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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 6374920" data-attributes="member: 177">I'm not trying to be aggressive here, but I think I'm about to spend a lot of verbiage telling you you're wrong about some things.  I admit that I don't actually know what's going on in your head - I recognize that I'm speaking based on some deductions that may be inaccurate - so for all that I apologize. The Forge gave us a few nice things - some language for stuff, for example.  It also has some unfortunate legacies - like taking theory over practical application.  I have a friend who doesn't like cheese.  It isn't that he's vegan.  It isn't that he is lactose intolerant, or allergic.  It is not a matter of health or principle, just a matter of taste, which is fine.  But then, when we're doing a game-night dinner, and he doesn't hear the ingredients list, he gleefully eats three helpings of a casserole that's got lots of cheese in it.  We have to wonder if he's letting his preconception get in the way of judging the final product.Let us consider dissociative mechanics.  A dissociative mechanic is one in which the player has to make considerations that the character could not - since within the fiction the character doesn't have "fate points", the mechanic is dissociative and metagaming.  That's the theory.  But, qualifying the mechanic as dissociative and metagaming, however, actually misses the base issue.  The base idea is to keep the player immersed and/or thinking as their character would think.  But, that should *not* be evaluated on a mechanic-by-mechanic basis!  That should be evaluated on an overall game experience basis!  Discarding the mechanic alone, without considering its action in the context of actual play, means you easily miss the forest for the trees.  By thinking only of the mechanic itself, you miss any synergy created with the rest of the system.The real question is - in the context of play, does the mechanic cause the player to dissociate themselves from their character?  No, at least, not in my experience.  The most immersive tabletop experience I had of late was playing a FATE game at a house con.  My wife, who generally wants nothing to do with mechanics for just the reasons that make most folks want to avoid supposedly dissociative mechanics, loves FATE because it allows her to more deeply concern herself with who and what her character is than most games.Not that FATE is a perfect system, by any means.  But forcing dissociation between a player and character isn't one of its major flaws.Now, after all that, I have to mention - in my personal opinion, your desire to see only Actor stance in the players should be written by hand in neat cursive writing a hundred times, put into a large ashtray, and burned.  You are a GM, not the thought police.  While it is okay to ask them to not, like, read the monster manual and use that information in game, the players get to make decisions for *their* reasons, not yours, and the GM doesn't get to dictate the player's approach to play.</blockquote>

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