In Defense of the Theory of Dissociated Mechanics

[Victim]

I think it's pretty easy for even clearly associated mechanics to break immersion simply because even though every step along the way makes sense, the overall result isn't what was expected.

For example, consider the anti-mob focused fighter without something like Come and Get It or marking. Enemies smartly stay away and dispersed from him, which makes sense. OTOH, all the mechanics related to beating up groups of enemies then basically don't exist (or matter only rarely) in the actual narrative.

 

[innerdude]

theAlexandrian's interpretation of War Devil suffers from a fatal flaw: characters know any effects placed on tham and the source of those effects. TheAlexandrian's "problems" with "besieged foe" involve the creature being hidden, disguised, or undercover. All of that goes out the window when the War Devil uses Besieged Foe to mark the PC. Doing that reveals that the War Devil is an enemy of the PC.

Once that's been eliminated, the war devil's marking feature is no different from the fighter's (except the war devil doesn't have to hit the target first). He's directing his menace at that PC, forcing him to split his attention.

How is this a problem? I would wholeheartedly EXPECT my players to root out the cause of any effects placed on them, and try to avoid them in the future, even if they didn't know how or why they happened in the original narrative.

That particular motivation doesn't "go out the window" when the power gets used, and suddenly, "Yup, guess that War Devil's an enemy."

Thus, a player/character would absolutely be reasonably expected to want to understand the source of the War Devil's power, and mitigate it, both meta- and in-game.

This, as I stated, is where "inherent" dissociation gets fuzzy--if my players/characters can't reasonably divine ways to maximize their ability to defeat a War Devil in the future, then it doesn't matter how narratively associated any one instance of Besieged Foe is. They're still getting meaningful choices taken away from them for the next time they face a War Devil.

For a choice to be meaningful, the player/character has to have some baseline in which to evaluate the ramifications of that choice. Lack of ramifications = the negation of meaningful choice.

 

[prosfilaes]

theAlexandrian's interpretation of War Devil suffers from a fatal flaw: characters know any effects placed on tham and the source of those effects.

How? Does a character who's blind and deaf know that? If it's not magical or psionic, then how?

I think it's pretty easy for even clearly associated mechanics to break immersion simply because even though every step along the way makes sense, the overall result isn't what was expected.

For example, consider the anti-mob focused fighter without something like Come and Get It or marking. Enemies smartly stay away and dispersed from him, which makes sense. OTOH, all the mechanics related to beating up groups of enemies then basically don't exist (or matter only rarely) in the actual narrative.

How does that break immersion? Something not working the way the player wants to is not breaking immersion, it's things not going the way players want it to.

 

[JamesonCourage]

I think I'd prefer "dissociated player".

That'd be a lot less accurate, in my opinion.

 

[Hussar]

What's farcical about that? If the characters decide that's a trade-off they're willing to make, then why shouldn't they do that?



I don't get it. If my character has the capacity to send his opponents reeling through a wall of fire, he's going to do that. If the mechanics say I can do that and you think I shouldn't, then there's something wrong with the mechanics, not the players.

I have to admit, I'm not really seeing a problem here, at least based on the example given.

1 character puts up some sort of wall of fire and the other characters keep pushing the baddies back through this wall, forcing it back and forth.

Isn't this just smart play?

I know in our last session, we fought a creature near a large fire. Every chance we got, we shoved that thing back in the fire and made it stay there (or at least tried). Nothing about the situation seemed contrived or dissociative at all. Fire=Hurt=Good!

Where's the problem?

 

[Hussar]

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.

I would argue that we do this all the time. It would be a very boring game where the players never provided any narrative for their mechanical resolutions. In fact, we'd be back to combat sounding like a game of Bingo. Instead, I would argue that most players are perfectly comfortable providing a fair level of narrative for their actions and, in fact, the game generally rewards players who do so.

After all, how many threads on boards are there along the lines of "How can I get my players to be more engaged in the game world" are there? I would say that most DM's want their players to provide at least a basic level of narration.

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--

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).

Again, and this point keeps getting ignored, this presumes a single cause for the power to work. That the power must work one way and ONLY one way forevermore. 3e generally worked like that. An effect had one and only one cause and only one method of resolution.

4e does not enforce that. The Besieged Foe power could have ALL of the above causes within the same encounter. The devil shoots a ruby ray and causes the effect, he exhorts his followers and gets the same mechanical effect but a different narrative one. This is a feature, not a bug.

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.

Or, conversely, it makes magic interesting and, well, magical as in unknown and unknowable. Again, isn't this something that has been missing from D&D for a long time?

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, this is a mistaken interpretation. It is categorically not 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?

Again, your presumptions are showing.

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.

Ballocks. I'm sorry, but this is just wrong. Since there is no specific narrative linked to a specific effect, the players are free to add in their own narrative in any means they like. I could just as easily argue for my PC to make a Religion check to be able to come up with a bit of scripture that negates his use of his power.

Why can I do this? Because the mechanics are not tied to any specific narrative. Thus, the player is free to do anything he likes, so long as the table accepts it, rather than being forced to conform to the single interpretation that the game designer provides.

 

[Hussar]

Later thought:

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.)

Something I've noticed with TheAlexandrian's critiques is that he plays rather fast and loose with mechanics when arguing. For one, his counters to the Besieged Foe ability all require effects that don't appear in 4e. There is no Wall of Force spell and Silence and Remove Curse are both rituals and can't be used in combat (well, unless that combat is REALLY long).

Which rolls it back to a basic 4e design principle - don't overthink things. In 3e, the "marking" effect would have to be spelled out exactly and would have to work exactly the same for all things that can mark, for exactly the reasons he outlines - how does this effect interact with all these other effects?

But, since the "other effects" are no longer in the game or are now silo'd away from combat, you don't have to worry about it. The blanket counters that many magic spells were in 3e and earlier - Silence, Remove Curse, etc, simply aren't an issue anymore.

But now, since you don't have Spell Resistance, and a host of other blanket effects that interact with all other effects, these issues aren't a problem in this system.

The bad part of powers is that they are limited in scope. The good part about powers is that they are limited in scope.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I have to admit, I'm not really seeing a problem here, at least based on the example given.

1 character puts up some sort of wall of fire and the other characters keep pushing the baddies back through this wall, forcing it back and forth.

Isn't this just smart play?

Could be. I was replying to the situation, as supposedly presented in another topic (which I haven't read), and which people were trying to prevent. That fact that they were trying to prevent it was considered evidence that it was a problem in some peoples' games. As I said when I first replied, there could be more to it than my guess.

 

[pemerton]

I'm talking about the definition which emerges if you take the essay at face value, and then to the logical conclusions from there.

That the author of the essay doesn't want to make this definition plain--and in fact, goes to a great deal of trouble to obscure it--is his problem not mine. Or rather, a reflection on him, not the rest of us that have to deal with the confusion.

I'm enough of a logician to answer that.

<snip>

Pemerton, following the parameters thus established, has claimed that at his table, mechanic X was used with no disassociation. Therefore, the mechanic is not inherently disassociative. He has not claimed, in this part of his argument, that no one using the mechanic could ever honestly report disassociation.

<snip>

There is thus the side issue of how much reported evidence from participants to take at face value. This is highly embedded into the dispute from the get go, because it is fairly clear that the Alexandrian and some of his "evangelists" could not permit counter evidence to be presented without disputing the reports.

<snip>

Given all that, then, there is separate but more difficult argument about whether there is any meaningful concept occurring to attach the label "disassociated" to, outside of other related terms, such as metagaming and abstraction. And if so, what is its nature and scope? Pemerton, Wrecan, I, and others have intuited that there is not--because no one advocating that there is has yet shown us a scope or nature for the term that we agree falls outside of those other related terms.

<snip>

The first claim is a lot more threatening to the "theory", in part because once it is established, people start talking more reasonably around the second one. There is a sense in which we can't even talk seriously with the OP or Jameson or you until all that underbrush is cleared out. You'll note that BotE works really hard to make sure that the underbrush keeps growing.

As for any inherent quality of 4E compared to previous versions, it is relatively speaking, very anti-simulationist, considerably more pro-narrative (though, selectively), more unabashed in its use of metagaming options, and prone to stripping the pretense out of its abstractions (in favor of clarity).

if your game is already slanted towards story that "develops in play" versus story that arises out of other elements (background, setting elements established early, etc.), then by definition you've put some work into maintaining consistency for ad hoc narrative elements. You already have tools in place to handle the things that arise.

You're on fire today! (But I can't XP you yet.)

play any version of D&D (or most RPGs) as a board game, and you will get a board game.

<snip>

Depending on the game, it might be a different kind of board game

This is how I personally feel about ToH played with a flying thief on a rope. Admittedly it's a rather flexible and open-ended boardgame (because eg the GM adjudicates what happens when you try to hammer pitons into walls, and then stand on them, to avoid falling into pits when you open levers) - but I don't see any roleplaying of the sort I'm interested in.

 

[tomBitonti]

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).

I left out a lot of text.

There is a disconnect here ... however the Besieged Foe is fluffed, none of that has any mechanical effect whatsoever. No matter how you describe it this time, no matter how different you describe it next time, the effect remains exactly the same. There is no practical in game meaning to the fluff, that's just there because you added it to add color to the scene.

My read of what is disassociated here is that some players want to "open the box" to discover more details of how the ability (in this case, Besieged Foe) works, and other players just aren't interested.

In 3E, Bull Rush works by one actor pushing another. Strength helps it work better. Size does, too, as does having extra training (the Bull Rush feat). Strength and size both also work to oppose it.

I am thinking (although, I'm not 100% sure if this works, and I can't say how it would work, in detail. I'd probably provide some constant bonus plus strength), a player could ready to assist someone if they were Bull Rushed. Are there rules for pushing someone on icy ground? I would expect a bull rush to work better against someone on icy ground, up until the pusher was also there.

In 4E, my read of many powers is that they are atomic, with fixed results, with much if not most of the model is wrapped in the attack vs defense mechanic, with several different bonuses wrapped in the attack modifier, and several other bonuses wrapped in the defense modifier.

Edit: That sounds like a criticism of 4E relative to 3E, but in this regards I think 3E is already "terminally ill", in that it had already taken many steps to introduce rules that are not explainable (in any real sense). Power attack works for me. Some variations of Cleave don't. (Witness the old "bag of critters" exploit.) AOO's have a lot that is artificial (if I have combat reflexes and an 18 Dex, and I sneak into a room with four sleeping guards, can I AOO all four? How is that being helpless does not draw an AOO? As well, since you could easily draw two AOOs, one for moving, the other for, say, casting a spell, shouldn't I get two AOO's against each of the speeping guards? Or is provoking more active, in the sense of actually prostrating myself to my enemies attack?

TomBitonti