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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5630149" data-attributes="member: 42582">Not on purpose.Here are the two relevant quotes, in full:What I see here is a discussion of "pure narrative" with "no mechanics" (what The Alexandrian calls "improv drama", which he then suggests links the tactical skirmishes of 4e).I also see a discussion of 100% dissociation in purely abstract games - these would be The Alexandrian boardgames.I don't know if you're meaning to press all the same buttons as Justin Alexaner et al in your post, but you've succeeded in doing so. Despite my many posts describing ACTUAL PLAY EXAMPLES of 4e's mechanics in action, being used to roleplay, you seem to me to be discussing pure theorycraft about improv drama and boardgames.You also refer to "your definition" of "dissociation". I'm not sure who the "your" is meant to denote - presumably not me, given that I have no definition of dissociation, as I regard it as a pseudo-notion.You then seem to agree with Crazy Jerome's description of 4e, which has been well-known since some time in 2008, and much discussed by both 4e enthusiasts and those who don't like 4e. Given that Crazy Jerome's description of 4e does not need, nor use, the notion of "dissociation", I think it is consistent with my view that "dissociation" is a pseudo-notion.If I've misundestood you, I apologise. I haven't misunderstood the essay. The only factual information that it contains is that Justin Alexander dislikes 4e because of the particular character of its metagame mechanics, but it dresses up this rather pedestrian fact in a pseudo-theory of "dissociative mechanics".The relevance of the anthropic principle - mentioned by wrecan - is this: that the only reason Justin Alexaner's pseudo-theory gets any traction is because there is an audience for it who have not, before 4e, experienced dislike of D&D because of its metagame mechanics. That is, his primary audience is those who can cope with, or even enjoy, D&D's existing, pre-4e metagame mechanics. Other potential readers of his essay, who don't like classic D&D's metagame mechanics, already stopped playing D&D between 20 and 30 years ago, and so they are generally not actual readers of his D&D blog.Hence the analogy to the anthropic principle - that the only investigators into the existence of a universe will discover that it is a universe capable of housing and sustaining those investigators, however improbable that may seem a priori.So, mutatis mutandis, with the essay - his primary audience are apt to discover that he accurately captures their experience of 4e, however non-universal this experience might be, just because they are an audience who is having their first taste of an edition of D&D with metagame mechanics that they are not accustomed to.For those who are genuinely unfamiliar with the range of RPGs that predate 4e and have very obviously influenced its design, and/or with the history of simulationist alternatives to D&D that flourished particularly in the 80s (like RQ, RM and C&S), I can certainly see that they might not notice how the essay trades on projecting a rather particular experience as a universal property of certain mechanics (namely, their tendency to induce "dissociation").If you in fact are agreeing with a range of other posters on this thread that the occurence of "dissociation" - ie the effect of a particular mechanic driving a wedge between player and PC (or perhaps the fiction more generally) - depends primarily on the experiences and expectations that a player brings to the table, rather than being inherent to particular mechanics, than I certainly did misunderstand you. For which I again apologise.But this is clearly not what the Alexandrian is saying. Upthread, Beginning of the End said that 4e's power mechanics, as metagame mechanics, are comparable to making moves in a board game. That is continuing the line that a tendency to cause "dissociation" is an inherent property of 4e's mechanics.OK.From my position, what I see in the Alexandrian's essay and in BoTE's posts is the same old stuff about 4e being a board game in which the pieces are given funky names, and being a series of tactical skirmishes linked by improv drama.Innerdude's posts are a bit more sympathetic than that, but several of his posts still have the same sort of lame imagined examples of play which are intended, apparently, to show that "This is the catch. Right here. This is the thing that can't be explained away." These posts frustrate me for two reasons. First, the imagined examples of play are not, as far as I can tell, drawn from any actual play experience by innerdude, nor even any serious attempt to think about how those who play 4e might go about doing it in a coherent fashion. Nor do they bear any resemblance to the actual play examples I've set out upthread.Second, this notion of "this is the catch, right here" is in its fundamentals no different from The Alexandrian's assumption that his aesthetic response isn't just a matter of taste, but is evidence of some objectively existing problem, to which players of 4e (to quote another poster upthread) have a "blind spot". The language of "trade-offs" tends to carry similar connotations. The overall vibe is as if those who play 4e are unable to comprehend what is going on in their own games, but once the light has been shone by those who APPEAR TO BE ENGAGING PURELY IN THEORYCRAFT then 4e players come under some sort of onus to concede that 4e really does have these problems, these inherent flaws, that those who play it have just been ignoring and working around.I'll finish by venturing another analogy: suppose I tried to prove that hit points are a "dissociated" mechanic by putting forward the following imagined example of play:Cleric: That dragon really took it out of you. It bit off both your arms, and a leg. Fighter: Yeah, luckily I was able to finish it off by holding my sword in my teeth and swinging it by twisting my neck! By the way, have you got any healing that can help me? Cleric: Yep, a couple of Cure Light Wound spells should grow that leg back. And I can memorise some more tomorrow. And even if I don't, your arms will regrow in a month or so anyway. Fighter: OK. Gee, imagine what it would be like to live in a world in which humans didn't regenerate like slow-motion trolls, and had no more strength in their necks and jaws than a monkey. We'd never be able to beat dragons in combat!No player of classic D&D, or 3E, should regard that tripe as saying anything relevant to the hit point issue, other than perhaps making it clear that loss of hit points - at least for PCs who are likely to recover those hit points in short order - should not be narrated as the severing of limbs.Whatever the issues with hit points - and in my view their are complexities - the problem is not primarily that they produce a stupid game. Rather, it's that in order to avoid a stupid game you have to (at least occasionally, perhaps often) think about how you're going to narrate them before you do so. Of course, that will have consequences - for example, no matter how many combats the typical PC fights it's pretty unlikely she'll be maimed unless a foe has a sword of sharpness. If one doesn't like this consequence - as I don't, in a game that otherwise tends towards simulationism - then one can play something else! But it would be foolish to think that this conclusion shows hit points to be, per se, an untenable mechanic, or even one which must tend towards introducing incoherence, or "dissociation", into the play of the game. For some, the plot protection element presumably helps them get into an otherwise simulationist game. And for yet others, like Doug McCrae upthread, they might just assimilate hit points to the simulation, treating them as supernatural toughness and using that to explain why no surviving PC ever gets maimed. (And it would obviously be absurd to say that those who like hit points as plot protection, or who like simulationist toughness hit points, have a "blind spot" towards realism. They just prefer something else.)In short, I think it's possible to explore the features of a game that one does or does not like without making claims about "the catch, right here" that those who play the game only cope with because they have a blind spot. This is what the "theory of dissociated mechanics" fails to do.</blockquote>

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