At long last, I think I've finally come to understand what wrecan and pemerton are saying when they don't believe dissociative mechanics exist, or that even if they are "dissociative," there's no harm in it because it serves a narrative function.
The premise is based on the idea of situational narrative. In other words, any particular application/resolution of a 4e power should only be described, or "narrated," within the specific context in which it is invoked--i.e., the short-term situation surrounding the encounter in which it is used.
Yes. Sorry, I thought that we were all on the same page about this - in fact, I though this was what The Alexandrian had in mind in saying that these mechanics require frequent and pervasive house ruling, because he's calling each of these bits of narration an episode of houseruling.
It's no longer necessary to try and concoct encounters that plays to a party's strengths; you can simply assume there's always a narratively acceptable way for a given character "power" to work within the scene, and everyone gets to participate.
You could be right about this. When I build encounters I'm generally looking at thematic content first, relying on the 4e designers to give me monsters that will (i) work well at the table, and (ii) help express or reinforce the desired themes. So the issue of worrying about the party's tactical abilities isn't normally in the front of my mind.
it can have the tendency to keep player focus more on the individual scenes, and less on the world as a whole (your mileage may vary, of course).
I see the gameworld as built up out of individual scenes. I don't play in a strictly
No Myth fashion - first, because I use the implied setting of the 4e core books, which provides some backstory straight up; second, because I have further worked up some of the core relationships betweens gods, NPCs etc in advance of play (these notes for the campaign, which is now reaching 12th level, are about 4 A4 pages); and third, because 4e rewards at least a bit of GM prep of encounters.
But I am a big fan of the approach that Paul Czege sets forth
here, although my D&D game is nowhere near is hardcore as I think Czege's games would be:
when I'm framing scenes, and I'm in the zone, I'm turning a freakin' firehose of adversity and situation on the character. It is not an objective outgrowth of prior events. It's intentional as all get out. . . I frame the character into the middle of conflicts I think will push and pull in ways that are interesting to me and to the player. I keep NPC personalities somewhat unfixed in my mind, allowing me to retroactively justify their behaviors in support of this. . . the outcome of the scene is not preconceived.
So what you descibe here is not a problem for me.
somewhere along the way, no matter how good the GM, no matter how engaged the player, there's going to be instances that crop up where a narratively acceptable reason for some powers to work is simply not there--or at best, stretches the boundaries of credulity. No matter how hard one tries, there's going to be situations that dissociate the character from the construct.
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I'm guessing that pemerton and wrecan might respond, "Yes, this happens, but in our groups it happens so rarely that it doesn't pull us out of 'immersion,' and we simply play out the mechanical happening and keep moving, enjoying the other benefits of narrative resolution within the scene."
It hasn't happened yet in the context of tactical combat resolution. That said, my party has two martial PCs, and no warlord (though it would be fun to have one!).
We've had fights in which the fighter marked oozes and Footwork Lured them over pits. It didn't cause any trouble - it was just more manifestation of the PC's mastery of the halberd.
These two skill challenges caused a bit of a furore online after I posted the actual play report, but didn't cause any trouble at the table as far as the fiction was concerned, and (as best I can recall) the play of them was overwhelmingly in first person narrative (ie player speaking as PC). But not completely, as the actual play report indicates (ie there were some meta-discussions between me and some of the players to help clarify what exactly it was that they envisaged their PCs doing.)
As many others have stated, it's not that ANY ONE instance of a power can't be "associated"--it's the fact that around every single turn, with every single character type, built into the core baseline of 4e, potential dissociations are there, just waiting to crop up.
I still think that this is the core issue. For those with simulatinist priorities, the potential for "dissociation" is the problem - as Jameson Courage noted upthread.
Whereas unrealised potential don't bother me here, any more than (for example) BryonD seems to be worried by the
potential, in 3E, for mid-to-high level PCs to reliably survive ridiculously high falls.
In spite of your declarations to the contrary, I think you are doing exactly what you say you aren't--equating your player's singular experience "where a Paladin became a frog and back" to some universal application that dissociation doesn't exist, that it's all in our heads.
Well "dissociation" is, by definition, in someone's head! It is the state of having your immersion disrupted - a mental state.
This one experience doesn't nullify other wholly valid criticisms presented in the concept of dissociation
It's true that it doesn't show that you don't have your immersion disrupted by certain mechanics. But it's equally true, in my view, that it shows that the mechanics that disrupt your immersion don't have that property in any inherent way - they affect some players some ways, and other players other ways.
Do you not believe that there are mechanics that promote "immersiveness," and those that don't? Are all mechanics equally good or bad for promoting immersion, it's only a question of creating the right "narrative scene" and somehow getting the player and GM to find the right "association" to make it work?
Well, what exactly "immersion" is when you talk about it I'm not sure. As I said upthread, it's not an analytic category I use very much, but (now that I am starting to) I see it in terms of the player "inhabiting" the PC - speaking in first person, expressing the PC's feelings, acting on the basis of the PC's felt emotions.
And I don't think that there are mechanics that tend, in general, to facilitate this or impede it. I mean, maybe we can think of some mechanics that probably would - cook 5 flapjacks for the other players to earn a reroll, for example - but I don't know of any RPG that has mechanics that make you get up from the table like this, and spend a fairly serious effort doing something completely unrelated to the game or to the progress of the fiction.
I think it is going to depend on particular participants' prior experiences, their expectations, heck, even their moods on the day. The HeroQuest rules, for example, have this example (I can't remember which edition, and I'm paraphrasing a bit, or maybe even mashing a couple of examples together):
Suppose your cowboy PC has Fast Runner 18, and your horse has Gallop 16. That does mean that, in a contest where speed matters, you have a better ability to apply your speed than does the horse, and are more likely to win such a contest. But it doesn't mean that you're faster than your horse. If you try and frame a contest in which you and your horse compete in a race, you just lose (assuming a standard western game, rather than eg superheroic cowboys). So suppose, for example, your horse is running away. You can't catch it. In that situation, look for something else - eg use your Loyal Steed 16, matched against its Fiery Temperament 12, to call it back .
Now suppose that a given table is playing a western scenario where this very event crops up. The player knows that his/her PC can't outrun his/her horse,
not because the action resolution mechanics says so (the characters in HeroQuest don't have a movement rate) but because genre-based credibility constraints preclude it. Will this produce "dissociation" from the fiction - because the constraint arises from the metagame rather than the mechanics - or reinforce the fiction - because the constraint is inherent within the shared conception of the fiction being created? In the abstract, how can we know?
So anyway, the player decides to use Loyal Steed instead, as per the rulebook's suggestion. Does this produce "dissociation"? Well, what is actually happening in the fiction? Is the PC whistling to his/her horse? Or does the horse just have a change of heart, like Snowy sometimes does in Tintin? Is narrating the scene one way or another more or less likely to produce immersion? Some players might find that narrating the horse's change of heart divorces them from inhabiting their PC. Others might feel that it reinforces the inhabitation of their PC, given that the loyalty of his/her horse is such a central feature of the character (a bit like the player of the paladin in my game narrating something the Raven Queen did as part of reinforcing his inhabitation of his religiously devoted PC).
The fact that the particular scenario you shared, that particular scene, allowed the player to create a valid, prescient association (in character, even) doesn't change the fact that in OTHER CIRCUMSTANCES, with OTHER CHARACTERS, with OTHER situational factors, a dissociated mechanic can create circumstances that are implausible at best, and untenable at worst.
Implausibility and untenability are relative, I think.
And part of what is causing me to disagree with you is that you haven't produced any actual play examples, or even hypotheticals that treat the participants in the game, and their engagement in the narrative task, in a sympathetic light. (Cetainly, your marking hypothetical does not do this.)
So from my point of view, you seem to be jumping at shadows. And as I've said,
those shadows matter if you have simulationist priorities, but otherwise don't.
those of us who WANT more "immersion" and less "dissociation" from our RPGs find value in the concept. In spite of your objections to the "attitude" or "tone" in which the original essay was presented, it provides value to some of us as a way to evaluate RPG mechanical structure.
You believe it doesn't exist. Fine. But telling us, "It doesn't exist, because I watched my player completely sidestep it IN ONE PARTICULAR INSTANCE" is just as much a fallacy as claiming that dissociative mechanics affect everyone equally. I have never, not once, in this thread claimed that the effects of dissociation are universal across groups or experience, but just because it isn't universal in all circumstances doesn't mean it doesn't exist, or that no one finds value in the concept.
As I've said in my exchanges with Jameson Courage, I think that "dissociation" is inherenlty relative - ie "these mechanics get in the way of
my immersion". To the extent that you think the notion has non-relative content - ie that there is a genuine class of mechanics that has, for all or even most RPGers, a tendency to disrupt immersion/engagement with the fiction - then I don't agree and still contend that it is a pseudo-concept.
As I've said in several posts, what I see in the original essay (where perhaps it is malicious) and also in your posts (where it doesn't seem malicious, but seems to me to demonstrate a lack of familiarity with non-simulationist play), is a complaint against non-simulatonist mechanics. Which is fine - as I said way upthread, a potentially interesting biographical fact about The Alexandrian. But there is nothing objectively meritorious or special about simulationist play.
And at least as I'm trying to make sense of immersion, I'm not sure that simulationist play has an especially tight connection to immersion. Ron Edwards has
this to say about immersion and stance:
Immersion is another difficult issue that often arises in Stance discussions. Like "realism" and "completeness" and several other terms, it has many different definitions in role-playing culture. The most substantive definition that I have seen is that immersion is the sense of being "possessed" by the character. This phenomenon is not a stance, but a feeling. What kind of role-playing goes with that feeling? The feeling is associated with decision-making that is incompatible with Director or Author stance. Therefore, I suggest that immersion (an internal sensation) is at least highly associated with Actor Stance. Whether some people get into Actor stance and then "immerse," or others "immerse" and thus willy-nilly are in Actor stance, I don't know.
And in the same essay he says this about stance and simulationist vs other priorities:
Stance is very labile during play, with people shifting among the stances frequently and even without deliberation or reflection.
Stances do not correspond in any 1:1 way to the GNS modes. Stance is much more ephemeral, for one thing, such that a person enjoying the Gamist elements and decisions of a role-playing experience might shift all about the stances during a session of play. He or she might be Authoring most of the time and Directing occasionally, and then at a key moment slam into Actor stance for a scene. The goal hasn't changed; stance has.
However, I think it's very reasonable to say that specific stances are more common in some modes/goals of play. Historically, Author stance seems the most common or at least decidedly present at certain points for Gamist and Narrativist play, and Director stance seems to be a rarer add-on in those modes. Actor stance seems the most common for Simulationist play, although a case could be made for Author and Director stance being present during character creation in this mode. These relative proportions of Stance positions during play do apparently correspond well with issues of Premise and GNS. I suggest, however, that it is a given subset of a mode that Stance is facilitating, rather than the whole mode itself. Some forms of Simulationism, for instance, may be best served by Director Stance, as opposed to other forms which are best served by Actor Stance. Similarly, some forms of Narrativism rely on Actor Stance at key moments.
I think Edwards is right that Actor stance, while the predominant stance for mainstream simulationist play, is by no means confined to that sort of play. Which suggests that immersion is not going to be confined to simulationist play.
I also think he is right about the frequency of shifts in stance. Furthermore, as per my imagined example of playing G2 upthread, some rules - like AD&D's hit point rules - seem able to straddle Actor and Author stance simultaneously. This is probably a feature rather than a bug, at least for those who value immersion. And I think that 4e's metagame mechanics can fairly easily be played in this same sort of straddling way, where the adoption of Author stance does not require abandoning first-person narration or inhabitation of the PC, and therefore need not disrupt immersion.
Anyone who's ever complained that 4e doesn't provide as much "world building" opportunities isn't stating an objective truth, they're actually commenting on the mechanical elements that naturally push for scene-based resolution narrative. It's not that you CAN'T do world building in 4e, it's that the entire rules system is designed purely from a scene-based narrative resolution, rather than a holistic, "simulative" point of view.
Well, yes. I posted to that effect on a thread about six months ago:
4e resembles a game like The Dying Earth. I've never read the Vance stories, but feel that I could run a game of Dying Earth from the rulebook. It gives me the "vibe" and "meta-setting", plus tips on how to set up situations/scenarios that will exploit that vibe to produce a fun session.
My feeling is that 4e was written with the intention to be GMed in this sort of way. I say this because (i) it fits with the game's emphasis on the encounter - combat or non-combat as the basic unit of play; (ii) it fits with the obvious effort to create that default atmosphere, with the gods, race backgrounds and so on in the PHB and the little sidebars in the Power books; (iii) when you look at the original MM (with most of the campaign info located in skill check results), plus think about how skill challenges should play out (with the GM having to make calls about NPC responses, and other elements of the gameworld, on the fly in response to unpredictable player actions), and even look at the whole emphasis on "situations" rather than "world exploration" as the focus of play, the game seems intended to support "just in time" creation of world details, using "points of light" and the default atmosphere as a framework for doing this in; (iv) it fits with the absence of a developed setting.
<snip>
I think that the lack of a setting isn't a coincidence relative to the mechanical and flavour changes, but rather fits with them as part of a coherent (but, as it turns out, perhaps not so popular) overall design.
I think it's actually a bit of a challenge to come up with action resolution mechanics that suit both "just in time" GMing of a situation-driven game, and that suit "world/story" GMing of the sort that a developed setting supports.
I'm not saying it's impossible - HeroWars, for example, is a game that tries to combine both approaches using Glorantha as the gameworld.
But just one example as to why it might be tricky - in a "world/story" game, the GM is likely to know the obstacles in advance, and to present them in some detail to the players, and the players will then be looking for action resolution mechanics that really let them enage with the detail of those challenges. And those action resolution mecanics have to produce results that put the players on the same page as the GM - otherwise the game won't run smoothly.
On the other hand, in a "just in time" game the GM is more likely to be adding details to a situation in response to ideas and interest expressed by the players as play is going on. So the action resolution mechanics have to be ones that encourage the players to produce those sorts of ideas, and that let them pursue their interests - otherwise the GM will be left with nothing to build on.
Skill challenges are, in my view, a good attempt at a mechanic for the second sort of play - and that is how the rules for skill challenges are presented in the DMG and PHB (I can provide quotes if desired). But skill challenges are a fairly poor mechanic for the first sort of play - they tend to produce the "exercise in dice rolling" experience, as the GM describes the situation to the players, and tells them their options, and the players roll the dice. And this is how the examples of skill challenges both in the DMG and in the WotC adventures have tended to be experienced (not by everyone, but I think at least by a majority of the posts I've read on these forums).
making acceptable scene-based, "narrative" resolutions using these powers puts a significant onus on the players to create the narrative.
Yes. Upthread, I indicated that, contrary to The Alexandrian, I call this
playing the game rather than houseruling.
If you're the type of player that naturally resists this tendency to begin with, it's certainly not going to aid your cause.
<snip>
But if your group doesn't enjoy this, it creates big, big problems, likely leading to the widely recognized phenomenon of the 4e "battle slogfest." No descriptive narrative, just a play-out of the mechanics, in one encounter after another.
Yes. I've posted about this many times in the past (see eg the second of my above self-quotes).
if you're not the type of group/player/GM that enjoys this style of play, and doesn't want to have to engage with individual scene-based narrative at that level EVERY TIME YOU PLAY, then 4e is far and away NOT the right game. In fact, it's soooooooo far outside the line as to be untenable.
Yes. It baffles me that anyone with purist-for-system simulationist priorities would try and make 4e work for them.
