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I don't see why character creation is relevant. I don't see how character creation can be dissociated or associatd because there isn't even a character yet. Nor do I see why whether one decision about character creation or advancement whether associated or not necessarily affects whether later...

Not getting this or why you think it matters.

Don't be obtuse. Someone can clearly say I prefer games that don't have dissociated mechanics" without necessarily meaning "games that have dissociated mechanics are objectively bad games". Either we accept the distinction exists or posters need to stop telling people to express things in...

Dissociation and association are closely related to diegetic and non-diegetic, but there are some differences which make the additional terms somewhat useful. Some things are both mechanical and diegetic and associated. "My wizard knows how to cast the fireball spell". Some mechanics are not...

Ok whatever. I’ve interacted with you before so this outcome is not surprising.

If you place value on associated mechanics then obviously that's true. If you don't then obviously it's not.

No. The alternative to specific mechanic that's unable to work effectively as a mechanic is to not suck. In other words the easiest fix to the problems with the mechanic is to make it more flexible but also more dissociated. And that's a compromise with the obvious design priorities that the...

But it isn't. I can judge whether something is dissociated mechanics without any particular affective response to the game in question. A lot of people on this thread seem to have only ever seen the terms used in the context of D&D and the 3.5/4e edition war. I've seen it used to described a...

A lot of it is that people are still fighting the edition war. You can understand the edition war or you can fight the edition war but you can't do both. Look there's the uncharitable interpretation which you give above. There's also a more charitable interpretation in that people were being...

I've done it in this thread.

The test of whether you can separate a descriptive term from a value judgement is whether you can use descriptive term without making a value judgement. You can. I don’t know why people over complicate things.

It depends on the type of game but rpgs in general tend to toward a deconstructive element towards genre conventions in settings. Tolkien can get away with not caring if Rivendell has sewers, but if the PCs kill one of Elrond's sons and then hatch a plan to escape through the sewers then the GM...

An elf may defecate in the woods, but if you see him doing so the magic is lost and he disappears from the world forever.

Realistic in some ultimate sense? Probably not. Fitting with the sense people had at the time about how things should work? Probably. An awful lot of 3.0s design I think can best be understood that almost noone at the time was doing class based systems. From my memory they were widely seen...

Just coming back to this. I think it goes back to what I said earlier about modelling processes more than outcomes. In the 3.5 paradigm that martials use you would model someone being wise to a Fighter's tricks by giving them a Sense Motive roll the second time you tried to use a trick against...

Although D&D is really lacking a lot elementals. Where's the potassium elementals, sulpur elementals etc?

What if a new opponent enters the battlefield as a reinforcement in a later round? You get to use it on them then I take it? It doesn't really work. The fact that you can come up with some sort of rationalisation or explanation that works most of the time doesn't change the fact that the...

Can't really see why it would. If I was going to draw anything out of it, it would be that the same observable phenomena can have multiple valid interpretations until we really get down into the nitty gritty. Just like Newtonian physics can be in a sense wrong, but also in a practical sense right.

You seem to be responding to an argument but I have no idea what the argument it that I'm supposed to have made.