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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6004085" data-attributes="member: 996">Meh.  I haven't seen anything that can only be taken dissociatively, only things people insist on taking that way, while rejecting other interpretations.I was wondering why it is that this major-seeming bit of game design theory had taken so many decades to be articulated, and it finally struck me: it hadn't.  It's just looking at meta-gaming from a different angle.  Meta-gaming is a familiar concept, something that can happen in any game: players who make decisions based on player knowledge rather than in-character knowledge can be said to be meta-gaming.  A sub-set of that is making decisions based on knowledge of the game /rules/ as opposed to based on what those rules try to (but can never perfectly) model.   Games that are abstract or 'unrealistic' (or imbalance or inconsistent, for that matter) make meta-gaming more of a temptation because the gap between what the rules do and what they try to model can be pretty wide.  But it's always a player choice.Funny, you seem determined enough to do so...A martial encounter could be explained as a 'trick' that you can't pull off in the same encounter because everyone's wise to it.  A martial daily could be explained as a more elaborate one that requires set-up, risk-taking, and effort that you're lucky to pull off once.  While martial powers aren't magical in the sense of having such a keyword, they are super-human and could have a mystical explanation, if you're more comfortable with such things.  A martial character could perform meditation and centering exercises at the start of the day to prepare him for those few moments when he feels he must push beyond human limits.  Each such move, manuever, trick, kata or whatever you want to call it is a one-time all-out effort.  If it succeeds it's a relief, it fails it's a blow to your confidence, either way, you're not going to be able to attempt it again until you've restored that mystic sense of balance and awareness you attain with your daily training and meditation.  Nothing in the way martial powers work, mechanically, nor even the way they're presented (super-human, but not super-natural) prevent such rationales.</blockquote>

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