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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 6287721" data-attributes="member: 6775031">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. Now you're just embarrassing yourself. A very simple model can easily relate to a very complex model. Maybe you're unfamiliar with the concept of "relation"?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.I won't presume that you're entirely unfamiliar with the history of war games. Maybe you just forgot? But war games - with a map, and miniatures, and funky dice and all that - have been used to model actual military engagements. Real military tacticians have turned to such models when trying to decide which strategy to use in a given situation. There is enough correlation between a heavily abstracted dice model and reality that you can use the former to predict the latter.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.</blockquote>

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