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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8241298" data-attributes="member: 16814">Ah, I've had a brain flash. You're using "dissociative" in the sense of "the PC isn't doing it, the player is."  You mean the player is making a choice from outside the confines of the PC's notional perception that then enters the game.  Cool, I see it, but it doesn't affect what I've said about hitpoint, or armor class, or even spells.  You've rolled your play into making these things part of the PC's awareness, but it's still external game mechanics intruding into the fiction in a way that's not related to the PC's understanding.  Instead, you're deploying a lampshade in each case.  Telling the PC that they lost 10 hitpoints, for instance, isn't what's happened, instead you're describing something in the fiction that ad hoc represents this loss of hitpoints.  (And I say ad hoc because it depends on the specific circumstance of the hp loss as to how it's described, not because there's no principled approach to description involved at a given table.) Regardless of how it's described, though, the effect is the same -- no change in the PC's capability.  It's still dissociated even when considering dissociated from the POV of the PC, we've just become long accustomed to ignoring this.But, if we do go with this definition of dissociative, then we have a new trouble -- the searching for a secret door is now moving away from dissociative.  The PCs, from within their POV, are doing a rational thing -- looking for a way out of a dead end with guards approaching.  If they find a secret door, it's still within their POV -- nothing breaks that POV.  Instead, we're now having to look at what's going out outside the PCs to find the dissociation, at which point you have to ask what it's dissociated from?</blockquote>

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