In Defense of the Theory of Dissociated Mechanics

[pemerton]

My guess as to why it gets flak for using them is the audience is used to the D&D game running without them. I already have other systems of choice I turn to for narrative/dramatically satisfying play. 4e targeted such play space <edit>more</edit> than its predecessors and seemed to move away from the sort of play (heavy exploration, rewards coming directly from context and overcoming a hostile environment) I wanted when I turned to using the D&D rules.

I agree with this, excpet with a substituion of "expected" for "wanted" in the last clause. It is precisely because 4e differed from what I had traditionally expected from D&D that I now want to play D&D.

In other words, it seemed that 4e was not true to the roots of its style of game.

Add to that a marked change in presentation and apparent design philosophy and you gete passionate alienated fans.

The last sentence here seems pretty plausible, if a lot of people agree with, or (in terms of their own perceptions and feelings) exemplify the first sentence here.

I personally have a fairly uncertain handle on the roots of D&D's style of game - there is classic Gygaxian D&D, there is the much more character-focused way that I played Basic/Expert and then D&D (which enjoyed some support in Dragon magazine in the mid-80s), there is heavy sim-style world-building exploration (which enjoyed a lot of support in Dragon around that time), there is 2nd-ed era GM-driven storytelling (which irritated me at the time and which I'm even more averse to these days), there is 3E which I don't really get at all (I don't see what 3E offers that Rolemaster - perhaps with a Fate point system to allow players to mitigate criticals vs their PCs (heck, let's publish it and call it HARP!) - doesn't do better - but that's probably just me). And the 3E of Pathfinder adventure paths looks different to me from the 3E of many ENworld posters' sandboxes.

But the fact that I like 4e because of its mechanical departures from earlier editions probably makes me an outlier in the way I engage with (or fail to engage with) D&D's roots.

 

[Beginning of the End]

The real grunt work would be determining the damage "cost" of various effects. Some of the more powerful ones wouldn't be "affordable" until higher levels are reached when base damage permits the options.

Don't make any effect too good for the damage cost. Here is an important bit- the effects generated are not and should not be equal to those produced by magic or other limited use effects.

Unfortunately, this is very difficult to balance without being able to tightly control the exact number of encounters a group will experience between extended rests (or whatever other mechanic you use for allowing limited use effects to recharge).

You can already see this in pre-4E D&D: Here most fighters basically have "do damage as often as you want" as the only ability you need to balance, but whether or not this is balanced varies widely depending on how many encounters you experience per day. One? The fighter might as well stay home. Twenty? Now the fighter is essential.

Add special, at-will abilities to the fighter and now you're balancing from two directions.

Interesting discussion all around. I think something about the essay rings true for me, in terms of what may be one of the root reasons i cant seem to get into 4e. However i really believe this stuff is a matter of taste and preference and that our reactions to games begin with a feeling ( i.e. I am not having a good time playing this or this really bores me) and then we try to figure out the reasons why. This is why i dont think it is fruitful to prove to someone their reasons for disliking a game are wrong. Because at the end of the day it isn't a matter of providing a logical proof that johnny really likes 3e though he says he doesn't. You can prove his assumptions about why he doesn't like it are questionable, but he is still going to have that same reaction to the game itself.,

I don't find this to be universally true. We certainly haven't found any value in 4E's dissociated mechanics, but there are plenty of other games where understanding how they're supposed to be played has allowed out group to enjoy them. (Whereas if we had approached them as traditional RPGs we wouldn't have.)

And what if the ankheg tries to spit again in 5 hours, 58 minutes? At this point it's certainly almost completely full, hmm? Why is there no individual variation in "recharge times"?

My point is that this is something in the rules which, when viewed through the "lens of reality," lacks a good, consistent fictional explanation. We have to "house rule it" to make it make sense. It is different in degree, but not in kind, from many other such things we cheerfully accept in our D&D game.

And yet this is supposed to be an "associated" mechanic.

Actually, what you're clearly demonstrating is that -- contrary to Imaro's claim -- there's nothing inherently dissociated about recharge mechanics. But you're muddying that issue by insisting on some sort of partisanship in your antics.

As for a condition such as "Only if anyone is around to hear it", that's an epic fail. What it means is that the smart thing is always to blow the Horn of Gondor when facing something big (like the Balrog). Because it can't do any harm - it just won't do any good. But mysteriously Boromir didn't do this. Instead he waited until his back was completely against the wall, hoarding the daily to use against completely impossible odds because he didn't know when the next extended rest was coming and would prefer to have something in reserve in case the next obstacle was even worse than the current one.

Alternatively: He used the horn in Gondor because there was help to be summoned. He didn't use it in Moria because there was no help to be summoned.

Ultimately, this kind of "let's pretend this narrative is literally a game session" is of virtually no use whatsoever.

4e on the other hand tries to simulate the genre.

There's really no evidence of that to be found in the rulebooks or the design diaries. 4E's goal appears to have been to create a balanced system for handling predictable strings of encounters.

More generally, you've got two very confused Venn diagrams going on here.

First, narrative control mechanics are almost always dissociated mechanics. But not all dissociated mechanics are narrative control mechanics.

Second, some genre-emulation mechanics may be dissociated mechanics. But the relationship is tangential at best.

4E has a lot of dissociated mechanics. But it doesn't have much in the way of genre-emulation mechanics or narrative control mechanics.

 

[innerdude]

Having read through most of the thread, and the Alexandrian's essay again, I'm just as firmly convinced as to the general premise and conclusion posited--that dissociated mechanics are bad, if they're used in the place of non-dissociated mechanics without any benefit in utility or substance (i.e., transfer of narrative control).

But the importance of that concept continues to grow in my mind, and it's based on something that struck me as I was writing my 2nd post on page 6 of the thread--namely that in order for roleplaying games to work at all, they have to represent a form of human rationality as it comes to dealing with other sentient, rational entities.

In other words, beyond any mechanical representations or resolutions, a player has to assume that their actions inside the game world will at some point receive a response. That other rational entities (read: people) are evaluating the character's actions, and formulating appropriate responses, based on the game world's structure, cultural and racial norms, the individual entities' circumstances, etc. as defined by the GM.

This, in my mind, is the heart of roleplaying. Whatever class and skills a character possesses, whatever race, whatever "level" or proficiency a character has, all of that is merely a vehicle for the player to present themselves as a particular rational entity, and that the game world is expected to respond, act, and react to what is presented. Character backbround matters because of this reality. I've seen a lot of people say in essence that no character needs a background any more specific than "I grew up with an adventuring spirit."

But if you're approaching roleplaying as a form of experiencing vicarious human interaction, that's insufficient, because the character's background naturally forms the character's own internal sense of rationality. A character with no background is literally its own dissociation--it's a mechanical construct of numbers with no basis for the point of reality it inhabits within the game world.

Now some might say that no outside observer can know personal intention anyway. That if a player wants to act randomly, it's their prerogative, and the GM, or "game world," or "mileu" be damned. "It's my character, I choose to act the way I want. It's the GM's job to figure out how it 'fits' their vision."

That's fine and good, to a point; clearly no one plays RPGs to be told how to play their character. But more often than not, it leads to natural breaks within the rationality of the character--i.e., the substance of the character within the game world. The player rarely or never associates character actions with the logical extension of rational outcomes.

Now some may say that this doesn't matter, that such a play style can be rationalized by "The character just doesn't care what other people think."

Yet the circumstances of your typical RPG adventurer precludes this basic premise. Getting good at adventuring takes waaaay too much effort to "not care." A fighter who goes around killing stuff, wenching, and drinking ale all the time isn't passively "not caring," he's actively constructing an essence so that his worldview of "not caring" can flourish. People who truly "don't care" aren't adventurers--they're lazy sacks of crap (or if they are adventurers, they're probably not very good ones).

An action/adventure RPG, regardless of system, has to assume some level of this rationality--that the characters within it consider the results of their actions within the mileu. It's part of what makes RPGs great, and a much different experience than playing Settlers of Catan, Dominion, or even the Castle Ravenloft board game.

I'm rambling a bit here I realize, but the question comes back to, what does this have to do with dissociative mechanics?

The answer is this: I don't play roleplaying games, at least for those designed from the "Actor" perspective like D&D is, to "dissociate" my character's rationality.

Dissociative mechanics in general are just one more layer of abstraction, one more set of arbitrary barriers to the type of roleplaying I enjoy, which is entirely character associative. I want to play in roleplaying games that push character association, because I enjoy exploring the sense of human rationality that such association provides.

And as I re-read the Alexandrian's essay, I was even more convinced that dissociative mechanics are inherently at odds with this paradigm.

 

[Beginning of the End]

The examples that I gave weren't analaogous to knowing the DC of an open lock check, or d6 damage from fireballs.

To repeat them, they were: knowing that a 200' fall won't be fatal; knowing that a sword blow won't be fatal; knowing that one more blow will be fatal.

All of these are the result of knowing precise numbers to which the PC doesn't have access to. I'm not seeing the distinction. If you're still seeing one that doesn't rely on knowing the precise numbers involved, please explain it.

Yes, it's metagaming. That's the point of the mechanic. It doesn't follow from that that it undermines roleplaying and promotes tactical skirmishing, which is what Justin Alexander's essay claims.

The essay says nothing about dissociated mechanics promoting tactical skirmishing. When you just make up imaginary like that, it's difficult to have a meaningful conversation with you.

The essay also explicitly states that nothing about dissociated mechanics undermines roleplaying around those mechanics. (OTOH, it's pretty much true by definition that you are not roleplaying during those times in which you are using dissociated mechanics and, therefore, not engaged in the process of making decisions as if you were your character.)

 

[pemerton]

I think I like the idea, as well as ThirdWizard's description of FATE Declarations, but if DMs can raise the DC as high as they want to effectively negate a fiction they don't want to exist (for "good" or "bad"), I don't see how it's any different than "old school" DM adjucation that some people enjoy being removed from.

At least in HeroQuest, it's not about the GM setting the DC very high to negate someting. It's about the GM telling the player, at the metagame level and before anything has happened or been attempted in the fiction, that a certain canvassed option isn't going to wash.

The difference from old school GMing would be (i) that it happens pre-emptively, in this metagame fashion, and (ii) because of that, it can be done, and is expected to be done, in a more consensual fashion. (I identify in more detail below how metagame mechanics, and mechanics that have a certain looseness of fit between mechanical resolution and ingame fictional events, help contribute to the second of these differences.)

Whether these differences are very siginficant overall, or for any given group, I don't know. They are significant for me.

That is the problem with only going part way. Above, somewhere in this thread, I said that 4e was only kinda-sorta dissociated, not really dissociated in any meaningful way. What you just pointed out, that would be the "meaningful way" that I was referring to. Because there is no mechanical benefit to the narrative aspect.

I don't entirely agree. The narrative aspect, for example, can be pretty important for bringing page 42 into play.

One actual play example of this: before using Footwork Lure against a sonte golem, the player of the fighter in my game dropped a flask of wrestling oil onto the ground between himself and the golem, to increase the distance that he could slide the golem (and thereby get the benefits of Polearm Momentum against it). For this to work, the narrative aspect of Footwork Lure - that by deft work with his halberd the fighter lures the golem into stepping on the slippery patch of oil - has to be acknowledged. And the fact that the slipperiness was caused by oil itself became relevant when the party's wizard place a Wall of Fire in an adjacent square the next round - I decided to let the fighter roll a save for his patch of oil, which it failed, and the oil therefore combusted and the enhancement of Footwork Lure was lost.

One hypothetical example (at least, hypothetical relative to my table): a PC knocks a snake "prone". Following the Rules Compendium text (p 233), the table accepts that the prone condition

can affect limbless creatures, such as fish and snakes . . . when such a creature falls prone, imagine it is writhing or unsteady, rather than literally lying down.​

So the table agree that the snake has been flipped onto its back. Now one of the players remebers that the party was earlier warned by an oracle to look out for a snake with diamond markings on its back, and wants her PC to make a Perception check. The difficulty of that check, which the GM has responsibility for assigning on the spot, is clearly going to be affected by the fiction that the table has agreed to.

And the narration is crucial to resolving a skill challenge, per PHB p 259 and DGM pp 73-75:

Your DM sets the stage for a skill challenge by describing the obstacle you face and giving you some idea of the options you have in the encounter. Then you describe your actions and make checks until you either successfully complete the challenge or fail…

Running a skill challenge: Begin by describing the situation and defining the challenge. . . You describe the environment, listen to the players’ responses, let them make their skill checks, and narrate the results...

When a player’s turn comes up in a skill challenge, let that player’s character use any skill the player wants. As long as the player or you can come up with a way to let this secondary skill play a part in the challenge, go for it…

In skill challenges, players will come up with uses for skills that you didn’t expect to play a role. Try not to say no. . . This encourages players to think about the challenge in more depth…

However, it’s particularly important to make sure these checks are grounded in actions that make sense in the adventure and the situation.​

But even in cases where the narrative doesn't have an immediate mechanical consequence, it can still be important to play - which relates to my earlier response to Yesway Jose about mechanics for love. Thus, if a player describes a PC's power or ability working in a certain fashion, this contributes to the persona that is being developed for that PC. This is in turn relevant to how NPCs, demons, gods etc will view with and interact with the PC. Which matters to exploration, to scene framing, and can also, in turn, have mechanical implications in the context of a skill challenge.

An actual play example: the drow chaos sorcerer in my game has recently become a Demonskin Adept. The way the player of this PC describes his various abilities working matters to the manner in which demons, demon worshippers, devils etc - in short, all those who care about chaos and its ways - perceive, and therefore interact with, the PC in question. And this is not irrelevant or an afterthought to the the game. This is the game.

(A related point - a player, by choosing to narrate his/her PC's powers and abilities in a certain way, is also implicitly constructing the table's own "credibility test" paramters. This is another point of difference, I think, from classic D&D.)

What is your and/or Average Joe's motivation to describe the action in fluff terms? Why not just announce "I trip the opponent"?

The mechanical result is fixed.

What I've said above helps answer this, I think.

Anyone noticing the tension between having a detailed, tactical game and having narrative resolution?

Yep. But I'm used to it, because most of my GMing experience is with Rolemaster, which my group played in a vanilla narrativist fashion while still relishing every ounce of mechanical detail that Rolemaster provides both in character building and action resolution (OK, not every ounce, but many if not most of them).

For me, there are two keys, I think, to dissolving the tension. One is to make sure that the stakes of the combat are tightly integrated into the unfolding narrative. This doesn't mean no light-hearted or more peripheral conflicts - but even peripheral conflicts are still peripheral ie on the periphery of the unfolding narrative, and not completely divorced from it.

The second key is to make sure that the combat itself, as it unfolds in its tactical richness, is also populated by moments that express the concerns of the unfolding narrative. A whole range of decisions made by the participants in the game feed into this. For me as GM, it's part of what I keep in mind in encounter building, and then in adjudicating the encounter and actuallly playing the NPCs - for example, in target selection, choosing which powers to use, etc I look for opportunities to push salient buttons (will the dwarf be defeated by a phalanx of hobgoblins? will the mage-invoker of Ioun and Vecna, having teleported into a room to blow the doomspeaker of Dagon out through the window, be able to survive the guardian demon she summons into the room as her final act? can I wipe the smile off the face of that cocky drow sorcerer?). I think 4e is very good for this, because it's underlying mechanics are robust enough that making decisions in this sort of way - at least in my experience to date - tends to yield a dramatic but mechanically "fair" fight. I generally don't have to worry about anti-climactic underkill or "oops, TPK" overkill (which is a definite difference from Rolemaster).

The players also contribute in this second way. By building their PCs and choosing certain classes, powers and abilities, they already introduce, by default as it were, certain material into the course of tactical play. And because of the same "flexibile" or "forgiving" character of 4e's underlying mechanical robustness, they can play to the narrative without concern that this will lead to mechanical suboptimality that costs the party. (To put it another way: at least in my experience, the mechanics are robust enough in this sense that they don't genrate a very strong push from narrativism to any sort of hardcore gamism. They leave room for more light-hearted gamism - "high-fiving" clever moves and the like - but I think this sort of gamism is fairly compatible with a relaxed narrativism that focuses more on aesthetic and thematic value than the "serious moral questions" that are sometimes identified with narrativism.)

A game like HeroQuest probably offers more immediate satisfaction for a narrativist agenda, but some of us like the crunchy bits of 4e. Burning Wheel and The Riddle of Steel are games that probably mix crunch and narrative control in comparable sorts of degrees, but both tend more to the gritty than the gonzo, I think, and my group likes gonzo fantasy (not necessarily silly fanatsy, but plane-travelling, mixing it up with devils, demons and gods, epic destinies, etc).

 

[Pentius]

(OTOH, it's pretty much true by definition that you are not roleplaying during those times in which you are using dissociated mechanics and, therefore, not engaged in the process of making decisions as if you were your character.)

I think this sentence says a lot. You, as well as innerdude above(and Alexander, if I'm reading him right) seem to be going by a definition for roleplaying that only accepts the Actor Stance as roleplaying, and puts Author and Director Stance outside it. It's this rejection of the other two stances that leads to the attitude in the article that gets my hackles up. Actor Stance is all well and good, but I've never been very fond of it, myself. I play mainly in Author Stance, shifting to Director Stance whenever the mechanics let me. It's the way the game makes the most sense to me, and has ever since I first picked up the AD&D 1e Player's Handbook nearly two decades ago, reading and rereading the introduction that promised me a game where my friends and I created our own exciting fantasy stories. And you can bet your sweet can I consider myself a roleplayer.

I don't think the mechanics Alexander labels as "Disassociative"(still a very poor term, imo) are bad. If you want to play exclusively in Actor Stance, then they aren't for you, and 4e may very well not be either. But for those roleplayers who enjoy the other two stances, they're incredibly useful, even exciting tools, that we will happily go off and roleplay with.

 

[pemerton]

All of these are the result of knowing precise numbers to which the PC doesn't have access to. I'm not seeing the distinction. If you're still seeing one that doesn't rely on knowing the precise numbers involved, please explain it.

Knowing that I can jump over a 200' cliff and survive isn't just about knowing precise numbers as a player, which the PC doesn't know. Likewise about knowing that one more blow will kill me.

These are about the player being in a cognitive state, which (i) almost certainly affects the way s/he plays his or her PC, and (ii) is a cognitive state that that PC could not possibly be in.

So, for example, the player who knows that the 200' fall can't kill his/her PC decides that her PC will jump. What can the PC possibly be thinking that allows him/her to make the jump with the same degree of insouciance? All I can think of is "I have a lucky feeling about this!" But if that's enough to make hit points "associated", why can't it do the job for 4e's metagame powers?

Similarly for the player who has his PC charge a bevy of archers because s/he knows that the damage from the arrows can't add up to a fatal total. What is the PC thinking? Again, all I can think of is "I feel lucky!".

And now consider the player who decides that his/her PC will jump, and the PC does so - and the PC, in a bizzare coincidence, takes maximum damage, and therefore (let's suppose) has 1 hit point left. The very same PC, who just seconds before had a lucky feeling, now will act as cautiously as possible, because any weapon attack has a chance of killing him or her. What is the PC feeling? Not that every bone is broken - s/he gets up and walks away. Not that s/he can't dodge - her movement speed and Tumbling checks are unimpeded. She's feeling unlucky. Like the gods have deserted her. All her divine favour has been used up. Anyway, however you "associate" that, do the same when you play 4e!

TL;DR - there're are reasons that generations of RPGers have rejected D&D hit points for other, different, damage mechanics. One of those reasons is that hit points produce decision-making that has no correlation to the actual decisions that people who don't have cognitive access to their future luckiness are able to make.

Yes, it's metagaming. That's the point of the mechanic. It doesn't follow from that that it undermines roleplaying and promotes tactical skirmishing, which is what Justin Alexander's essay claims.

The essay says nothing about dissociated mechanics promoting tactical skirmishing.

This mischaracterised what I said.

It's obvious to anyone who can read that Justin Alexander doesn't say that dissociated mechanics in general promote tactical skirmishing, given that he praises their role in Wushu. But I think it's equally obvious that I haven't imputed this view to him.

When I say "that's the point of the mechanic", and then say that it doesn't follow from that point that it (ie the mechanic in question) undermines roleplaying and promotes tactical skirmishing, I am not talking about so-called dissociated mechanics in general. I'm talking about a particular mechanic - namely, a rogue using Trick Strike - which is the the target of Justin Alexander's attack. (And to the extent that I'm generalising by way of implication, the implied generalisation is obviously to other martial daily and encounter powers in 4e.)

the essay appears to presuppose that a combat resolution mechanics that are complex and have a signficant metagame component are at odds with, or at best orthogonal, to player control over the narrative.

Why, exactly, do you think this? I see nothing in the essay that would lead one to that conclusion, and, frankly, rather the opposite.

Anyway, here are the bits of the essay that I particularly had in mind when making those above interpretive remarks:

Of course, When the characters' relationship to the game world is stripped away, they are no longer roles to be played. They have become nothing more than mechanical artifacts that are manipulated with other mechanical artifacts.

You might have a very good improv session that is vaguely based on the dissociated you can sidestep all these issues with house rules if you just embrace the design ethos of 4th Edition: There is no explanation for the besieged foe ability. It is a mechanical manipulation with no corresponding reality in the game world whatsoever.

At that point, however, you're no longer playing a roleplaying game. mechanics that you're using, but there has been a fundamental disconnect between the game and the world -- and when that happens, it stop being a roleplaying game. You could just as easily be playing a game of Chess while improvising a vaguely related story about a royal coup starring your character named Rook.

In short, you can simply accept that 4th Edition is being designed primarily as a tactical miniatures game. And if it happens to still end up looking vaguely like a roleplaying game, that's entirely accidental. . .

[D]issociated mechanics can also be quite useful for roleplaying games. It's all a question of what you do with them. Specifically, dissociated mechanics can be useful if the reason they're dissociated from the game world is because they're modeling the narrative. . .

Traditional roleplaying games, like D&D, are based around the idea of players as actors: Each player takes on the role of a particular character and the entirety of play is defined around the player thinking of themselves as the character and asking the question, "What am I going to do?"

. . .

But there is another option: Instead of determining the outcome of a particular action, scene-based resolution mechanics determine the outcome of entire scenes. . .

Clearly, a scene-based resolution mechanic is dissociated from the game world. The game world, after all, knows nothing about the "scene". . .

The disadvantage of a dissociated mechanic, as we've established, is that it disengages the player from the role they're playing. But in the case of a scene-based resolution mechanic, the dissociation is actually just making the player engage with their role in a different way (through the narrative instead of through the game world). . .

There are advantages to focusing on a single role like an actor and there are advantages to focusing on creating awesome stories like an author. Which mechanics I prefer for a given project will depend on what my goals are for that project. . .

In the case of Wushu, fidelity to the game world is being traded off in favor of narrative control. In the case of 4th Edition, fidelity to the game world is being traded off in favor of a tactical miniatures game. . .

[T]he easiest comeback would be to say that it's all a matter of personal taste: I like telling stories and I like playing a role, but I don't like the tactical wargaming.

That's an easy comeback, but it doesn't quite ring true. One of things I like about 3rd Edition is the tactical combat system. And I generally prefer games with lots of mechanically interesting rules. I like the game of roleplaying games.

My problem with the trade-offs of 4th Edition is that I also like the roleplaying of roleplaying games. It comes back to something I said before: Simulationist mechanics allow me to engage with the character through the game world. Narrative mechanics allow me to engage with the character through the story. . .

There is a meaningful difference between an RPG and a wargame. And that meaningful difference doesn't actually go away just because you happen to give names to the miniatures you're playing the wargame with and improv dramatically interesting stories that take place between your tactical skirmishes.

To put it another way: I can understand why you need to accept the disadvantages of dissociated mechanics in order to embrace the advantages of narrative-based mechanics. But I don't think it's necessary to embrace dissociated mechanics in order to create a mechanically interesting game. . .

In other words, I don't think the trade-offs in 4th Edition are necessary. They're sacrificing value and utility where value and utility didn't need to be lost.​

So the reason I think that Alexander's essay appears to presuppose that combat resolution mechanics that are complex and have a signficant metagame component are at odds with, or at best orthogonal, to player control over the narrative, is because the essay discusses such mechanics (namely, 4e martial dailies) at some length, and concludes that they are not giving players control over the narrative, and rather are supporting a tactical skirmish game, in relation to which any fiction would be "dramatic improv" of no relevance to action resolution.

And the reason I say that Alexander's essay claims that 4e's martial daily powers undermine roleplaying and promote tactical skirmishing is that he says "In the case of 4th Edition, fidelity to the game world is being traded off in favor of a tactical miniatures game".

To be honest, I'm surprised that my reading of the essay - which is manifestly an attack upon 4e for being a tactical skirmish game, with the martial dailes picked out as exhibit A in the case for 4e's sacrificing of roleplaying to tactical skirmish play - is at all controversial.

I mean, the remark (that falls under a heading "Accepting Your Fate") that "you can sidestep all these issues with house rules if you just embrace the design ethos of 4th Edition: There is no explanation for the besieged foe ability. It is a mechanical manipulation with no corresponding reality in the game world whatsoever. At that point, however, you're no longer playing a roleplaying game" is pretty unambiguous.

4E's goal appears to have been to create a balanced system for handling predictable strings of encounters.

<snip>

4E has a lot of dissociated mechanics. But it doesn't have much in the way of genre-emulation mechanics or narrative control mechanics.

This seems to me to make much the same presupposition as does Justin Alexander's essay.

Why is the player of a rogue, who chooses to use Trick Strike on a given occasion against a given foe - thereby bringing it about that, in the fiction, his/her PC shines in that particular duel against that particular foe - not exercising narrative control?

Here is Justin Alexander's characterisation of narrative control mechanics (from the same essay):

Second, you can create a story. In this approach you are focusing on the creation of a compelling narrative. . . . The dice you're rolling have little or no connection to the game world -- they're modeling a purely narrative property (control of the scene). . . [This] gives greater narrative control to the player. This narrative control can then be used in all sorts of advantageous ways. For example, in the case of Wushu these mechanics were designed to encourage dynamic, over-the-top action sequences . . .​

In what way is the player of a rogue, who has his/her PC use Trick Strike, not (i) using a mechanic that has little or no connection to the game world but rather models a purely narrative property (namely, of being a singularly impressive duelist), (ii) which is under the control of the player (because the player gets to decide when to use the power), (iii) in an advantageous way (namely, to create what the player regards as a compelling story about his/her clever, swashbuckling rogue).

Besides being narrative control mechanics in the sense suggested in the essay, 4e's daily powers are intended to play another obvious role in relation to the production of a compelling narrative, namely, of producing without effort a certain sort of pacing in the resolution of combat.

(And in case anyone things being a singularly impressive duelist doesn't count as a "compelling narrative", here is Alexander's example of a compelling narrative from Wushu (again, this is from the same essay):

Since it's just as easy to slide dramatically under a car and emerge on the other side with guns blazing as it is to duck behind cover and lay down suppressing fire, the mechanics make it possible for the players to do whatever the coolest thing they can possibly think of is . . .​

I think being John Woo in a modern action adventure RPG is about as compelling as being D'Artagnan in a fantasy adventure RPG - ie probably reasonably entertaining for the participants in the game, although fairly prosaic by overall standards of artistic quality. In any event, Alexander is not setting the bar for "compelling narrative" so high that a 4e game obviously lacks the capacity to clear it.)

The essay also explicitly states that nothing about dissociated mechanics undermines roleplaying around those mechanics.

<snip>

OTOH, it's pretty much true by definition that you are not roleplaying during those times in which you are using dissociated mechanics and, therefore, not engaged in the process of making decisions as if you were your character.

This isn't the only, or self-evident, definition of roleplaying in relation to RPGs. For example, it renders author stance not roleplaying by definition, whereas a good chunk of pretty classic D&D play takes place in author stance - I, the player, decide what would be a clever thing to do - perhaps in conversation with my fellow playes, perhaps not - and then retroactively impute the relevant reasons and motivations to my PC.

It's also unclear how this notion of "roleplaying around dissociated mechanics" - ie adopting actor stance when you're not in author or director stance - relates to Alexander's claim that, if you do this in relation to 4e, "You could just as easily be playing a game of Chess while improvising a vaguely related story about a royal coup starring your character named Rook."

 

[prosfilaes]

Knowing that I can jump over a 200' cliff and survive isn't just about knowing precise numbers as a player, which the PC doesn't know. Likewise about knowing that one more blow will kill me.

These are about the player being in a cognitive state, which (i) almost certainly affects the way s/he plays his or her PC, and (ii) is a cognitive state that that PC could not possibly be in.

So, for example, the player who knows that the 200' fall can't kill his/her PC decides that her PC will jump. What can the PC possibly be thinking that allows him/her to make the jump with the same degree of insouciance? All I can think of is "I have a lucky feeling about this!" But if that's enough to make hit points "associated", why can't it do the job for 4e's metagame powers?

I don't buy that it's dissociative. People take more than 200' foot jumps all the time; if you could make the landing with as much safety as if you had a parachute (and the fact that anyone sane trusts a parachute is beyond me) then why wouldn't an adventurer make the jump? The fluff here is clear; high-level adventurers can survive long falls and reasonably know that. There's an exact parallel to something in the game world; you just don't like the fluff it implies.

(I'm not sure what's so different from getting in close combat with a dragon. A dragon's breath is realistically as sure a kill as a 200' foot fall, and a strike from its claw nearly so.)

 

[pemerton]

I don't buy that it's dissociative.

<snip>

The fluff here is clear; high-level adventurers can survive long falls and reasonably know that. There's an exact parallel to something in the game world; you just don't like the fluff it implies.

But how do they survive? This is similar to my response upthread to Jameson Courage - you don't establish a coherent gameworld just by telling me that Heirophants have a non-magical ability to square the circle, and that it is teachable and learnable. I want to know, how are they doing it? What fiction am I being invited to imagine?

In the case of the fall, what might this be? Luck? Divine favour? (Surely not meat! Or really strong bones - after all, that is what a barbarian's DR models.) If you can regard knowing how lucky you are going to be, in advance, as associated, then I don't see why the same mind trick can't be played in respect of martial dailies.

I'm not sure what's so different from getting in close combat with a dragon. A dragon's breath is realistically as sure a kill as a 200' foot fall, and a strike from its claw nearly so.

Well, the answer to the claw thing is meant to be that it doesn't really hit you, it just grazes you or winds you slightly.

The breath I can't say so much about, and I think it's therefore not a coincidence that a more simulationist approach to breath weapons and saving throws is seen fairly early on in the history of D&D (I'm thinking of Roger Musson's "How to Lose Hit Points and Survive", in White Dwarf, but I'm sure it's not the only example).

To me the easy solution to both the breath and the fall is that the player knows his/her PC will survive, but the PC doesn't. That is, that hit points are a type of mechanical resource that the player draws on to help regulate his/her PC's exposure to risk, knowing that a certain degree of narrative protection is available, but apt to be ablated.

But this requires adopting author stance rather than actor stance. I think an actor-stance-only version of hit points will tend to produce play that is, in practice, indistinguishable from "hit points as meat", although most groups won't worry about what this means for the biology of their high-level PCs.

 

[Yesway Jose]

I don't entirely agree. The narrative aspect, for example, can be pretty important for bringing page 42 into play.
<snip>
But even in cases where the narrative doesn't have an immediate mechanical consequence, it can still be important to play - which relates to my earlier response to Yesway Jose about mechanics for love.

If you're extrapolating from a general statement, then that's fine. However, I was trying to be specific about which kind of mechanics encourage narration and which don't. Page 42 is the most narrative-rewarding mechanic there is, probably because those mechanics are the most twiddly of them all.

So the table agree that the snake has been flipped onto its back. Now one of the players remebers that the party was earlier warned by an oracle to look out for a snake with diamond markings on its back, and wants her PC to make a Perception check. The difficulty of that check, which the GM has responsibility for assigning on the spot, is clearly going to be affected by the fiction that the table has agreed to.

OK, well I find this example to be a bit offbase for a couple reasons, but I'll just say that I highly doubt any player will start narrating standard attack actions consistently in order to find easter eggs like that one.

What is your and/or Average Joe's motivation to describe the action in fluff terms? Why not just announce "I trip the opponent"?
The mechanical result is fixed.

What I've said above helps answer this, I think.

As per what I've said above, sorry, but not at all.

If we're asking if a mechanic encourages narration, it has to also be true for an average session with Average Joe. A mechanic that encourages narration in oddball corner cases or for storyteller players who are already inclined to narrate regardless, then it doesn't prove much to claim that a mechanic encourages narration 0.1% of the time -- as most of us are interested in the 99.9%.



P.S. Average Joe is Average Roleplaying Joe, not Average In-the-Country Joe. Just in case anyone was going to extrapolate on that...