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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6598481" data-attributes="member: 42582">If you think the at-wills, encounter powers etc are "decoupled'" from the fiction that is a psychological fact about you (about your beliefs and experiences). I don't find them decoupled at all, because in my mind and in my narration at the table I couple them.The Alexandrian's comment about house rules is, in my view, absurd. Connecting the mechanics to the fiction isn't house-ruling: it's playing the game. Much as Gygax, in his DMG, points out that a successful save vs dragon breath made by a warrior chained to a rock might correlated, in the fiction, to a chain breaking. That's not a house rule - it's playing the game, which includes introducing narration within the parameters that are set by the rules of the game.Sometime back in 2008 or 2009 I pointed out that all the flashpoints around 4e had already been anticipated by Ron Edwards back in 2003. <a href="http://" target="_blank">Edwards' wrote</a>:Step On Up is actually quite similar, in social and interactive terms, to Story Now. Gamist [= Step on Up] and Narrativist [= Story now] play often share the following things: •Common use of player Author Stance (Pawn or non-Pawn) to set up the arena for conflict. This isn't an issue of whether Author (or any) Stance is employed at all, but rather when and for what. •Fortune-in-the-middle during resolution, to whatever degree - the point is that Exploration [ie establishing the shared fiction] as such can be deferred, rather than established at every point during play in a linear fashion. •More generally, Exploration overall is negotiated in a casual fashion through ongoing dialogue, using system for input (which may be constraining), rather than explicitly delivered by system per se.It is the last dot point, in particular, that summarises the whole debate over "dissociated" mechanics: namely, they require the shared fiction (which Edwards calls Exploration) to be negotiated in a casual fashion rather than being delivered by system per se. For instance, why can't I use CaGI again? The 4e system won't tell you - you have to work it out in play via consensual narration, with the system (and genre, and . . .) constraining permissible answers, but the system doesn't itself tell you.The somewhat bizarre thing to me is that D&D has always had these mechanics - its to hit and damage rolls are the most obvious examples (what does a hit with a roll of 6, that does 12 hp damage, do? the GM just makes it up - the system only provides an answer if the damage reduces someone to zero hp). The GM deciding that on this occasion the 12 hp of damage mean a bruise to the hip, but next time narrating it as a stinging blow to the ribs, isn't houseruling! (And it's ludicrous of Justin Alexander to suggest otherwise.) S/he is playing the game, by adding in the narration that the system calls for.4e seems to differ only in (i) generalising them from combat resolution to the skill system and the martial resource suite, and (ii) putting more of them on the player side (no GM, presumably, is going to ad hoc the narration around every player's use of an encounter power). Obviously some people don't like it, but that's all they have to say. There's no need to build a great pseudo-theory around it. Ron Edwards had already completely analysed it more than 10 years ago (and more than 5 years before 4e shipped).</blockquote>

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