In Defense of the Theory of Dissociated Mechanics

[Crazy Jerome]

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 said it was undefined. Then I went on to qualify that contention by noting page 42 and the general advice provided about how to handle such situations. "Undefined" here was called out as meaning, strictly undefined by RAW--and implies a very literal reading of the RAW. Once once has absorbed the import of the provided advice, then I agree with you. No doubt, playing other games with similar sensibilities made this more apparent at the launch of 4E, whereas some of the advice didn't arrive until DMG 2, and some still hasn't made it.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

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.

...

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".

What I do when I DM is a mixture of these styles. There is some real operational play mixed in, though not nearly to the degree as one would expect in a traditional 1E dungeon crawl. And my "develop in play" style is somewhat of a "just in time" version, but it is "just in time" modeled more after the inventory systems used by modern commerce than straight improvisation on demand. Or if you prefer, it is improvisational jazz rather than improvisational theatre. The key difference is when and how decisions are made.

Let me outline how it works for me, to illustrate:

1. Scene is framed, by me and/or players. Characters are well understood. They have a place to act. Typically, I give them the broad outline, then they fill in details, as they need to ground themselves. They are in small fortified village, poorly maintained, and sloppily guarded. What are the walls made of? I know that one, already, as an image is in my mind. "Wood". How high? I decide--15 feet, but inconsistent, and thus shorter in places. There is a tavern. How does it appear? I ask the player that wants to know to narrate something appropriate. If the thing they narrate isn't entirely a good fit, I'll help them tweak it so that it is.

2. Through a series of events, the party ends up confronting corrupt guards at the door to their fortified barracks. The guards slam the door and manage to barricade it before the PCs can act. One of the PCs, a minitaur fighter (very strong) wants to break down the door. I need to know the DC of the door. No problem. But I also need to know about the floor plan inside and other such details.

3. I decide on the things that need a decision. Then I convey that decision to the players. So before the player rolls, I have a DC for that door. I'm emphatically not changing it to fit with a great roll or poor roll to produce some outcome that I like or want. I know there is a stairwell to the second floor in an anteroom just inside the door, and a narrow hall to the right. When do I know it? Right before the player busts down the door, and I need to describe what they see. There is also a cloak rack in the hall (as I visualize the room), but I don't care about that in the chaos of the fight unless a player states that they are observing more carefully.

4. Players react. The ones that are prone to use scenery are going for the stairs, or asking about other options. The options are then described as decided, not based on what the player wishes for. Sorry, no giant drapes in the anteroom to drop over the guards charging down the hall.

Now, as it happens, the above scene took place in an adventure that I got from a module--a rather poorly designed and written module in Dungeon. But I used it the same way I do things myself--I got an impression from it, and then ran the session as develop in play from that impression, rather than the module itself. (I did use the NPCs and monsters more or less as written, same as I would if I wrote them out myself for my own adventure.)

This is part of that improv jazz distinction. There are pieces prepared ahead of time. These pieces fit a pattern or impression in your mind. As you need new pieces, you use the impression, tool, techniques, etc. to improv a suitable piece that fits into what has come before. Then you narrate. It's a subtle difference between that and "make up something cool," but it is a difference. What you get is something that does a fairly good job of emulating certain aspects of simulation, without exactly being simulation--same as, unless you really know what to look for, you'll have some difficulty definitely picking out the improv jazz from the fully prepared jazz.

Finally, to pull this off, you do need some note taking, but unlike simulation note taking, which demands a high fidelity on details, you are more worried about the fidelity to the impression. The impression is king. In simulation, you might improv a description of a dance by an orc tribe--the point being color, to immerse the players into the world with details, and if it matters later, their ability to use this detail dealing with a similar tribe in the future. Runequest is heavily slanted towards this kind of play, at least by its default presentation. I think some D&D players who value immersion go for it, as well. Whereas, in this impressionist variety, the details of the dance don't matter. The color matters, but in broad strokes. And it matters that these orc tribes have some kind of ritual dance. But the player is not asked to remember details and use them later. The player is expected to remember the impression, and use that later.

It is also no accident that my favorite painters are Monet and Renoir.

 

[pemerton]

I said it was undefined. Then I went on to qualify that contention by noting page 42 and the general advice provided about how to handle such situations. "Undefined" here was called out as meaning, strictly undefined by RAW--and implies a very literal reading of the RAW.

Oops - sorry about that. I didn't go back and check, I just remember the comments about page 42, and about it being presented as being particularly salient for combat. (Under the heading "actions the rules don't cover", which I guess is your point!)

 

[Yesway Jose]

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.

I said it was undefined. Then I went on to qualify that contention by noting page 42 and the general advice provided about how to handle such situations. "Undefined" here was called out as meaning, strictly undefined by RAW--and implies a very literal reading of the RAW. Once once has absorbed the import of the provided advice, then I agree with you. No doubt, playing other games with similar sensibilities made this more apparent at the launch of 4E, whereas some of the advice didn't arrive until DMG 2, and some still hasn't made it.

All of the below is IMO, YMMV.

Any fantasy/sci-fi medium has the problem of incorporating new technologies or magical elements into their worldbuilding:

I'm sure that screenwriters struggled with the adoption of the cell phone in real-life. Many movie plot devices were all based on the landline phone. Now you deal with it by either a) setting the movie in the 80s or earlier, or b) make up an excuse for why your cell phone isn't working, or c) adapting the plot to cell phones for a different story. All 3 approaches are legitimate, although (b) only works for any one scenario in one movie, and only (c) really rolls with that reality.

There is option (d) -- a movie set in 2011 where no character uses a cell phone even if they could and didn't have an excuse not to. That's disassociated to me...

D&D could have been completely surreal, but it isn't. There's something to be said for familiarity. D&D draws upon familiar elements in literature and movies and mythology, like dragons, Medusa's gaze, princes transformed to frogs, magic flying carpets, truth serums, Jedi mind trick, and so forth.

Earlier editions of D&D attempted to import these familiar fictional constructs, resulting in a) more fantasy and wonder, but having to account for b) game balance and worldbuilding. I think when it came to balancing (a) vs (b), the designers leaned towards (a) more fantasy and wonder.

Yes, that could result in problems, but..

with zones of truth, you can a) not even notice the implications -- true in my experience, b) notice it but purposefully gloss over it, c) houserule it out of existence, d) introduce in-game reasons to restrict its use by NPCs, e) just roll with it and work the stories around it.

I think the designers knew that there was a social contract in place and houserulings to buffer against potential problems, and gosh darn it, it was worth it to have more fantasy and wonder in the game! IMO I would have pushed slightly more towards (b) but still with an eye on (a).

4E plays it safest due to its focus on combat-informed tactics and game balance. So Medusa's instant-flesh-to-stone gaze becomes a more gradual thing. Permanent polymorph until dispelled becomes a 6 second duration. Magic carpets are prohibitively expensive. Hypnotism begins as a binary effect. IMO I acknowledge the underlying goals but I think it went too far.

Personally, I think, IMO, YMMV, and accepting no responsibility for substantiating the factuality of my opinion, I think it's like D&D was a toy box full of all sorts of wonderful and colorful toys, some of which could be slightly dangerous and caused some babies to cry but were otherwise amazing toys to play with if you were emotionally mature with sharing toys, and then 4E came and took away all the sharp-edged colorful toys and left you with soft rounded toys in a padded room for your own protection -- and if you decide to stray out of the play area (through a somewhat hidden door marked 'Page 42') and create your own new toys, you do so at YOUR OWN RISK. Otherwise, you can peer through the windows of your play area and watch other kids playing with slightly dangerous but very fun colorful wonderous toys that you cannot have (this is where one type of "disassociation" comes in for me, the disconnect between your play area vs the outside world). It seems that the designers don't trust you to behave, or they just haven't figured out what to do with the fun but slightly dangerous toys so they discontinue them until they find a way to literally nerf them for your protection.

And yes, that was always happening to some extent in D&D, except that to avoid disassociation, I think most toys were designed to work more or less the same in the play area and the outside world. and if the toy worked differently in the play area vs the outside world, there was a fictional reason for it. If the toy was too dangerous, like a nuclear bomb, it would not be included at all, but you wouldn't have a half-assed half-nuclear bomb as a sort of poor man's compromise between nuclear bomb or no nuclear bomb. I think it's better to have no item at all than an item so nerfed it no longer resembles the fiction you're familiar with (Crazy Jerome, is that anything like your "fairy tale logic" that a non-greedy dragon isn't a dragon?).

I think it's interesting to note that dragons and all sorts of horrible monsters exist in the game alongside small villages to large cities. If this fiction was attacked aggressively with the same hardnosed approach to Zones of Truth and Walls of Iron, I think it could be asked why isn't the world completely overrun with monsters while the weaker races hide in holes and grub in the dirt, like the early mammals did during the reign of the dinosaurs? There's also a broken economy and so forth. Clearly, there are some unrealized worldbuilding issues in any D&D setting, but this doesn't seem to be a significant problem. The designers can be trusted to introduce dragons and so forth that integrate with the world, and the players can be trusted to use any narrative they want to fluff the mechanics that they're allowed to use, and they can even be trusted to use any narrative to justify oddball cases like marking an ooze or tripping a snake, but the PCs cannot be trusted (by default anyway) to interact with or use tools that might alter the game world in unexpected ways. As you drill down to all the mechanics behind this paradigm, it seems to me that this paradigm may partially inform some of the "disassociated mechanics" that can exist when you think your PC *could* do something but seemingly arbitrarily cannot or when a player does something mechanically that you cannot quite explain why/how the PC is doing so within the context of the game world.

So if you play strictly by the rules, there's a certain spectrum of fantasy roleplaying you'll ever get. If this bothers you, and if you're still playing 4E, and if you allow for more use of Page 42, and if you're not afraid of upsetting game balance and worldbuilding, and if you have a solid social contract between the DMs and players, (and by this point, a large fraction of gaming groups are eliminated), then you can expand the worldbuilding to include more advanced/swingy fantasy elements. Since you're going at it solo, with no guidelines, like a pioneer, it's a very different experience, like writing your own mini-RPG system. You might end up like Lost or Battlestar Galactica, starting off strong and then meandering and diverging and retconning and leaving behind plotholes and lost threads as your write every season on the fly without a long term vision for how all the new elements integrate into your gameworld. Some people enjoy equally every episode of Lost and BSG, but others wished that the screenwriters had a more coherent vision from the get-go.

So yes, the mechanics are excellent for their design intent. Yet going back to the 1st post of page 50 of this thread, I think one can have "disassociation" when one defines the Rule as Page 42 and defines the Fiction as the story of the PCs and their relationship to a game world that is potentially dynamic and variable in the hands of any one gaming group. I don't know that Page 42 on its own is robust enough in the hands of any one DM to tell the stories that will prevent "disassociation" for the scope of an evolved post-4e campaign or game world. And if one gives up and does away with all that, then one circles back to the top of this post...

And I don't know that fingers recently pointed at 3E, no matter how justified, prove that 3E is more "disassociated" than 4E, assuming that's an interesting discussion to have. IMO I'm waiting for Mearls' hints at 5E and layers that might bridge the divide.

DISCLAIMER: All of the above is IMO, YMMV. I'm not purposefully attempting to disprove anyone's opinions, and I'm willing to agree to disagree. Please accept my apologies in advance for any semantic errors or opinions that conflict with yours.

 

[wrecan]

What happens to the economy when a dragon's hoard gets dropped on it? What happens when any rogue can open a lock? How do gnomes get along with humans without the first exterminating the latter? How do Roman Catholic priests work in your world (since getting rid of masons from some sort of real world simulacrum matters, sure so would getting rid of RC priests?)

How is any of this a function of 4e mechanics?

 

[wrecan]

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.

Everything didn't lead up from the latter. Everything led up from your opinion that 4e worldbuilding was not easier than 3e. I pointed out a specific instance in which that is not true, which did not involve the houseruling that people can do in both 3e and 4e. It's now up to you to present countervailing evidence.

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

I'm not asking you to disprove my opinion. I'm asking you to support yours in the face of the countervailing evidence I presented.

You've convinced yourself that B=0, not me.

On what basis do you believe that 4e has hidden mechanical obstacles to worldbuilding analogous to the ones I identified in 3e?

 

[wrecan]

nvm

 

[prosfilaes]

How is any of this a function of 4e mechanics?

The size of a dragon's hoard and the nature of gnomes are given in the Monster Manual. The rogue's ability to pick locks is in the PHB. And the clerical magic in the PHB totally changes the relation of the Roman Catholic Church to the world around them. (And if you give up the Roman Catholic Church, what's the big deal about giving up the historically less significant masons?)

In fact most of us have been explicitly saying not that some people don't like 4e, but that the reasons for the dislike are inherently subjective, and not objective, as TheAlexandrian in the blog that started this thread has indicated.

And the Mona Lisa is not objectively a better painting than the one's you can buy at a flea market. That many people do like it better is objective, and the reasons why can be discussed reasonably, even if they are inherently subjective.

Put a different way: just because something is subjective, doesn't mean it's not real.

 

[wrecan]

The size of a dragon's hoard and the nature of gnomes are given in the Monster Manual. The rogue's ability to pick locks is in the PHB.

The size of a dragon hoard is given in the Monster Manual?! I don't think so. A dragon hoard would be given out as treasure parcels based on the level of the dragon and the party confronting it.

At any rate, how is world-breaking for dragon hoards to be introduced into an economy? Certainly, the specific hoard may have an inflationary impact, depending on the robustness of the economy, but that's isn't world-breaking from a design perspective, particularly since most of any dragon's hoard will be spent on buying equipment to keep the PCs' appropriately equipped for their level.

Nor is it world-breaking from a world-design perspective for any "rogue" to open a lock, especially since in 4e, the only "rogue" is a PC who takes that class, or specific NPCs that the DM decides should be trained in Thievery.

Nor is a Roman Catholic priest a necessity in athe heroic fantasy realm that D&D is designed to imitate. You seem to have confused "heroic fantasy realm" with "Earth".

(And if you give up the Roman Catholic Church, what's the big deal about giving up the historically less significant masons?)

I wasn't referring to the Craftmasons. I was referring to stonemasons, the actual profession. I think a world in which quarries, stonemasons, engineers, and the like have been replaced with singing minstrels is a much different fantasy realm than what D&D is intended to emulate, as evidenced by the fact that none of the campaign worlds for which 3e sourcebooks were released (including Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Eberron, Dragonlance, and Ravenloft) have minstrels replacing stonemasons.

I know you're probably just being smarmy, but since you didn't include an emoticon, I'm going to proceed as if you were being serious and didn't understand why your questions didn't have anything to do with fantasy world-design.

just because something is subjective, doesn't mean it's not real.

Agreed. But nobody is saying the feeling of dissociation that some people experience isn't genuine.

 

[prosfilaes]

At any rate, how is world-breaking for dragon hoards to be introduced into an economy? Certainly, the specific hoard may have an inflationary impact, depending on the robustness of the economy, but that's isn't world-breaking from a design perspective, particularly since most of any dragon's hoard will be spent on buying equipment to keep the PCs' appropriately equipped for their level.

If the PCs can buy level-appropriate equipment, that means there's enough traffic in PC equipment of that level to support the industry that makes it. People don't have million GP items unless there's a demand for them; if they're older items that the merchant has happened to pick up, they won't be priced at a million GP unless there's people around with that type of money to buy it. That's pretty alien to most fantasy.

I wasn't referring to the Craftmasons. I was referring to stonemasons, the actual profession.

So was I.

I think a world in which quarries, stonemasons, engineers, and the like have been replaced with singing minstrels is a much different fantasy realm than what D&D is intended to emulate, as evidenced by the fact that none of the campaign worlds for which 3e sourcebooks were released (including Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Eberron, Dragonlance, and Ravenloft) have minstrels replacing stonemasons.

I don't recall masons having much of an impact on any of those settings; if they are mentioned in the rulebooks, it's as a note in some table. Nor do I think the issues are that big; in a non-capitalistic world, where the concept of ROI is unknown, where wizards and clerics are some of the most powerful figures around, where lords might want to keep powerful magic in reserve instead of giving it to just everyone, where guilds exist that will object, possibly violently, to anything that detracts from their power, where lords depend on their support by those guilds, I don't think every lord would summon their pet high-level wizard, have them make a specific magical item, and then use it all over the place.

Agreed. But nobody is saying the feeling of dissociation that some people experience isn't genuine.

No, but you're acting like it isn't connected to specific features of D&D 4e.