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Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 6599926" data-attributes="member: 85870">First, the examples you've cited here are all examples of player intent. You're not addressing the resolution of the mechanic within the fiction. [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] argues that narrating a power's resolution is no different than narrating hit point loss, but to me it's a huge difference trying to rationalize how the same basic "2W + move your foe 1 square" power works for a fighter, a rogue, a wizard, an invoker, a cleric, a warlord, a warpriest, a shardmind, a druid, a ranger, a whatever-the-crap-else.......  For example, I don't have to rationalize how the Bull Rush maneuver / feat works for 75 different classes in 3e. And yeah yeah, I know Bull Rush required a feat tax, and no one would ever take it because it was suboptimal, blah blah. Doesn't change the fact that I don't have rationalize the fiction for using the Bull Rush maneuver/feat differently for every single class in the game, like I would if I took a power.In this sense, even the 4e powers' naming conventions work against them----by setting every power up as  "unique, flavorful" thing that only that class can do, it puts even more onus on the player/GM to make the use of that power in the fiction unique. Now I'm totally willing to admit that there are likely hundreds of 4e powers that are not "decoupled" from the fiction dissociatively. I've not made an exhaustive search of 4e powers because [a] there's thousands of them, and it's not worth my time to do it just to rationalize the reality of mechanical dissociation in RPGs.All this is outside the point that martial daily powers simply fail the association test outright. There's no explanation for why a martial power source character using a power once during a day cannot use that power again until tomorrow. And every gyration and rationalization of 4e proponents to make it "believable" or "plausible" have never once in seven years convinced me otherwise. But beyond that, "getting pulled out of my head" by having to create my own fiction for powers' mechanical resolution is not tied to any one power, or any one set of 15 powers, or any one class. It's about the ENTIRE 4e package as a whole. It's about martial dailies, it's about the marking mechanic (which is frankly one of the strongest arguments Justin Alexander makes for dissociation in the original essay), it's about healing surges and "shouting at someone to close their wounds", it's about NPCs blatantly not working the same way as PCs (I'm okay with this to a point, but not the extent 4e pushes it), it's about the sheer brokenness of skill challenges as initially published (to the point that 4e DMs often just ignored the skill challenge rules), it's about "knocking an ooze prone".........Then throw in the problematic powers ("Come and Get It" is the obvious poster boy, but there are others) and ultimately it's a recipe for a roleplaying game I can't engage with on the level of character immersion that I want.Now, here's the thing----I have no problem with Fate. At all. The difference is, I go into Fate with a wholly different mindset. The whole point of Fate is to subsume process sim to the needs of the story. Justin Alexander comments on this in the original essay. He states that 4e's mechanics would be FINE AND DANDY if they served a real purpose......in his mind that purpose would be to create a true scene narration resolution system, rather than a process sim resolution system, but that D&D 4e simply isn't up to the task. I actually re-read the originally essay (not the revised primer, but the original), and it struck me just how much he actually "gets" what 4e COULD be doing in terms of "scene framed narrativism." He's totally cognizant of that particular trend in "indie" RPGs, but is of the opinion that 4e just isn't really doing it right. 4e's mechanics don't lead to strong enough "narrative resolution" options to make the trade-off in rules changes worth it to abandon the more "traditional" D&D experience  [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION], [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION], [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] et. al. obviously disagree with that). To bring the point home, I've stated numerous times on these forums that I no longer play D&D of any variety for the same reasons----I found systems where I don't have to deal with D&D's legacy tropes at all, that work better to give me the kind of game I want. The reason I became involved in this discussion again is because I simply couldn't stand by and watch [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] and [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] and [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] dismiss my actual, tangible play experience with 4e, and how much the concept of dissociated mechanics resonated with me. Now, I will say this------Having re-read the original "Dissociated Mechanics" essay again, I will say that there are some points that are vague. At first I thought "dissociation" happened solely at the player / PC "decision tree" level, where decisions made by the player had to correlate to those made by the PC to be associated, but that's not the case. Marking, for example, is definitely "associated" at the player / PC decision tree level---both the player and PC in the fiction want to gain advantage over an enemy to improve their odds. Marking breaks down at the "fictional mapping" level, not at the "decision tree" level. I actually think the argument could be stronger if Alexander made this specific distinction. And I can certainly see [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s argument that being okay with Wushu's narrative scene resolution mechanics but not 4e's seems a bit hypocritical, where it's a subjective degree of taste.</blockquote>

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