D&D's magic is based on the Dying Earth by Jack Vance. How you claim that Vancian magic is "not a very good reason to justify metagame resources for spells because it's easy" is beyond me. Sure, it may have the happy effect of balancing metagame resources, but the reason Vancian spellcasting is in the game is because the designers wanted to emulate the kind of magic that appears in Dying Earth.
This is not so. D&D magic started out, like the rest of D&D, as a hacked tabletop wargame. And wizards getting to cast each spell once per battle was just the way the wargame worked - neither more nor less. It got called Vancian because Jack Vance's magic looks a little like it on a bad day if you squint a bit - but in practice Vance's actual magic (in which the greatest archmages
might know half a dozen spells and negotiated with genies to do the rest of the work) is much better represented by 4e daily powers than older editions of D&D where you got a lot more spells when you could call yourself an archmage.
Okay, let me try to make it even simpler for you:
DM: The orc king has accepted your challenge, and he will allow the party to pass through his territory if you can beat him in a game of one-on-one basketball. That's an opposed check.
Player: Cool, I have a +15 bonus to Dexterity (Basketball) checks, because of my Dex 20, and my proficiency +5 with Expertise for another +5.
Character: I know that I am very good at the game of basketball, because I am naturally dexterous and have a lot of practice with basketball, including specialized training beyond what normal players would invest.
Player: I roll (d20 + 15) to see how well I apply my knowledge of basketball strategy, physical abilities, and ability to read the opponent over the course of the next half hour.
Character: I see that the orc king is very tall, so I will attempt to feint left and then slip around to the right, before performing the lay-up maneuver. I then see that my basket was successful, so I re-evaluate positions and situational variables to inform my next action.
DM: *rolls dice behind the screen* The orc king lumbers around and tries his best to block your shots, but you're just too fast for him, and you easily win with a final score of 26 to 14.
That's associative, because the player is not using any information that the character doesn't have - the character is perfectly aware of how good she is at basketball. To contrast, here's what a dissociative basketball encounter would look like:
Player: I spend three of my karma points, which I gained after rescuing someone from that burning house last week, to grant a +10 bonus on my next non-combat skill check.
It's dissociative because karma is not something that the character knows about, and cannot consciously choose to invoke. The decision of the player does not represent a decision of the character on any level, no matter how abstract.
As I have noticed ever since
The Alexandrian wrote about disassociative mechanics, disassociative mechanics are a mix of strawmen and people not understanding what is going on in the system - or not wanting certain factors to be modelled.
If we look at the "associated" version of the rules you present, they are
incredibly boring. It's a simple roll-off for what was planned to be something climactic but instead comes down to the roll of 1d20. To me that's no fun - if we are going to have an epic basketball showdown
I want an epic basketball showdown. Not spamming a basketball skill and having a simple roll-off.
On the other hand the disassociated system, assuming that you get that system design has come on since Marvel FASERIP was written thirty years ago, is starting to get more interesting. You're not just taking ball handling skill into account. You've also got a morale factor - even in your example where the morale came from the fact that the person had rescued people earlier that week meaning that they were on a high and their self image was high enough that they would not give up to fatigue and defeat. But had the match been a friendly one without stakes they would have not spent the karma. They'd have taken the loss.
Even in your strawman disassociated system the decision made by the player ("Do I push myself hard enough that I might injure myself and will certainly give up a non-renewable resource that might save my life in a literal life or death struggle?") is much, much more interesting than the decision made by the player in the associated system ("What's my basketball skill?") And the question about how big a risk to take by going flat out at risk of hurting yourself (i.e. not having the Karma to spend when you need it) is one that is being made strictly in character.
And as I have shown the actual decision being made when the rubber meets the road ("Do I push myself flat out here at risk of minor injury and exhausting myself rather than play as if it was a friendly game?") is much closer to one that is being asked at the time than the one in the supposedly associated system (what can my player roll). What is not being checked at the time is where that Karma came from so it is irrelevant.
If you ask a basketball player how good she is, honestly, on a scale from +1 to +20, then she can give you an answer. Granted, it's probably pretty biased, and she'll probably try to go into more detail than that (I'm +14 at passing, but only +9 on three-pointers), but she can do it. She has access to what that information represents. If you ask who is better between two players, without going into more details, people can agree on that; there are objective metrics, about how much each person is likely to contribute toward victory, and you can calculate the likelihood of winning based on those objective factors.
And if that worked then the team with the biggest bank balance would always win the league. But assuming there is
rough parity (I'm not beating Michael Jordan in a basketball game unless he's asleep or dead) then factors like teamwork and how well the team meshes as a unit, morale, rest, whether this is where the players go flat out because this is the big one or whether they are saving themselves for a bigger match later in the week, and other things
all have a pretty big contributory factor. And even using your example the karma example took account of morale and whether the characters were pacing themselves or going flat out - and the supposedly associated one did not.
It's fine. You can disagree with the theory, but that won't change its existence or applications any more than if you disagree with any other theory. The important thing is that the designers understand it, because they're the ones who decide how to apply the theory, or whether to ignore it because they don't care about modeling an objective reality.
The question is whether the designers care about modelling things beyond an objective reality and actually want to get into the
psychological reality of the individual concerned - something that is inherently subjective. If the individual's motivation and morale do not matter then modelling objective reality is sufficient for the purpose and you can rely exclusively on associated mechanics. If you care about motivation, morale, and how much people are willing to risk then strictly objective factors have ceased to be the determining ones and you need some subjective factors that are left up to the individual player to associate because different characters are associated differently.
Your appeal to wargames is, in fact, an appeal to wargames
without morale rules. (Normally morale on a wide scale is handled statistically - but the narrower your zoom gets the worse an approximation this becomes).
