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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5629666" data-attributes="member: 42582">Yes. Forcing a player to conceive of injury in terms of hit points can be "dissociative", too. It's one reason I dropped AD&D for Rolemaster as my preferred mainstream fantasy RPG a little over 20 years ago.But that doesn't tell us much about the hit point mechanic, except that I didn't like its relationship to the fiction. There's been quite a bit of discussion of the details of hit points upthread, and on the recent "dying, unhealable NPC thread". And at least as I see it, the analyses of hit points that identify why I didn't like them don't appeal to the notion of "dissociation". They talk about Actor vs Author stance, simulationist vs metagame mechanics, fortune-in-the-middle, etc.One point I've been trying to make, using the G2 discussion as an imaginary example (although something pretty close to it did happen when I GMed G2 many years ago) and my paladin case as an actual example, is that the sense in which a player has to "stop mid-turn" is purely logical or formal. That is, the player has to do something which falls under the "Author stance" description rather than the "Actor stance" description.But there is no temporal or psychological sense in which the player has to stop mid-turn. The player just plays the game: "I'm pretty confident I can't die from falling that distance: I jump!", or "Ah - but the Raven Queen turned me back". Here we have the player exhibiting both Actor Stance (first person narration, emotionally expressing his/her PC, etc) and Author Stance (in the jumping case - because the player's conception of his/her PC's desires is shaped by his/her knowledge, which is metagame knowledge, that the fall can't do more than 60 hp damage) or Director Stance (in the polymorph case - because the player is also determining a fictional truth about an NPC, namely, the paladin's god).As I've just tried to show, it is not necessary that there be a switch. Not all logical switches have to be temporally located, psychologically actualised events.For some, they may be. And those players might experience "dissociation". But I don't believe that there are many useful generalisations here.As far as I can tell you are stating this as a matter of conjecture, rather than on the basis of any widespread investigation of the evidence of actual play.My own actual play experience doesn't bear this out.Of course there can be differences in rules adjudication. For example, if another encounter with a Transmuter occurred in my game, and a different PC was turned into a frog until the end of the Transmuter's next turn, the ingame explanation for the ending of the polymorph effect might be quite different.But difference is not, per se, inconsistency.Does anyone participating in this thread have actual play experience with war devils, that they want to share?I don't myself, but I certainly don't see anything too problematic about the power.First, in my game the main dimension of meaningful choice is thematic rather than operational. So if my players were worried that they were going to encounter more war devils, and wanted to ensure that they didn't become Beseiged Foes of those devils in those future encounters, they would likely take steps to get protections against devils and suchlike - which, mechanically, might be items or rituals that allow shedding conditions imposed by devils, or might be page 42 Religion or Arcana checks to the same end (much as a Heal check can permit a bonus saving throw).The closest actual play example I can give to this hypothetical scenario is the following:The PCs had gone to an island at the behest of some elves, on which stood an old temple that had become corrupted by the Shadowfell. The elves wanted the PCs to recover a statue of the Summer Queen. The PCs did so, but as they were leaving the temple to go back to their boat, so they could then row back to the elves, a black dragon flew towards them. The PCs decided to take a stand under the temple portico - which would prevent the dragon attacking them from the air - rather than risk a confrontation in the open or while rowing across the lake. The one disadvantage of this strategy, they discovered, was that it left a good chunk of the party inside the zone of darkness that the dragon created. But the PC wizard succeeded in dispelling the darkness by calling on the magic of the Summer Queen as embodied in the statue (mechanically, an Arcana check while holding the statue to dismiss the zone).This sort of response, whether preplanned or ad hoc, because it turns on the thematic source of the power, rather than the details of its mechanism, isn't going to be hurt by varying narrations.The second reason I don't feel the force of the concern is that the game has been pretty well designed to avoid giving rise to it. Thus, for example, there are powers that allow PCs to shed marks. These will work against Besieged Foe however it is flavoured - although that might change the flavour of those mark-shedding powers on those occasions of use. And there are few abilities that turn on the sorts of concerns the Alexandrian states - so there are no silence spells that would stop the War Devil from shouting commands, and no Remove Curse spells that would lift a curse (where a curse is characterised by process rather than endstate - there are, as noted, condition-lifting powers, but they will work however Besieged Foe is narrated).I can think of one possible corner case - the War Devil is being narrated as commanding his allies how to attack, and then a PC uses a power that imposes the deafened condition on those allies. Can the War Devil still confer on them the benefits of Besieged Foe? Or does the targeted PC get at least a temporary reprieve? How I personally would adjudicate that would depend very heavily on other features of the context that we don't have ready-to-hand in these purely hypothetical discussions.I can see how all this might be rather unsatisfactory for those who like operational play, in which the main dimension of "meaningfulness" is "cleverness of contribution to overcoming the operational challenges". As I've been saying since 2008 or so, it's pretty clear that 4e is not the game for such people.4e, in my view, does not support operational/Gygaxian gamism very well. Nor does it support purist-for-system simulationism very well. 3E clearly supports both better (1st ed AD&D perhaps better still).But that doesn't leave 4e without a viable niche, becaues these approaches aren't the only viable ones. So diagnosing problems for 4e relative to these modes of play is not diagnosing problems for 4e per se. (Which is not to say that it has none - it does, for example with skill challenges as per my recent post <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/5628303-post114.html" target="_blank">here</a>.)Is this meant to relate to any actual reported instance of play, or just a remark in the abstract?I'm not playing a game without mechanics. I'm playing 4e, which is a pretty mechanics-heavy game.But the mechanics are, on the whole, not purist-for-system simulationist ones. That is, they don't model or express ingame causal logic.One mechanic is this: when a Transmuter Balefully Polymorphs a target, that target turns back at the end of the Transmuter's next turn.This gives rise to a question within the fiction: Why? Why does the polymorph effect end?Here is one possible answer, that I had thought of when I placed a Transmuter into the scenario: the polymorhp magic wears out pretty quickly. This would be treating the mechanic in a more-or-less simulationist fashion.Here is another possible answer, that the player of my paladin worked out after his PC got turned into a frog and then shortly turned back to normal: the Raven Queen turned me back! This is treating the mechanic in more of a metagame fashion - that is, while it recognises that the mechanic obliges the participants at the table to agree that, within the fiction, the polymorph effect on the target has ended, it leaves it open on any given occasion that the mechanic is applied what exactly the explanation for that outcome, within the fiction, might be. And my player has put forward an explanation by uttering something in character, which explanation no one else at the table queried.The rulebooks don't themselves stipulate which of these answers should be adopted. Nor do they stipulate whether the rule should be understood in a simulationist or in a metagame fashion. They leave these as open questions. As it happens, and as I've explained, when the situation arose at my table, the answer that was actually put forward, and was not contested by anyone (not by me, not by another player) was the second of the two possibilities I've canvassed.So we have an instance of a mechanic - ie we're not in the realm of mechanicless narrative - which is ambiguous as to how metagamey it is, if at all, but which was applied at my table in a metagame fashion. And the application of the mechanic in that way was initiated by a player, not the GM. And was initiated by the player in the course of playing his PC, and as part of the process of "inhabiting" that PC.That is my black swan. Because, if the "theory" of "dissociated" mechanics was right, then treating the mechanic in a metagame fashion rather than a simulationist fashion would tend to disrupt the player's inhabitation of his PC. Whereas at my table, it was a method for reinforcing that inhabitation. But this is like someone explaining how a meal has been served on a polenta base, and corn meal has been used in the pastry component of the meal, and the meat inside the pastry is corned beef. I mean, yes, I now know why I didn't like the meal - I don't particularly care for either the texture or the flavour of polenta or corned beef - but to infer from that "Ah, now we've worked out why the meal was disgusting", when I'm at a table with a dozen other diners who loved it, would look a bit like I was projecting my preferences somewhat.I've been saying for many, many pages - and so have wrecan, Crazy Jerome and Hussar (and maybe others I've left off the list) - that 4e has metagame-y, non-simulationist mechanics, and that this explains why some people don't like it. But going on to describe those mechanics as "dissociated" mechanics is just to project those quirks of taste onto the system itself.Now I'm not a thoroughgoing relativist about questions of aesthetic value. If you explain to me that the base of the meal is mud, the pastry full of grit, and the filling is some form of excrement, I might be more ready to project my disgust onto the food itself. Apart from anything else, there are likely to be fewer connoisseurs around who would reject my judgement.But metagame-y, non-simulationist mechanics aren't the mud and turds of the roleplaying world. They're at the centre of a good chunk of modern RPG design. In this sense, 4e is innovative only for mainstream fantasy gaming. It's certainly not the avant-garde.Just as I'm not a thoroughgoing relativist, I'm not per se hostile to conservatism in aesthetics either. Like many who aren't well-schooled in the arts, and even some who are, I find looking at the works of the great masters, or classical statuary, more uniformly rewarding than a visit to a modern art museum. But even when I personally don't enjoy, or really see the point of, some cutting edge installation, I'm prepared to take seriously that others - including others who have thought hard about the issues - see something serious there, something of value.RPGs are the same. I'm not sure that I want to play <a href="http://www.halfmeme.com/nicotinegirls.html" target="_blank">Nicotine Girls</a>. There are political/moral reasons for that, and also more personal ones - eg do I want to spend my leisure time roleplaying lifecrushing despair? But I have no trouble acknowledging that there's something there, alright. And it was reading the rules to Nicotine Girls that first gave me a clear sense of how I might use the idea of an endgame in my much more mainstream Rolemaster campaign. And the same ideas strike me as equally relevant to 4e's Epic Destinies.TL;DR - projecting personal aesthetic responses can lead to unnecessary coflict. (Of course, some people want unnecessary conflict. This goes back to [MENTION=54877]Crazy Jerome[/MENTION]'s point about clearing away, or cultivating, the undergrowth.)</blockquote>

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