Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6596815" data-attributes="member: 996">People worried about dissociating are hairsplitting to begin with, quibbling with implications of how you might translate abstract game mechanics into imagined actions of imaginary characters in an imaginary world.  There's no disconnect between other abstract mechanics and in-game events, either, unless you force their to be.  Power Attack?  Obviously if you're swinging a lot harder, that's obvious to your enemy, and he'll make more of an effort to avoid it, thus the penalty.  But, wait!  Your enemy can't decide /not/ to do so, nor can he decide to make that extra effort when he's low oh hps, so you're exercising control over something other than your character when you Power Attack!  Oh no, another dissociative mechanic! It's not, really, because no mechanic ever is, only the visualization constructed by the player to /make/ it dissociative is.  As you point out, it's easy to, instead, imagine power attack as simply swinging harder, but wildly.  Just as it's easy to imagine Action Surge and Battlemaster CS dice as being 'exhausting,' even though using up one doesn't exhaust the other, rather than the player decision somehow forcing circumstances not under the PC's control.  Just as it's easy to imagine any martial encounter or daily in 4e, exactly as the PH1 described them, as being exhausting in the same, 'selective' way that Action Surge, Second Wind, and CS dice are in 5e and Stunning Fist, Rage, and a few other extraordinary powers in 3.5 were.   True.  Abstraction is real.  However, they are closely related:   any dissociative mechanic is going to be abstract, because it's abstraction that leaves room to manufacture the disconnect.  And, of course, because any TTRPG mechanic is necessarily abstract.  If you find any mechanic not to be dissociative, you just haven't tried hard enough to come up with an inappropriate enough way of imagining it.</blockquote>

Verification