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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5638900" data-attributes="member: 42582">As far as I can tell you are trying to be conciliatory in your post(s). Unhappily, though, I read some of your posts as mischaracterising the way I play 4e D&D. What is for you mere "semantics" is for me a key question of adequacy of description.That's not particularly your problem, and there's no particular reason you should care. There's probably no reason why I should care either! But driven by some irrational impulse, I have this continuing desire to try and convey the way I play the game.For example, you say:the clarification that a mechanic could subjectively be viewed as simulationist if "a person in Actor/Author stance may feel mechanic X is metagame-y as read but fluffs it to make it feel simulationist in gameplay". I think that covers part of your concern above.What does this exactly mean - that when I read the mechanic in a rulebook, it strike me as a metagame mechanic, but when I play the game I do something to make it feel like it's not a metagame mechanic? I'm not even sure what that means. I may be wrong, but I don't think it's a notion that you've come up with based on actual play experience of someone doing such a thing.The best sense I can make of it is something like this:A mechanic is a metagame mechanic. Such a mechanic therefore does not bring all of its ingame consequences with it. So when it is used in play, the participants at the table supply the narration ("fluff") - constrained by whatever parameters the mechanic establishes - in order to determine what is happening in the gameworld.For you the difference between these two ways of putting things might be mere semantics. For me, it is the difference between saying something I can't understand (but suggests that narrativist players try to trick themselves, during the course of actual play, into thinking that they're playing sim) and something that I can understand, that reflects how I actually play the game, and is consistent with the generally accepted characterisations of non-simulationist play that I have quoted upthread (from Ron Edwards and Vincent Baker).Here is another post of yours, from upthread, that I responded to earlier:As I said earlier, I don't know, and so you don't know either, whether or not there is permanent Baleful Polymorph in my gameworld. What I do know is that the Raven Queen has the power to turn her paladins, who have been polymorphed into frogs, back into their own forms. I know this because one of my players narrated events in that way, and it went uncontested at the table. What permitted that narration to occur was that the rules mandated that, at a certain point, the polymorphed PC will revert to his/her own form. But the rules left it open why the polymorph comes to an end. The player supplied an ingame explanation.As far as I can tell, this is the sort of mechanic that The Alexandrian is describing as dissociated.As far as I can tell, this is the sort of mechanic that innerdude has been discussing, over the past 200 or so posts, as requiring "narrativist" interpretation which, for some participants at least, might "break the fourth wall".As far as I can tell, this is the sort of play - whether in the context of polymorph durations, or the movement of enemies when Come and Get It is used, or in narrating second wind, or in using a daily power like Trick Strike - that is what many of those who don't like 4e don't like about it.Namely, the mechanics don't bring with them, ready made and pre-determined, their ingame content/interpretation. That is what I mean, and what I think many others mean, when I say that they are not good mechanics for simulationist play.Using these mechanics does not involve "fluffing things to make them feel simulationist in gamelplay". The point of narration isn't to resolve some issue with the mechanics. It's to resolve some issue that arises from the fiction, and is compelling for the participants. The function of the mechanics is to set parameters on that. Not more. Not less.Here are the most relevant passages from <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/narr_essay.html" target="_blank">Edwards</a> and <a href="http://www.lumpley.com/hardcore.html" target="_blank">Baker</a>:RE: Fortune-in-the-Middle . . . preserves the desired image of player-characters specific to the moment. . . It retains the key role of constraint on in-game events. The dice (or whatever) are collaborators, acting as a springboard for what happens in tandem with the real-people statements. VB: My goal as a gamer . . . is to push both invention and meaning as much as possible into actual play.When the player of the paladin in my game said, in character, "Ah, but the Raven Queen turned me back" that was invention - world building, narration, establishing the content of the fiction, whatever exactly you want to call it - and meaning - faith, loyalty, hope, dependence, all the meaning that accompanies blind devotion - taking place during actual play.This isn't achieved by starting with metagame mechanics but then pretending, in play, that they're simuationist. Simulationist mechanics predetermine invention and meaning. That's why I don't use them.</blockquote>

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