In Defense of the Theory of Dissociated Mechanics

[innerdude]

Okay, I just looked up something in the D&D 4e Monster Manual I, the Deathlock Wight's "Horrific Visage" power.

Horrific Visage (standard; recharge 4, 5, 6) * Fear
Close blast 5; +7 vs. Will; 1d6 damage, and the target is pushed 3
squares.

That's all you have in the description of the power.

As I understand it, if you're playing according to 4e's assumed scene-based narrative sensibilities, the DM can describe this any way he or she sees fit--

"The Deathlock Wight opens its mouth wide, wider than any creature of flesh, and screams."

"The Deathlock Wight conjures a vision of abyssal horror that envelops you."

"The Deathlock Wight catches and holds your sight, and an indescribable horror overcomes you, your muscles clenching like a vice."

Great! Fun, evocative, narrative flavor.

But.....

Does the wight have to be looking at you to invoke the power, or can it do it to you even if you're directly behind it and it isn't looking?

Is the power magic? Does an anti-magic barrier stop it?

It says it's a fear based power, and it attacks Will--does that mean it can be used against one of us if we're using a scrying ritual? The scrying ritual doesn't mention if powers can be used against me while scrying.

If it does use it on me while scrying, does it still push me back 3 squares?

If we've chosen the scream narrative, does a silence spell counter it?

If we've chosen the abyssal horror narrative, can a player close their eyes to ignore it?

What if I'm playing a Paladin, and narratively I see my character as being immune to undead fear effects. Does that mean the power is causing physical damage to me, because narratively that's what makes sense to me, even though the power says it's a Fear-based Will attack? Does that mean it's actually targeting AC for me, and not Will?

Any one narrative description is perfectly acceptable for an individual scene. But to then not carry that narrative forward, so that a player/character can benefit from their first hand experience and knowledge seems brutally disingenuous.

What about another power with the same monster:

Grave Bolt (standard; at-will) * Necrotic
Ranged 20; +6 vs. Refl ex; 1d6 + 4 necrotic damage, and the
target is immobilized (save ends)

What is a "Grave Bolt"? What if I narratively describe it as a ball of unholy light that bursts from the wight's hands, hurtling towards its foe?

Fighter PC: "Damn, we just fought one of these things, I'm going to chop off its hands, so it can't cast that bolt thingy."

GM: "You can't do that."

Fighter: "Why not?"

GM: "Because I'm ruling you can't cut off the wight's hands."

Fighter: "Wait just a minute. I'm a BIG DAMN HERO, with a BIG DAMN MAGICAL SWORD, with massive feats in sword fighting. But you're telling me that even though my magical sword can HURT a wight, it can't sever a limb?"

GM: "Fine, you can cut off its hands, but it doesn't matter. The whole hand thing was just for that one wight."

Fighter: "Well frak me then, how does the bolt work for this one?"

GM: "It conjures a piece of ethereal finger bone, and shoots it at you."

Fighter: "Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot, mate."

In essence, the GM is punishing the player for coming up with a creative idea, when the Fighter PC did nothing more than make the natural, logical leap that one wight is like another.

(And as an aside, isn't one of 4e's big tenets to "Say yes to the player"? How can you "Say yes to the player," when no two scenes have any possible overlap of "narrative consistency"?)

Call me crazy, but not only is a scenario like this "dissociative," it carries the even bigger penalty of discouraging player creativity.

Of course one answer to our dilemma is, "Come up with better narrative for the Bolt power, or don't bother with narrative at all."

But do proponents of scene based narrative resolution not see the inherent problems with that answer?

To my knowledge, the premise in favor of dissociative mechanics is, "Narrative based resolution mechanics provide more freedom for controlling individual scenes and character actions within the scenes."

Unfortunately, we've also stumbled on to an unexpected antecedent: "Since no one scene-based narrative device can be assumed to be carried into another scene, future player inferences about any given mechanic are impossible, other than the actual mechanical results." This is the catch. Right here. This is the thing that can't be explained away.

It's very similar to the firestorm created by the Robot Chicken episode where Perkins said a player couldn't attack a door with a power. There's lots of reasons that judgement got made, but having looked at the concept of dissociation a bit more, it's my sense that one of the reasons is that the GM is essentially conceding that he can't allow certain things, because he can't carry the inference created by a particular "narrative" beyond a single encounter without, you guessed it, treating the "narrative" as a house rule.

Again, I realize that in a SINGLE INSTANCE, for a single scene, for a single circumstance, any one narrative resolution can be satisfying. But carried outside the individual scene, there's a landmine awaiting.

Of course, this can all be avoided if the GM simply avoids using narrative elements at all, and merely describes the mechanical effects.....but oh wait, I thought the entire point of dissociated mechanics was to LET the players and GMs create narrative, because it's "immersive" and "engaging."

 

[Griego]

I find any dissociation that at-will/encounter/daily powers create to be very easy to hand-wave, because that structure makes book-keeping so easy. XD In a 3.x campaign, certain Batmen/Women or CoDzillas need to be tracked closely lest they mysteriously develop 'infinite spells/day syndrome'.

 

[Hussar]

Whoo boy, this one is long. Let's take it point by point.

Okay, I just looked up something in the D&D 4e Monster Manual I, the Deathlock Wight's "Horrific Visage" power.

Horrific Visage (standard; recharge 4, 5, 6) * Fear
Close blast 5; +7 vs. Will; 1d6 damage, and the target is pushed 3
squares.

That's all you have in the description of the power.

As I understand it, if you're playing according to 4e's assumed scene-based narrative sensibilities, the DM can describe this any way he or she sees fit--

"The Deathlock Wight opens its mouth wide, wider than any creature of flesh, and screams."

"The Deathlock Wight conjures a vision of abyssal horror that envelops you."

"The Deathlock Wight catches and holds your sight, and an indescribable horror overcomes you, your muscles clenching like a vice."

Great! Fun, evocative, narrative flavor.

Stop right there. Something to remember, and I'm now wondering if you have me on ignore, because I've repeated this a couple of times and it hasn't stuck yet, it's entirely possible to narrate this exact same effect all three ways in the SAME encounter.

But.....

Does the wight have to be looking at you to invoke the power, or can it do it to you even if you're directly behind it and it isn't looking?

No different than 3e - facing does not apply. Note, that it's not a gaze attack, which does have specific mechanics applied, so, applying gaze mechanics to this power is beyond the scope of the power itself.

Is the power magic? Does an anti-magic barrier stop it?

AFAIK, Anti-magic barriers are a 3e construct and generally don't exist in 4e.

It says it's a fear based power, and it attacks Will--does that mean it can be used against one of us if we're using a scrying ritual? The scrying ritual doesn't mention if powers can be used against me while scrying.

Well, I'm not sure which scrying type ritual you want to use, so I picked Observe Creature. Since I am outside of its range, I don't know why it would be capable of affecting me through any ritual I can think of. It's no different than trying to use any other power.

If it does use it on me while scrying, does it still push me back 3 squares?

See above.

If we've chosen the scream narrative, does a silence spell counter it?

Again, there is no silence spell in 4e. There is a ritual that makes things quieter while inside the area, but, since this is a close blast, it would be extremely difficult to use the ritual in combat.

If we've chosen the abyssal horror narrative, can a player close their eyes to ignore it?

How do they know to close their eyes in the first place? And, since this is a magical, mind effecting fear effect, isn't it basically planting the image in your brain?

What if I'm playing a Paladin, and narratively I see my character as being immune to undead fear effects. Does that mean the power is causing physical damage to me, because narratively that's what makes sense to me, even though the power says it's a Fear-based Will attack? Does that mean it's actually targeting AC for me, and not Will?

Having narrative control and changing the rules are two different things. This would be a house rule and any problems that arise from house rules are not the fault of the mechanics.

Any one narrative description is perfectly acceptable for an individual scene. But to then not carry that narrative forward, so that a player/character can benefit from their first hand experience and knowledge seems brutally disingenuous.

Just how many times are they going to encounter this particular type of creature over the course of 30 levels? Being able to exploit meta-game knowledge gained because you've memorized the Monster Manual is not behavior I want to reward.

What about another power with the same monster:

Grave Bolt (standard; at-will) * Necrotic
Ranged 20; +6 vs. Refl ex; 1d6 + 4 necrotic damage, and the
target is immobilized (save ends)

What is a "Grave Bolt"? What if I narratively describe it as a ball of unholy light that bursts from the wight's hands, hurtling towards its foe?

Fighter PC: "Damn, we just fought one of these things, I'm going to chop off its hands, so it can't cast that bolt thingy."

GM: "You can't do that."

Fighter: "Why not?"

GM: "Because I'm ruling you can't cut off the wight's hands."

Fighter: "Wait just a minute. I'm a BIG DAMN HERO, with a BIG DAMN MAGICAL SWORD, with massive feats in sword fighting. But you're telling me that even though my magical sword can HURT a wight, it can't sever a limb?"

GM: "Fine, you can cut off its hands, but it doesn't matter. The whole hand thing was just for that one wight."

Fighter: "Well frak me then, how does the bolt work for this one?"

GM: "It conjures a piece of ethereal finger bone, and shoots it at you."

Fighter: "Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot, mate."

In essence, the GM is punishing the player for coming up with a creative idea, when the Fighter PC did nothing more than make the natural, logical leap that one wight is like another.

(And as an aside, isn't one of 4e's big tenets to "Say yes to the player"? How can you "Say yes to the player," when no two scenes have any possible overlap of "narrative consistency"?)

Call me crazy, but not only is a scenario like this "dissociative," it carries the even bigger penalty of discouraging player creativity.

Oh come on. Please. First off, "chop off its hands" isn't something ANY version of D&D does. Secondly, who says it actually needs those hands to shoot those bolts. You chop off the hands and the bolts come from the stumps. Problem solved.

Of course one answer to our dilemma is, "Come up with better narrative for the Bolt power, or don't bother with narrative at all."

But do proponents of scene based narrative resolution not see the inherent problems with that answer?

No, one answer to our dilemma is don't play with dicks. If the player is going to be such a prat that he's trying this sort of thing to exploit, rules lawyer fashion, every single thing that comes out of the DM's mouth, I'd much rather get a new player.

To my knowledge, the premise in favor of dissociative mechanics is, "Narrative based resolution mechanics provide more freedom for controlling individual scenes and character actions within the scenes."

Unfortunately, we've also stumbled on to an unexpected antecedent: "Since no one scene-based narrative device can be assumed to be carried into another scene, future player inferences about any given mechanic are impossible, other than the actual mechanical results." This is the catch. Right here. This is the thing that can't be explained away.

It's very similar to the firestorm created by the Robot Chicken episode where Perkins said a player couldn't attack a door with a power. There's lots of reasons that judgement got made, but having looked at the concept of dissociation a bit more, it's my sense that one of the reasons is that the GM is essentially conceding that he can't allow certain things, because he can't carry the inference created by a particular "narrative" beyond a single encounter without, you guessed it, treating the "narrative" as a house rule.

Umm, you realize that in the Robot Chicken episode, the power he was trying to use was the 4e version of Faerie Fire and actually dealt no damage? While his explaination was maybe problematic, the ruling certainly wasn't.

Again, I realize that in a SINGLE INSTANCE, for a single scene, for a single circumstance, any one narrative resolution can be satisfying. But carried outside the individual scene, there's a landmine awaiting.

Of course, this can all be avoided if the GM simply avoids using narrative elements at all, and merely describes the mechanical effects.....but oh wait, I thought the entire point of dissociated mechanics was to LET the players and GMs create narrative, because it's "immersive" and "engaging."

It's only a landmine if the player is actively trying to exploit loopholes. It's no different than the player trying to exploit loopholes in the written rules as well.

When the players are actively engaged in the game and not busy trying to twist every situation that comes from their DM's mouth, the game runs a lot better.

 

[Hussar]

TL&DR version of above:

It seems to me that Innerdude, you have confused the idea of players having narrative control with having complete narrative control. 4e grants some narrative control to the players, but only in very specific ways.

If you go beyond those specific ways and have problems, that's not the fault of the mechanics.

 

[pemerton]

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.

Sometimes there are trade offs, in terms of clarity or efficiency or simplicity. Like BryonD upthread noting that his 3E players don't have their PCs jumping willy-nilly of cliffs just because they can.

Again, what trade offs are worth making, for what purposes, seems likely to vary from group to group.

As per my post, though, if NO significant percentage of people were playing 4E in that way, there wouldn't be a playtest mod, unless WoTC was trying to solve a problem doesn't exist. Either way, the paradigm of playing 4E as a case of 1 or 2 (above) for some select group of people is informing the mechanics for the official system. So either way, 4E (or parts of 4E) are ultimately being shaped by those playing a tactical skirmish game.

That may well be so. I would expect WotC to take Encounters pretty seriously, and I would find it easy to believe that Encounters has a lot of tactical skirmish play - from my point of view, this would seem to be the 4e equivalent of beating ToH with a flying thief on a rope.

 

[pemerton]

3e didn't introduce any new mechanics.

I still can't XP you, for you campaign writeups (thanks, good stuff, I like your Babylonian world and its successor especially), for your WotC article on conditions, or for the quoted insightful observation.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Just in passing, there is a subset of "bad wrong fun" simulation where the players are "clever" by exploiting the fluff as mechanics, in ways that many tables would not accept. See getting all physics major on lightning bolt or fireball in 1E AD&D to gain some extra advantage.

This is similar to crossing a boundary in gamist play from tactical smart play to abusing rules exploits. Naturally, it is a social contract thing that different groups will draw boundaries for in different places.

3E made some effort to reduce this via standardization, though obviously it had niche cases where it still happened. (See fabricate and gold exploits via craft rules.) 4E built on what 3E had done, though not so much deliberately but as a side effect of removing sim elements in flavor of genre fidelity via narration.

Some of the early, extremely hostile 4E criticism (and not a small amount of the early 3E criticism) seemed to me to be primarily motivated by, "Hey, you took away my opportunity to manipulate the letter of the fluff to get a win--spirit of the genre go hang." Naturally, what some people saw as dick moves others saw as clever moves, and vice versa. Having seen some exceptionally clever play that did not involve abusing fluff, I can't say that I bemoan the loss. YMMV.

 

[pemerton]

Forcing a player to "construct narrative" can be dissociative, if it is not an assumed responsibility for the player to do so.

Yes. Forcing a player to conceive of injury in terms of hit points can be "dissociative", too. It's one reason I dropped AD&D for Rolemaster as my preferred mainstream fantasy RPG a little over 20 years ago.

But that doesn't tell us much about the hit point mechanic, except that I didn't like its relationship to the fiction. There's been quite a bit of discussion of the details of hit points upthread, and on the recent "dying, unhealable NPC thread". And at least as I see it, the analyses of hit points that identify why I didn't like them don't appeal to the notion of "dissociation". They talk about Actor vs Author stance, simulationist vs metagame mechanics, fortune-in-the-middle, etc.

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.

One point I've been trying to make, using the G2 discussion as an imaginary example (although something pretty close to it did happen when I GMed G2 many years ago) and my paladin case as an actual example, is that the sense in which a player has to "stop mid-turn" is purely logical or formal. That is, the player has to do something which falls under the "Author stance" description rather than the "Actor stance" description.

But there is no temporal or psychological sense in which the player has to stop mid-turn. The player just plays the game: "I'm pretty confident I can't die from falling that distance: I jump!", or "Ah - but the Raven Queen turned me back". Here we have the player exhibiting both Actor Stance (first person narration, emotionally expressing his/her PC, etc) and Author Stance (in the jumping case - because the player's conception of his/her PC's desires is shaped by his/her knowledge, which is metagame knowledge, that the fall can't do more than 60 hp damage) or Director Stance (in the polymorph case - because the player is also determining a fictional truth about an NPC, namely, the paladin's god).

The mechanic imposes the switch in the moment of resolution, and that switch can feel jarring, depending on preferred playstyle.

As I've just tried to show, it is not necessary that there be a switch. Not all logical switches have to be temporally located, psychologically actualised events.

For some, they may be. And those players might experience "dissociation". But I don't believe that there are many useful generalisations here.

Mechanics that require external narrative resolution create a much higher potential for inconsistency in future rule adjudication.

As far as I can tell you are stating this as a matter of conjecture, rather than on the basis of any widespread investigation of the evidence of actual play.

My own actual play experience doesn't bear this out.

Of course there can be differences in rules adjudication. For example, if another encounter with a Transmuter occurred in my game, and a different PC was turned into a frog until the end of the Transmuter's next turn, the ingame explanation for the ending of the polymorph effect might be quite different.

But difference is not, per se, inconsistency.

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).

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.

<snip>

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.

Does anyone participating in this thread have actual play experience with war devils, that they want to share?

I don't myself, but I certainly don't see anything too problematic about the power.

First, in my game the main dimension of meaningful choice is thematic rather than operational. So if my players were worried that they were going to encounter more war devils, and wanted to ensure that they didn't become Beseiged Foes of those devils in those future encounters, they would likely take steps to get protections against devils and suchlike - which, mechanically, might be items or rituals that allow shedding conditions imposed by devils, or might be page 42 Religion or Arcana checks to the same end (much as a Heal check can permit a bonus saving throw).

The closest actual play example I can give to this hypothetical scenario is the following:

The PCs had gone to an island at the behest of some elves, on which stood an old temple that had become corrupted by the Shadowfell. The elves wanted the PCs to recover a statue of the Summer Queen. The PCs did so, but as they were leaving the temple to go back to their boat, so they could then row back to the elves, a black dragon flew towards them. The PCs decided to take a stand under the temple portico - which would prevent the dragon attacking them from the air - rather than risk a confrontation in the open or while rowing across the lake. The one disadvantage of this strategy, they discovered, was that it left a good chunk of the party inside the zone of darkness that the dragon created. But the PC wizard succeeded in dispelling the darkness by calling on the magic of the Summer Queen as embodied in the statue (mechanically, an Arcana check while holding the statue to dismiss the zone).​

This sort of response, whether preplanned or ad hoc, because it turns on the thematic source of the power, rather than the details of its mechanism, isn't going to be hurt by varying narrations.

The second reason I don't feel the force of the concern is that the game has been pretty well designed to avoid giving rise to it. Thus, for example, there are powers that allow PCs to shed marks. These will work against Besieged Foe however it is flavoured - although that might change the flavour of those mark-shedding powers on those occasions of use. And there are few abilities that turn on the sorts of concerns the Alexandrian states - so there are no silence spells that would stop the War Devil from shouting commands, and no Remove Curse spells that would lift a curse (where a curse is characterised by process rather than endstate - there are, as noted, condition-lifting powers, but they will work however Besieged Foe is narrated).

I can think of one possible corner case - the War Devil is being narrated as commanding his allies how to attack, and then a PC uses a power that imposes the deafened condition on those allies. Can the War Devil still confer on them the benefits of Besieged Foe? Or does the targeted PC get at least a temporary reprieve? How I personally would adjudicate that would depend very heavily on other features of the context that we don't have ready-to-hand in these purely hypothetical discussions.

I can see how all this might be rather unsatisfactory for those who like operational play, in which the main dimension of "meaningfulness" is "cleverness of contribution to overcoming the operational challenges". As I've been saying since 2008 or so, it's pretty clear that 4e is not the game for such people.

4e, in my view, does not support operational/Gygaxian gamism very well. Nor does it support purist-for-system simulationism very well. 3E clearly supports both better (1st ed AD&D perhaps better still).

But that doesn't leave 4e without a viable niche, becaues these approaches aren't the only viable ones. So diagnosing problems for 4e relative to these modes of play is not diagnosing problems for 4e per se. (Which is not to say that it has none - it does, for example with skill challenges as per my recent post here.)

If you're telling a pure narrative in which whatever you say is true, there is zero "disassociation" because there are no mechanics.

Is this meant to relate to any actual reported instance of play, or just a remark in the abstract?

I'm not playing a game without mechanics. I'm playing 4e, which is a pretty mechanics-heavy game.

But the mechanics are, on the whole, not purist-for-system simulationist ones. That is, they don't model or express ingame causal logic.

One mechanic is this: when a Transmuter Balefully Polymorphs a target, that target turns back at the end of the Transmuter's next turn.

This gives rise to a question within the fiction: Why? Why does the polymorph effect end?

Here is one possible answer, that I had thought of when I placed a Transmuter into the scenario: the polymorhp magic wears out pretty quickly. This would be treating the mechanic in a more-or-less simulationist fashion.

Here is another possible answer, that the player of my paladin worked out after his PC got turned into a frog and then shortly turned back to normal: the Raven Queen turned me back! This is treating the mechanic in more of a metagame fashion - that is, while it recognises that the mechanic obliges the participants at the table to agree that, within the fiction, the polymorph effect on the target has ended, it leaves it open on any given occasion that the mechanic is applied what exactly the explanation for that outcome, within the fiction, might be. And my player has put forward an explanation by uttering something in character, which explanation no one else at the table queried.

The rulebooks don't themselves stipulate which of these answers should be adopted. Nor do they stipulate whether the rule should be understood in a simulationist or in a metagame fashion. They leave these as open questions. As it happens, and as I've explained, when the situation arose at my table, the answer that was actually put forward, and was not contested by anyone (not by me, not by another player) was the second of the two possibilities I've canvassed.

So we have an instance of a mechanic - ie we're not in the realm of mechanicless narrative - which is ambiguous as to how metagamey it is, if at all, but which was applied at my table in a metagame fashion. And the application of the mechanic in that way was initiated by a player, not the GM. And was initiated by the player in the course of playing his PC, and as part of the process of "inhabiting" that PC.

That is my black swan. Because, if the "theory" of "dissociated" mechanics was right, then treating the mechanic in a metagame fashion rather than a simulationist fashion would tend to disrupt the player's inhabitation of his PC. Whereas at my table, it was a method for reinforcing that inhabitation.

Those qualities you discuss above is what makes 4E uniquely "disassociative" to me.

But this is like someone explaining how a meal has been served on a polenta base, and corn meal has been used in the pastry component of the meal, and the meat inside the pastry is corned beef. I mean, yes, I now know why I didn't like the meal - I don't particularly care for either the texture or the flavour of polenta or corned beef - but to infer from that "Ah, now we've worked out why the meal was disgusting", when I'm at a table with a dozen other diners who loved it, would look a bit like I was projecting my preferences somewhat.

I've been saying for many, many pages - and so have wrecan, Crazy Jerome and Hussar (and maybe others I've left off the list) - that 4e has metagame-y, non-simulationist mechanics, and that this explains why some people don't like it. But going on to describe those mechanics as "dissociated" mechanics is just to project those quirks of taste onto the system itself.

Now I'm not a thoroughgoing relativist about questions of aesthetic value. If you explain to me that the base of the meal is mud, the pastry full of grit, and the filling is some form of excrement, I might be more ready to project my disgust onto the food itself. Apart from anything else, there are likely to be fewer connoisseurs around who would reject my judgement.

But metagame-y, non-simulationist mechanics aren't the mud and turds of the roleplaying world. They're at the centre of a good chunk of modern RPG design. In this sense, 4e is innovative only for mainstream fantasy gaming. It's certainly not the avant-garde.

Just as I'm not a thoroughgoing relativist, I'm not per se hostile to conservatism in aesthetics either. Like many who aren't well-schooled in the arts, and even some who are, I find looking at the works of the great masters, or classical statuary, more uniformly rewarding than a visit to a modern art museum. But even when I personally don't enjoy, or really see the point of, some cutting edge installation, I'm prepared to take seriously that others - including others who have thought hard about the issues - see something serious there, something of value.

RPGs are the same. I'm not sure that I want to play Nicotine Girls. There are political/moral reasons for that, and also more personal ones - eg do I want to spend my leisure time roleplaying lifecrushing despair? But I have no trouble acknowledging that there's something there, alright. And it was reading the rules to Nicotine Girls that first gave me a clear sense of how I might use the idea of an endgame in my much more mainstream Rolemaster campaign. And the same ideas strike me as equally relevant to 4e's Epic Destinies.

TL;DR - projecting personal aesthetic responses can lead to unnecessary coflict. (Of course, some people want unnecessary conflict. This goes back to [MENTION=54877]Crazy Jerome[/MENTION]'s point about clearing away, or cultivating, the undergrowth.)

 

[Pentius]

-snipped for brevity-

You know, I had a point by point response going, but then I realized it all boiled to this:

Yes, if you are going to approach every interaction with a combative, dare I say, exceptionally jerk-esque agenda, narrative control will be a useful tool for you to bludgeon your players with.

If you want to aggressively stifle creativity, you can use these mechanics to help you do that.

If someone at your table is not mature and respectful enough to use this control in good faith, they probably shouldn't be allowed to use it.

But then, as the saying goes, "Jerks find a way." What system exists that a jerk cannot corrupt? I can think of none.

 

[pemerton]

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.

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.

Apparently I should read your posts before posting! These points are spot-on, and illustrate how in 4e the whole idea of "interpreting" or "countering" a foe's abilities is less about operational planning and more about pursuing the central thematic ideas that the game puts forward.

Just how many times are they going to encounter this particular type of creature over the course of 30 levels? Being able to exploit meta-game knowledge gained because you've memorized the Monster Manual is not behavior I want to reward.

More good stuff.

IThere 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.

I want to point out, here, that you move from "mechanical effect" to "effect" to "practical in game meaning".

The claim of "no mechanical effect whatsoever" is, in my view, itself not true. As I posted a few times upthread, the way that a power or ability is narrated may often be significant for how the players hook onto it using page 42.

But even if you take the view that use of page 42 is a corner case (I don't, personally) it doesn't follow that it has no effect, or no practical in game meaning. In a game where the main focus is not on operational play of the "flying theif on a rope" variety, but rather (for example) on doing something dramatic or interesting starting with the notion that this is a WAR DEVIL - a being of pure martial domination whom my god has charged me to defeat! - than the fact that I succumbed to a curse placed by that creature might be quite significant. It might affect NPC reactions. Other players' conceptions of, or the player's own conception of, the PC. The structure and resolution of subsequent skill challenges. The structure and resolution of subsequent combats! (Am I the only GM who has recurring monsters and NPCs act on the basis of fictional happenings in previous encounters? I assume not.)