This doesn't follow for me.
Imagine that after a long drought there is rain. The village says "Hallelujah, it's a miracle". It's just people trying to deduce a cause-and-effect for the phenomenon. Nobody would accuse the end of the drought itself to be a disassociation, because presumably there is some meteorological reason for it, and the village just had a different explanation.
I think we've covered this before, that the character's explanation of the result of a mechanic may run parallel but not conform to the "real" reason.
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So A is defined as B and B is disadvantageous because of C
So you go look for a Y and show that C is not true, therefore Y is not B and A is not B?
That's your black swan????
You' seem to be making an assumption about the actual play I reported which is not true.
You seem to be assuming that when the player of the paladin says (in character) "But the Raven Queen turned me back", this is an expression of that paladin's hope, but not an accurate report of what actually happened in the fiction.
That assumption is false. Which is why I said, when I introduced the anecdote, that the player treated the duration mechanic as a metagame mechanic.
In saying (in character) what he said, the player of the paladin has
both expressed the paladin's religious conviction,
and established a fact about the gameworld, namely, that the Raven Queen turned the paladin back.
Within the fiction, there is no other explanation for why the spell ended. It's not at all like your meteorological analogy.
To put it in terms of your placeholder variables: I haven't shown you a Y. I've shown you a B that is not a C. That is, I've shown you an instance of the sort of play that the Alexandrian condemns as dissociative - namely, taking a mechanic and more-or-less ad hocly attributing an ingame significance to it - that in fact did not dissociate but reinforced the fiction and helped the player inhabit his character within that fiction. (In terms of stances, the player seems to have simultaneously occupied Director and Actor stances.)
It's not until your statement above that anybody defending 4E actually speculated *why* hit points might be deemed to be less "disassociative" for the immersionists.
Well, I posted my G2 example quite a way upthread, but it didn't get much traction.
Before this, I believe the general argument was that hit points have been around long enough that people have learned to tolerate it. That's a theory, but not a proof.
On this issue I tend to agree with Wrecan. It's about players as much as mechanics.
The fact that some players can straddle Author and Actor stance in relation to hit points tells us something about hit points as a mechanic - they can permit such straddling - but it also tells us something about those people - they're prepared to straddle in that way. It's a historical fact, after all, that lots of players have not been prepared to do this, and therefore migrated to RQ, RM etc. I was one of them. And I still find pre-4e hit points wonky.
I mean, I could just as easily point to my player straddling Director and Actor stance while playing his paladin, as point to hit points, to show the possibility of straddling. That doesn't show that all, or most, or even many, players are actually interested in straddling those stances while playing 4e. But it does show that the link between 4e and immersion-disruption is contingent and highly relative to the interests, experiences, preferences etc of the players in question.
