Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7645987" data-attributes="member: 4937">Certainly not intentionally or consciously.  I don't particularly like dissociated mechanics either, but that wasn't the main thrust of my thinking.  To get the main thrust of my thinking, rather than harkening back to some other discussion, consider the statement that I was responding to in the context of this discussion about the play processes around attempts to persuade.  Note that I advanced the theory that much of the problems could be solved by close consideration to the factors involved that made persuasion difficult, things such as the character of the NPC.   The statement that I'm responding to said in effect, "No, we learn the character of the NPC from the result of the mechanics without respect to preexisting fiction.  Fiction isn't the input to the process but the output."  Consider then exactly what you are defending or trying to refute, particularly with respect to the real game examples the OP provided.Well, that's a real tangent to the conversation, and I can't really speak to the argument you're having with whomever you are having with it, but for my part I would say that the Flashback mechanic and the "Mastermind" feat that I have in my own game are not dissociated mechanics at all and so your whole line of argument misses the point.   Despite the fact that both allow the person to make statements about the past in the middle of play, both have a number of restrictions on the them that are designed to tightly associate them to the fiction by allowing actions that could only be plausibly explained by actions that could have occurred in the fiction.  Moreover, the issue of dissociated mechanics is not strongly related in my opinion to the problem of a player making statements about the past or making statements about anything other than the actions of his character.  We could neatly define player statements into four groups - dissociated/not dissociated, choice of character ("propositions")/force over the fiction ("calls") - and things would fall into all four categories.   I don't know what conversations you had in the past, but in terms of the sort of statements I refer to as "calls" my biggest problem with them is when they aren't mechanically regulated by the system, and that's solely because I think that fiat power in the hands of a player rather than a referee is antithetical to most of the aesthetics of a game which are generally defined by the limited resources available to the player.   I don't think they are more or less likely to be dissociated than a proposition.  For that matter, I haven't really decided whether a "Flashback" is a call or a proposition.   I'm leaning toward thinking that it is a proposition, and the only difference about it is that it is retroactive - the player makes a proposition about something that the player could have done in the past "off camera".   So really it's just a sort of associated proposition.  Why would I have a problem with them provided the game regulated and limited their usage?   As you said, they could fit happily into game of D&D, and for that matter they date as far back in D&D in some forms to the 1980's.  Kenders had a "Flashback" ability related to their kleptomaniac acquisition of items, that allowed them to assert that they had off camera acquired something in the past useful to the present situation.It's not that your post its impenetrable so much as I still have no idea what the motivations were for it, except that I disagree that "Flashbacks" actually are outside of continuity relationships.  You aren't allowed to make a Flashback that breaks continuity, despite the fact that it is "backdated" action.</blockquote>

Verification