Confirm or Deny: D&D4e would be going strong had it not been titled D&D

[Tequila Sunrise]

Which I think is actually at the heart of a lot of the dissatisfaction which occurred...

Oh, no doubt daily exploits are part of 4e's overestimation of the diehard fanbase's tolerance for new questions that are no more difficult to explain than traditional questions!

Turning all Fighters into mystic warriors loses a lot of potential tropes (cf. Conan). There's nothing inherently wrong with such stories and for certain settings (Wuxia, Fantasy Anime, Power Ball Z, etc.) it works just fine. But if you want to play a more traditional sword and sorcery where your fighter is just a guy really good at shoving half a yard of steel into things, then you might have a harder time making the mental adjustment.

Out of curiosity, have you ever met a player who wanted to play the 'I'm just a regular (really skilled) dude with a sword' trope? If so, how did those players deal with D&D's combat system?

And how do you deal with martial encounter exploits, btw?

 

[Bedrockgames]

Hostility? Hmmm, well, how about the fact that you're trying to tell me that the system I like is somehow inferior even though the systems you like have exactly the same issues. Telling me you don't like 4e? Fantastic. No problems. Telling me that 4e is bad because of criteria which applies equally to the stuff you like? Yeah, you're going to get a bit of hostility.

Okay lets clarify one thing, I am not saying 4E is inferior, or that it is bad. I am saying I don't personally like it, it isn't my cup of tea, and I think part of it is because I find many of the mechanics on the dissociative side (though that is far from the only reason). That is all I am saying. I am not at all trying to suggest because I find a lot of its mechanics dissociative that it isn't well designed or isn't perfectly fine game. From a design standpoint, I think it is solid. It seems to meet the goals the designers had in mind, and I think for me it would even work for the right campaign setting (which is why I mentioned that I borrowed some elements when I ran my d20 Wuxia campaign).

 

[Bedrockgames]

Like Tony Vargas, I don't. But, the point remains that all the criteria for dissociative mechanics equally applies to Power Attack.

Okay. I get that. We simply disagree on this point about power attack. I saw the same list that you did when tony (if it was another poster i apologize) explained why he thought power attack was dissociative. I wasn't convinced by that list and the things it mentioned have never come up for me or been a problem during play. So I just can't agree that I see the mechanic as being all that dissociative. Certainly I imagine some people might find it so (because what you find dissociative often comes down to how you describe and resolve actions, and there is a lot of variety in the hobby). But I just don't think the bulk of players would find it to be so.

But like I said before, I am not particularly concerned about debating each mechanic point by point or proving that one edition or another is objectively more dissociative. That isn't why I find the concept useful these days. Now I find it helps me design, as one standard among many, for weeding out potential issues in mechanics.

 

[Wicht]

Out of curiosity, have you ever met a player who wanted to play the 'I'm just a regular (really skilled) dude with a sword' trope?

urm, yes...

If so, how did those players deal with D&D's combat system?

urm, they rolled dice, and they stabbed a lot of things with their fictional swords...

And how do you deal with martial encounter exploits, btw?

Such as?

 

[Bedrockgames]

It's inconsistent because you claim not to like something for a reason, while at the same time, have no problems with other elements which exhibit exactly the same reasons. I have zero problem with you not liking 4e. I do have a problem with the idea that you don't like 4e because the system is somehow flawed with identical flaws that appear in systems that you apparently do like.
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First, I never said dissociative mechanics was the reason why I don't like 4E, I said I think dissociative mechanics are part of the reason why I don't like 4E.

But I don't think what you say holds here. There is a necessary subjective element to assessing mechanics for the dissociative. We are not all going to see the same thing in a mechanic because our play styles are different. A mechanic that might prove very dissociative for me because of how I play, might not for you because the way you play it just doesn't present any issues. I think if I shared your conclusions about power attack, that it is dissociative, then yes it would be inconsistent for me to say I didn't like dissociative stuff in 4E, but it was fine with power attack. But I don't find power attack at all dissociative so there is simply no inconsistency there. And I have no desire to rehash the debate of whether 4E itself is dissociative. But understand one can accept a certain amount of it in a game (or have grown accustomed to it in prior editions) and not want more of it.

 

[Bedrockgames]

If it's not arbitrary, then there's some way to define or test for it that would apply only to some mechanics, but not to others, even if it did depend on qualitative differences.
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The measure is very simply how disconnected people in general find the mechanic is from their character's actions in the setting. That is going to vary from one person to the next, but you are looking for a general pattern. I think what you do, and how I use it, is you first ask whether you find it dissociative, then see if your game group does, then try to gauge whether the e majority of players are going to react the same way. Personally I am not concerned about every minor edge case, I am concerned mainly with glaring cases (even if they are rare). My concern is actual play. If I put out a game and people write in to tell me they found this mechanic dissociative (even if they are not using the word dissociative but clearly talking about that lack of connection between mechanic and character action) that is something I like to fix. The more effort I've put into nipping the dissociative in the bud, the less this is an issue.

That said, I am not 100% opposed to all dissociative elements. Sometimes they might be a necessity, because the simplicity a mechanic offers or just how cool it is, outweighs my concern for it being somewhat dissociative (or maybe for the game concept I am working with, it just isn't a big deal)

But again, like I said before, if this doesn't improve the game for you, if the concept simply isn't useful, by all means you should ignore it. I ignore all kinds of design and RPG concepts that simply fail to resonate with me (yet I can see they are valuable for some folks).

 

[Bedrockgames]

k (really, a very intuitive mechanic, but because attack rolls are so abstract in D&D, vulnerable to the arbitrary nonsense that is 'dissociative mechanics').

Here I think there is a simple reason why lots of people don't have an issue with power attack. Personally I found there was a more 1-1 connection between your attack roll and your attack in 3E than in previous editions. In 2E or 1E with 1 minute rounds, sure power attack might have been less connected to the action (though whether it would clearly break from it would still boil down to how you manage that abstraction in game). But 3E went to what a 6 second round? Plus fighters now have a huge number of multiple attacks. I definitely started seeing each attack roll as a discrete action and I think a lot of other people did as well. I think 3E was using a much less abstracted combat round and attack roll that 1E or 2E.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Traditionally, in Dungeons and Dragons, powers with a per day use are in some way mystical, magical or supernatural.

Like the 3.x Barbarian's, Rage, for instance, which was Extraordinary, not Supernatural.

I'll agree that what you describe was a common perception, but it's never been a hard and fast rule, and 4e wasn't the first time it that perception was challenged.

When 4e gave such powers to all classes, including fighters, it felt to many people like fighters were being made into a class of mystical warriors.

As an initial reaction, that's understandable.
Seven years later, it's not.

So, going back to the original topic of the thread... this discord between traditional dungeons and dragons mechanical tropes and the fiction of the 4th edition caused a discord in the ability of some individuals to be able immerse themselves in the game as Dungeons and Dragons.... the name brought with it certain expectations, but from the outset, the rules fought against those expectations in some people. And the daily powers for fighters are a part of that discord between expectations and delivery.

What's so shameful that you need to hide it under all that obfuscation? I mean, that boils down to "4e was better... better is different... hate different." Except for specifically calling out fighter dailies (the only difference you actually mention, specifically), which suggests it's all just about wanting fighters to be inferior.

Which is an understandable expectation. In classic D&D, casters had vastly more options than non-casters, and fighters were handy mobile walls or magic-item platforms or, with specialization, effective beatsticks - it mostly depended on what variants the DM used and what items he gave out. In 3.x, the prepped casters were solidly Tier 1, and the fighter, while an elegant class design with come nice customizeability, was Tier 4 or 5. Anything other than 'casters rule, fighter drool' must have defied expectations. I know I was pleasantly surprised.

 

[Erechel]

Just because Newton published Philosophiæ naturalis principia mathematica in 1687 does't mean that gravity wasn't around from the Big Bang. You could name a "rationalization", and "not a reason", but that, in fact does not stop gravity to function. You can call it whatever you want, even "demon's pull", but that does not mean that you will fly if you jump over a building.

And yes, dissociative mechanics were there always (as I said prior, e.g. character levels), but abstraction is another thing, the exact opposite, in fact. Whereas an abstraction is a mechanical effort to "regulate" some in-world phenomena, a dissociative mechanic is the pull to introduce a mechanical rule into a game, with little if any in-world explanation or later "fluff". When I first read Dragons of a Summer Flame, I truly cannot buy that in-world they use "levels" for the Knights of Takhisis promotions to ranks: it was truly cheesy. "Once a knight reaches fifth level he must endure the Tests of Takhisis". How they even know that they have levels? That concept never was a concern in earlier books, nor it has an in-world explanation.

Yet, you have to remember that this book was released in the dawn of D&D 3rd Edition. They were actively promoting new D&D books and Dragonlance was one of the most succesful franchises, so they forced this component as a sad excuse to promote the game. Before, there was the more blurry, abstract concept of experience, a concept that we can relate to. What level of High School Teacher am I? I don't know. But I have five years worth of experience teaching Literature to teenagers from diverse social classes.

This is an example of how dissociative mechanics work, not originary of your beloved 4th edition. And, as many said earlier, context means a world here. I did not buy that dissociation then, but I nevertheless tried 3rd edition several years later. I tolerate it.

And the fact that there is dissociative mechanics in 4th edition does not mean that all of the mechanics are dissociative. But I do think that there are so much of this, and metagame influences a lot of the players choices, whitout any in-world explanation. And one thing is perception and another thing is phenomena. But actually, I think that in the context of 5th edition, several of the mechanics, implemented in a different way and context, weren't as dissociative, because they were used to reflect some in world phenomena. Vancian combat maneuvers, for example, are now just maneuvers that can be "vancianly pumped up" with some effort by the Battlemaster, as Disarm (see the DMG, if you don't believe me).

You still can disarm a foe, only that not as acuratelly as prior. It is dissociative? Yes, a little bit, but the overwhelming roleplaying focus of the edition worth a little more tolerance, and you easily can relate with a "combat maneuver" passed through generations, although I personally "fix" some of the rules (as the replacing of a meneuver, or other very dissociative mechanics). And the fact that this archetype allows me to play a concept of fighter (my old intelligent crossbowman) that I already tried in previous editions without success has much to do with this. As I said, context means a world here. Dissociative mechanics are one of the many things that we can say that it is present in any edition of D&D, but for many reasons I already detailed earlier, in 4th edition did not work well (at least for me, the tolerance of the mechanics is the subjective value, not their presence).

 

[Erechel]

What's so shameful that you need to hide it under all that obfuscation? I mean, that boils down to "4e was better... better is different... hate different." Except for specifically calling out fighter dailies (the only difference you actually mention, specifically), which suggests it's all just about wanting fighters to be inferior.

And that is why reactions are so "vitriolic". So, other opinions are subjective, but yours aren't? Anyone that does not like 4th edition is a moron with no value at all? Because it's different. We are dinosaurs. We can't appreciate difference.

Wow. I don't really think that discussing with you worths more than this, because you are simply trying to state that you are superior.