In Defense of the Theory of Dissociated Mechanics

[M.L. Martin]

Effect-based design like that is boffo for balance, since the designer has total control over the limited uses of the ability and they don't have to worry about anything unexpected or surprising happening at all.

I know effects-based design. Effects-based design was one of the first things I discovered when stretching beyond D&D, and many of the systems I own material for and would like to try (HERO, M&M, Tri-Stat, Savage Worlds) are effects-based systems.

4E is an effects-based system--but it's a low-resolution one, or what might be called 'low definition, low trust'. I don't think the problems that it has caused some folks lie in the effects-based foundation, but that the game does not provide the more rigorous mechanical definition of HERO, nor does it encourage allowing special effects to play a greater part like HERO's special effects can at GM's discretion, M&M's emphasis on descriptors or power stunting, or Savage Worlds' encouragement of power trappings having some mechanical effect.

Of course, since one of the overriding principles of both 3E and 4E's design appears to have been "Try to keep as many of the PC abilities under the rules and free of DM adjudication as possible," this may not be a surprise.

 

[BryonD]

5) Your experiences exist differently from your recollection.

No, that is NOT an option because he is talking about MY experiences. I accept his experiences as real and quite different than mine.

6) You have always - always - played with heavily dissociative mechanics for as long as you have played D&D. But you ignored them. You can't or won't ignore equally "dissociative mechanics" in 4e for whatever reason. This causes you to assume that the "dissociative mechanics" you ignored - be it consciously or unconsciously - never existed in the first place.

There is the concept called "relative". I have numerous times comments on issues where 3E could be better in this regard. But 4E very intentionally lurched in this direction. And, more importantly, the design concept behind 3E attempts to avoid this while 4E actively embraces it. Which IS NOT to say that this is bad. Only that it is different. And not what a lot of people like. A lot of people LOVE it. But a lot see it as a serious flaw as well.

3e is a bad simulationist game. Anyone who is not a 3e fan can tell you that. Heck, plenty of 3e fans can tell you that.

Oh, I agree that a lot of non-3E fans will say that. Of course, I've had a lot of 3E haters tell me about how their eyes bleed or they get migraines at the thought of trying to run 3E.

I agree that 3E CAN be run in a manner that ignores simulation.
I also agree that some people clearly find keeping up with running 3E in a manner that embraces the simulation to be stressful and not fun.

But when you tell me about my game, you are simply amusing. You have no idea what happens in my game. And your statements about it are wrong.

Your experiences are, of course, your experiences. They are your subjective experiences, and they are colored with your ignoring of "dissociative mechanics." They never stopped existing, you simply stopped noticing them.

Do I get to start telling you what you are ignoring in your games? Are you going to go on record right now and say that I can decree anything I want and you will accept that as truth?
I didn't think so.

It appears you have a deep NEED to believe that I'm ignoring things. Which is pretty telling.

I do experience issues in 3E that I wish were better. In a few cases I've actually house-rules to fix them. In some cases it is better to grin an bear it. But the great majority of the time, these issues don't come into play. Again, if you (a) stop trying to tell me about myself and (b) stop trying to put relative issues in only black and white categories, then, just maybe, you will see the distinction.

And if all you have as an argument is to tell me that I don't know about my own games, then you are lost. But, that is true the moment you try to insist that there are not significant differences between the games here.


My 3E simulation games ROCK.

 

[BryonD]

I'm curious Nineball.

Can you offer a serious, thoughtful justification for why someone might love 3E and yet find 4E completely unsatisfying?

You just happen to be the latest in a growing pattern of 4E myrmidons who seem to find the simple idea that 3E is the game of choice of a lot of people to be enraging.

I mean, I'm an edition warrior. I admit it. Happily. It's fun.

And I love 3E and find 4E unsatisfying. But I consistently admit that 4E does do the things it set out to do. It is a great game at doing what it intends and it is clear that a lot of people love it for that. That is great.

I used to be disappointed that my apples had been replaced with oranges and apples were no longer "in season". But Paizo fixed that for me. Everyone should be happy.

I'll happily argue all day long about what 3E does and does not do and what 4E does and does not do. But it still comes down to different strokes. Play what you love.

But when I offer critical comments about 4E, they reference particular elements of the game system relative to my personal preferences. I've never told anyone that their experiences don't exist. That is a really bizarre position to be taking.

 

[billd91]

He asks the 1e/2e/3e wizard (that is, he asks himself) how fireball works - and tells himself that it's logical.
He asks the 4e rogue (that is, he asks himself) how a daily power works - and tells himself he doesn't understand it.

But because he's disguised the question to himself as one asked of a 4e rogue, now he says: "Haha! 4e is to blame!"

Once you see through that trick, the whole 'theory' falls apart.

All his theory says is a 'disassociated mechanic' is one he can't, won't or doesn't want to conceptualise. Had he said such a thing, it might actually have been useful to someone, somewhere. It's not such a bad concept for a game designer to bear in mind.

As it is, the entire 'theory' looks little more than an attempt to make the author's prejudices sound like objective analysis.

You're missing something in your rebuttal. The dissociative part isn't that the rogue can use this daily power of feints and motion to make his opponent dance to his tune, it's that the rogue's ability to tap that particular power occurs only once per day. That's the problem with 4e in this particular post.

The reason that the fireball is less dissociative is because the PC has more choice about it. He can prepare that "daily" power multiple times as long as he's sufficient level to manipulate that kind of power. His ability to tap that power is more directly associated with his own will to use that power as he sees fit.
I think the rogue's daily power (and all martial dailies) would be better served, and less dissociative, if they weren't separate from the encounter powers. If each encounter power had a "boosted" level of performance related to the base encounter power but a bit better, and the PC had a limited number of boosts to use per day, then the power would be less dissociative than your typical martial daily. The character doesn't lose the skill he so cleverly shows in 4e only once a day, he still has it as a trick to pull out with each new encounter (before his target gets wise to his tricks), it's just that he occasionally does better with it.

 

[Elf Witch]

The only reason this is odd is because for so long EN World was a place where you could say "3e is a better game then 4e," but you could not say "4e is a better game then 3e." That former made you a fan; the latter, a "fanboy."

You really need to get off the cross because someone needs the wood.

Both sides have said some pretty insulting things to each other and the mods have tried to stop all of it.

I have been told by some 4E fans when I say 3E is a better game then 4E that I am gronard, afraid of change , that I am angry at WOTC and bitter, fatbeard and other insults that I don't recall at the moment.

Why can't you accept that some people just don't like the direction the game went in?

It is like you want us to admit that we like a crappy game then it will be okay in your book if we like it. I don't go around saying 4E is a crappy game I say that I don't enjoy the mechanics of the system. And I try and explain what it is about it that I don't like.

Some 3E fanboys were major asshats over the change but so was some 4E fanboys. Neither side has the monopoly on behaving like jerks.

 

[pemerton]

pemerton is an excellent poster who approaches gaming/4e from a different direction than I, and his style fits with a sort of "the rules support the story" approach rather than my "the rules define the story" approach.

Thanks!

The paradigm of encounter and daily powers is not an avatar issue, it's a player issue (and one that I share with you, please don't feel that I'm judging you). By that I mean the avatar does whatever they do and it can be described in the world. The player is the one who "knows" that the avatar cannot do it more than once. The avatar doesn't "know" that, in a sense

I think this is right.

the rules exist not as a simulation of the game world. The concept is that the game world exists(I use the term loosely, since the game world is fictional) outside of the rules. It has it's own physics, or lack thereof. The rules, instead of modeling the world, act as a set of tools by which the players interact with the world.

So is this.

[MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION] has been making the point that the PC isn't real, and doesn't literally know or do anything. The stats and abilities on the character sheet are, primarily, tools for the player to use to play the game. Because the game is an RPG, the main way the player plays the game is by engaging the ficitonal situation via his/her PC. That is why many of the stats and abilities on the character sheet pertain to things that the player can have his/her PC do. (I don't want to say that this is inherent to roleplaying, but I think it is pretty central to most RPGs.)

But it is a further question whether the rules that govern a player's deployment of his/her PC must also be rules that model the ingame, imaginary causal processes of that PC.

RQ and Classic Traveller are two well-known RPGs that come closest to this sort of simulationism. As some have pointed out, 3E comes close in some places but not others (turn-by-turn combat, for example, and associated notions like "full attack", clearly are not simulationist in this sense - the constraint of taking turns is not something that exists within the fiction - only the participants in the game know or care about turns.)

4e has more of these mechanics which are addressed to the player, but do not model ingame processes. But it doesn't follow that no one at the table knows what is happening in the gameworld, nor that the fictional characters can't be imagined to narrate their own biographies. It also means that the 1x/enc or 1x/day limits on some abilities are not necessarily part of a PC's biography. The rules constraint operates on the player, not the PC. That is, it's not necessarily the case that a PC fighter can't perform a sweeping blow more than once in five minutes. It's just that s/he never does.

An issue that [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] has raised in many threads on these boards is a different one from that of so-called "dissociated" mechanics, namely, does adjudicating action resolution in the game require the real-world participants to know what is happening in the fiction? I agree with LostSoul that if the answer to this question is "no", then we're sliding from an RPG to a boardgame/wargame. But I think that, in the case of 4e, the answer to the question is "yes" - although the sorts of fictional details required are different from what they might be in other games (eg position is very important, precise swordplay technique used is not that important).

It was after playing over the years I came to the comclusion that the to hit die rolling largely does not matter. It is not what makes a fight memorable. It is the tactics, like where some one stands in a bottleneck to split the enemy force in to more managable chunks. Or some has the ability to go nova and finally the lucky criticals that one shot an enemy.

Now one of the things that I like about 4e combat is that daily encounter and action points allows one to set up finishing move and are new opportunities to set up more memotable combats.

To my mind, this is what encounter and daily powers in 4e are about. The design intention is pretty clearly that, if the GM builds encounters according to the guidelines, and the players do their best to engage those encounters using the abilities on their character sheets, than a dramatically satisfying combat will result.

Whether or not this design goal has been achieved is a different question (in my experience it has been, but others' experiences seem to differ).

Whether or not the action resolution mechanics operate without the participants needing to engage the fiction is also a different question (in my experience this is not the case, but again others' experiences seem to differ).

Wrecan, of the WotC boards, is more elegant in his phrasing than I. I think he says it best.

That's a good post (and makes me feel more sane - someone else has noticed the indie influence on 4e's design).

Wrecan's comments on falling damage and damage remind me of this passage from Maelstrom Storytelling (p 116):

A good way to run the Hubris Engine is to use "scene ideas" to convey the scene, instead of literalisms. . . focus on the intent behind the elements in a scene, and not on how big or how far things might be. If the difficulty of the task at hand (such as jumping across a chasm in a cave) is explained in terms of difficulty, it doesn't matter how far across the actual chasm spans. In a movie, for instance, the camera zooms or pans to emphasize the danger or emotional reaction to the scene, and in so doing it manipulates the real distance of a chasm to suit the mood or "feel" of the moment. It is then no longer about how far across the character has to jump, but how hard the feat is for the character . . . The scene should be presented therefore in terms relative to the character's abilities . . . Players who want to climb onto your coffee table and jump across your living room to prove that their character could jump over the chasm have probably missed the whole point of the story.​

There is something similar also in HeroQuest 2nd ed (pp 72-74):

Resistances [that is, DCs] are determined relative to the PCs' collective ability ratings . . . Resistances are usually asssumed to have all complicating or mitigating factors built into them. Even when the PCs re-encounter a previous obstacle, you can change the resistance directly if . . . dramatic or pacing reasons indicate that this is the most entertaining choice. Make sure that you describe changing conditions so that the change in difficulty appears believable . . .​

This is how I run skill challenges in 4e. The fact that combat works in a different, and more simulationist, fashion contributes to what I regard as the biggest flaw in 4e's action resolution mechanics, namely, the lack of guidance on how to integrate skill challenges with the tactical resolution system.

There's always GURPS and Riddle of Steel as well.

I would have thought that Spiritual Attributes in TRoS are "dissociated mechanics", in that - from the point of view of the PC - the use of bonus dice from SAs does not correlate to any particular thing that the PC is doing when egaged in a passionate rather than more pedestrian conflict.

 

[chaochou]

You're missing something in your rebuttal. The dissociative part isn't that the rogue can use this daily power of feints and motion to make his opponent dance to his tune, it's that the rogue's ability to tap that particular power occurs only once per day.

I'm talking about this definition of dissociated mechanics:

When I talk about "dissociated mechanics", I'm talking about mechanics which have no association with the game world. These are mechanics for which the characters have no functional explanations.

I don't see how it's missing something to point out that characters are not capable of giving functional explanations of anything. It's a nonsense definition, followed by nonsense examples.

And 'mechanics which have no association with the game world'? Who creates association? Or fails to create association? Whose game world are we talking about? It's just a way of saying 'dissociated mechanics are ones I can't / won't conceptualise'.

I dont think I missed anything. By the definition provided there are no objectively 'dissociated mechanics'. Just individual decisions over whether to - and if so how to - rationalise, explain or interpret.

 

[Dunnagin]

I think if someone says "a dagger does 1d4 damage and a sword does 1d8 damage" the actual accuracy of this system based on various circumstances can be argued. Daggers may pierce armor more easily at close range and thus be more damaging, a sword may deflect harmlessly off this or that... those types of debate.

The point is though, my mind can associate a small sized dagger with a small die (d4) and a physically larger weapon with a larger die (d8). This is a short leap of logic.

If a mechanic says that a thief or a fighter can perform some action which doesn't align to thieving or fighting at all... something similar to teleportation (you just appear somewhere else), then you begin to lose me.

This is like saying that a normal Dagger now does "1d4 and resurrection once per day", which is fine... you'd say it's a "magical dagger"... so my mind wants to take 4e "powers" and say "these are magical fighters and magical rogues".

Also, they try to keep the damage output across classes close to one another... so my rogue and mage can keep up with a fighters damage output.

The end result, for me is a system where "we are all fightery magicy and we just do it because our powers balance any rules gap".

I'm not a big fan of this type of design imperative.
It seems really forced.

 

[Elf Witch]

I think if someone says "a dagger does 1d4 damage and a sword does 1d8 damage" the actual accuracy of this system based on various circumstances can be argued. Daggers may pierce armor more easily at close range and thus be more damaging, a sword may deflect harmlessly off this or that... those types of debate.

The point is though, my mind can associate a small sized dagger with a small die (d4) and a physically larger weapon with a larger die (d8). This is a short leap of logic.

If a mechanic say that a thief or a fighter can perform some action which doesn't align to thieving or fighting at all... something similar to teleportation (you just appear somewhere else), then you begin to lose me.

This is like saying that a normal Dagger now does "1d4 and resurrection once per day", which is fine... you'd say it's a "magical dagger"... so my mind wants to take 4e "powers" and say "these are magical fighters and magical rogues".

Also, they try to keep the damage output across classes close to one another... so my rogue and mage can keep up with a fighters damage output.

The end result, for me is a system where "we are all fightery magicy and we just do it because our powers balance any rules gap".

I'm not a big fan of this type of design imperative.
It seems really forced.

This is a great example. I know that balance is a key theme in 4E and some people really like that. I don't like it to the extent that they took it. I feel as if they had to add a lot of mechanics that really don't make sense to me just to make sure everyone has something awesome to do every round.

My son said to me that 4E reminds him of how a lot of little league sports teams have taken the route that everyone gets a trophy.

My group played 4E to see how we liked it and our opinion was that it was to bland. Full disclosure here my group has never felt that there was an issue between casters and non casters. We really didn't mind grapple.

We have some house rules that fix certain issues we see. For example we think fighters are boring out of combat so we changed the skill system to get rid of cross class skills by using a feat called applied learning. The feat taken at first level makes all skills class skills.

I do agree that 3E RAW is hard to balance for a low magic campaign so we tweak it for that or play a different system.

 

[Dunnagin]

I've always kept a different balance in mind while DMing I guess.

Let's say I have three players, and they want these characters:
A sly con artist thief who like to gamble
I thug of a fighter who just like to hit stuff
An overly curious mage who loves fiddling with magic

I'm not worried as much about combat balance, as I am the balance of "stage time".
So I think up some plot thread like (oversimplified example):
The thief has (what he believes to be) a useless magic item, which he sells to the mage (this is how the two meet). The mage realizes it is a "summoning stone" and gradually fiddles with it until it releases a demon! This leads to a series of events... of course the fighter will get to smash critters and things... but the balance is in giving each player the story they envisioned (they gave me the basic hooks, I give them the details).

The rest of the adventure has ample trap disarming and con artist opportunities for the thief... lots of arcane tidbits and oddities for the mage... and of course things to smash (which is also fun) for the fighter.

This, to me, is not only a complete game... but it helps a story unfold.

Systems which have hundreds of options for combat (3e) and systems which are designed to balance combat (4e) both focus on combat... and we all know, there is way more fun to be had than just combat... or at least, building players up to have a reason for combat.

I think game design, game mastering and playing can contain a lot of expressive storytelling... instead of a focus on "solid combat mechanics"... I wish games focused more on telling good stories... this is why I like or dislike certain movies... and games are just another form or entertainment for me, so why not be a bit artful.

Instead of arguing over which system handles combat better... perhaps we should analyze what factors outside of combat mechanics... or any mechanics actually... make the game fun.

Non mechanical items such as... world building, plot threads, motivations, character backgrounds, etc.
While we argue about which type of initiative mechanic makes the most sense... are we forgetting storytelling? I kind of hope not.