The more I look at it seems that the Alexandrian's essay approaches dissociation from two angles:
1. Forcing a player to "construct narrative" can be dissociative, if it is not an assumed responsibility for the player to do so. If you're playing from an "Actor"/simulative point of view, it is not generally expected that the player should have to provide the narrative details. Having to stop mid-turn, and create a narrative that "makes sense" for a particular mechanical resolution could be considered "dissociative," because the player is no longer engaged in Actor stance, but Author stance. The mechanic imposes the switch in the moment of resolution, and that switch can feel jarring, depending on preferred playstyle.
That said, this POV obviously assumes a very particular style of play/group, and can hardly be considered universal--but within these parameters, it can be dissociative. Groups who assume narrative resolution have no sense of this at all, and rightfully so.
2. Mechanics that require external narrative resolution create a much higher potential for inconsistency in future rule adjudication. Obviously, pemerton, wrecan, and others have demonstrated that in some cases this is a feature, not a bug. However, I think the Alexandrian's discussion of the War Devil is most salient here--
But if you're talking about this besieged foe ability, what would the DM describe? What is the war devil actually doing when it marks an opponent?
What happens that causes the war devil's allies to gain the +2 bonus to attack rolls? Is it affecting the target or is it affecting the allies?
.....
Of course the argument can be made that such explanations can be trivially made up: A ruby beam of light shoots out of the war devil's head and strikes their target, afflicting them with a black blight. The war devil shouts horrific commands in demonic tongues to his allies, unnaturally spurring them into a frenzied bloodlust. The war devil utters a primeval curse.
These all sound pretty awesome, so what's the problem? The problem is that every single one of these is a house rule. If it's a ruby beam of light, can it be blocked by a pane of glass or a transparent wall of force? If it's a shouted command, shouldn't it be prevented by a silence spell? If it's a curse, can it be affected by a remove curse spell?
And even if you manage to craft an explanation which doesn't run afoul of mechanical questions like these, there are still logical questions to be answered in the game world. For example, is it an ability that the war devil can use without the target becoming aware of them? If the target does become aware of them, can they pinpoint the war devil's location based on its use of the ability? Do the war devil's allies need to be aware of the war devil in order to gain the bonus?
If the mechanic wasn't fundamentally dissociated -- if there was an explanation of what the mechanic was actually modeling in the game world -- the answers to these questions would be immediately apparent. And if you're slapping on fluff text in order to answer these questions, the answers will be different depending on the fluff text you apply -- and that makes the fluff text a house rule.
(Why would you want to answer these types of questions? Well, some trivial possibilities would include: The war devil has used magic to disguise himself as an ally of the PCs. The war devil is invisible. The war devil is hiding in the supernatural shadows behind the Throne of Doom and doesn't want to reveal himself... yet.)
In this case, the choice of "narrative" for the War Devil does, and I might argue
should, have an effect on future player/character choices. If a group knows that Besieged Foe has one set of causes, and how to lessen/circumvent them, it could change the entire dynamic of an encounter with a future War Devil (I'm assuming for simplicity that the Alexandrian expects us to extend this line of reasoning to many other powers/abilities, both for monsters and PCs).
At least to me, this is a type of situation that narrative resolution style is less effective at encompassing. Yes, we can situationally create a non-dissociated, agreed-upon reason of how the War Devil's power works in one circumstance. But to arbitrarily change it from encounter-to-encounter feels problematic,
because now it's affecting the actual available choices of the players.
In this case, the lack of association is
stunting potential player/character creativity, because they have no way of evaluating the effectiveness of the results.
This is more along the lines of what I was referring to about "rationality." In some instances, a player/character can no longer to expect to use rational cause/effect reasoning for a particular encounter approach--"Just because it worked one way last time, doesn't mean it's going to this time, even though it's the same beast."
Again, there are ways to make that association--"Well, it works differently for different War Devils." Well, how many kinds of War Devils are there in this world, anyway? (As many as the number of encounters requires, apparently).
But then it's no longer a factor of "Actor stance immersion," and more about adherence to the observed natural world--species are species because of
consistency of traits.
Is a War Devil a War Devil, or is it something else?
You could still say it's just subjective preference. The level of acceptable dissociation before I throw up my hands and say, "This is just STUPID!" may be totally different than someone else's. But if there is such a thing as "inherent dissociation," it's somewhere in this concept. The refusal to apply specific narrative fluff to the War Devil negates a player's ability to creatively, rationally respond in unique ways to one in the future. Since there is no narrative, there are, by extension, no appropriate responses that can be planned, and characters are losing
meaningful choices to make as a result.
