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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FireLance" data-source="post: 5618978" data-attributes="member: 3424">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.</blockquote>

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