EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Very well said. This shows my issue well. Only certain, very selective versions of "this kind of choice/thinking is just too bizarre for a character to make/think," when a host of such decisions and thoughts has existed since D&D began. Hit points readily lead to highly unnatural thinking even if you treat them as "meat" points. E.g., "It's fine if I jump down this 100-foot cliff. Sure it will hurt, but I have 68 HP and falling damage is only 1d6 damage per 10 feet. I can't possibly take enough damage to die, and am very likely to take less than half my HP, so may as well just do it." Yet these choices are fine because HP are grandfathered in and aren't a discrete mechanical package. And while even many hardcore roleplayers will make such decisions, they'll rarely even notice how "dissociated" those choices are, because HP are like old leather, comfortable and familiar.It seems to me that if a player knows that their PC can never be surprised (Alertness), or as per what I've quoted can know how many hits from an ogre they can take without falling - bizarre sorts of knowledge that no one in the real world has about themselves - then a PC can also know that (eg) they can perform this particular bit of swordplay once per encounter.
Yet the whole "dissociation" argument is supposed to rest on the notion that that is too bizarre a piece of knowledge for a character to have.
I made a similar argument about the disconnect between attack rolls and damage rolls. If you roll them separately (as the majority of players do), then you have an unnatural disconnect between player choices and character choices, readily expressed in pure RP terms: you know that you hit long before you know that you dealt a telling blow or a glancing hit or whatever, meaning you cannot describe the action until you havemade a purely out of character action. Meanwhile if you roll both at once, you are determining the results of actions that, X% of the time, never actually happened--the player thus has chosen to act, and has acquired knowledge through that action, that the character could not possibly have, creating another "dissociation" between the mental/behavioral state of the character and that of the player.
I fear I no longer remember who said it, but some claimed that my assertion that magic gets an unfair pass on this stuff was incorrect. Can anyone give me a good example thereof? I have already argued that I don't see the necessity of "dissociation" between "I have X units of Y-level spellcasting left," and IIRC Crimson Longinus has said the same thing. Does anyone have any other examples they know of? I will of course critique them so this is a request to put one's head on the chopping block so to speak, but I would very sincerely value being proven wrong on this point. I would really rather there be as many metrics as possible where magic (especially spells in particular) and non-magic can meet in the middle. With "dissociation," it really does come across as merely a restatement of "realism for thee but not for me," just by way of forking "realism" into two parts, "association" and unspoken implicit assumptions of IRL intuition.
Wow. I had no idea that he had gone this far. So much for even the thin veneer of consistency. Even "dissociation" isn't bad (despite the fact that he explicitly rejected the inclusion of any "dissociated" mechanics for the at-the-table play of something purporting to be a roleplaying game). It's bad "dissociation" that is bad, becoming an outright No True Scotsman fallacy, just of a negative rather than positive character. ("No role-playing game would have 'dissociated' mechanics!" "But...you said you like Numenera?" "No role-playing game would have bad 'dissociated' mechanics!")An example of how the Alexandrian engages in special pleading in order to make exceptions for "dissociated mechanics" in games that he likes:
Justin's criteria claims here that it's okay "as long as those [dissociated] mechanics are providing a valuable function." This self-selectively overlooks what "valuable functions" such mechanics have in the games that he dislikes while making exceptions for them in games that he does like. In short, it's okay when Numenera has dissociated mechanics, but it's bad when 4e D&D has dissociated mechanics.
This is ultimately why I find his whole "dissociated mechanics" argument to be facile. It's a post hoc argument trying to address why he dislikes 4e, which he tries to make seem infallible through jargon. The problem is, however, that once you begin applying that jargon with consistency to other games, then one starts seeing "dissociated mechanics" everywhere, but instead of admitting that the original argument was flawed or re-addressing one's personal hang-ups with 4e D&D, it instead becomes about making exception after exception to preserve an argument increasingly filled with holes.
Or, to more directly address his particular claims: he's saying "dissociated" mechanics are fine, so long as they're...the player and the GM negotiating with one another. Giving the individual player the power to exercise these things on a small scale, however, is apparently absolutely verboten. Because the former is somehow okay and 100% playing a role, while the latter is somehow not okay and absolutely antithetical to playing a role. Because the former "serves a useful function," but the latter doesn't....according to him. It's just blatantly ad-hoc and "rules for thee but not for me."
Yeah, at this point, I'm afraid I can't take the "dissociated" mechanics argument even remotely seriously. Referencing it requires so much rejection of the way its creator actually used it, you (generic) may as well go for something else, you'll save yourself the bother.