"Stumbling Around in My Head" - The Feeling of Dissociation as a Player

[Tequila Sunrise]

Take your own advice.

I've tried to be very patient and very explicit in stating that "only the last few hit points count" was a workable explanation of the rules (albeit not the explanation supported by most editions of the game). It makes me a little sad that the people subscribing to that position in this thread are apparently incapable of extending the same live-and-let-live courtesy, apparently out of their desire to fight an edition war by proxy.

Nice red herring, but I'm not warring here. You outright lied about the official 3e explanation of hit points, and I corrected you with a direct quote. You try to back your lie up with a self-reference, and I...

 

[Libramarian]

@Libramarian : Yeah, I've read your reasonably long-winded essays. But to summarize an awful lot of text, you could simply say essential difference between simulationism and narrativism is that simulationism says "Here is a world. Live in it" and narrativism says "Here is your story. Tell it." (Gamism is, of course "Here is a game. Play it.")

Focusing on the sorts of stories that the players want to play is the core concept of narrativism. Is simulationism completely incapable of this? For 1 player? No. For 5 players? Unless they all share very common interests, generally, yes.

Using your form, Narrativism is "Here is an audience and a premise, create a story." Gamism is like "here is an audience and a game, win it." The audience (the other players around the table) part is important.

Simulationism is "here is a world or a genre, live in it". GNS considers genre emulation to be simulationism. It says sticking close to a checklist of genre tropes is more akin to simulating physical or historical reality than story creation. Some people have problems with this but I am on board with this, at least theoretically.

Anyway my point about 4e is, while I know at least pemerton finds 4e's scene focus and skill challenge mechanics useful for narrativist play, I find it misleading and frankly kind of pretentious when people try to argue that something like Come and Get It is useful for narrativist play. The idea between CAGI and related dissociated mechanics is the 4e designers chose to "brute force" class balance by homogenizing (and nerfing) the player-directed mechanics. It's about balance, which is generally a gamist technique.

There is no necessary connection between a dissociated mechanic and narrativism. Dissociated mechanics can support gamism, narrativism or simulationism, or they can be pointless and not support any creative agenda.

I certainly don't think dissociated mechanics are necessarily bad. I think they should be used more carefully than they are in 4th edition.

 

[prosfilaes]

But personally, I think it makes the world of D&D something different from how it is generally presented and played.

I disagree; in fact, I think it makes it match how it is played. D&D has a deep tactical war aspect, and when that mode switches on, characters act like something is potentially fatal if and only if it is in fact potentially fatal in the player's estimation. If the characters lived in a world where one arrow could potentially fell them, they wouldn't be so quick to charge archers.

 

[pemerton]

I disagree; in fact, I think it makes it match how it is played.

We may be at cross-purposes - when I talked about how "the D&D world is generally played" I wan't meaning the way the players play their PCs in combat. I was meaning the way the background fiction is generally presented in rulebooks, setting books, etc, and the way that stuff is generally brought out in play.

For example, if hit points are really divinely-infused toughness, why don't they go away in an antimagic field, like other SU and SP abilities? Or, if they are innate physical toughness, then why don't you get them when you shapechange, like other EX abilities?

The way hit points are treated in the fiction suggests that they are not part of the fiction at all, either as divine favour or "meat". The way they are treated in the fiction suggests that they are metagame plot protection.

 

[Neonchameleon]

You want to claim, as Neonchameleon does in a later post, that 1E exclusively endorses this interpretation? You're simply wrong. (In point of fact, the 1E DMG is explicit in stating that any attack which inflicts hit point damage is a physical wound.)
...
That'll be my last word on hit points in this thread.

Take your own advice.

I've tried to be very patient and very explicit in stating that "only the last few hit points count" was a workable explanation of the rules (albeit not the explanation supported by most editions of the game). It makes me a little sad that the people subscribing to that position in this thread are apparently incapable of extending the same live-and-let-live courtesy, apparently out of their desire to fight an edition war by proxy.

Not the way I read it. You seem to have been claiming that reading the rules as written in 1e was directly wrong. And by citing your link first you are excluding a wide swathe of D&D rules and second you seem to be saying "Justin Alexander's interpretation overrides the actual rules as written".

Fallacy the first falls apart when you take into account that the goblin scored three critical hits in those ten attacks. So the goblin scored a critical hit that didn't do more than a trivial flesh wound. In what possible universe can that be described as a critical hit? Fallacy the first therefore does not work with 3.X or any other system where critical hits merely do hit point damage.

Fallacy the second might be a fallacy because it doesn't fit with D&D rules. But how often is someone actually hit in the Errol Flynn swashbuckling hit points were meant to replicate? This merely underlines that hit points don't quite do the job intended.

As for your so-called beautiful abstraction, I find this no more beautiful than the 4e dying rules. It's a kludge intended to reflect one part of the game rules in the real world. It mostly says "we can't say what a hit point really means". The whole thing's a slightly incoherent kludge that works until you examine it closely, but any interpretation I've ever seen falls apart with a common condition. In AD&D it's swashbuckling (for that matter the same goes for 3e). In 3e it's critical hits. In 4e where the game embraces the action movie physics that hit points produce, it's dying. And this is the most fixable one of all.

Gygax's description of what two high level swashbucklers hacking away at each other's hp pool actually represents, is different from how it actually feels in play. Gygax says I'm supposed to think "Errol Flynn battling the Sheriff of Nottingham", but in play it actually feels more like "Boorman's Death of Uther".
I just raise this point because the lameness of that 3e duel has stuck with me for 9 years, whereas in my Friday AD&D game I just had the exact opposite experience, but it was only possible in AD&D because both duelists were in platemail. And this difference in impression... impressed me.

Indeed. The problem with hit points is that they don't feel right for the impression they are trying to give. They are a metagame mechanic that will fall over in one direction or another if you investigate them too hard. It feels wrong to treat hit points in the 1e way for a swashbuckling duel - they are, after all, called "Hit points". Gygax wrote at length in 1e about why treating them as meat is unsatisfactory. Although it's probably more satisfactory than treating them in the way Gygax intended. With a rename, the 4e cinematic hit point/stun and healing surge/endurance mechanic would work well - but the dying rules are a mess. Hit points have always been a problem for D&D because they are an almost pure metagame and pacing mechanic people try to throw simulationist justifications around.

 

[GreyICE]

Using your form, Narrativism is "Here is an audience and a premise, create a story." Gamism is like "here is an audience and a game, win it." The audience (the other players around the table) part is important.

Simulationism is "here is a world or a genre, live in it". GNS considers genre emulation to be simulationism. It says sticking close to a checklist of genre tropes is more akin to simulating physical or historical reality than story creation. Some people have problems with this but I am on board with this, at least theoretically.

Anyway my point about 4e is, while I know at least pemerton finds 4e's scene focus and skill challenge mechanics useful for narrativist play, I find it misleading and frankly kind of pretentious when people try to argue that something like Come and Get It is useful for narrativist play. The idea between CAGI and related dissociated mechanics is the 4e designers chose to "brute force" class balance by homogenizing (and nerfing) the player-directed mechanics. It's about balance, which is generally a gamist technique.

There is no necessary connection between a dissociated mechanic and narrativism. Dissociated mechanics can support gamism, narrativism or simulationism, or they can be pointless and not support any creative agenda.

I certainly don't think dissociated mechanics are necessarily bad. I think they should be used more carefully than they are in 4th edition.

You managed to rephrase what I said into something longer and somewhat less accurate, but which uses more irritating words. That'd be exactly what's wrong with those terrible essays, yes (a world already IMPLIES a genre man, you don't need to separate the two, and gamists enjoy playing games more than they enjoy winning them (a hard fought game that is quality and lost is more fun than an easy game and an easy victory).

As for Come and Get it, no. It's no more based in narrativism than "Improved Trip" is simulationist. D&D has always had strong gamist elements. I mean 1E is almost pure gamism in many respects. It's a fun ability that is fun to use and fun to narrate - and also the whipping boy for far too many things. If you can't handle a fighter luring a group of enemies in close and then punishing them for their mistake, you probably have an issue with a TON of genre fiction. Because warriors luring a bunch of people in and then going nuts is pretty much a staple (watch goddamn Buffy the Vampire slayer and you'll see Buffy Summers do exactly that many times - ye gods this is not hard to find examples of). So it's a fun gameplay element that also mimics a lot of fiction and was drawn from it (look at the name itself and you can see that).

And that's where your entire argument, to me, runs off the rails. Come and Get it is fun to narrate! It's fun to use from a gamist perspective. The simulationist is left out in the cold, I suppose, but oh well, can't please anyone.

Now look at trip mechanics. From a narrative perspective, they are the most boring things in the universe - exactly how the trip mechanic works is defined heavily by the rules manual (compare to the very loose ways that 4E gives for being 'knocked prone' which are much more open to interesting narratives). From a gamist perspective, well, they're powerful. And hellishly boring. Trip someone, pin them down, make lots of attacks. Fail your trip attempts - or find something that's hard to trip - Oozes can be tripped (and in fact get no modifiers to preventing it, so pretty easily), so not as much as you'd think - and go back to full BAB spam. It's a game where you have two cards and you always know which one you'll play. And from a simulationist perspective?

Oozes can be tripped. So your simulation fails dramatically.


But somehow the issue of how fun mechanics are at the tabletop gets lost in all this back and forth. Here's the issue - Buffy jumping up on a tabletop, whistling to get the attention of a room full of vampires, and going "hey boys, I'm up here" is good old fashioned fun. Sir Tripsalot tripping the zombie, followed by Sir Tripsalot tripping the Ooze followed by Sir Tripsalot tripping the dragon is good old fashioned BORING. Maybe if your "beautiful example" of non-dissociative mechanics didn't make me want to fall asleep during gaming sessions I'd be a tad less skeptical about your creative direction.

P.S. Can you please find another power other than Come and Get It? Because it's one power in the entire book. I mean why do we even need to defend it? You can't defend the 3.5E drowning rules, they perfectly, in completely clear plaintext, allow drowning to heal somebody. Every system on the PLANET will have a few things that make zero sense (and at least Come and Get It is a fun sort of zero sense in a lot of situations). Go find a few more examples, plox.

 

[Umbran]

And if anything, the failure of 4E seals the argument on whether 4E was a legitimate D&D ...

Ladies and gents, a moment of your time...

It is all well and good to not like a game. it is all well and good to say you don't like a game. But trying to call a game objectively "illegitimate" is edition warring, in our book.

This thread is not about 4e. It is about how to design a game. 4e is merely one example. Turning this into Edition War territory will not be tolerated. Any further edition warring in this thread, by either side, is apt to result in summary eviction from EN World for several days, without further warning.

Questions? Take them to e-mail or PM with the moderator of your choice. Thanks for your time and attention.

 

[Mallus]

The question I keep coming back to re: dissociated mechanics --I'm trying to be constructive so I left out the scare quotes-- is this:

What's the value of association?

I think back to a 3.5e PC I ran for a year or so, Rashid. He was a reach-weapon melee character built to use (abuse?) the tripping rules. There wre no metagame-y restrictions on how often he could attempt to trip a foe, the rules took into account sim-y things like size and weapon type, the decision to trip a foe directly mapped onto his, etc.

But playing him in combat felt like playing a video game; specifically Soul Calibur --a Japanese 3D fighting game-- spamming a Seung Mina combo. These associated rules didn't draw me into the PCs perspective/experience. Quite the opposite. They reminded me I was playing one game while simultaneously reminding me of another.

So, again, what's the (inherent) value in association? What effect is it supposed to produce, in and of itself?

 

[mmadsen]

As for Come and Get it, no. It's no more based in narrativism than "Improved Trip" is simulationist.

I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean, because improved trip seems like a decent way to simulate skill at foot sweeps and throws.

Come and get it, on the other hand, isn't narrativist at all, because it isn't driven by story concerns: plot, character, etc.

More than anything, come and get it seems Euro-gamist. It's a neat little game mechanic with a patina of theme that comes right off if you scratch at it looking for simulation.

 

[mmadsen]

What's the value of association?

Associated mechanics should reflect the modeled reality so clearly that they disappear, because there's no disconnect between what's happening inside the game world and what's happening in the rules.

There wre no metagame-y restrictions on how often he could attempt to trip a foe, the rules took into account sim-y things like size and weapon type, the decision to trip a foe directly mapped onto his, etc.

But playing him in combat felt like playing a video game...

A bad simulation can be disassociated. It's not solely a matter of designer intent.