Menu
News
All News
Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
Pathfinder
Starfinder
Warhammer
2d20 System
Year Zero Engine
Industry News
Reviews
Dragon Reflections
Columns
Weekly Digests
Weekly News Digest
Freebies, Sales & Bundles
RPG Print News
RPG Crowdfunding News
Game Content
ENterplanetary DimENsions
Mythological Figures
Opinion
Worlds of Design
Peregrine's Next
RPG Evolution
Other Columns
From the Freelancing Frontline
Monster ENcyclopedia
WotC/TSR Alumni Look Back
4 Hours w/RSD (Ryan Dancey)
The Road to 3E (Jonathan Tweet)
Greenwood's Realms (Ed Greenwood)
Drawmij's TSR (Jim Ward)
Community
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Resources
Wiki
Pages
Latest activity
Media
New media
New comments
Search media
Downloads
Latest reviews
Search resources
EN Publishing
Store
EN5ider
Adventures in ZEITGEIST
Awfully Cheerful Engine
What's OLD is NEW
Judge Dredd & The Worlds Of 2000AD
War of the Burning Sky
Level Up: Advanced 5E
Events & Releases
Upcoming Events
Private Events
Featured Events
Socials!
Twitch
YouTube
Facebook (EN Publishing)
Facebook (EN World)
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Podcast
Features
Top 5 RPGs Compiled Charts 2004-Present
Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary (RPGs) V1.0
Ryan Dancey: Acquiring TSR
Q&A With Gary Gygax
D&D Rules FAQs
TSR, WotC, & Paizo: A Comparative History
D&D Pronunciation Guide
Million Dollar TTRPG Kickstarters
Tabletop RPG Podcast Hall of Fame
Eric Noah's Unofficial D&D 3rd Edition News
D&D in the Mainstream
D&D & RPG History
About Morrus
Log in
Register
What's new
Search
Search
Search titles only
By:
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Menu
Log in
Register
Install the app
Install
The
VOIDRUNNER'S CODEX
is coming! Explore new worlds, fight oppressive empires, fend off fearsome aliens, and wield deadly psionics with this comprehensive boxed set expansion for 5E and A5E!
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
4e design in 5.5e ?
JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an
alternative browser
.
Reply to thread
Message
<blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8411811" data-attributes="member: 6790260"><p>Alright. I'm not sure if this essay is new <em>to me</em> 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.</p><p></p><p>To begin, we have a flawed premise, that you can <em>cleanly</em> separate "things my character knows and is aware of" from "things my character <em>could not</em> know and <em>is not</em> 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 <em>directly</em> 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.</p><p></p><p>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 <em>limited precognition</em>. AoE markers are the Echo forewarning you about your enemies' attacks, so that <em>to them</em>, you're nigh-invincible, dodging everything. This is even story-critical during the Stormblood expansion, where you must fight <em>enemies</em> who have an artificial version, and need a workaround (one that, notably, <em>isn't explained to you</em>, because if <em>you</em> knew how it worked, your enemies could dodge it). The Echo also explains TPKs/"wipes": they <em>don't happen</em>, they're Echo visions of what would happen to cause failure--meaning you can "learn" from mistakes in timelines that never happened.</p><p></p><p>That's the main, fundamental, fatal flaw with "dissociated" mechanics. <em>Literally any</em> mechanic can be <em>made</em> 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.</p><p></p><p>Second section, Metagamed and Abstracted, he basically admits that this is not actually a <em>category</em> problem at all, but rather a disagreement over how much explanation is required:</p><p></p><p></p><p>In other words, <em>absolutely all</em> 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 <em>mechanically</em> 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 <em>invent</em> explanations of the form "characters can tell you what X is and that casters of greater skill create more intense flames"--those are <em>setting elements</em>, not <em>rules elements</em>.)</p><p></p><p>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:</p><p></p><p></p><p>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 <em>that</em> 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 <em>zero interest</em> 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 <em>every</em> Wizard should be intimately familiar with.</p><p></p><p>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, <em>when 4e comes along</em>, THEN it becomes a problem. That's blatant special pleading.</p><p></p><p>The next section, on re-associating mechanics, again conflates <em>setting interpretations</em> with <em>rules elements</em>. Association <em>isn't a rule element</em>; it isn't even a <em>setting</em> element. It is a player <em>interpretation</em> 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 <em>post hoc</em> 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 <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/how-is-5e-like-4e.681629/#post-8354225" target="_blank">almost everything 4e</a> did*), it does engage in some--yet, again, the Alexandrian does not take 5e to task for doing that.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>The penultimate section, which I won't even dignify with quoting, is Mr. Alexander stating his usual gatekeeping screed: some games <em>just are</em> roleplaying games, and thus fit thus-and-such standard, and all the other games <em>just aren't</em> roleplaying games, no matter how much evidence one might show to the contrary. As was mentioned by others above, this is not a <em>conclusion</em> that Mr. Alexander came to after careful analysis of a variety of pieces of evidence. It is a prior <em>belief</em> 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.</p><p></p><p>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 <em>objective analysis of game design</em>, and (c) presenting his pet theory of what "roleplaying game" means as though it is the one, only, <em>and objective</em> meaning of the term.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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).</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="EzekielRaiden, post: 8411811, member: 6790260"] Alright. I'm not sure if this essay is new [I]to me[/I] 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 [I]cleanly[/I] separate "things my character knows and is aware of" from "things my character [I]could not[/I] know and [I]is not[/I] 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 [I]directly[/I] 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 [I]limited precognition[/I]. AoE markers are the Echo forewarning you about your enemies' attacks, so that [I]to them[/I], you're nigh-invincible, dodging everything. This is even story-critical during the Stormblood expansion, where you must fight [I]enemies[/I] who have an artificial version, and need a workaround (one that, notably, [I]isn't explained to you[/I], because if [I]you[/I] knew how it worked, your enemies could dodge it). The Echo also explains TPKs/"wipes": they [I]don't happen[/I], 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. [I]Literally any[/I] mechanic can be [I]made[/I] 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 [I]category[/I] problem at all, but rather a disagreement over how much explanation is required: In other words, [I]absolutely all[/I] 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 [I]mechanically[/I] 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 [I]invent[/I] explanations of the form "characters can tell you what X is and that casters of greater skill create more intense flames"--those are [I]setting elements[/I], not [I]rules elements[/I].) 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: 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 [I]that[/I] 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 [I]zero interest[/I] 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 [I]every[/I] 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, [I]when 4e comes along[/I], THEN it becomes a problem. That's blatant special pleading. The next section, on re-associating mechanics, again conflates [I]setting interpretations[/I] with [I]rules elements[/I]. Association [I]isn't a rule element[/I]; it isn't even a [I]setting[/I] element. It is a player [I]interpretation[/I] 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 [I]post hoc[/I] 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 [URL='https://www.enworld.org/threads/how-is-5e-like-4e.681629/#post-8354225']almost everything 4e[/URL] 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 [I]just are[/I] roleplaying games, and thus fit thus-and-such standard, and all the other games [I]just aren't[/I] roleplaying games, no matter how much evidence one might show to the contrary. As was mentioned by others above, this is not a [I]conclusion[/I] that Mr. Alexander came to after careful analysis of a variety of pieces of evidence. It is a prior [I]belief[/I] 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 [I]objective analysis of game design[/I], and (c) presenting his pet theory of what "roleplaying game" means as though it is the one, only, [I]and objective[/I] 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). [/QUOTE]
Insert quotes…
Verification
Post reply
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
4e design in 5.5e ?
Top