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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5638953" data-attributes="member: 42582">The issue for me is that, unless I've badly misunderstood, they're two parallel opinions about what is happening in my game.  I don't for a second think that you care how I play my game. My concern is that, as far as I can tell, you don't really understand how I play my game. And so are misdescribing it.I may be wrong about this, but what makes me reach this belief is that you keep posting characterisation of 4e play, of "dissociation", of metagame mechanics, etc, that don't resemble my own experiences of play. And are at odds with the actual play I have described in this thread.For me, to borrow your ice cream analogy, it's as if I'm sitting here happily gobbling down my vanilla and you pass by and say "Hey, don't mind me, keep eating your chocolate!" I don't get the impression that you want to police me. I do get the impression that you've misunderstood what I'm doing. If I'm eating vanilla, and you're telling me I'm eating chocolate, to me that is more than semantics. It's inadequate, mistaken description. OK, this is where I quite strongly disagree. And this is where I'm trying to work out whether you're basing your descriptions of what is going on your own play experience, or on theory, or as an attempt to interpret how others have described their play experience, or . . . ?It is true that author stance (as opposed to pawn stance) involves retroactively imputing a motivation - ie cauastion - to the PC. It is equally true that director stance (which may be in play when a power like Come and Get It is used, or when a saving throw is made in AD&D and this is explained as the fates intervening at the last moment to protect the PC) involves imputing causation into the gameworld.But there is no simulationism here. The mechanic does not suddenly become simulationist. It was a metagame mechanic. It permitted, or perhaps mandated, some narration. The narration took place. The narration established some ingame causal connections. Nothing in the mechanic corresponds to, or models, those ingame causal connections. So we have a mechanic, that is metagame. We have some narration, that is coherent, consistent, genre-preserving, verisimilitudinous, etc. But we don't have any simulation. I'm not sure what subjective expectations you're referring to. The difference that I see is that you are asserting that some simulation takes place, whereas I am denying that.You may regard this as mere semantics, but I don't think that it is. It is a fundamental difference in how RPGing can be approached, that Vincent Baker refers to in the quotes I've posted upthread. Of course Baker is describing matters from his side of the divide in approaches - BryonD upthread describes the view from the other side. The issue is this: is the content of the gameworld, the way it works, the way events will unfold, etc determined PRIOR TO PLAY, by the logic of the mechanics, or determined IN PLAY, by the narrative choices of the participants (using the mechanics to establish constraints)?If you play the first way, then the ingame duration of Baleful Polymorph is determined in advance by the mechanics (eg as per AD&D and 3E, this might be "until dispelled"). And any divine intervention to shorten that duration has to be determined according to the divine intervention mechanics, which take into account considerations like piety, frequency of previous calls for intervention, etc, etc (it's a while since I've read that part of the AD&D DMG).If you play the second way, then the mechanics might tell you that, after a round, the target of Baleful Polymorph returns to his/her original form. But why that happened in the gameworld is left as something to be worked out by the participants in the game as part of playing the game. If they want to tell a story about divine intervention, they can. If they want to tell a story about an apprenctice magician with the barest of control over his magic, they can. If they decide that, in this gameworld, Baleful Polymorph is per se a very short transformation, they can go that way instead. The mechanics don't, on their own, answer the question.These are very big differences in playstyle. They're not just differences in subjective experience. If you sit down to play at the second sort of table (playing, say, HeroWars/Quest) and all your experience has been at the first sort of table (playing, say, Runequest) then you'll find it hard to work out what's going on. Hard to play the game. And vice versa. There are objectively different things going on at these tables. And in my view this is obscured rather than illuminated by saying that the second table is really simulationist too. Yes, the people at the second table have a coherent story going on - they're roleplayers, not boardgamers, and they try to avoid contradiction in their narration. But the mechanics they use aren't simulating anything.(4e is not as metagamey as HeroWars/Quest. 3E and AD&D are obviously not as simulationist as Runequest. At some of these tables, then, the contrast may not be so markd. But if the 3E player is feeling "dissociated" by 4e, then I think that is sufficient to mark some relevant degree of difference.)This, right here, is why I get the impression that you don't understand non-simulationist play. Your description of this mechanic, and its implications for gameplay, runs together metagame and gameworld in a way that only makes sense if simulationism is assumed.It's true that the mechanics required that, in the fiction, the paladin turn back from a frog to himself, but this is not a fact about the gameworld. It is a fact about the gameplay - ie the rules required that, as from this point in the course of play, everyone at the table must agree that, in the fiction, the paladin is no longer a frog.But why that should be so, in the fiction, is up for grabs. As far as anyone in the gameworld is concerned, the polymorph would have continued but for the divine intervention. As far as the gameworld is concerned, it is just not true that the polymorph spell would have ended anyway.Well, for me the core issue is the one I keep coming back to with the polymorph example. You consistently say "The spell would have ended anyway". But this is a statement only about the mechanics, namely, that they mandate a narration of the paladin as having retransformed. The further inference that you make, from the mechanics to the gameworld - that in the gameworld he would have turned back anyway - is sound only if a simulationist reading of the mechanics is taken for granted. My table didn't read the mechanic in that way. So it's simply not true that, absent the divine intervention, the paladin would have turned back. (It's true that, absent a narration about divine intervention, some other story would have been told about why the paladin turned back. But this isn't a truth within the fiction. This is a truth about how me and my friends in the real world would have played the game.)This is exactly what it means to use the mechanics to set parameters on the narration of what is happening in the gameworld, rather than to treat them as a model of what is happening in the gameworld. The other stuff - about invention and meaning happening in play rather than before play - is the reason why I like using metagame rather than simulationist mechanics.</blockquote>

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