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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6271978" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm still confused: is feeling important to the notion of dissocatied mechanics, or isn't it?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.)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 <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?308488-In-Defense-of-the-Theory-of-Dissociated-Mechanics/page24&p=5626076&viewfull=1#post5626076" target="_blank">this</a> <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?308488-In-Defense-of-the-Theory-of-Dissociated-Mechanics/page25&p=5626398&viewfull=1#post5626398" target="_blank">thread</a>, 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.</blockquote>

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