In Defense of the Theory of Dissociated Mechanics

[pawsplay]

You're saying it's quite possible to have an abstract simulation? That's an interesting idea, as most, if not all, rpgs generally regarded as simulationist are very detailed.

Not only is it possible... but a simulation is by definition abtract! Otherwise it would be reality.

 

[Dunnagin]

simulation, narration & game play remind me of the three terms often used in business:
quality, time & cost

Clients always want things to be top of quality, delivered on time or early and done on or under budget.

We are all "clients" of the RPG's which we purchase... so it is no surprise to me that we want a good level of simulation that encourages great narratives and that is the most fun to play.

When I think of it in those terms... I feel bad for game designers.
When running a project I often asked a client which TWO options were most imperative.

The poor game designers cannot ask us that, since we are a huge group that cannot agree on this ourselves.

sigh

We are not easy clients, as a whole... perhaps

 

[Yesway Jose]

Scenario A: A Knight and a Barbarian are playing a game of rock-paper-scissors. Who wins?

Mechanic 1: Players play a match of rock-paper-scissors. Maximum association of mechanics to fiction.
Mechanic 2: Players roll a die, higher die roll wins. As good as an association of mechanics to fiction as you're likely to get; an opposed die roll perfectly simulates a 50% chance of winning at rock-paper-scissors.


Scenario B: A Knight and a Barbarian fight a duel. Fictionally, they are equal oppponents. Who wins?

Mechanic 1: Players fight a duel ala LARPing. Disassociated from fiction unless the players are also equal opponents.
Mechanic 2: Opposed die roll or a match of rock-paper-scissors. Good association to the end result of the duel, although zero association with the minutiae of the battle.


Scenario B: A Knight and a Barbarian fight a duel. Fictionally, the Knight is the stronger opponent. Who wins?

Mechanic 1: Opposed die roll. Poor association to the end result of the duel, because there isn't a 50:50 probability of a win.
Mechanic 2: Opposed die roll with an extra bonus for the Knight. Better association to the end result of the duel.

* * *

Reviewing that, I'm wondering if "disassociated mechanics" can be defined as:

(1) IF you use a mechanic to pre-determine the outcome of a fictional event
AND (2) IF the fictional construct was imagined to play out by some number of roleplayers/screenwriters/authors (to average out for individual variation)
THEN (3) CAN/DOES #1 and #2 independently yield the same or similar probability curve of possible outcomes?


Disclaimer: Fictional expectations in point #2 will strongly influence if #3 is true or not.

-An ordinary man is shot at with multiple submachine guns. The mechanics say he's at -10 hit points. The fictional consensus is that he's dead. No disassociation.

-An action hero in a Hollywood movie is shot at with multiple submachine guns. The mechanics says he lost 20 hit points but still has 40 more hit points. Screenwriters concede that he dodges past the bullet fire. No disassociation (because losing 20 hit points can be abstracted to mean that he used up some luck "points" and maybe a bullet graze).

-A superhero is paralyzed by a freeze ray. The mechanics say he's paralyzed for a short while and then snaps back into action. One scientifically-minded writer decides that the superhero's lung muscles stop working and asphyxiates, but the rest of the comic book writers form the consensus that he's OK. So no (significant) disassociation.

-A villian is holding a world-shattering artifact, so a wizard casts Hypnotism on him. The spell mechanics state the wizard can slide the target or force him to make a basic melee attack against a creature. The fictional writers imagine that the wizard could feasibly mind-control the villian to drop (or throw) the artifact and withdraw. The mechanics don't allow the spell to work that way. That would be disassociation of mechanics.

It is my personal opinion that many 4E mechanics do not permit or encourage the same probability curve of possible outcomes in a fantasy narrative that would/could be imagined by a significantly large enough percentage of the roleplaying community, thus a strong impression of disassociated mechanics for a significant number of people.

Is 3E disassociation-free? Of course not, but it's all relative, and anyway, one doesn't negate the other.

 

[Elf Witch]

This is what really hits it on the nail for me. I am continuously boggled by people who say "I can't play 4e, it's too gamist, the daily powers pull me out of the character" followed by "Oh, hit me with cure lesser, not cure moderate, I only lost 5 HP."

You make player-based choices all the time. If 4e is the step too far, then ok, I can get that. But there's a difference between "4e is a step too far" and "my editions never did that at all!"



If there is anything you should learn from The Alexandrian, it is that everything is defined to mean "4e is bad." The actual used definitions will change on the drop of a pin, but at the end of the day, the result he truly wants is "This is why 4e is bad."

I have not read anyone here saying that my edition never did that. What I have read is 4E has taken it to far for me to to be able to enjoy it.

If there is anything we should learn from your posts is that any criticism of 4E is not justified and our only purpose is to say 4E is bad. Of course you are allowed to criticize 3E because for some reason that is different. Oh yeah 3E is a crappy system and we just can't admit it.

I seen several 3E fans here admit that Alexander had an axe to grind but we thought there was some points he brought up that we found interesting and worthy of discussion.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Quick note, for late reply. The first "this" is referring to a quote of my assertion that the problem was not disassociated mechanics, but what the person brought to the table.

I am not at all certain that this is true. AFAICT, what one brings to the table is either an awareness of the disassociation, or being bothered by it, which is a problem that not all will have. But, because not everyone will be aware of/bothered by the disassociation of avatar and player does not mean that said disassociation doesn't exist.

If, ultimately, "role-playing" means "associating the player's POV with the POV of a fictional avatar" then disassociation of those POVs affects role-playing, to the degree that it occurs. Obviously, if you define "role-playing" differently, you will draw a different conclusion.....but that doesn't make the original conclusion wrong.

IMHO, it depends upon how you see "role-playing", whether or not you are aware of the disassociation, and the degree to which any disassociation interferes with your goals in playing the game.

Note also that this is true for any game element, and is not limited to 4e. To the degree to which anything interferes with your goals in playing the game, that thing is going to be a problem. It is the interaction between your goals and the ruleset that creates the problem -- it is not true (IMHO) to say that it is solely what you bring to the table, or solely what occurs in the ruleset.

Starting at the end, of course any such problem (or things that work with no problem, for that matter), are an interaction between what you bring and the rules (and what everyone else brings, too).

But note that the inherent claim of the theory is that a line is crossed with 4E in this interaction that makes a difference in kind, not simply degree. As I've mentioned elsewhere, claiming degree is not a problem at all. It is the claim of difference in kind that is all the problem. Because once you claim that, then you've either got to find evidence to support it, or, if you want to work the other way around, you start seeing evidence to support it.

You can't find that evidence in people who are bothered by the difference in degree. If the rogue only getting Trick Strike 1/day bothers you enough that it changes your play experience, then any difference in kind that may or may not be present (according to a theory) will be masked, or at least contaminated, by this experience. For there to be a difference in kind, it would have to also be affecting the people who are not bothered by the difference in degree, and if present, this will be the easier place to show it. That is, the guy playing the rogue who is fine with Trick Strike being 1/day is being affected in some negative way by the disassociation itself.

The claims that are made is that said guy "isn't roleplaying" very much, if at all. Or any number of similar things. The guy actually playing 4E is frequently saying some version of what permeton keeps saying: He is consciously acting as a player to use a metagaming narrative/gamist resource to make fight happen in ways that are exciting, while simutaneously imagining his rogue pull off some variation of a move that doesn't happen all that often. But the person looking for evidence of disassociation (at the theory level) must reject that testimony, because the theory has put "metagaming" into another bucket.

There are many variations on this argument--but they all come back to, if not backed away from, some version of, "the thing you say you do you didn't actually do." This is the offensive part. My report of what someone did at my table cannot have happened because then the theory is disproved.

There have been several examples put forth in this thread of niche things that have supposedly illustrated a disassociated mechanic. I'll pick one that is particular easy to rebut, the d4 dagger versus the d8 longsword. This exactly an example of what the player (or the group) brings to the table, and is based not, as was first claimed, on "logic", but on feeling and limited evidence.

Note, I'm not saying that people don't have a reaction to those weapon sizes that adversely affects their enjoyment of the game. They said they did. And even if I didn't give them that courtesy, I once felt the same way! The very thought of going back to the OD&D d6 for all weapons was something that I simply could not do.

OTOH, it has long been a complaint in some circles that one of the big problems with D&D combat was the pretense that there was all that great a difference in how long it took to kill someone with a dagger versus a longsword. The very idea was ludicrous, as the thinking goes, because the skill of the hands that wield it, and the circumstances under which it is willed, are so much more vital. And 3E even addresses this concern! Very rapidly, compared to previous version, level, attributes, magic, etc. matter a whole lot more than the die size. Are we then saying that low level D&D is not disassociated, but it gets gradually more so as we go? I can hear the answer already. "Well, this guy gets a bunch of levels and power, and these dwarf the base weapon, and that makes perfect sense." OK. So at some point in training/abilities/magic, it is fine, right? Now that we've established that it is degree, we are just talking about price.

Now, you don't have to buy one version of fantasy reality or another for your arguments, let alone your game. Mix in all the different literary traditions we are trying to emulate, and the target is not only moving, but erratic. But the argument that the longsword must do more damage than the dagger, because it is bigger, lest you therefore have a mechanic that inherently disassociates the mind from what "dagger" and "longsword" mean in the imagined reality is, well, a really narrow view of the possibilities of imagined realities or really dismissive of them. That is for "inherent". If all you need to show is that it bother you in your imagined reality, then you can use whatever you want. But now we are back to what the players bring to the table.

BTW, a niche thing, critical to understanding how people like me have no problem with things like Trick Strike, is the realization that 1/day is not actually "exactly 1/day". Rather, it is "zero to once per day", which over time, played in a game where a story is taking place, come out to considerably less than 1/day. It becomes much easier to visualize such a move rarely coming up, once this is noted. You can't do that if you assume, however, that someone is playing the game as a boardgame, and exactly milking every resource for maximum effect, all the time.

 

[FireLance]

-A villian is holding a world-shattering artifact, so a wizard casts Hypnotism on him. The spell mechanics state the wizard can slide the target or force him to make a basic melee attack against a creature. The fictional writers imagine that the wizard could feasibly mind-control the villian to drop (or throw) the artifact and withdraw. The mechanics don't allow the spell to work that way. That would be disassociation of mechanics.

Frankly, this to me is more a case of the effect of a spell not fully living up to its name (or its default flavor). If the spell was explicitly described as being able to trigger only one of two very basic reactions in the target (effectively, fight OR flight, and nothing else) then there would be a much lower level of disassociation.

The way I see it, it is essentially up to the players and the DM to prevent disassociation by not using mechanics that create disassociation for them. I suspect that most of the mechanics with a high potential for disassociation are the martial abilities. Magical abilities have the convenient "it's magic!" handwave, but for martial abilities, the players (and the DM) need to work harder to ensure that the narrative remains at a level of plausibility that they are comfortable with. That is the price that you have to pay if you want to stretch the limits of what can be accomplished by martial characters. If you are not willing to pay this price and are willing to accept that martial characters will be more limited than the others, you can simply restrict yourself to using the more straightforward options for martial characters (for example, the Essentials fighters and rogue).

To a certain extent, I think that the "cure" for disassociation is simply internalizing the way things work in the game. When I first started playing D&D, the biggest source of disassociation for me was the way that spellcasters worked. Magic-users and clerics simply didn't work the way I expected them to. What was this "memorization" nonsense? Wizards don't run out of spells (at least, they never did in the fiction that I was familiar with - mostly because spellcasters were usually anagonists or plot devices, but this didn't even feature in novels like A Wizard of Earthsea where the protagonist was one). A cleric should simply pray and his deity (in his or her infinite wisdom) would provide whatever miracles are most appropriate to the situation.

Naturally, since I'm still playing the game, I got used to it in time (there is a significant amount of self-selection on this forum - if I hadn't managed to get over my disassociation, I wouldn't be posting here, now, in the first place), and it's now almost second nature for me to talk about "preparing" daily spells (or prayers, or invocations, or whatever). And I've been getting over disassociation in every new edition since.

 

[pawsplay]

But note that the inherent claim of the theory is that a line is crossed with 4E in this interaction that makes a difference in kind, not simply degree. As I've mentioned elsewhere, claiming degree is not a problem at all. It is the claim of difference in kind that is all the problem. Because once you claim that, then you've either got to find evidence to support it, or, if you want to work the other way around, you start seeing evidence to support it.

I agree that the evidence has not been furnished that this is a different of kind, rather than degree. I agree that the evidence has not been furnished that 4e as a whole is a different game of a kind, rather than to a degree. I do think that the identification of the problem some people have with certain mechanics is accurate as to what is bothering them.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I agree that the evidence has not been furnished that this is a different of kind, rather than degree. I agree that the evidence has not been furnished that 4e as a whole is a different game of a kind, rather than to a degree. I do think that the identification of the problem some people have with certain mechanics is accurate as to what is bothering them.

I agree.

I think it then follows that the "way out" is by understanding how people who aren't bothered are playing differently, such that they aren't bothered. And then either adopting their methods and/or houseruling around the issues to avoid the need of their methods. Or, since this is a game after all, if one doesn't want to bother, play a different game that better fits the preferences in question.

That is what individual players and tables can do. On the larger question of what can be changed to accommodate more people, in a single version of D&D, it is easier to find the limits on how far "degree" can be pushed if people really understand why the line gets crossed.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

As a related aside, the huge irony for me in this particular discussion is that on one level I completely sympathize with those so bothered by the 4E choices. While I don't have any issue with most of the 4E elements discussed, pro or con, thus far, I have a similar "bother" against coarse granularity in skills.

I recognize that, from a playability standpoint, why it has to be that way, but I think you can see the severity of the problem for me when I say that I find even games like Hero and GURPS insufficiently fine. 4E bothers me, 3E bothers me, Non-weapon proficiency rules bothered me. I can control it and enjoy the game, but it lurks there all the time. And frankly, even though 3E skills were finer grained, I found that overall, 4E bothers me less in this respect, because it did cross a line. 3E kept teasing me that if I only tweaked this or that skill, I'd quit being bothered. 3.5 both teased me, but also told me to lower expectations. 4E just stopped teasing me altogether and told me I would have to deal with it. Which, oddly, was more functional for me in actual play at the table.

So it might be useful to note that even though we are talking about lines being crossed, solutions aren't always as easy as staying sufficient distance back from the edge.

 

[pemerton]

The problem he has with the Rogue is that no in-game reason such as "He forgets how to do it" is given. Instead the reason he can do it only once per day is because it is a daily power... thus it is disassociated from the game fiction.

If a participant in an RPG is unable to draw a distinction between the reason for XYZ from the point of view of the players of the game, and the reason for XYZ from the (imaginary) point of view of the fictional inhabitants of the gameworld, then that person will probably not enjoy 4e.

This is true. I don't think we need the label "dissociated mechanics" to describe it, though. It's no more or less an interesting fact than that a person who hates iron-spike-and-10'-pole-play (like me) probably won't enjoy the Tomb of Horrors.

Anyway, returning to the rogue. The rogue hasn't forgotten how to do it. Or been rendered unable to do it. It's just that s/he doesn't do it. Why not (from her perspective)? Any number of reasons is possible - s/he gets unlucky, s/he doesn't bother because not enough is at stake, s/he has something else she'd rather be doing, etc, etc.

A comparable degree of "dissociation" in (typical) classic D&D play - why do the wandering monsters never catch a PC pants down relieving him- or herself in a corner of the dungeon? Among the players at the table, we know the reason - because no one wants to explore that particular human activity in the context of the game. In the fiction, who knows? The PCs get lucky, I guess. Does anyone infer, though, that because it never comes up, PCs don't go the toilet?

Disassociated mechanics, IMO, seem to be mechanics that aren't justified (even if that justification is "It's magic") in how they behave within the fictional reality of the game world. Instead they are left to be interpreted by those at the table. Thus they are disassociated until one associates them to some causaul relationship in the game.

So they're not justified, except that they are justified by those at the table - so where's the problem?

I mean you've given your interpretation of why he can but in the books this is not stated.

Correct. As you've already indicated, it's left as an exercise for the participants in the game.

Some people call this process, of the participants at the table working out among themselves what is happening in the fiction, roleplaying.

That's not really a satisfying explanation from an in-game perspective.

Joe the Hero: Wow, Ziggy, that was amazing! Can you do it again?
Ziggy the Rogue: Uh, no.
Joe the Hero: Why not?
Ziggy the Rogue: I've, uh... exhausted my physical and mental resources.
Joe the Hero: You mean you're tired?
Ziggy the Rogue: Not, uh, not exactly. I'm just too... exhausted... to do THAT.

Relating this to the hit point example:

Ziggy the Rogue: Wow, Joe, that was amazing! You took them all down and you haven't even broken a sweat!

Joe the Hero: Uh, I'm practically dying here - one more hit, even a scrape from a rock or a knife, and I'll drop.

Ziggy the Rogue: Gosh, I didn't notice. Do we need to call an ambulance? Get a stretcher?

Joe the Hero: Not at all, I'm as spry as when I woke up this morning. It's just that . . . .

(Complete dialogue to taste.)​

In other words, what Doug said:

TA imagines conducting an interrogation of a character, asking him to explain why he can only use Trick Strike once a day. Surely a similar interrogation could be conducted regarding hit points. We could ask how a character on one hit point who fled, or sought rest or healing, knew he was badly wounded or severely fatigued, given that none of his capabilities were impaired in any way. His movement, his skill use, his ability to strike, to deal damage, to avoid blows, all of these were functioning at full capacity. And yet such a technique of interrogation, uncovering inconsistencies, insufficient explanations, is deemed capable of uncovering dissociated mechanics.

As it happens, [MENTION=18280]Raven Crowking[/MENTION] has a serious explanation for how we should make sense of this hit points thing - namely, that a player whose PC has 1 hp left will play his/her PC more cautiously, and this is how the exhaustion/depletion of divine favour shows itself. And the same thing will happen with the player of a martial 4e PC who has no dailies left - s/he will play the PC more cautiously, because having fewer good powers to deploy. That is how the depletion of reserves, or failure of luck, or whatever we want to think of it as, will manifest itself.

HP's are defined in the gameworld as a combination of things that equate to one's ability to continue to fight, including but not limited to physical endurance, luck, divine favor, morale, etc... These are all in-game connections for the mechanic of hit points... it's abstracted not disassociated.

What does it mean to say "I took 4 hp damage" or "I delivered 4 hp damage"? Or to say "I have 1 hp remaining"? We can't know in the abstract. It can only be resolved by the participants in the game in a given context. For example, 4 hp taken by a high level fighter with 80 hp is different from 4 hp taken by a giant slug with 80 hp (the slug's hp, unlike the fighter's, are mostly meat) is different from 4 hp taken by a 1st level MU. And 1 hp remaining for that MU or rogue who rolled a one on the die is obviusly very different from 1 hp remaining for that high level fighter, or the giant slug.

hit points as a huge abstraction gives me plenty of space to associate the mechanics with the fiction. A more specific mechanic, like slide 2 squares, can often provide less wiggle room to create plausible fluff for that context.

Again, that's all relative. Hit points as an abstraction cannot be entirely free of disassociation, but I think much less so than some other 4E mechanics.

Each to his or her own. Until 4e, I could never handle hit points (and so I played Rolemaster, in which hit points - earned by ranks in Body Development - are all meat). But slides have never caused me or my group any trouble.

The Alexandrian essay records a potentially interseting biographical fact about Justin Alexander, but not much more than that as far as I can tell.

If the avatar doesn't "know", then why doesn't the avatar attempt things that would be extremely effective, if successful, and which the avatar has no reason to believe will not be successful?

This is, AFAICT, the root of what is being called "disassociative mechanics" -- the player must disassociate from the avatar's POV in order to make effective choices in the game milieu.

<snip>

If, ultimately, "role-playing" means "associating the player's POV with the POV of a fictional avatar" then disassociation of those POVs affects role-playing, to the degree that it occurs. Obviously, if you define "role-playing" differently, you will draw a different conclusion.....but that doesn't make the original conclusion wrong.

LostSoul already replied to this in some detail. But to add some examples to his discussion of Power Attack - why does the avatar, in 3E play, not wait until the goblin leaves cover before running out and shooting an arrow? The mechanical explanation, from the player's point of view, is that (i) the rules don't permit readying both a move and a standard action, and (ii) there is no analogue to the charge for ranged attacks. In game which use simultaneous resolution - like some versions of Rolemaster, and some versions of classic D&D - the issue doesn't arise in the same way.

But I've never seen or heard it suggested that the presence of turn-by-turn initiative rules in 3E makes it not a roleplaying game.

In any event, the notion that "roleplaying" means assimilation of the player to the PC, not just as advocate and controller, but in terms of point-of-view, strikes me as too narrow to capture more than a small handful of paradigmatic roleplaying experiences. (For example, it would put such a strong constraint on metagaming that huge chunks of classic D&D play -which depend on the player having a sense, independent of his/her PC, of the conventions of the game, like pit traps and 10' poles and the like - would be excluded from the ambit of roleplaying.)

Ofc, TA is wrong about besieged foe, the rules do in fact provide a game world explanation. I would assume that when he wrote the article, the author only had access to the power description and not the accompanying text on pg 67 of the MM -

They use besieged foe... to direct their subordinates against dangerous foes​

In a recent thread, I and other posters pointed to the flavour text for kobolds - which talks about them being skulking ambushers, preferring to swarm foes and then run away if threatened, etc - as helpful for understanding what the Shifty power is about. We got the reply that because that text appears a few centimetres up the page, rather than in the very stat block next to Shifty, it is irrelevant to interpreting and GMing the Shifty power. Presumably, the same can be said in response to your reading of Besieged Foe.

Personally, the way I read Besieged Foe is as primarily a metagame thing. It's as if the GM played an "Unluck" or "Anti-Fate" token on the player, saying "This war devil and it's allies are going to take you down!" The effect of the power is to produce the result that the foe is besieged, because it creates a mechanical incentive for the war devil's allies to attack the targeted PC.

Those who don't like pure metagame abilities could intepret it as a curse instead: "You shall know the wrath of my legions!"

If a mechanic says that a thief or a fighter can perform some action which doesn't align to thieving or fighting at all... something similar to teleportation (you just appear somewhere else), then you begin to lose me.

How many rogue powers in PHB, MP and MP2 grant teleportation? One: a level 22 utility power called "Mountebank’s Flight" with the flavour text "You steal a bit of magic to stow away on another creature’s teleportation." (There is also a 20th level teleportation power for the paragon path Arcane Trickster.)

Across those same three books, how many fighter powers grant telepotation? None. (Again, a fighter paragon path which requires warlock multi-classing grants a teleportation utility power at level 12.)

So how exactly does this comment shed light on 4e's mechanics?