with M&M the percentage of text that emulates genre is still miniscule compared to the percentage that states how fast your PC can fly, how much he can lift, and how many points that costs, type-stuff.
I think D20 Cthulhu is another example of this: pages and pages of gun rules, but nothing for chases, and little better than guidelines for dark secrets, sinister families, collecting clues etc.
The way I see it, is that genre does have rules, potentially just as complex as more convential rpg rules. It's really not as impossible to codify, and requiring of a GM, as many game designers seem to think.
This comment has reminded me of something else I was thinking about while cycling home last night - namely, on what basis it is said that encounters/dailies "don't correspond to anything in the gameworld".
In a couple of my 4e sessions this year - one a couple of weeks ago, the other a couple of months ago - the mid-paragon-tier PCs have found themselves fighting phalanxes of hobgoblins, which I've statted up as Huge and Gargantuan swarms.
In one of these fights, the tiefling paladin used his Questing Knight encounter power, Strength of Ten (close blast 3 weapon attack) to push the phalanx back. In the next turn, the phalanx moved forward and (using its swarm ability to occup an enemy's space) surrounded the paladin. The ranger let go an arrow from his fiery burst greatbow, which inflicted OG fire damage on the phalanx, as well as the paladin. The paladin, being a tiefling, didn't care about the fire, and wanted to try to set more of them on fire. Per page 42, I let him make an Intimidate check to deal additional fire damage on his attacks in return for granting combat advantage. The fight continued for a couple more rounds before the PC's focus turned to the hobgoblins' pet chimera.
For me, at least, the dissociation is not obvious. From a genre perspective, it's pretty clear what is going on. The paladin, as a Questing Knight, displays the strength of ten ordinary soldiers and pushes back a whole phalanx of hobgoblins. The hit point damage this inflicts (which is at a bonus because swarms are vulnerable to close attacks) reflects several hobgoblins being knocked down or killed. Then the hobgoblins rush him and surround him. But an arrow lands admidst them, exploding into a burst of flame that sets many hobgoblins, as well as the paladin, on fire. The paladin, aflame and surrounded by what is left of the phalanx, starts laying into them with wild abandon, and more hobgoblins fall to sword and flame.
At my table, at least, I don't think it occurred to anyone to ask "Why doesn't the paladin push back the phalanx a second time". And that's not because we're thinking of the Strength of Ten as a fire-and-forget spell: even though the paladin's weapon attacks are Divine and not Martial, we don't think of them as spells. They are divinely-inspired feats of martial prowess.
The encounter power is a
player resource, which permits the player, once between short rests, to have his paladin display the Strength of Ten. But in the fiction, the paladin is not using his "Strength of Ten" ability. He's just displaying the strength of ten, inspired by his god and by his pursuit of his quest, and forcing back the phalanx. On the next turn, when the player chooses a different action for his PC - laying into the hobgoblins to try and set them on fire - it's again clear what is happening in the fiction, and what the PC is doing.
It's not even clear to me that the player has to leave actor stance - part of the cleverness of the way that D&D mixes its meta into its non-meta (with hp, healing surges, powers etc) is that the player/PC line gets sufficiently blurred that you can expend the meta whilst inhabiting your PC. As a matter of
logic, it may be that the player leaves actor stance, but as a matter of phenomenology I don't know that this is true. (A different player in my group
does leave actor stance - he's commented to me that one thing he likes about 4e is that it lets him
play his PC rather than
ben his PC, and he often talks about his PC in the third person. But the guy who plays the paladin is more of an old school "I am my character" type in his approach to roleplaying.)
It seems to me that the dissociation will only emerge if you turn your attention away from the stuff that is genre/thematic significant, and instead start asking genre-inappropriate questions, like "How come I only display the strength of ten once every 5 minutes?"
There can also be other corner cases - like what exactly is happening in the fiction if the paladin uses Strength of Ten - a weapon close blast 3 - against a single target 3 squares away? But that sort of case will hardly ever come up: a paladin is nearly always in close combat, and he will typically use Strength of Ten when he has multiple foes nearby, given that it's one of his small number of AoE attacks - whereas he has other single target weapon and ranged attacks. If the corner case
did come up, then a quick bit of situation-appropriate narration would handle it. (Eg because Strength of Ten allows the paladin to shift to a square within the blast, you can just narrate it is a charge, even though technically the shift takes place after the attack.)
Again, it seems to me that only those who dwell on mere mechanical possibilities, rather than what is actually happening in play, will be "dissociated" by this sort of thing - and start coming up with all sorts of complex subsystems that replace the paladin's close blast mechanic with something else that simulates him forcing back a whole horde of foes with a single blow (say, some sort of pushback/ricochet mechanic).
Which once again takes the focus away from the genre approprite stuff - that this knight can display the Strength of Ten - and onto the process-simulation minutiae that have a tendency to bog down RPG mechanics.
