GMMichael
Guide of Modos
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 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."
...so these examples should look more like: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:
In 4E, which made the mechanics of losing/regaining hit points explicitly acknowledge multiple ideas, there's an extra step added in this process:
- Determine hit points regained
- Contextualize this with injuries taken when hit points were lost.
- Determine hit points regained
- Determine if this means injuries were healed or courage/resilience is restored.
- Contextualize this with how injuries were taken and/or how courage/resilience was lost when hit points were lost.
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.
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.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.