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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6597550" data-attributes="member: 42582">In that case you haven't been following the discussion very closely. Other posters have raised it on these boards. I have been critical of Power Attack in all its forms ever since I encountered it: it's a terrible mechanic that is a trap for the maths-weak and trades on a mechanical oddity of the system (namely, the separation of to hit and damage rolls).I don't call it dissociated except in inverted commas ("dissociated"), because I think "dissociation" is a spurious label - the label metagame already existed and does the job, and is not pejorative in the way "dissociated" is. And Power Attack is absolutely a metagame mechanic. (Contrast, say, 3E's fighting defensively, which is not metagame and actually correlates to meaningful elements of the fiction.)What has this got to do with anything? Did Justin Alexander do some polling before he wrote his essay? Where does he talk about "how common the complaint is"?How common a complaint is tells me nothing about a mechanic except how popular or unpopular it is. Which seems to vindicate [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s suggestion that "dissociated" is simply a way of dressing up "metagame mechanic that I (and others) don't like".No one that I'm aware of disputes that 4e has metagame mechanics. For reasons that are utterly opaque to me, some people dispute that Gygax's classes, levels, XP, hit points and saving throws were metagame, despite him writing long essays to this effect in his DMG (for all of them except class).3E replaced metagame saving throws with non-metagame ones - Fort, Ref, Will - which in my view was a major step backwards in D&D design. It tried to make classes non-metagame also (look at NPC classes, Prestige Classes, multi-classing rules, etc), another step backwards in my view. For me, 4e is true to those metagame elements of Gygaxian D&D and develops them in new directions.The fact that many other people have different preferences isn't relevant to me, and doesn't have any implications for my preferences. I don't need a pseudo-theory like The Alexandrian's to justify my preferences to me. I just need to know what I enjoy in a FRPG.</blockquote>

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