Confirm or Deny: D&D4e would be going strong had it not been titled D&D

[Wicht]

As an initial reaction, that's understandable.
Seven years later, it's not.

I played the way I played for a lot longer then 7 years, why should I have to change my tastes to suit other people, simply for the sake of change. For that matter, why should anyone's particular tastes and preferences be subject to any sort of time table? First reactions are often lasting impressions, and all your druthers will not make it different than what it is.

 

[Wicht]

What's so shameful that you need to hide it under all that obfuscation? I mean, that boils down to "4e was better... better is different... hate different." Except for specifically calling out fighter dailies (the only difference you actually mention, specifically), which suggests it's all just about wanting fighters to be inferior.

Which is an understandable expectation. In classic D&D, casters had vastly more options than non-casters, and fighters were handy mobile walls or magic-item platforms or, with specialization, effective beatsticks - it mostly depended on what variants the DM used and what items he gave out. In 3.x, the prepped casters were solidly Tier 1, and the fighter, while an elegant class design with come nice customizeability, was Tier 4 or 5. Anything other than 'casters rule, fighter drool' must have defied expectations. I know I was pleasantly surprised.

Alas, you have found me out. Oh, woe... how easily you have seen through my shallow pretenses. I am undone! The inate superiority of the 4e mechanics has created an inferiority complex within my fragile psyche and I am simply masking my fear that I have been wrong all this time in my seeming enjoyment of a pathetically wretched game system. How clever of you to spot the disdain for the fighter class I have been secretly hiding all these long years. I fear there is little more to say here now that all my inner secrets have been so skillfully discovered.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Just because Newton published Philosophiæ naturalis principia mathematica in 1687 does't mean that gravity wasn't around from the Big Bang. You could name a "rationalization", and "not a reason", but that, in fact does not stop gravity to function. You can call it whatever you want, even "demon's pull", but that does not mean that you will fly if you jump over a building.

Not a good analogy. Newton did offer an explanation of gravity, but an accurate description. 'Dissociative mechanics' are offered as an explanation.

And yes, dissociative mechanics were there always (as I said prior, e.g. character levels), but abstraction is another thing, the exact opposite, in fact. Whereas an abstraction is a mechanical effort to "regulate" some in-world phenomena, a dissociative mechanic is the pull to introduce a mechanical rule into a game, with little if any in-world explanation or later "fluff".

That's not a definition I've seen before, but let's consider it. Have there been mechanics in D&D that could be seen as intruding on the fluff? Why yes, yes there have: Levels, complete with level titles, classes, Vancian casting, price lists, armor class, hit points - it'd read like a list of mechanics in D&D, there aren't a lot that sedately glide beneath the threshold of perception. "Dissociative Mechanics" is a concept made up of whole cloth in 2008 by a blogger who had an ax to grind with WotC. The standards by which examples were judged in those two blog posts were so broad and so open to willful mis-interpretation that, using the same standards, almost any mechanic could be labeled 'dissocitiative.' That makes the concept, itself, meaningless. It doesn't mean mechanics that get the dissociative label aren't real, and it doesn't mean the label isn't a think people really apply, it's just that the application of the label is arbitrary, and thus meaningless.

And that is why reactions are so "vitriolic". So, other opinions are subjective, but yours aren't?

Of course my opinions are subjective. I don't go on about them much, though. I did, after demonstrating how Power Attack could be labeled 'dissociative' using the same criteria applied to fighter dailies, for instance, admit that I did not actually find Power Attack dissociative, myself, but it's not relevant to the point, which was that the definition of dissociative mechanics given when the concept was first articulated could be arbitrarily applied to any sufficiently abstract mechanic. And Power Attack - anything touching on attack rolls and hps, really - was sufficiently abstract.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I played the way I played for a lot longer then 7 years, why should I have to change my tastes to suit other people, simply for the sake of change. For that matter, why should anyone's particular tastes and preferences be subject to any sort of time table?

No one's tastes need be forced to change just because of the passage of time, nor is anyone required to justify their tastes. There's no accounting for 'em, afterall.

First reactions are often lasting impressions, and all your druthers will not make it different than what it is.

True, first impressions - even when, as in this case, they are demonstrably mistaken - can be lasting for that individual.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The measure is very simply how disconnected people in general find the mechanic is from their character's actions in the setting. That is going to vary from one person to the next, but you are looking for a general pattern.

No, I'm looking for an objective definition that can be applied dispassionately. Otherwise, 'dissociative mechanics' is strictly identical with mere, wholly subjective, dislike.

Which would be fine, if it weren't presented as a reason (rationalization) for dislike.

I think what you do, and how I use it, is you first ask whether you find it dissociative, then see if your game group does, then try to gauge whether the e majority of players are going to react the same way.

So you determine if a mechanic is dissociative based on a fallacious appeal to popularity, even as you have no means to gauge that popular opinion beyond looking at edition war threads and applying confirmation bias.

That is, also, a meaningless way of applying the label.

My concern is actual play. If I put out a game and people write in to tell me they found this mechanic dissociative (even if they are not using the word dissociative but clearly talking about that lack of connection between mechanic and character action) that is something I like to fix.

Lack of connection between mechanic and character action is mere abstraction. A TTRPG necessarily has a lot of abstraction.

I think you'd be better served looking at the kind of mechanics that receive the complaint, and finding commonalities. For instance, in the case of 4e, the 'dissociative mechanic' label was primarily applied to martial dailies, and exclusively to martial exploits, healing surges, and closely related mechanics. No power of any other Source ever attracted the label. That's a pretty clear correlation.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Vargas, we get it you don't like the dissociative term. Time to move on to something new. This is getting really old and really dull.

 

[pemerton]

You'd have to ask Justin Alexander, or read the parts of the essay where he explains why he is okay with it in Wushu but not so much in 4E.

I quoted the part where he explains why he is okay with it in Wushu but not in 4e. And you quoted that part of my quote in your post!

I'll repost it again:

In the case of 4th Edition, fidelity to the game world is being traded off in favor of a tactical miniatures game. . . .

n the case of Wushu these mechanics were designed to encourage dynamic, over-the-top action sequences: Since it’s just as easy to slide dramatically under a car and emerge on the other side with guns blazing as it is to duck behind cover and lay down suppressing fire, the mechanics make it possible for the players to do whatever the coolest thing they can possibly think of is (without worrying about whether or not the awesomeness they’re imagining will make it too difficult for their character to pull it off).​

My point is that there is no reason, other than mere personal preferences of style or genre, for thinking that sliding dramatically under a car and emerging on the other side with guns blazing is awesome narrative control, but having the goblins charge you and then be cut down by you en route is not.

On your characterisation of "dissociation" as a real thing that is indicated by a mechanic leaping out at someone (post 281 upthread): hit points have leapt out at me in every edition of 4e, where the mechanic actually makes sense (proportional healing, inspirational healing, etc) - that's part of why I ditched AD&D for RM, and why many others also ditched it for RM, RQ, HERO etc.

But if "dissociation" is player-relative, then it's hardly an objective property of mechanics, is it?

 

[pemerton]

The Player who insists on using Power Attack, even when it is clear that doing so is making them hit less often is at fault, not the feat itself

<snip>

don't play that way, calculating for maximum effectiveness.

How do you know that the feat is making you hit less often unless you do the maths?

Or, rather, given that the feat has to be declared before the dice are rolled, of course it is making you hit less often than you otherwise would. The trade off is increased damage. How do you know if the trade off is worthwhile without doing the maths?

If the answer is "rely on intuition" then I don't think that's a very good answer, because in my experience most people's intuitions involving probabilities and expected outcomes aren't that robust.

If the point of the feat is to boost damage, just give a damage boosting feat.

As to why I say it plays on the maths of the system, and is therefore metagamey, it simply trades on the fact that D&D separates the to hit roll from the damage roll. Which is not modelling anything in the fiction but is just an artefact of the mechanics.

I guess you never played baseball. Home run hitters also tend to have higher strikeout rates. Babe Ruth may have had a record in home runs for a long time, but he also had a record for strikeouts - that he suffered. It's almost like they're giving up accuracy for more power on the hit or something...

I think you've missed my point.

No doubt someone can swing harder but less accurately. I've done that myself, chopping wood or hammering nails (though never in combat).

My point is that the to hit roll in D&D doesn't correspond to accuracy, nor the damage roll to hardness. Eg a to hit roll that barely hits, but that deals maximum damage, can very easily in the fiction correspond to a precision blow.

The division of the attack process into a to hit roll and a damage roll is purely an element of game design, not modelling any distinct ingame causal processes, and Power Attack simply exploits that mathematical framework to set up an optimisation problem for mathematicians to solve.

Because the level of digging required for you to find it is extensive and I don't think you are making a strong case (for the reasons I and others have given about the ability). It feels like you are combing through trying to find reasons and they are not really holding up. I don't know, it feels a bit disingenuous.

So 4e mechaincs "leaping out" at you is self-validating evidence of their "dissociative" character, but me saying that Power Attack is a ridiculous, metagaming mechanic is "digging", "disingenuous" and involves "reasons that aren't holding up"?

Who went and made you the arbiter of what is genuinely "dissociative" and what is not? Why do your feelings have some objective weight that mine (or [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION]'s) don't?

 

[pemerton]

Traditionally, in Dungeons and Dragons, powers with a per day use are in some way mystical, magical or supernatural.

I thought that Rage and Stunning Fist were both EX ie non-magical, non-mystical and non-supernatural.

 

[pemerton]

I never wanted to call every 4th edition player a munchkin, I was saying that the 4th edition designers took a more munchkinesqe approach to the game, that they embrace powergaming as a core factor in the game, forcing the gamers to do it as well.

If you mean that the game is built to be played - that its mechanics aren't just for show, or for window-dressing - than yes.

But not everyone thinks that it is bad play to push a game, either storywise or mechanics-wise (ideally the two track together). Some of us think it is a sign of bad mechanics that they break when pushed.