@EzekielRaiden suggested I post this in its own thread, so blame them if this goes off the rails!
As 5.5 is announced, it is also clear that 4e is having a moment, due in no small part by Matt Colville's recent advocacy and
streaming. I never played 4e, but it seems there are a lot of fans of the edition here, and I'm curious as to your take on 4e design, and what 4e have or should be brought over into 5.5. This discussion started by me asking what people thought of Justin Alexander's many criticisms of the system, some of which are here:
Four years ago, in an effort to understand why I found so many of the design decisions in the 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons antithetical to what I wanted from a roleplaying game, I wrote an es
thealexandrian.net
So, very much not trying to start an edition war here! So let's be nice to everyone! Rather, looking to gather thoughts on how mechanics from 4e played out at the table (e.g. did they feel "disassociated"), and what should be brought forward into 5.5.
Alright. I'm not sure if this essay is new
to me or not (it is, after all, nine years old), but I will approach it as though it were a new one and give my commentary. As I mentioned in that prior thread, I am pretty against both the theory itself and the Alexandrian's presentation thereof. I say this only to make it clear that I am a major skeptic.
To begin, we have a flawed premise, that you can
cleanly separate "things my character knows and is aware of" from "things my character
could not know and
is not aware of." My counter-example for this is FFXIV (yes, a video game!) FFXIV puts great emphasis on what TVTropes calls "gameplay and story integration": almost all mechanics are
directly related to the story, even for many things that wouldn't be in other games. Two main examples (among many, MANY others) are "area of effect" markers from enemy attacks, and groups "wiping" (TPK) on content. An in-game power called the Echo explains both narratively--and is critical to some plot points.
The Echo has many mysterious powers, and the PC (and many adventurers) possess it. Some powers are fluffy, like "you understand all languages" or "you see flashbacks about other people," but there's also
limited precognition. AoE markers are the Echo forewarning you about your enemies' attacks, so that
to them, you're nigh-invincible, dodging everything. This is even story-critical during the Stormblood expansion, where you must fight
enemies who have an artificial version, and need a workaround (one that, notably,
isn't explained to you, because if
you knew how it worked, your enemies could dodge it). The Echo also explains TPKs/"wipes": they
don't happen, they're Echo visions of what would happen to cause failure--meaning you can "learn" from mistakes in timelines that never happened.
That's the main, fundamental, fatal flaw with "dissociated" mechanics.
Literally any mechanic can be
made associated. It's not an inherent property; it arises from personal interpretation. IOW, it depends on what things each player desires an explanation for, and what things they feel have such an explanation. But there are also other issues I'll address later.
Second section, Metagamed and Abstracted, he basically admits that this is not actually a
category problem at all, but rather a disagreement over how much explanation is required:
But this generalization can be misleading when taken too literally. All mechanics are both metagamed and abstracted: They exist outside of the character’s world and they are only rough approximations of that world. For example, the destructive power of a fireball is defined by the number of d6’s you roll for damage; and the number of d6’s you roll is determined by the caster level of the wizard casting the spell. If you asked a character about d6’s of damage or caster levels, they’d obviously have no idea what you were talking about. But the character could tell you what a fireball is and that casters of greater skill can create more intense flames during the casting of the spell.
In other words,
absolutely all mechanics are necessarily abstracted. And, in many cases, the relationship between those abstractions and the final product is tenuous at best. All we have for numerous spells, for example, is that we know what
mechanically happens, and we thus construct from that mechanical knowledge a fiction that works. Ideally, the mechanics conform in all cases to what we would naturally expect--but sometimes they don't. When they don't, we work around it one way or the other, tweaking mechanics to match natural expectations or accepting a break from those naturalist expectations so the mechanics keep going. This is true of literally all games that model anything where naturalistic expectations may apply. (And, as before, you can always
invent explanations of the form "characters can tell you what X is and that casters of greater skill create more intense flames"--those are
setting elements, not
rules elements.)
The subsequent "Explaining It All Away" section is where we get into the hardcore cherry-picking, or rather, willful blindness of long-established mechanics in order to critique new mechanics:
On a similar note, there is a misconception that a mechanic isn’t dissociated as long as you can explain what happened in the game world as a result. The argument goes like this: “Although I’m using the One-Handed Catch ability, all the character knows is that they made a really great one-handed catch. The character isn’t confused by what happened, so it’s not dissociated.” What the argument misses is that the dissociation already happened in the first sentence. The explanation you provide after the fact doesn’t remove it.
To put it another way: The One-Handed Catch ability is a mechanical manipulation with no corresponding reality in the game world whatsoever. You might have a very good improv session that is vaguely based on the dissociated mechanics you’re using, but there has been a fundamental disconnect between the game and the world. You could just as easily be playing a game of Chess while improvising a vaguely related story about a royal coup starring your character named Rook.
As others have noted above: What's the in-advance explanation for an attack that misses? There isn't one, because AC is so many wildly diverse things that all you know, prior to rolling, is
that an attack is being made. What's the in-advance explanation of hit points having no specific negative impact until the last one? There isn't one, because HP are so many narratively-distinct things that it's impossible to do anything more than describe vague "wounds" or "that really hurt" etc. (I have
zero interest in opening the "are HP meat-points or abstraction-points," so if anyone wishes to debate me on that topic, that wish will not be granted.) What's the in-advance explanation for things like Wizards only gaining new spells in discrete chunks, and in particular, doing so exactly two at a time? There isn't one, even though that's something
every Wizard should be intimately familiar with.
There are dozens of mechanics riddled throughout D&D that are naturally "dissociated" unless given a clear in-character explanation. Few, if any, settings provide such explanations. The Alexandrian never had a problem with any of those things. However,
when 4e comes along, THEN it becomes a problem. That's blatant special pleading.
The next section, on re-associating mechanics, again conflates
setting interpretations with
rules elements. Association
isn't a rule element; it isn't even a
setting element. It is a player
interpretation of setting elements, on whether and how those setting elements correlate to the rules elements. Thus, it's incorrect to say that it is a "house rule" to provide
post hoc explanations, in setting terms, for so-called "dissociated" mechanics. Both his "this falls afoul of the Rule 0 fallacy" and his "this requires hundreds, perhaps thousands of house-rules" arguments thus completely fall apart. What he's actually opposing here is "reskinning": the idea that a single mechanic can have more than one narrative explanation, and that a single narrative explanation might come from two different sources. 4e radically embraced reskinning, and while 5e is substantially more restrained about it (as it is with
almost everything 4e did*), it does engage in some--yet, again, the Alexandrian does not take 5e to task for doing that.
The section on realism is basically him addressing a non-sequitur. My only comment on it is that "realism" does have one thing in common with dissociation: they're both personal interpretation masquerading as objective characteristics of rules. It's why I've exclusively switched to talking about rules being "grounded" rather than "realistic." "Realistic" innately connotes objectivity, while "grounded" innately connotes subjectivity, and "grounded" is allowed to have different meanings in different contexts, while "realistic" is expected to conform, more or less, to the physical world you and I live in.
The penultimate section, which I won't even dignify with quoting, is Mr. Alexander stating his usual gatekeeping screed: some games
just are roleplaying games, and thus fit thus-and-such standard, and all the other games
just aren't roleplaying games, no matter how much evidence one might show to the contrary. As was mentioned by others above, this is not a
conclusion that Mr. Alexander came to after careful analysis of a variety of pieces of evidence. It is a prior
belief that he has carefully selected evidence to support. And his whole line about "the act of using associated mechanics IS roleplaying" is absolute hogwash--and, when paired with his foregoing statements about "dissociated" mechanics, it is quite literally telling ardent roleplayers playing 4e "You are having badwrongfun, please start having goodrightfun." Like...anyone who expressly states that "telling a good story" "has nothing to do with roleplaying," I just...I don't know what to say to that person, I lack the words to express how incoherent that statement is.
His final statement is a hilariously-transparent "I'm not trying to hate on you, I'm just trying to hate on you!" band-aid over a bullet wound. Like, I honestly have no idea how he can end how he does when he talks about "Ultimately, this explains why so many people have had intensely negative reactions to dissociated mechanics: They’re antithetical to the defining characteristic of a roleplaying game and, thus, fundamentally incompatible with the primary reason many people play roleplaying games." That's (a) accusation of badwrongfun, (b) elevating "intensely negative reactions" from a subgroup of the community to
objective analysis of game design, and (c) presenting his pet theory of what "roleplaying game" means as though it is the one, only,
and objective meaning of the term.
I know this is long, but I'm responding to a rather long essay to begin with; brevity was never an option. I hope this has been helpful in communicating exactly why I have so many problems with this specific essay and The Alexandrian in general.
Also, I encourage you, if you are interested in learning more about 4e that doesn't come from parody videos, to both check out the link I included above--it is definitely my "best" post in terms of likes etc. from other posters--and to check out any of Matt Colville's YouTube videos where he talks about 4e. Also, if you're interested, I can offer explanations of why 4e spoke so much to me, and why I was so deeply disappointed that 5e abandoned so much of 4e (or, as noted above, did its absolute best to conceal any 4e mechanics it actually used).
