Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5618971" data-attributes="member: 54877">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.  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. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> 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. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

Verification