In Defense of the Theory of Dissociated Mechanics

[Yesway Jose]

Do you have a basis for that opinion?

Of course. It is scattered across all the different pages and in my head.

Because I was responding to it by showing how 4e is exempt from one aspect: it doesn't have built-in mechanics that break worlds in the way that 3e does. To show 3e does I gave a handful of examples. If you want to show that 4e has similar problems, be my guest. I've looked and didn't see them.

Are you going by the default strictly play-by-the-rules 4E or by the paradigm discussed earlier that anything extra a spell can do outside of combat is undefined and up to the DMs/players, because remember that everything led up from the latter.

Since it's your opinion, it's up to you to find a counter, rather than demanding that I prove the negative (i.e., prove that 4e has no hidden problems).

Why? I haven't tried to disprove your opinion.

Actually, since I don't see any "hidden problems in any one real or hypothetical 4E game world", B=0, and since I've alread shown A>0, then by the transitive property, A>B. QED.

You've convinced yourself that B=0, not me. So congratulations, I guess, for proving your own opinion to yourself.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Then put the design commitee in quotes. But at the bottom, there was a discaimer that this was my general opinion. I'm not adding footnotes from every sentence to the disclaimer. I find these semantics tiresome and tangential to my opinion. All of the above is my opinion. Thank you.

It might have been your opinion. But your opinion was on matters of cold hard fact. When the facts your opinions are based on are shown to be wrong, that means your opinions are based on nothing more substantial than hot air and should be acknowledged as unsupportable.

1) It allows a will save. (And do you know if the save was successful?)

As a matter of fact, you do know if your spell has succeeded. And the equivalent to being sworn in is to consent to the zone of truth. There is no problem here.

The whole matter would be limited by the honesty of the caster, and of the skill of the audience to detect duplicity.

You mean that you can bribe judges? Shock horror.

In fact, the SRD states "Like any iron wall, this wall is subject to rust, perforation, and other natural phenomena." That's not the same as stating that it's like any iron wall, it only shares the qualities of rusting, perforation and natural phenomena. Artificially being cut up into blocks is not natural phenomenon.

You're clutching at straws. As apparently you went all the way to the SRD, let's see what the spell actually says.

Wall of Iron Conjuration (Creation)

Level: Sor/Wiz 6 Components: V, S, M Casting Time: 1 standard action Range: Medium (100 ft. + 10 ft./level) Effect: Iron wall whose area is up to one 5-ft. square/level; see text Duration: Instantaneous Saving Throw: See text Spell Resistance: No You cause a flat, vertical iron wall to spring into being. The wall inserts itself into any surrounding nonliving material if its area is sufficient to do so. The wall cannot be conjured so that it occupies the same space as a creature or another object. It must always be a flat plane, though you can shape its edges to fit the available space.
A wall of iron is 1 inch thick per four caster levels. You can double the wall’s area by halving its thickness. Each 5-foot square of the wall has 30 hit points per inch of thickness and hardness 10. A section of wall whose hit points drop to 0 is breached. If a creature tries to break through the wall with a single attack, the DC for the Strength check is 25 + 2 per inch of thickness.
If you desire, the wall can be created vertically resting on a flat surface but not attached to the surface, so that it can be tipped over to fall on and crush creatures beneath it. The wall is 50% likely to tip in either direction if left unpushed. Creatures can push the wall in one direction rather than letting it fall randomly. A creature must make a DC 40 Strength check to push the wall over. Creatures with room to flee the falling wall may do so by making successful Reflex saves. Any Large or smaller creature that fails takes 10d6 points of damage. The wall cannot crush Huge and larger creatures.
Like any iron wall, this wall is subject to rust, perforation, and other natural phenomena.
Material Component

A small piece of sheet iron plus gold dust worth 50 gp (1 pound of gold dust).

There in black and white. Or rather blue for emphasis. Let me repeat the first line of the spell. You cause a flat, vertical iron wall to spring into being. Not an iron-like wall made of magic. An iron wall. One that can't be dispelled and isn't affected by an anti-magic field because the duration is instantaneous. I do not know how the spell could be any clearer about it being iron. But you have your opinion and seem to want to stick to it irrespective of whatever the rules say.

And that's all it is, speculating.

Has anybody here really expressed concern for Zones of Truth and Walls of Iron affecting their own game (and not someone else's hypothetical game)? No.

That has nothing at all to do with the subject under discussion. Your claim was one about worldbuilding. Not play. Worldbuilding. And this is a problem about worldbuilding. PCs don't often have a use for Zone of Truth on an industrial scale. Legal systems do. And merchants do. PCs don't often need a weight of iron measured in tonnes. Kingdoms do. And armies do. If there are such solutions readily available, the NPCs are idiots not to use them. And making every NPC in the world an idiot is a worldbuilding problem even if it never comes up in play.

You introduced the Wall of Iron so that you could make a point against a claim that doesn't exist on this thread.

Yesway Jose, meet Yesway Jose.

I stated my opinion that "I don't think it's fair to state that 4E is better than or is exempt from 3E-like problems in terms of worldbuilding".

4e doesn't have anything like as strong or overwhelming magic as 3e. This was a deliberate design decision

If you provide 3 anectodes, it doesn't prove otherwise, much less change my opinion.

Facts, rules, and logical argument. We've provided all of these. And they haven't changed your opinion. I wonder what it would take to change your opinion.

Is your counterargument to tally/quantify all the many hidden problems in 3E, and then numerically compare to all the hidden problems in any one real or hypothetical 4E game world, and then prove that A > B? If so, you have a long way to go.

Do me a favour. Find problems in 4e that are remotely comparable to the listed ones in 3e. Oh, that's right. 4e PCs and NPCs use different rules. Even if there was a second level wizard utility power allowing them to make gold out of thin air, this would not crash the 4e economy because only PCs use the wizard class. It is logically impossible for 4e gameworlds to have the sort of problem 3e does in this respect due to the fundamentally different design. The best you can do is find a broken ritual - the index for them is twenty two pages, but having skimmed through some are useful but I can't see anything that seriously forces game worlds to be re-written (possibly Ironwood - altering a single wooden object to have the strength and consistency of steel for 75gp, but that's the only one I see)

 

[tomBitonti]

I'm not sure I fully follow what you are saying here, but to the extent that I have it, I'd say the 4E answer is not that it doesn't matter, but "If it matters to you, you decide." That "if" is important.

This is analogous to how I already handled all kinds of details in the game, 4E, 3E, and previous. If a player wants to know, and I don't have a preference, I get them to tell me the answer. It is not as if the little half-elven girl apples had no name before the player named her. In the fictional world, she has always had a name. Whether provided by a player or me at the moment, or me earlier, or a published module--is immaterial.

From a narrative point of view, "how and why things work," is just another detail. It might matter now, that someone has cared enough to ask. It didn't matter until then. And critically, the explanation is not presumed to be binding on another campaign, let alone another table.

Well, I think that gets back to the 4E powers not really being tied to the fluff. You can describe a 4E power, but it doesn't follow from any model which can be used to educe new details and modified effects, and any model that you provide can no detail that you can use to infer a modified effect. That goes to my example of Come And Get It: If you model it as involving any kind of visual display, will it still work in darkness? Where-as, if you look at Marshall Auras, those require that the Marshall be audible. Silence will, by inference, negate the ability.

Going back to the example of Wall of Iron, I think that is a bit of a misdirect: You can fix wall of iron by small(ish) changes: Make the effect one hour per level, and add a provision 'any portion of the wall which is detached from the main section of the wall fades from existence'. That is to say, Wall of Iron seems to be an example of a insufficiently thought out spell effect. Much the same can be said for the various "Orb" spells: They were poorly implemented in terms of the underlying balance and model of the game. Because Wall of Iron can be easily patched up, that to me says that its problems don't say much about problems with the 3E spell model.

 

[Wiseblood]

Jumping in on page sixty something. Looks like disassociated mechanics are in each game. The argument seems to be "to what degree?".

A wall of Iron does sound like a chore to cut up.

 

[Hussar]

I should say, Zone of Truth is an excellent way to keep the kingdom safe!

Will it keep us safer? Yes, in the hands of the wise and skillful!

Did I kill the Prince? No! (The Prince fell onto a dagger; the fall together with the dagger killed the prince. What I don't say is that I pushed the prince, so my push indirectly killed the prince, but the fall and the dagger were the more direct cause.)

And, if the advocate only asked you that single question you'd be fine. But, "Were you there when the Prince died?" and "What were doing just before the Prince died?" and "Did you want the Prince to die?" should clear up most of that.

Looking at the Wall of Iron example, there is still the need to carve up the wall into usable pieces. I guess an investment in an adamantine dagger is needed, otherwise, I just have a huge hunk of iron. How would I even begin to carve that up? Or fit it into a furnace to melt it down? Seems like a big furnace. Ok, then a bound fire elemental, and a safe spot for a rather large flame, and equipment for casting the iron into smaller portions.

Umm, what? You do realize that we carve up big chunks of iron all the time? Without magic? And we've been doing so for a REALLY long time. A good hot furnace and you get nicely melted iron. Sure, in this case, you need a pretty darn big furnace, but, since Wall of Iron is actually shapeable, you don't have to make it that difficult - you make a Wall of Iron three inches thick and break it off with a hammer.

Also, as a 6'th level spell, that gives you a 11'th level wizard, whom is rare in some environments.

Not by the stated demographics in the 3e DMG. You only need a large town or larger. Any decent sized kingdom should have at least one and one is all you need.

But, by the spell, the Iron is actual Iron, as the spell has a duration of "Instantaneous". Also as a result, the resulting wall cannot be dispelled.

Joking aside, you have a point: The resulting wall is quite valuable.

On the other hand, there is a lot that is world breaking in this regard. Any permanently bound fire or ice elemental seems to be a perpetual source of heat and cold. A decanter of endless water is an endless source of water. You could use teleport to shift large masses to the top of a high mountain, for a source of energy. Or, define a frame of reference inside of a moving box carried aloft by a flying wizard using levitate, and who is moving very quickly, to shift a large mass from standing still to that same velocity. That is, assuming that teleport is relative to frames of reference. Otherwise, how do you teleport off of a moving boat, or to the opposite side of a world? Or, what is the limit of using stone shape to carve a narrow slice around a block, for a fast way to create a tunnel, one block at a time? When you travel miles underground (below sea level), why don't you experience blistering heat and unendurable pressure?

Generally, if you push too far in these lines, the game rather breaks. Then you are back to more of a question of player expectations: How does a player expect teleport to work? What do players find is "reasonable" for game abilities?

TomBitonti

This I agree with. The magic system, and really, any system in D&D you care to name is hardly rigorous in it's approach to reality. You can poke pretty large holes in it.

But, then, claiming that one edition is more difficult to world build in than another edition is a bit wonky. No one has to prove that 4e is easier to world build in, just that it's no more difficult than any other edition.

 

[pemerton]

if my PC wants to learn teleportation, then it may be universal in the game world, every apprentice learns it, but for some reason the PC can't. It's arbitrary, and it's arbitrary in a way that goes against what the players want to do, solely in the name of balance.

What you describe here seems more like a situation where PCs can't be wizards. Which is quite conceivable (eg for a Conan game).

If you are saying that the PC is a wizard, but for some reason can't do what every other apprentice wizard can do, then the problem seems to me to be not one of dissociation, but a more basic one of coherence, or at least of verisimilitude.

The sorts of balance constraints on PCs I had in mind (and that I assumed Yesway Jose had in mind) tend to concern esoterica rather than bread-and-butter capabilities, precisely because coherence and verisimilitude already sort out the bread-and-butter questions.

my world building is more about providing a place for the characters to act than it is about the world itself.

I don't know how you can have one without the other at every place that they interact.

No myth is one way to do it - which has also been labelled "just in time" GMing in some other threads on these boards.

For the PCs to have a place to act, it's not essential to have anything more than a description of where they are and who they can see, plus some shared understanding between players and GM of background and genre. The gameworld then gets built out of the material of actual play. Its sort of the opposite of a module which has paragraphs of backstory for the GM to read that never comes into the open when the players actually take their PCs through the adventure.

I don't run an entirely no myth game, but I suspect that by ENworld standards I'm closer to it than many.

A similar sort of approach to the prioritising of character and situation over world building is implicit in this comment by Paul Czege:

I go around the room, taking a turn with each player, framing a scene and playing it out. . . 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.​

I'm not saying that there is anything better about GMing in this sort of fashion. I just offer it as an answer to the question - how can you have one (character) without the other (setting) at the points where they interact?

I also think it's fairly evident that some action resolution systems support no myth or situation-driven play, in which the prior development of setting takes a back seat to character and situation, better than others.

For example, the more the action resolution mechanics require the players to focus on the minutiae of the gameworld, and discourage the players from allowing one scene to be wrapped up and another scene framed (eg because there are potential mechanical advantages to be gained by keeping the scene alive), the harder it will be to run no myth. An example of this would be dungeon exploration in classic D&D - the mechanics for that are 10' poles, ear trumpets with wire mesh, standard door opening procedures, etc, all of which (i) encourage the players to engage with the minutiae of the dungeon setting, and (ii) can't be fairly adjudicated by a GM who doesn't already know the architectural and other details of the dungeon, and (iii) tend to lead to play of the sort being described in the various recent ToH threads, focusing on operational exploration rather than engaging with situation (the module becomes, in effect, one long scene).

4e's mechanics offer better support for no myth or situation-focused play, because the action resolution mechanics- both combat and skill challenges, and also including the resource recovery elements of these mechanics - tend to encourage scene-based play rather than a one contious scene approach. To really run 4e this way, though, you need to go beyond the core rulebooks and bring in approaches and techniques from other games - such as the [utl=http://www.wizards.com/dnd/files/187_Save_My_Game.pdf]Save My Game article[/url] which promoted Burning Wheel-style "Let it Ride".

 

[pemerton]

Are you going by the default strictly play-by-the-rules 4E or by the paradigm discussed earlier that anything extra a spell can do outside of combat is undefined and up to the DMs/players

That paradigm is not actually a 4e paradigm. It's one that, if I recall correctly, you coined.

The 4e paradigm that Crazy Jerome and I discussed (and maybe others whom I've forgotten) is that anything extra a spell or other power can do whether inside or outside combat is governed by page 42. That is, (i) it's not undefined (of course there can also be undefined houseruling and improvisation, but that aspect of roleplaying is not remotely unique to 4e), and (ii) it has nothing to do with a combat/out-of-combat divide. In fact (and as Crazy Jerome mentioned upthread), the DMG presents page 42 as being relevant primarily to combat. It is DMG2, in its discussion of skill challenges, that talks seriously about using page 42 + powers in non-combat contexts (although many, many players noticed the possibility before DMG2 was published).

I think that gets back to the 4E powers not really being tied to the fluff.

At this level of generality, this statement is not true. And I'm not at all suggesting that you're being deliberately slack or provocative in your wording, but mistaken descriptions of the 4e mechanics are (in my view) part of the problem in having serious discussions of the game between those who play it and those who don't.

4e powers have keywords. Keywords are crucial for understanding how the powers relate to the fiction. For example, a power with the fire keyword, that deals fire damage, can set fire to a tree. A power with the weapon keyword, that deals only untyped damage, cannot set fire to a tree. I think this is fairly obvious, but even if it weren't it is explained unambiguously (although perhaps in a slightly odd location) in the DMG's discussion of using powers against objects.

As I noted in my discussion upthread of the Vincent Baker blog that frozenwastes linked to upthread:

I think how 4e combat is experienced may depend a lot on whether, for any given group, the stuff that is drawn on the battlemap is first and foremost fictional stuff - trees, rubble, fog, walls with doors and windows, etc - or first and foremost mechanical stuff - cover, difficult terrain, obscuring terrain etc. Perhaps in part because my maps are fairly sketchy and my group uses board game tokens rather than miniatures or even WotC's picture tokens, I think that the fictional stuff prevails. And this is reinforced by the resolution of interactions with it that involve rightward arrows and not just manipulating the map - like climbing walls, overturning furniture, opening or closing doors and shutters, etc.

<snip>

there are also aspects of the 4e architecture that generate rightward arrows - the rules on damaging objects, for example, make it clear that keywords (like fire, ice, teleportation etc) have fictional signficance. A tree can be set alight, for instance, but a stone pillar can't - so here we have a rightward pointing arrow, from fiction to mechanics, that is not just boxes (in the form of a cover symbol on a map) to boxes. Icy terrain can be used to cross a river, whereas a grasping vines spell that also creates difficult terrain probably can't. And so on.

"Rightward arrows", in this passage, means decisions taken in the course of action resolultion that involve reasoning from the fiction to the mechanics. "Boxes" refer to mechanical gamestates. (The terminology is from the Vincent Baker blog).

 

[prosfilaes]

What you describe here seems more like a situation where PCs can't be wizards. Which is quite conceivable (eg for a Conan game).

If you are saying that the PC is a wizard, but for some reason can't do what every other apprentice wizard can do, then the problem seems to me to be not one of dissociation, but a more basic one of coherence, or at least of verisimilitude.

The sorts of balance constraints on PCs I had in mind (and that I assumed Yesway Jose had in mind) tend to concern esoterica rather than bread-and-butter capabilities, precisely because coherence and verisimilitude already sort out the bread-and-butter questions.

Apprentice wizards was a bit of an exaggeration, but teleportation is not esoterica; it's one of the most useful things magic can do. In fact, pre-4ed wizards almost invariably had teleportation, and wizards who didn't spend most of their time trying to kill creatures are probably even more likely to have it. Balance constraints by their nature are about the most useful and thus most common abilities.

 

[pemerton]

teleportation is not esoterica; it's one of the most useful things magic can do. In fact, pre-4ed wizards almost invariably had teleportation, and wizards who didn't spend most of their time trying to kill creatures are probably even more likely to have it. Balance constraints by their nature are about the most useful and thus most common abilities.

OK. But 4e wizards are chock-full of teleportation, both in their powers and in their rituals. The only fantasy RPG I can think of that has more teleportation is Rolemaster.

 

[Yesway Jose]

It might have been your opinion. But your opinion was on matters of cold hard fact.

Look, I summarized my opinion and ended with "Take it or leave it". You decided on neither, and attacked my opinion about what you claim to be an issue of "cold hard fact". I refute that it is fact, because hidden but unrealized/solvable problems do not need to be fixed, and I see no evidence that DMs were crying to TSR/WoTC about Zones of Truth destroying their game, so I think you're getting apoplectic over a non-issue. Much more importantly, however, I was frank and up-front that I had neither the time nor inclination to face off a multipronged debate, including tangents about the exact degree to which 3E worldbuilding has been playtested, not to mention how tangential it is from the central topic of this thread.

When the facts your opinions are based on are shown to be wrong, that means your opinions are based on nothing more substantial than hot air and should be acknowledged as unsupportable.

Have you aggressively attacked everyone who failed to substantiate their opinions to your satisfaction and, failing to do so, acknowledged to you that it's unsupportable even they disagree or just don't care to argue about it, or do you only narrowly focus on me because you don't like my opinion? If we were all equally in-your-face aggressive about demanding that nobody is allow to have an opinion about "matters of fact" and subsequently attempt to prove the factuality of that opinion, thus nullifying the whole point of stating "I think" or IMO or "It's my opinion that...", then I guarantee you that this thread would not be much fun for anyone.