In Defense of the Theory of Dissociated Mechanics

[pemerton]

you are equating a specific aspect of the game (falling) to the core powers system.

<snip>

You required an example of abusing a specific subset of the 3E rules to create the same flaw that is observed in using the fundamental 4E system as intended.

Does "flaw" here actually mean flaw, or does it mean "feature disliked by Bryon D"?

the price for this break even is a break down in the feeling of being in the novel. The patterns are arbitrarily forced. For my enjoyment value I am paying a steep price for no gain.

Does "arbitrarily" here mean without reason, or "not for a reason that speaks to or engages BryonD"?

It's clear that you don't like 4e. It's clear that this is, at least in part, because of certain mechanics, the existence of which is uncontentious.

It's clear that one reason you don't like those mechanics is because, if you were to play losing them, you would not experience a certain feeling.

You haven't given me any reason to think either (i) that all RPGers should want to experience that feeling, nor (ii) that experiencing that feeling is at the heart of RPGing, nor even (iii) that others, when using the mechanics in question, won't experience the feeling that you can't.

I'm not sure whether pointing these things out is combative or not, because - as the questions at the start of this post indicate - I'm uncertain as to what you intend by your key evaluative statements, and in particular how far they are meant to go beyond describing your own personal preferences and experiences. If they aren't meant to go beyond that, then presumably you agree with me about (iii), and perhaps also (i) and (ii).

 

[Pentius]

The catch 22 seems to be:
-if you are worried about immersion and associated mechanics, use page 42 to create new shared fictional constructs
-BUT you may not extrapolate that new fictional construct to meaningful combat, even if it disrupts immersion
-and if you complain about this dilema, that's your problem as a player
-and none of the above is a problem of mechanics disassociated from the story you want to tell

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

The second bullet point is where you lose me. I think applying your new fictional construct to combat is fine, if you follow the same basic guidelines/responsibilities as you should with any ruling. That is, tinker with it at your own risk. That's not to say don't tinker with it, it's to say that you should be aware that you might break something, so you should be careful and also be prepared to fix something if you break it.

 

[pemerton]

Fencing skill is obviously different from a once per day power.

I don't agree with this at all.

The rogue - a fictional being - has fencing skill. The player - a real being playing a game with rules - is entitled, by the rules of the game, to use a daily power. The player, by using that power, brings it about that in the fiction, the rogue's fencing skill is evinced.

To repeat - it is not the rogue who uses the power. It is the player. The rogue is just fencing.

And the rogue's fencing skill can be explored and explained and understood by the inhabitants of the fictional world.

<snip hypothetical mark dialogue>

I'm sure any of us could come up with an explanation for how this might actually work "in the game world," given the time and inclination, but really, why would we want to, and more to the point, why should the game rules FORCE US TO DO SO to maintain an "in the moment" semblance of rationality?

I posted about marks upthread, actually. Of two players in my group I talked to, one assumed that fighter marking is metagame, the other that it is ingame.

I also suggested, upthread, that a war devil's Besieged Foe power may best be viewed as a metagame tool for bringing about the result that a foe of the war devil is "besieged" by the devil's allies.

If you don't want to play a game with metagame mechanics, I don't think anyone is FORCING YOU TO. If you want to know why I don't mind the marking mechanics in 4e, it's because (i) they tend to produce a story which is about the fighter and the paladin holding off the slavering hordes, and (ii) the fighter mark produces immediate interrupt attacks, which keep the combat moving quickly.

Why, in game, do the marks override? Well the player of one of those two PCs will generally check with the other before placing a mark. In game, I assume that when the fighter's mark overrides the paladin's this is because the paladin is dropping his challenge, and when the paladin's mark overrides the fighter's this is because the paladin is divinely challenging the foe (I focus on the paladin's marking mechanic rather than the fighter's, here, because I think it is more naturally interpreted as having an ingame as well as - perhaps even instead of - a metagame aspect).

Instead of a power I can use once a fight that forces mooks to surround my fighter so he can respond with a cool attack, I would like a power I can use anytime mooks choose to surround my fighter, or he can position himself inside a group.

Well, the dwarf halbedeer PC in my game has the following powers and abilities:

*+14 Athletics bonus;

*Mighty Sprint: encounter move action, gain +4 speed, ignore difficult terrain, and gain a +5 bonus to any Athletics checks during the move;

*Create Opening: encounter minor action, allow an adjacent ally threatened by an adjacent enemy to shift away, in return for suffering an attack from that enemy;

*Opportunity Attacks that gain +3 to hit and on a hit force a moving enemy to stop;

*Footwork lure: at will, on a hit shift and then slide the target into the vacated square;

*Sweeping Blow, Battle Cry: both encounter, attack all surrounding enemies;

*Come and Get It: encounter, pull nearby enemies adjacent and then attack all surrounding enemies;

*Passing Attack: encounter, attack one enemy, and if hit shift, attack another enemy;

*At least one daily that lets him attack and push surrounding enemies ("Own the Battlefield"?);

*Polearm Momentum is a feat lets him knock prone targets whom he slides or pushes;

*Deadly Draw is a feat that lets him gain combat advantage against targets he pulls (and maybe slides also?) at least 2 squares;

*And he wears Rushing Cleats, which are magic footwear that enhance his pushes and slides by 1 square.​

This is a character who has no trouble moving into a group of enemies, drawing his enemies to him, pushing them away if necessary, keeping them locked down where he wants them and keeping his allies safe. If he is surrounded by mooks, he can definitely deal with them!

One reason I've listed all these abilities is to help give a sense of how the mechanics support this aspect of the PC's persona. In the fiction, it's not as if the PC is once per encounter performing Come and Get It, and twice per encounter performing a close burst, etc. In the fiction, rather, there is a dwarf halbedeer who is constantly moving around the battlefield, using his finesse with his polearm to force his foes where he wants them and to keep them from his allies, etc. The suite of encounter powers, daily powers, feats etc are the player's tools for making it the case that this fictional character exists.

It's not quite the same for the wizard PC, whose abilities represent discrete spells that he has learned. And the sorcerer is somewhere between the wizard and the fighter on this spectrum of degree of correlation between (i) powers as player tools, and (ii) what it is that the PC is actually doing in the fiction.

if you could find a power that made people fall prone in combat (like horrid whispers), and you took it, then you could call that another aspect of your hypnotism. The more powers you took and attributed to hypnotism, the more potent a combat hynotist you become.

This is a good example of how you might go about building a wizard who is moving along that spectrum, away from the position of the wizard in my game and towards the position of the fighter in my game.

Just as the 4e mechanics don't require that every PC be located on the same place on that spectrum, so there is no need for every instance of a given class to be located on the same place on that spectrum.

 

[pemerton]

I would lay good money on the fact that several posters will have a visceral reaction against that anecdote.

Only one so far, unless I missed some posts!

But as far as I have noticed, no one else in this thread is posting any actual play experiences. And the Alexandrian doesn't seem to draw on any actual play in the original essay - he just gives us stupid imaginary dialogues between PCs in a non-existent games.

If people are going to say that metagame mechanics, or narrativist mechanics, per se draw players out of the game, or out of roleplaying, or "dissociate" them from their PCs, I want them to have to actually engage with the evidence of my (and perhaps others') play, which is entirely contrary to that claim.

It's like Crazy Jerome said upthread - some claims being made in this thread seem to implicitly, but not all that subtlely, deny that stuff is happening in my game, which in fact happens every session.

If I acted the paladin character, I might wonder after the battle:
1) Whenever an evil caster turns me into a frog, will the Raven Queen always turn me back to normal a minute later?
2) When an evil caster turns someone else into a frog, will the Raven Queen always turn them back to normal a minute later?
3) If an evil caster affects me with another foul spell, will the Raven Queen save me too, or does she only help with frog-related spells?
4) If (gods forbid!) I ever fell out of the Queen's favor, will she still save me? Would I be a frog forever? Or would I revert to normal after a minute whether or not I have the Queen's favor?
5) If I seek a wizard for advice, will he laugh and sing: What's the Raven Queen got to do with, got to do with it...?

The player's narration was nice for that moment, but it's still 'disassociated' from the big picture.

I DO respect players contributing to the narrative and making it more interesting and imaginative world. I just don't know that ad hoc narratives make the entire story plausible and consistent enough that resolves concerns of 'disassociation' for everyone else, except to those who are already on board.

If the Paladin did assume that the Raven Queen did save him for that moment, but he never explored this philosophy further, and the idea never came up again, then it's not something that's consequential to the fiction -- it's only a brief "aha!" moment.

It's like a fart, it comes, has its moment, goes, and means nothing afterwards.

It's the difference between a real character with a personality and philosophy vs a caricature that makes a clever comment to serve one paragraph of a narrative.

I don't know how you are in a position to know whether or not the episode of play I reported is or is not "dissociated" from the big picture, that makes no contribution to a consistent story, "like a fart", nothing but a caricature rather than a contribution to a real character. That can't possibly be inferred from a single reported instance of play.

As it happens, the whole raison d'etre of that PC is to explore his personal relationship to the Raven Queen, as well as her relationship to the rest of the mortal world. Being saved from toad-dom by her power is just one part of that ongoing focus of play.

Your measure for coherence and consistency of story seems to be concerned entirely with the causal mechanicsm whereby events are produced. I don't read a lot of fiction, but the most recent modern novel that I read was The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. Like most modern fiction that I read, causation of the sort that seems to concern you wasn't at its core. Theme, emotion, history, politics, love, hate, fear, struggle - these are what make for a satisfying drama, at least in my view. Whether or not the Raven Queen came to the aid of her paladin in need contributes to that sort of drama.

If the Paladin did arrange for that, he could just say "Oops, I was wrong, I guess it wasn't the Raven Queen after all." The theory could all be in his head anyway.

And if the Paladin was an intellectual Paladin, then who are you as a DM or the player to say that the character cannot explore this question? (I'm sorry, this is a herotic fantasy game, we're not going to be repeatedly turned to frogs in this game, that's wrongbadfun)

Going back to the Paladin with the toads, you've insisted that the character in-game cannot observe and explore the difference between Baleful Polymorph in and out of combat, and that's why it's not disassociated (if I extrapolate correctly). This is a premise I cannot agree with. Not because combat is not an abstraction (I agree it is), but because IMO your implications are completely disassociating the mechanics from the story I want to tell.

I also play with good players who don't fling themselves off cliffs because they understand that the story is the point and abusing the system undermines the fun.

Happily for me, I also play with good players.

Why would a player, who - as I made clear in my first post on the topic - himself decided to treat the duration of the effect as a metagame mechanic to which he could attach his preferred narrative - then decide to have his PC undertake an investigation that would wreck the very narrative that he has decided to create?

Or, conversely, if the player decides that his PC is undergoing a crisis of faith, and therefore does decide to undertake the investigation that would show that the Raven Queen didn't save him at all, what would be the problem? And who are you saying would stop him? Where are the mechanics that would get in the way of the player pursuing this story about his PC?

We can explore it, but it is explored narratively.

<snip>

In game, your paladin can absolutely "explore" why the polymorph spell ends so abruptly. And the answer to that question (and whether the paladin's exploration will even be fruitful) will be determined by the story written by the DM.

I would just add to this - and written by the player also. (As in my crisis-of-faith hypothetical above.)

Also, your discussion of the way that the mechanics work in relation to encounters rather than in relation to the ficitonal world per se is first rate!

Dissociative mechanics are problematic not because they can't ultimately be "explained" in context, but because every single explanation is necessarily "reconstructing" the reality of the game when it happens.

And for a number of reasons, this is hardly an ideal situation while playing the game. The Alexandrian is fairly clear about this phenomenon--if you do this, and then apply that "reconstruction" from there on out, you've essentially created a house rule.

This is just false. In what way is the player of the paladin, in the ACTUAL PLAY EXAMPLE that I gave, reconstructing the reality of the game when it happens?

And what is the house rule that's been created?

And why is this not ideal?

There have been a couple of recent Tomb of Horrors threads on this forum. From those threads, I've learned that the best way to play the ToH is using a thief on a rope with a fly spell (the thief is more expensive than driving sheep through the dungeon ahead of the party, but also a more reliable and versatile scout).

Now, I want to say "Playing a game in which a thief scouts ahead flying while attached to a rope is hardly ideal - it's tedious and stupid, and bears no resemblance to either modernist fantasy like Howard or anti-modernist fantasy like Tolkien". But that would obviously just be an expression of my aesthetic preferences. So, until now, I've refrained.

Maybe you don't like a game where it is open to you, as a player, to decide that the reason the effect ended on you is because of the benevolence of your deity. But it would be easier to talk together about playing RPGs if you didn't start from the assumption that everyone likes and dislikes the same things as you.

Some (many?) players want to tell a story of fictional constructs being more or less consistent regardless of combat vs non-combat, and the mechanics of 4E combat are hindering those players from telling that story. Therefore, the mechanics are disassociated from the story that those players want to happen.

All this tells me is what I already knew - namely, that some players don't like various sort of metagame mechanics, don't like stances other than Actor stance, etc.

Maybe those players shouldn't play 4e.

I don't want to tell stories about superheroes, after all. That's why I don't play Champions or Mutants & Masterminds.

 

[JamesonCourage]

I don't agree with this at all.

That makes for good discussion

The rogue - a fictional being - has fencing skill. The player - a real being playing a game with rules - is entitled, by the rules of the game, to use a daily power. The player, by using that power, brings it about that in the fiction, the rogue's fencing skill is evinced.

I'm assuming that someone can have fencing skill without the daily. Thus my statement that they're different.

To repeat - it is not the rogue who uses the power. It is the player. The rogue is just fencing.

Indeed. It's narrative control. Which is a dissociated mechanic (to those who it separates from their role, obviously; I'll be using that as part of my definition for dissociated from this point on).

And the rogue's fencing skill can be explored and explained and understood by the inhabitants of the fictional world.

Right, except that's not the mechanic being measured. People are measuring the rogue's attack roll (fencing skill). If they measured how often the rogue could produce the result of Trick Strike, it'd be once per day. If they cannot measure that, then yes, it's narrative control (a dissociated mechanic).

As always, play what you like

 

[Gantros]

I'd like to try nudging this discussion in a different, hopefully more productive direction. There seems to be a pretty clear divide between the people here who grok the idea of dissociated mechanics and take issue with them, and those that have a "blind spot" for them (either not understanding the distinction, or not caring about it). Certainly we can agree that neither side is more correct than the other, but at least acknowledging and understanding the divide may provide some insights into how it can be bridged in the future.

One implication of this blind spot idea is that it opens up the possibility of creating mechanics and descriptions that could satisfy both types of player. Since martial daily powers have been a recurring point of contention and are pretty central to the 4e rules, let's use them as an example and try replacing the existing description:

... you’re reaching into your deepest reserves of energy to pull off an amazing exploit.​

with this one:

Characters with martial powers have a limited ability to see and subtly shape future events through their dreams. During each extended rest, they are able to visualize themselves performing one or more amazing combat exploits that will inevitably come to pass within the next day. These are no more than vague glimpses and are impossible to remember clearly upon waking, but the character will know instantly whenever the right moment to pull off an exploit arrives.
​

Now some questions for each side...

For those who have issues with dissociated mechanics - do you agree that a description like this would help make the daily power mechanic easier to accept without changing it mechanically? It attempts to associate the ability to use multiple challenging yet non-magical maneuvers once each per day with something the character could perceive directly (i.e. dreams), without relying on notions like "reserves of energy" that overlap with other mechanics like HP or Con.

For those who don't believe in or care about dissociated mechanics - would this alternative description unduly limit your narrative opportunities or have any other negative impact on your enjoyment of the game? And if so, would you have any issues with simply ignoring it or re-skinning it to better fit the specifics of your campaign?

 

[JamesonCourage]

I'd like to try nudging this discussion in a different, hopefully more productive direction.

I can't XP you again yet, but I do like your post and your motives.

Since martial daily powers have been a recurring point of contention and are pretty central to the 4e rules, let's use them as an example and try replacing the existing description:

... you’re reaching into your deepest reserves of energy to pull off an amazing exploit.​

with this one:

Characters with martial powers have a limited ability to see and subtly shape future events through their dreams. During each extended rest, they are able to visualize themselves performing one or more amazing combat exploits that will inevitably come to pass within the next day. These are no more than vague glimpses and are impossible to remember clearly upon waking, but the character will know instantly whenever the right moment to pull off an exploit arrives.
​

Now some questions for each side...

For those who have issues with dissociated mechanics - do you agree that a description like this would help make the daily power mechanic easier to accept without changing it mechanically?

Definitely. It still becomes a problem for players who want to play a mundanely-based character, no matter how fantastic he might be. Those character concepts seem to suffer when every martial character is a type of prophet.

I imagine you'll get some people on the other side against this as well, but we'll see. I might even be alone on this.

As always, play what you like

 

[innerdude]

It would be easier to talk together about playing RPGs if you didn't start from the assumption that everyone likes and dislikes the same things as you.

*mumble mumble* something about the doctor taking his own medicine *mumble mumble*

I'm not particularly worried about whether someone likes or dislikes the same things I do. But that doesn't mean I have to apologize for liking the things I do, nor exploring the possible meanings of why I do or don't like them, as it pertains to my RPG hobby.

It's clear that you and your group have no problem with mechanical dissociation (assuming you believe it's a real phenomenon to begin with), and are willing to accept, ignore, or re-appropriate their effects to achieve your groups' aims. No harm, no foul.

I'm just not particularly interested in playing RPGs with that mindset, and have been exploring the reasoning and possibilities for that sensibility.

I completely agree with Gantros in his post that there's

a pretty clear divide between the people here who "grok" the idea of dissociated mechanics and take issue with them, and those that have a "blind spot" for them (either not understanding the distinction, or not caring about it).

Obviously you fall in the latter category, as is your right and prerogative. Play with your group as you see fit.

 

[Hussar]

I'm sure any of us could come up with an explanation for how this might actually work "in the game world," given the time and inclination, but really, why would we want to, and more to the point, why should the game rules FORCE US TO DO SO to maintain an "in the moment" semblance of rationality?

Well, that's the crux of the issue isn't it? Why would we want to?

Well, to give a number of reasons:

• To allow players greater control over the action in the game.
• To lessen the impact random events have in the game
• To create games which fit specific thematic concepts rather than having loose, organic mechanics where we might get something we like, if we're lucky.
• To recognize precisely what Wrechan said earlier about a character only existing for a finite time and having something that only comes up 1 time in 1000 means it might as well not exist at all.

There are some reasons that jumped up out of my head without really trying.

 

[Hussar]

/snip

Definitely. It still becomes a problem for players who want to play a mundanely-based character, no matter how fantastic he might be. Those character concepts seem to suffer when every martial character is a type of prophet.

I imagine you'll get some people on the other side against this as well, but we'll see. I might even be alone on this.

As always, play what you like

No, they really, really don't.

I mean, LOOK at the powers for each level of a martial character - we'll say fighter or rogue. At every single level, there is at least one power that is not disassociated. Or at least, no more disassociated from the fiction than, say, critical hits or Action Points.

And, as an added bonus, because the math for 4e actually works reasonably well, there's no penalty for taking Power X over Power Y. They're all pretty close, although they do different things.

If you want a character or characters in 4e where the in-game reality is closely tied to the effects that character can generate, simply pick the right powers.

Is Tide of Iron disassociated? Is Cleave? Pretty much every level of power for fighters has the choice of "Hit something really hard now." That satisfies your definition JamesonCourage, of something that can be taught and learned. And it's not any more disassociated than critical hits.

The idea that the mechanics are forcing players to take these options is not true. The OPTION is there, of course. But, the option of playing a traditional character is there as well.