D&D 5E Realism and Simulationism in 5e: Is D&D Supposed to be Realistic?

[Thomas Shey]

I mean, "hit points" in themselves aren't dissociated. Definitely a lot of people who don't understand the difference between "abstraction" and "dissociation," though, and Alexander didn't always make the distinction as clear as it could have been.

I'm not sure that when an abstraction gets far enough away from what its representing, and even what its representing gets vague enough, that there's as much difference there as you're suggesting.

 

[Greg Benage]

I'm not sure that when an abstraction gets far enough away from what its representing, and even what its representing gets vague enough, that there's as much difference there as you're suggesting.

Yeah, you’re not tracking.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah, you’re not tracking.

What I'm saying is that a sufficient level of abstraction--especially when its vague enough about what it represents--is dissonant for many people, because it makes it harder for them to connect with what's going on.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

You can roll "effect dice" (e.g. damage) with the "action dice" (e.g. attack) to associate the player action with the character action. RAW 5e still leaves dissociated critical hit damage, so you might want to use max damage instead of doubled damage dice.

Lingering gap: why roll damage if none might be dealt? By fixing the time gap between action and result, you must introduce spurious effects whenever an action fails but effects were still rolled. Both present mechanical choices or actions unrelated to anything the character could see, do, or know.

Also, guess which edition used this (by your arguments) less "dissociated" form of critical damage? 4e. Not 5e, which (AFAIK) the Alexandrian has never decried for "dissociation." Hence: the standard is capricious and unfair.

(Technically 4e also adds more bonus dice on top, but because the static portion of damage was always fairly substantial, critical hits are basically always pretty meaty. There's little need for waiting or pre-rolling. Those dice also come from having a magic weapon or implement, so one could argue that the blanket exception for magic automatically excuses any "dissociation" that might occur, though I have already said how much that blanket exception bothers me.)

In practice, I think most players have so internalized damage rolls that they don't even notice the dissociation.

That's what I said. Familiarity and tradition excuse even serious "dissociation," while unfamiliarity and novelty invite thorough vetting for even trace amounts of it. D&D has used "dissociated" mechanics from birth; this only became a problem when people wanted to reify their dislike of an edition (4e) as an objective fault of its game design. If one can say that "dissociation" is sometimes okay (since it's been grandfathered in), that its use as an evaluative standard is personal and about taste rather than design, and that at its very core the concept carries an inherent pro-caster bias, then one has admitted to basically everything I've claimed. Doing so makes arguments on the basis of "dissociated" mechanics very weak though, which is why most fans of the concept will not do so.

I mean, "hit points" in themselves aren't dissociated. Definitely a lot of people who don't understand the difference between "abstraction" and "dissociation," though, and Alexander didn't always make the distinction as clear as it could have been.

Okay. What's the "association" for the 5e Fighter's Second Wind, which you can only do a finite number of times before resting? Or the "association" between choosing to rest and regaining all your HP, which you can only do once every so many hours? These things are hard coded into what HP are, but separate "how the mechanic works/resolves" from "what characters could know or do or choose."

How about hit dice? IIRC, the Alexandrian made clear that stuff like Second Wind (the 4e action) made healing surges "dissociated," yet hit dice, inextricable from 5e HP, necessarily work the same way in this specific sense (they're a finite pool of restoration which can only be spent in discrete chunks but which the character in principle does not know exist and would not be thinking "I should spend two of my five fnords right now.")

 

[Mordhau]

I don't think Dissociated mechanics is a completely useless term, but it's not a terribly precise one either.

I also think over the years a lot of people have got caught up in arguing about hit points as if it matters. As already stated they're so abstract that the distinction falls apart. In any case, if would seem to me that you would hardly need to be against dissaccoiated mechanics in total. You could just argue that you don't like too many of these kinds of mechanics. It's another thing that doesn't need to be a binary.

I also find it hard to argue that 5e isn't absolutely chock full of disassociated mechanics. Including, ironically enough, the basic spell slot system these days.

Withou giving it a lot of thought I wonder if the distinction would be clearer considering it as modelling process vs modelling results. 3E went to a lot of effort to model the process of trying trip someone, whereas 4e just connected trips to encounter powers and modelled the result - sometimes people get tripped.

You can see the distinction more historically. Compare Iron Heroes from the 3.5 era to 4E martial characters. Mike Mearls worked on both, but you can see in the former the class design ties itself into knots trying to model things that 4e didn't bother with. Even the basic currency in Iron Heroes works very hard to link specifically back into actions in the fiction eg the Archer gains tokens to spend on actions by aiming and he has to use the tokens on the same target he aimed at. I think nowadays most designers would realise that's more trouble than it's worth. But Iron Heroes hadn't yet made the break from the 3.5 paradigm of modelling martial characters that 4e would.

 

[Greg Benage]

Hence: the standard is capricious and unfair.

I don't..."unfair" to whom or what? You seem to think I don't think there are dissociated mechanics in 5e. There are. You seem to think I'm arguing something, anything, about 4e. I'm not. I understand this issue figured in the edition wars to some extent, but I skipped that whole thing. I probably can't sufficiently express how little I care about any of it.

I do care, somewhat, about dissociated mechanics. My preference is to avoid them. It's just that -- a preference -- and can range from mild (e.g. battle master superiority dice) to extreme (e.g. spend a poker chip to establish the NPC we just met is my long-lost mentor).

None of it has anything to do with abstraction.

 

[pemerton]

If it is is enough to vitiate realism that a RPG includes so-called "dissociated", or more aptly labelled "fortune in the middle" mechanics (ie dice roll mechanics that affect the state of the game prior to being correlated in any determinate way with events in the fiction) and/or "metagame mechanics" (ie mechanics that are deployed directly by the player without reflecting something done by their PC), then D&D falls at the first hurdle! As Gygax realised, given his discussions of action economy, hit points and saving throws in his DMG.

5e has all the ones Gygax discussed plus a whole lot more: spell slots as @Mordhau mentioned; abilities like Indomitable (clearly it is the player who chooses to spend the ability, not the PC); and basically whole suites of limited-use martial abilities that don't represent the expenditure by the PC of discrete bundles of power.

Personally I tend to think of realism as a characteristic of the fiction, rather than the gameplay process whereby the fiction is created. For instance, hit points are (in my view) more realistic when understood through a luck-and-skill-and-will-to-struggle-on lens (which makes them a fortune-in-the-middle mechanic) than when understood through a "meat" lens. The latter sort of fiction isn't realistic at all; in my view it quickly becomes absurd.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't..."unfair" to whom or what? You seem to think I don't think there are dissociated mechanics in 5e. There are. You seem to think I'm arguing something, anything, about 4e. I'm not. I understand this issue figured in the edition wars to some extent, but I skipped that whole thing. I probably can't sufficiently express how little I care about any of it.

The "dissociated" mechanics concept was specifically invented in order to criticize 4e for being bad at doing what D&D does. You may not have had a horse in that race, but that is (openly and explicitly) why the Alexandrian came up with the concept. By using it, you carry forward its history. If you have read his essays on the topic enough to articulate that others all too often get the concept wrong, then you already know that he specifically and explicitly used it to separate 4e from prior editions and did not do so with 5e. You have very clearly claimed to have read those essays, if you are claiming to know the correct meaning of the term better than others who use it.

Using one of the main weapons of the 4e edition war, explicitly constructed for the purpose of that war, carries that purpose forward. Especially if you don't actually specify that you know its history but reject those aspects of it, and doubly so if you repeatedly specify that others often use the term wrong by saying you know what the Alexandrian said and meant.

As for the unfairness, that is specifically to martial characters. I already said this. Magic gets a BS blanket exception because it isn't even remotely real, so it can work however it works and not be "dissociated" even in principle, while non-magical things are beset by such problems (and, of course, always made weaker and less capable if one removes the "dissociation.") The entire "dissociated" mechanics argument is inherently biased against non-magical characters.

I do care, somewhat, about dissociated mechanics. My preference is to avoid them. It's just that -- a preference -- and can range from mild (e.g. battle master superiority dice) to extreme (e.g. spend a poker chip to establish the NPC we just met is my long-lost mentor).

None of it has anything to do with abstraction.

I mean, it still does. Abstraction is one of the elements of "dissociation," by necessity: as defined in the source, it's mechanics that are abstracted away from the (fictional) situation at the level of character knowledge, choice, or action. As I have argued, "dissociation/association" is an incoherent term that picks and chooses only certain aspects of abstraction, diegesis, and "realism"/verisimilitude/etc., in order to say "X mechanic bothers me" but with a veneer of objectivity.

Again, if you (or anyone) admits that (1) these mechanics exist in essentially every version of D&D, (2) "dissociation" arguments unfairly target non-magical characters over magical ones, and (3) any use of "dissociation" as an evaluative metric is analogous to "I don't like steak because I don't like the taste of red meat" and not at all analogous to "I don't like this steak because it was improperly cooked," then there is no problem. But there is also basically nothing to discuss, because those admissions mean granting that (1) "dissociated" mechanics are quite acceptable in many contexts (thus invalidating its use as a disqualification), (3) only a personal prerogative (thus making no effort at objectivity, weakening or eliminating its use as an analysis tool), and (2) inherently geared toward a specific and controversial gameplay issue, caster supremacy (thus abandoning any pretense of neutrality in its use, as it has a clear design bias baked in). In evading the three layers I mentioned earlier, you have effectively neutered your ability to meaningfully discuss the topic beyond an expression of personal taste, and such expressions do not get us very far.

 

[Greg Benage]

Again, if you (or anyone) admits that these mechanics exist in essentially every version of D&D, that "dissociation" arguments unfairly target non-magical characters over magical ones, and that any use of "dissociation" as an evaluative metric is analogous to "I don't like steak because I don't like the taste of red meat" and not at all analogous to "I don't like this steak because it was improperly cooked," then there is no problem. But there is also basically nothing to discuss, because those admissions mean granting that "dissociated" mechanics are quite acceptable in many contexts (thus invalidating its use as a disqualification), only a personal prerogative (thus making no effort at objectivity, weakening or eliminating its use as an analysis tool), and inherently geared toward a specific and controversial gameplay issue, caster supremacy (thus abandoning any pretense of neutrality in its use, as it has a clear design bias baked in).

1. I think everyone (including Justin) "admits" that every version of D&D has had dissociated mechanics.
2. I don't think the distinction "unfairly targets non-magical characters." I prefer non-magical characters and also prefer associated mechanics for them.
3. My preference for associated mechanics is a preference. Justin allows that it's a preference and states explicitly that players can have a variety of good reasons for enjoying dissociated mechanics.
4. I think it's very useful as an "analysis tool" despite being a preference. I don't know what you mean by "objectivity" in this context or why it would be important.

It's not that complicated. When I play RPGs, I enjoy being immersed in my character's PoV. I'm not all woo-woo about it, but I enjoy immersion. Mechanics that map what I'm doing as a player to what my character is thinking/doing/experiencing "in the fiction" (to borrow a phrase) are a better fit for how I like to play than mechanics that require me to engage with the game in a way that doesn't map to my character.

By contrast, I can enjoy highly abstracted mechanics just fine, because none of this has anything to do with abstraction.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Dissociated mechanics has nothing to do with realism/verisimilitude, the topic of this thread.

That aside, I like dissociated mechanics. They provide fodder for roleplaying. Instead of thinking of it as the player and the character doing different things, I think of it as the player and the character having different explanations for it.

Why can't the Fighter use Action Surge every round?

Player: "Because the rules say I can only use it once per short rest."
Character: "I dunno. Something about seeing him attack my buddy just made me see red that time. Wish I could bottle that feeling and take it whenever I wanted to."