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Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 6597898" data-attributes="member: 85870">I'm sorry, I generally consider myself a fairly rational, cognizant individual. But my response to this statement is an emphatic......well, let's just say it's a much less socially appropriate way of saying "cow dung." So yeah, an EMPHATIC COW DUNG is my response to this. I spent more time "outside the head of my character" / engaging with the metagame of 4e than any other RPG before or since. And for the longest time, I could never figure out why. Why was my play experience with 4e, and my mental state during that play experience, so different than when I was playing BECMI or 3e? "4e is just as much D&D as anything else!", right? That's the claim every 4e proponent from here to Andromeda continues to shout at the top of his or her lungs, right? So why was my experience so different?One answer obviously might be, "You were doing it wrong." That may be part of the problem, I am willing to admit. But you've just stated in the quote above that you place no credence in the idea that the nature of the AEDU design concept, along with its built in decoupling of mechanics and fiction, might, JUST MIGHT generate a kind of play experience and psychological response from players based on the inherent design/character/function of those rules.I get it, the whole dissociation / "getting pulled out of your character" didn't happen to you with 4e. Well guess what---it happened to me. EVERY....SINGLE.....TIME I played it. It was a very real, tangible, recognizable response to my experience with the game. "Why I am so much less engaged with this than I was with 3e?" Yet somehow, you think I spent my limited time in 4e worried that my buddy playing a fighter might get to do cool stuff? (I played a rogue, by the way). You think THAT'S the reason I could never embrace 4e? Jealousy? I played a rogue SPECIFICALLY because everyone told me, "Hey guess what, rogues don't suck now!" I've played more half-elf rogues in D&D than any other three character concepts combined. I LIKE playing rogues. So somehow, the fact that I've enjoyed playing what is widely regarded as the most mechanically inferior class from 1e to 3e, and chose to play one again in 4e---because THE BALANCE STUFF IS SUPPOSED TO BE FIXED NOW!!!!!!---and yet STILL didn't have fun playing 4e, means that I just couldn't handle the new class balance?EMPHATIC COW DUNG. Tony, you're generally a pretty well-reasoned guy, but this comment goes beyond the boundaries of ridicule. It's so ridiculous I can't even fathom the depth of intellectual laziness and dismissiveness required to formulate it and put it into writing.We get it, you don't grok mechanical dissociation. But you don't get to tell me what's going on in my own head while playing an RPG.</blockquote>

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