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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6597322" data-attributes="member: 996">Not a good analogy.  Newton did offer an explanation of gravity, but an accurate description.  'Dissociative mechanics' are offered as an explanation. 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.   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.</blockquote>

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