D&D 4E 4e/13thA immersion question and 5e/13thA DoaM question

[pemerton]

Well you got the definition wrong so no wonder you can't figure things out. You most especially got the bolded part wrong. While true that it could effect some people that way the word dissociation is not referring to a feeling or experience while using the mechanic.

You ever ask yourself why half the playerbase went to Pathfinder? My guess is healing and dissociative mechanics (though the term DS wouldn't have been used the rejection of the feel would be there).

I'm still confused: is feeling important to the notion of dissocatied mechanics, or isn't it?

I view hit points as overal health and vitality both of which are known.

I never heard anyone ever think differently until I went online. I probably know a hundred people that think their characters know their hit points. I know that is anecdotal but I just never met any resistance on that. The point though is that if I thought hit points were completely unknowable then I would be opposed to them and probably just quit D&D altogether.

A player in D&D often knows that his/her PC has enough hit points remaining that s/he cannot die to a single arrow, or cannot die from jumping over a 40' cliff. This is possible even for a character of modest level. (Eg a 2nd level fighter can have enough hit points to be immune to death from a single arror, and by 4th level will typically have enough hp to be immuned to death from a 40' fall.)

No human being in the world can now these things of him-/herself.

Hence I have never met anyone, until I came online, who thought that hp corresponded to PC self-knowledge. They are information for the player about the buffer of luck/plot protection that the PC has. (Much as Gygax described in his DMG.) And for those players who didn't want to play a game with this sort of mechanic - and I've known plenty and been one from time-to-time - we played RQ or Rolemaster rather than D&D.

And flipping it around - if a PC in your gameworld can know that s/he is lucky enough to survive an arrow shot or a 40' fall with absolute certainty, then s/he can know that s/he is lucky enough to pull off one clever move in the next 5 minutes, but no more. (Ie there is nothing inherent to hp that makes them playable as non-metagame that is missing from 4e's mechanics.)

Mechanics which force you to leave actor stance and enter author or director stance are dissociative because they dissociative the character from the player. When the player is making a metagame decision, he is not "being his character".

<snip>

It's been explained a million times so I can only guess this answer doesn't fit your mental model so you ignore it.

There is a perfectly good non-pejorative word for mechanics that do not correspond to a choice the character makes in the gameworld: metagame mechanics.

And the claim that a player cannot use metagame mechanics while being in character is an empirical claim that is false: for some counter-examples (and many others could be given), I refer you to posts 477 and 498 in this thread, and the ensuing discusion.

In other words, my mental model is fine. I understand what you're saying - I'm just denying it. If you want to necro the thread I've linked to and discuss it further, I'm happy to.

 

[Emerikol]

English you are a jerk and really don't want to discuss anything civilly.

You want to just snark and snipe.

The word dissociation refers to the disconnect between the character and the mechanic. Different people will have different feelings about that fact. I personally dislike it and consider it immersion breaking. Others may feel differently.

I said twice now that the precise granularity of hit points is perhaps a bit much but a PC will know the general neighborhood. Having 60 out of 100 would be known versus 80 out of 100. It is just not worth hiding the extra info and there really isn't a way to act on it anyway.

This is my final reply to you. I'm ridding myself of the toxic useless posters in my life. Not those that the one's who disagree but want to have a conversation between reasonable people.

 

[EnglishLanguage]

English you are a jerk and really don't want to discuss anything civilly.

You want to just snark and snipe.

Trust me, you making contradictory arguments kills your point far better than I can. I snark because you pretty much shred your own arguments to pieces and leave nothing left for me.

The word dissociation refers to the disconnect between the character and the mechanic.

Ok.

Different people will have different feelings about that fact. I personally dislike it and consider it immersion breaking. Others may feel differently.

Yet you see no problem telling others their objectively wrong for disagreeing with you.

I said twice now that the precise granularity of hit points is perhaps a bit much but a PC will know the general neighborhood. Having 60 out of 100 would be known versus 80 out of 100. It is just not worth hiding the extra info and there really isn't a way to act on it anyway.

And that HP granularity you argue exists is also exactly why DoaM isn't dissociative.

This is my final reply to you. I'm ridding myself of the toxic useless posters in my life. Not those that the one's who disagree but want to have a conversation between reasonable people.

Ah yes, the classic tactic of ignoring everyone who disagrees with you so you can claim no one disagrees with you. I at least appreciate that you didn't flood my PM box with angry rants before putting me on ignore this time.

 

[Umbran]

English you are a jerk and really don't want to discuss anything civilly.

You want to just snark and snipe.

Making it personal. Insulting others.

Trust me, you making contradictory arguments kills your point far better than I can. I snark because you pretty much shred your own arguments to pieces and leave nothing left for me.

Publicly admitting to snarking. Also makes it personal a bit later in the post.


It looks to me like a couple of people are outright asking for a vacation from the site. I'm happy to oblige them. Maybe, from this point, they won't think we are kidding when we say that we expect posters to treat each other with a modicum of respect.

Make this your mantra:

DON'T MAKE IT PERSONAL. ADDRESS THE LOGIC OF THE POST, NOT THE PERSON OF THE POSTER. IF YOU FIND YOU CANNOT KEEP IT CIVIL, THEN DON'T POST.

 

[pemerton]

The word dissociation refers to the disconnect between the character and the mechanic.

That can't be right. Every mechanic is disconnected from the character, in so far as it is a process that the player in the real world activates and engages with.

I think what you mean is that the mechanic does not model or otherwise correspond to some decision the character is taking or process that the character is initiating in the gameworld.

Which is to say, the mechanic is a metagame mechanic.

In D&D, which has always had abstracted combat mechanics and has, over time, only reduced the extent to which action in combat is continuous, that includes a good chunk of the combat mechanics. I posted this recently on another of these threads:

Combat in D&Dnext (as in 3E and 4e) is broken up into 6-second chunks. Those chunks don't, in themselves, correspond to any event or process in the gameworld. Some physical processes in the gameworld - say, the swing of certain pendulums - have periods of 6 seconds, but combat is not one of those processes. The 6 second round is simply a metagame device for regulating the action economy.

As part of that action economy, the combat output of the typical character is determined by making 1 attack roll per 6 second round. That roll does not, in itself, correspond to any event or process in the gameworld. The combatants in the gameworld are (presumably) fighting much as real people do in the real world (or, perhaps, like fantasy people do in fantasy movies). They are not tocking at one another in a stop-motion fashion.

For the typical character, a successful to hit roll (" a hit") means that, in that 6 seconds of combat, the foe was worn down. In the fiction that could correspond to one mighty blow, multiple lesser blows, a flurry of skilled swordplay that left the foe somewhat exhausted, off-balance etc. The extent to which you want to treat this as some form of meat-ablation is up to you, although by default in D&Dnext, it's not meat until the foe has lost half their hp.

For the typical character, a failed to hit roll ("a miss") means that, in that 6 seconds of combat, the foe was not worn down. In the fiction that could correspond to blows successfully parried, or deflected off armour or a shield, or dodged, etc. Admittedly my grasp of the details of melee combat is limited, but it seems to me only in certain corner cases (eg a normal person dodges a giant's club or a dragon's bite) is the game mechanical "miss" likely to correspond in a literal sense to a series of swings which never connect in any physical way with a foe or his/her equipment. (Extra oddities arise in that, in the mechanics, it is possible to dodge a giant's club without yielding any ground, whereas at least in all the movie depictions of that sort of dodging I'm familiar with the dodging involves running about, to take advantage of the small target's manoeuvrability advantage over the giant, dragon etc.)

I think the contrast with a "continuous initiative", roll to attack then roll to dodge/parry system (say RQ, or BW) is pretty marked. For instance, an attack roll in D&D seems to cover, as a relevant part of the fiction, how well the enemy parried. But that is certainly not a part of the gameworld under the control of the PC whose player is rolling the d20!

 

[Ahnehnois]

That can't be right. Every mechanic is disconnected from the character, in so far as it is a process that the player in the real world activates and engages with.

I think what you mean is that the mechanic does not model or otherwise correspond to some decision the character is taking or process that the character is initiating in the gameworld.

Which is to say, the mechanic is a metagame mechanic.

In D&D, which has always had abstracted combat mechanics and has, over time, only reduced the extent to which action in combat is continuous, that includes a good chunk of the combat mechanics.

I think the distinction between "metagame" and "dissociative" (if there is one) is that the subset of dissociative mechanics are things that are presented as being in-character choices, but which turn out not to be.

For example, it is clear that the combat round is something that does not directly correspond to the in-game world. However, a player does not decide whether the combat round structure is engaged or adjudicate the passage of time. Likewise, it's true that parrying is not something a character can choose to do, but is abstracted into the attack roll, but this just seems to assume that everyone is trying equally hard to parry and is equally good at it and does so reactively rather than by any particular choice. A very abstract simplifying assumption, but one that applies equally to everyone.

Conversely, if we're talking about DoaM (or any of the other really jarring abilities), they do represent distinct in-character choices. The GWF ability ostensibly corresponds to some technique or set of techniques that the character learned, techniques which are observable to others and are a fairly standard part of combat in this world. Which means that the character presumably at some point decided that he did not want to miss any more, and chose to learn whatever set of tricks he knew would enable him to avoid this outcome. That's hard to swallow. It is so specifically because of the conceit that it is presented as a character ability as part of a class, which are not metagame structures.

Essentially something dissociative is "breaking the fourth wall" for rpgs.

 

[pemerton]

I think the distinction between "metagame" and "dissociative" (if there is one) is that the subset of dissociative mechanics are things that are presented as being in-character choices, but which turn out not to be.

For example, it is clear that the combat round is something that does not directly correspond to the in-game world. However, a player does not decide whether the combat round structure is engaged or adjudicate the passage of time.

Because you shift from "character" to "player" I don't quite follow this. But rolling initiative looks like it is "dissociative" on this account - in 3E and 4e, at least, it is not distinguished in mechanics or rhetorical accompaniment from making an attack roll.

Conversely, if we're talking about DoaM (or any of the other really jarring abilities), they do represent distinct in-character choices. The GWF ability ostensibly corresponds to some technique or set of techniques that the character learned, techniques which are observable to others and are a fairly standard part of combat in this world. Which means that the character presumably at some point decided that he did not want to miss any more, and chose to learn whatever set of tricks he knew would enable him to avoid this outcome.

No. The character trained until s/he became implacable. And that implacability is observable in the gameworld.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Because you shift from "character" to "player" I don't quite follow this. But rolling initiative looks like it is "dissociative" on this account - in 3E and 4e, at least, it is not distinguished in mechanics or rhetorical accompaniment from making an attack roll.

I don't see how. A character with a high initiative value might be aware that he reacts quickly to danger, but I do not think that the character is aware of when a combat round starts or ends or what his place is in that round. As you say, it's a completely metagame structure; it's not a rule that crosses the boundary between the character's experience and the player's engagement of game mechanics.

No. The character trained until s/he became implacable. And that implacability is observable in the gameworld.

Assuming that the character's previous misses were due to him "placating", sure. Otherwise, that's not really the point.

The point is that what we're being asked to believe is that the character himself was aware that he regularly missed in combat, decided to train to avoid that outcome, and is now aware that he never misses. Even in the surreal world of D&D, that's tough to swallow.

 

[pemerton]

A character with a high initiative value might be aware that he reacts quickly to danger, but I do not think that the character is aware of when a combat round starts or ends or what his place is in that round. As you say, it's a completely metagame structure; it's not a rule that crosses the boundary between the character's experience and the player's engagement of game mechanics.

I agree that it's a metagame structure. But, under your notion of "dissociation" a few posts upthread, I don't really see how decisions to ready an action, delay etc - which are mostly artefacts of the turn structure and action economy - don't count as dissociated.

The point is that what we're being asked to believe is that the character himself was aware that he regularly missed in combat, decided to train to avoid that outcome, and is now aware that he never misses. Even in the surreal world of D&D, that's tough to swallow.

I think you are using a notion of "miss" here that I am not. As has been pointed out on one of the threads by [MENTION=6680772]Iosue[/MENTION], "miss" means "the player misses the target number", not "the well-trained combatant fails to have his/her weapon fail to make physical contact with the enemy". What the character was aware of was that his/her fighting didn't drive down the foe as much as s/he hoped - so s/he trained to be tougher!

 

[Ahnehnois]

I agree that it's a metagame structure. But, under your notion of "dissociation" a few posts upthread, I don't really see how decisions to ready an action, delay etc - which are mostly artefacts of the turn structure and action economy - don't count as dissociated.

Maybe. Then again, I think those actions exist somewhat independently of the metagame aspects; the six-second round and the initiative count. The conditions for a ready or a delay are describable by the character in terms of waiting for a particular in-game event to happen and then acting.

so s/he trained to be tougher!

...but only under when he misses, whatever missing means. He isn't any tougher when he's not missing.

Hitting or missing is not, regardless of GWF or the like, a choice by the character, though it is an outcome he can observe. DoaM indicates that either the character prepared for the chance that he might miss and developed some special technique he is using when that happens. Which begs the question of why he is not doing that same thing when he hits; it seems self-defeating.