force a target's involuntary movement, means that you didn't push him. The rules tell us what's happening, and we flesh out that skeleton by unpacking the abstractions, bridging the cognitive gap.

24e is a decent contender for the new edition's name, but I'm partial to ODD (One D&D) as well. Anyway, I'd prefer my game rules to let as much storytelling happen as possible - or else "cognitive gaps" appear. I like to see rules support the story - not tell it where it can and can't go.

I mean, if we treat the story as an emergent property over the course of play, then the rules kind of have to inform us about where the story can or cannot go, at least in terms of what could possibly happen. If there's no check result for a skill that will let you run across water, and you don't have a special ability or magic item/spell that will let you run across water, then you're not going to run across the water to catch up to the ship an enemy is fleeing on, for instance.

 

[MichaelSomething]

If I wanted a game with no cogative gap, I'd go play GURPs! Or RiFTs! No one ever complained about cognitive gaps in RiFTs!

 

[aco175]

Does most of this come down to, telling the DM what you want to do or your intent rather than what you do and have to back up. Seems a bit of a thin line that most do not have problems with combining them into just one.

A player telling me that his character is going to swing over the river on the rope means the same as if the player said His character is intending to use the rope to swing across the river and wants to roll an Athletics check to determine if he is able to swing across the river using the rope.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I can't really speculate about anyone else's feelings on this, but here's how it worked out for me. I always thought of hit points as an abstraction and never liked, or really understood, the meat argument. After being on this site for a while I have since understood the meat side, but will never agree with it. This affected my reading of the HP healing affects greatly. When they alluded to healing actual wounds I always saw that as a holdover from older editions. I basically just mentally rewrote the effects in my head to not make those connections between wounds and HP, so that healing word power was rewritten to say something like; You whisper a quick prayer and your allies feel divine energy bolster them. My take on this is that 4th needed to take a firm stand on the HP issue, but that probably wouldn't have been well accepted either. Definitely better in my own opinion, but not well received overall.

Taking this a bit further, I'd like to see an actual injury mechanic that kicks in when you go down to 0 HP. A simple debuff would be good for the first injury you take, every further injury you take before healing would roll on a chart with a chance of a serious injury happening. Healing these injuries would take a ritual to heal, making healing actual injuries a lengthy and costly affair.

Edit: thinking about this possible injury rule, it's probably a little too punishing. Maybe making going to 0 HP force a roll on an injury table that has only a 25% chance for an actual minor injury to happen. These minor injuries could be cured by either a lv.1 ritual or a long rest, and they wouldn't stack. On a natural 1 you'd get a major injury that would require a higher level ritual to cure, or extended rest and doctor care. That would make going to 0HP scary without being too punishing.

Maybe even that might be too much to keep 4th's feel though, so maybe it's not a good idea for the game. That's how I'd want magical healing to work in the game though. Making actual healing the realm of rituals exclusively, with HP being completely removed from the equation.

The system I prefer is quite similar to this. When you are reduced to zero, you are incapacitated in what might be described as a "quantum" state until someone attempts to render aid. Then, you roll on a table, with modifiers such as how long since you were downed, your hit dice, con mod, what negative hp you reached, what kind of aid is being supplied (first aid, herbs, magic, etc) and so on. The results of the table indicate the severity of the injury, and what is required for recovery.

 

[Voadam]

Does most of this come down to, telling the DM what you want to do or your intent rather than what you do and have to back up.

I think it is a different issue, mostly a gap between the mechanics and the narration.

Taking the 1e poison discussion further. I have no intellectual problem with quantum hp that depend on the situation in most cases. The scorpion hit and I made my save so no actual piercing with the damage from the stinger, it is a threatened poisoning that stresses my warrior out so he loses 1d6 hp which is not represented by even a scratch.

Most of the time at the table it would not even get to that point of narration, it hit for 3 damage, Aargh, a 17 so save against the poison, Phew. Next action in the round. If I stop to actually narrate it more in depth for the result of the hit I have to switch to the intellectual concept of the near miss that stresses out the combatant.

However the narration and quantum nature of hp can be strained further by the situation. Suppose you have 2 hp but you get hit for 3 damage but make your save, so no scratch with poison from the stinger, but the stinger attack did enough damage to knock you unconscious or kill you. Narrating a venomous stinger attack that does not hit you for purposes of poison but does skewer you for physical injury is fairly awkward to reconcile.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

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?

 

[Celebrim]

I mean, it's not just the problem of the hit points.

Fourth edition in its design loudly screamed at the reader, "IT'S JUST A GAME! STOP TAKING IT SO SERIOUSLY. ACCEPT THAT IT IS A GAME AND JUST ENJOY IT." And, on some level there isn't anything wrong with that. That an RPG is just a game and shouldn't be taken too seriously is undeniable. And certainly there is nothing wrong with that aesthetic paradigm. But it's a very different take on D&D than the historical one that Jon Peterson famously called "Playing at the World". As such, it shouldn't at all be surprising that 4e appealed strongly to players with very different aesthetics than 1e, 2e, or 3e. It likewise shouldn't be surprising, that if you pull a "New Coke" move with the biggest brand in the marketplace that you'll lose more customers than you win over. Whether or not "New Coke" tastes better than classic Coke or not is entirely subjective. But that people who are happy with their taste preference will be unhappy when you change it is predictable.

The biggest and most irksome thing about 4e is the people who insist nothing changed about its aesthetic paradigm. I have no problem with you claiming that 4e was a better game for you than any prior version but claiming that nothing had changed about how the rules related to the setting and that this was just another iteration of D&D strikes me as a complete lack of confidence in your own aesthetic preferences. Like what you like, but don't think you need to win this particular argument to justify you liking it to me. It's objectively true that 4e overturned so much about how D&D related rules to setting and also changed so much about the setting at the same time. This doesn't make 4e objectively bad, but it does make it objectively different.

Take for example the idea of "minions". Minions are most defined by the 4e rule: "Hit points: 1, a missed attack never damages a minion." Now I can easily understand what that represents in the game, what does that rule represent in terms of the in universe reality? These creatures are never injured. If they are hit, they are dead. Even the lightest damage kills them. A rat is more durable. OK, but then a minion can be of any level - that was the thing that made them as a game mechanic interesting. You could have 12th level or 15th level minions. Now try to imagine them living in the same world and same story as the PCs. Do they die when they burn their hands on hot soup? When they stay out for an hour in a sleet storm, is that fatal? Imagine for a second what hit points are supposed to represent and this otherwise highly skilled warrior who has trained for years has none of them, and indeed so few of them that one training accident or one tumble down a flight of stairs is always fatal. It would be one thing if you said minions had hit points equal to their level. That could be rectified. But the fact that they don't points to the real reason why minions have 1 hit point, and it's not anything to do with the game universe - it's to avoid having any bookkeeping. It's really an entirely out of game justification.

What you have to do to make this make any sense is say that the rules really aren't modelling anything about the game universe. The metarule here is "Things that are off stage or don't involve interacting with the PCs don't follow the games rules." The same character doesn't have a consistent set of stats and attributes, but rather acquires a different set of stats and attributes depending on its role in the envisioned story. The metagame is paramount, not the simulated reality. The same character has a different stat block depending on whether it is an antagonist, a side character, a NPC's minion, a PC's henchmen, or a PC. Stats weren't modelling any consistent reality in 4e. And again, there is nothing wrong with that, but it is a change. "It's just a game, so it doesn't need to model anything" is the real underlying paradigm of 4e. There is no "Mind the gap." in 4e. It's "The gap is intentional. Pay it no heed."

 

[GuardianLurker]

To extend your cognitive gap example, one of the big problems I had with 4e was its class design. In particular, the fact that many of the classes (all?) had large overlaps in their mechanics, with little, if any, flavor changes between classes. The initial HP example was just one instance of it.

For me, these instances were bad enough that at times it felt like I was reading the same class again. And again. That wasn't helped when I noticed that the repeat abilities occurred at the same point in the class progress, regardless of how well the ability might, or might not, fit into the/my supposed concept of the class.

And while the division of abilities into their frequencies wasn't a bad bit of analysis, the presentation/mechanics of the dailies were so spell-like that when I read the wizard class, the decision to keep the spell-slot mechanic, instead of just folding the spells into the dailies directly, felt so contrived, that just reading it caused one of those cognitive gaps.

Now, I had many, many, other problems with 4e, but your cognitive gap model popped up in ALL kinds of places.

For that matter, thinking about it, the mismatches between my gameworld model and the implied gameworld model of recent D&D/Pathfinder editions keeps popping up problems too. As example, I really, REALLY, .... don't understand why PF2e limits spell-based flight for a single person, for 1 hour, to 7th rank!

I don't know if that counts as an example of your cognitive gap, but I think it's at least related.

 

[Voadam]

The same character has a different stat block depending on whether it is an antagonist, a side character, a NPC's minion, a PC's henchmen, or a PC. Stats weren't modelling any consistent reality in 4e. And again, there is nothing wrong with that, but it is a change.

It was and it wasn't a change.

It was fairly different from 3e where mechanics were fairly consistent for monsters and PCs.

For OD&D, Basic, and AD&D 1e and 2e monsters were different from PCs who also had some differences from NPCs.

A PC halfling has a Charisma score stat. A halfling in the monster sections does not. The 1e PH says that a PC dwarf cannot be a cleric, but an NPC one can.