Alzrius
The EN World kitten
What I find mind boggling is that people who claim to hate dissociatve mechanics will not wory about hitpoints which are completely dissociative. (part meat largely not)
That's because of the following (at least to me);
1) Hit points are not dissociative. Rather, hit point loss equals physical damage. Note that this is not the same thing as "hit points as meat," which sounds the same but introduces subtle errors into the idea (such as the idea that as you gain hit points, you somehow gain more physical mass). Moreover, there are two corollaries to this:
1a) An instance of hit point loss does not represent an absolute, in terms of the narrative wound dealt. Rather, the damage is scaled relative to the character's total hit points. So a blow that deals 8 hit points of damage to a commoner with 8 hit points is an instantly-lethal blow (e.g. being skewered through the heart), whereas a blow that deals 8 hit points of damage to a fighter with 80 hit points represents, say, a deep scratch along the forearm. This is not a dissociation; the metagame action is still tied to the narrative result (e.g. a wound is dealt when hit points are lost).
1b) The game doesn't try to model the physical deterioration that accompanies greater amounts of physical wounding as a gamist concession, rather than a simulationist failure. While D&D has the ability to model conditions of physical inability (e.g. taking penalties to attacking, conditions for fatigue, etc.), it deliberately chooses not to impose them on ordinary combat wounds in the name of keeping the game moving. This is also not a dissociation, as associated mechanics do not require fidelity to the real world. This brings us to...
2) Dissociated mechanics are only an issue when they limit the characters' ability to attempt to do something without an in-game rationale for it. Jon Peterson, in his book, said that the fundamental nature of what makes RPGs different from other games is that "anything can be attempted." Dissociated mechanics are only problematic when they interfere with that core concept of an RPG - if you want to undertake an action, such as throwing sand in your enemy's eyes, and the game's only rationale for disallowing this is because of a metagame construct that says you can only do this once per "encounter," then the dissociation has become problematic.
A dissociated mechanic in an area of the game that isn't tied to a character attempting an action is far less problematic, because it doesn't interfere with the immersive nature of role-playing a character.