I've never said I'm against anyone having fun anyway they want in an rpg. I do believe that prior to 4e, it was possible to play without dissociative issues and with 4e it was not. So I'd like a game where I can play in the style I prefer. If that game is also usable by others with different playstyles thats fine by me.
I'm going to substitute (i) "metagame mechanics which I do not like as they force me out of actor stance and/or I refuse to leverage post-hoc "genre-logic" in author stance even though the mechanic in question was never devised with the pretension of process simulation as arbiter" for your "dissociative issues". I've read the article in question and the hubris and circular/tautological reasoning was so extraordinary that my mind literally had to strike-through most of the effort therein to compel me to his side that, in the end, all that was left was (i).
What is interesting is my issues, and I expect others, run 180 degrees counter to your own. My agony after DMing DnD for over 20 years now has been my increasing awareness of its extraordinary deficiencies, in both settings and mechanics, to properly simulate (when examined under intense scrutiny) a model, with any fidelity, that is supposed to be constrained by real-world biophysics, atmospheric drag, musculoskeletal kinesiology. Without severe hand-waving (indifference), shallow or inefficient scrutiny (lack of awareness), or the imposition of meta-game "genre logic" as a kludge or a combination of all three, rigid DnD process simulation becomes an exercise in madness. My DMing style and tastes have both changed over the years as a direct response to this. As much as anything, this exercise in madness has bulwarked me toward the implacable conclusion that when someone says they do not like a specific DnD mechanic because it is "too gamist" or "too meta-gamist" or the new "dissociative", it is really because of (i). I just think, "oh, ok...the idea of a fighter marking an opponent (extraordinarily easy to rationalize through real-world opponent/defender or combat dynamics logic if you must) is too gamist or meta-gamist, thereby infringing upon your sense of the games fidelity to the model simulation...but you can get behind:
- Atmospheric drag being being non-existent or hand-waved (or perhaps less gravity?...but that brings up an abundance of other issues that would then undo the model's fidelity).
- Thrust being hand-waved.
- Lift being hand-waved.
- Violation of Conservation of Mass and Conservation of Energy with respect to spell-casting...or it being hand-waved or some never explained cosmological phenomenon intervening.
- If spells do not violate CoM or CoE then where does the energy/mass come from? Is it nuclear fusion or fission? Then chalk up hand-waving the impacts of radiation on a localized ecology.
- An abundance of biology/biophysics issues that must be hand-waved. The most painful being (because the implied setting is rife with them - Giant spiders, Giant scorpions, Ettercaps, Driders and every other creature with an exoskeleton) the unbound size of arthropods. In the real world, their physical size is severely constrained due to the perils of molting, the force of gravity, and the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere. What's more, a fully hardened exoskeleton needs to be scaled appropriately to the dimensions of the organism to prevent it from collapsing. Since strength is proportional to the square of the linear dimensions, whereas mass is proportional to the cube of the linear dimensions, the skeleton needs to become ever thicker as size increases. At a certain point, the design becomes impractical, and deadly, as the creature becomes paralyzed and is crushed by its own weight.
- Synergy between Strength and Dexterity being non-existent due to the siloing away of mechanical effect of ability scores. This must be hand-waved and, to a lesser extent, Constitution's synergy with them must be hand-waved as well (See my secondary long post in the Swashbuckler/Bravo/Duelist thread if you need the long version of this).
There are plenty more than that but I'm tired of writing. I haven't even touched on the mechanical system and its numerous, (necessary) built-in abstractions (as have been canvassed a thousand times over) that require post-hoc rationale infill or "DO NOT SCRUTINIZE AND/OR HANDLE CAREFULLY AS THIS WILL BREAK - social accord" as kludges if you want to maintain the <cough> internal consistency of the model...and, I guess, immersion.
A different perspective on the same issue: if resource management is so central to the game, then why does social and exploration activity not also consume resources?
When Mearls said in a recent L&L that such activity won't consume resources to the same degree as combat, he may as well have been saying that these other two "pillars" aren't really pillars at all, but more like the fake columns popular on some neo-classical facades.
Great point and great comparison. If DnD is an edifice, and 3 pillars are truly meant to load-bear the weight of the structure, then we need character resources/resolution mechanics that interface with and adjudicate adventure conflict.