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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tomBitonti" data-source="post: 5636110" data-attributes="member: 13107">A Finer Review of "Disassociated"An idea that I'm noticing from this ongoing thread is that "Disassociated" has several applications, and it has a different "feel" depending on the application.A second idea is that the notion of "Disassociated" depends a lot on what associations the player is trying to make.To very briefly online the first idea, one notion is a disassociation of a player ability from an explanation of how, for a single occurrence, the ability works.  A second notion is a disassociation based on the frequency with which an ability can be used.For an example of the first idea, "Come and get it" is frequently used as an example.  Models which explain this ability when it is used against several different types of foes, say, a swarm, a golem, a mindless undead such as a zombie, or a barbarian.  Folks, including myself, have had problems with the explanation.  For zombies, you could imagine the fighter slashing his arm to put the scent of blood in the air, or against a trio of golems guarding a doorway, making lunges at the doorway to draw their attention.Another example of the first idea is based on the question of who can try the ability.  If a fighter can draw zombies with a splash of blood, why couldn't anyone?A third example of the first idea is any daily ability which is not resource (think ammunition) based.As to the second idea, I have seen occasional wording which finds that game rules which don't, even abstractly, have any sensible correspondence to real physics, or real psychology, to be "disassociated".  In this regards, there seems to be a different underlying model against which the player is attempting to form an  association.  For example, folks new to role playing, or at least to D&D, find hit points to be a lousy model of health and damage.  On the other hand, some folks (myself included) are used to the 3E nomenclature, and keep trying to map 4E abilities to the 3E underlying model (as expressed by the keywords), and failing that, find 4E to be disassociative.  Other folks find various rules subsets to be disassociated to one degree or another, based on their actual experience, say, in fencing, or experiencing actual live fire.  As an example, based on the discussions regarding 200 falls, I found through research that, very roughly, a 50 fall has a 50% mortality rate, and a fall of between 70 and 90 feet has a 90% mortality rate.  I found also that even relatively short 10' falls can be lethal, depending on the surface and the area of incidence.That is to say, what two different people think of as "disassociated" will be influenced, strongly, by their notion of "reasonable" game physics.Anyways,TomBitonti</blockquote>

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