Blog Book Club #44: Dissociated Mechanics

[Barnum]

Welcome to this week’s blog book club. This week we are discussing Dissociated Mechanics by Justin Alexander of the Alexandrian. I am not a big fan of the topic or the author this week, but I’ll give it a shot.

Next week we’ll be reading “On Set Design” by Courtney Campbell of Hack & Slash.

You can see a list of previous blog club posts here.

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I fully expect a lot of people not to share my opinion this time around and would love to hear what you think. This topic is less of a OSR vs NON OSR topic and more gets into the meat of why people are drawn to this hobby.

Most of the post boils down to the provided definitions: “An associated mechanic is one which has a direct connection to the game world. A dissociated mechanic is one which is disconnected from the game world.” The line of thinking supporting this post goes that 4th ed D&D was filled with a lot of spendable and recharging powers and abilities that helped boost its function as a fantastical sport as war battle sim where players could do kick ass things, but suffered overall as an adventure game. Supposedly, All those power buttons players could push felt like arbitrary limits that removed people from feeling connected to the game.

The author contends that dissociated mechanics break people out of immersion. This is likely true. However, I really feel pretty strongly that whether something is dissociated or not is dependent on both conditioning and how a particular brain is set up. Over the course of years and years play, D&D players are conditioned over and over again to accept some mechanics as part of the way the world works and they are simply used to them. After a certain point the mechanics are integrated into a persona when the players inhabit a role.

As an example, one of the most Roleplaying intensive games I ever played involved a Paladin in 5th edition curse of strahd. Their core ability was divine smites which boil down to the players choosing to hit something very hard and doing more damage. Its pretty much Alexandrian’s textbook example of a dissociated mechanic. But I did not care, heck I appreciated the throttle. It sure wasn’t the smites that made me quit the campaign, but a host of personal issues, pacing, and specific grievances I developed with the game 5e over a decade of heavy play.

There are mechanics that are time honored D&Dism like hitting targets, protecting yourself from damage, casting spells, and remaining unseen. To me these are things players accept not because they inherently make the most realistic over even the best way to handle these situations, but because they are the most familiar. I have witnessed that when some people come understand that these things are nonsense they want them cast out of a game, or design new games without them. I accept that this is a journey folks must go on, and that its good for us to question the mechanics we use. But after a point its like people talking about how great a new diet is. They have cut something out they feel transforms their life/game. I see them as more engaged not because they have gotten rid of something important and were right to do so, but because they are taking ownership and feel more in control.

Ultimately, I accept that at some point we have to accept mechanical trade offs and concessions so that RPGs are more than improv. exercises. For me personally, the RP does not take precedence over the game. So I guess my point is not for people to just pinch their nose and keep using disassociated mechanics if they aren’t having fun, but to understand that player sensitivity to this stuff is going to be on a continuum. Be considerate of whether your dissatisfaction with a particular rule of the game is detracting from someone else’s experience. This is an appropriate topic to address in pre-game counseling and check ins sessions to see what everyone wants out their game experience.

PS: if you want more people ranting about game-y bits in your games here’s a questing beast video on metacurrencies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NU0W_Ze6NRM&t=486s

[xaran]

I don’t really agree with this blog post. By Justin’s own definition, all TTRPGs I know of are full of dissociated mechanics. In addition to character creation (which I don’t think is a good example anyway since it’s kind of outside the game; there’s no character yet to play the role of) old editions of D&D alone have HP (my character still has 50 HP, I can survive another 30’ fall) and some class exclusive features like weapon limitations or number of attacks per round. Some exceptions “work” within the world like clerics, but wielding a spear is so far beyond a quarterstaff or dagger a magic user can’t wield one?

The bigger difference with the feel of games like 4th edition for me (my experience is mostly from 13th Age) is that characters feel like they only “exist” and the world only cares about the context of combat. Magic users have vast powers, but their spells only have combat effects. They can technically improvise non-combat uses for spells, but it’s far less structured (and in 13th Age takes far longer than using spells for combat). It’s similar to situations in video games like a character that moves dexterously in combat to avoid damage, but they can’t traverse a small rock in the environment; there are artificial limitations placed around the character.

To me it’s just different levels of abstraction. What decisions do you want to make about your character? What kinds of resources do you want to manage? A game with a “One-Handed Catch” ability is probably using it as an abstraction for a character’s fatigue rather than trying to track fatigue directly. The longer a game goes on, the fewer options a player has to choose from.

[Weeping_Stag]

A lot of this blogpost really just feels like someone who is dissatisfied with a game, and looking for answers. A bit reactionary. I of course pretty much disagree with his points about dissociated mechanics. There are plenty of games that are successful and that use dissociated mechanics. The difference between a dissociated mechanic and an associated mechanic is basically flavor. Heat in lancer isn’t a dissociated mechanic because it’s called Heat. If it was called “plot tension level” or whatever, it would be dissociated. The game would work the same, and I don’t really see how this would break the sort of immersion Lancer players are looking for, This is much in the same way I do not understand how Momentum and Threat in Star Trek Adventures is argued to break immersion. I bounced off one of the two games I just mentioned, and it wasn’t because my immersion was being broken by its mechanics.

That being said, there’s definitely a group of simulationist gamers who seem to loathe this sort of mechanic, so I’m not at all surprised that they would hate a plethora of games for dissociated mechanics, since dissociated mechanics tend to appear more in non-simulationist games.

[pooserville]

I don’t see smites as particularly dissociated. “My god grants me a certain amount of divine power per day; I can choose to use channel power for various miracles [spells] or to smite my foes; I know how many uses of power I have.” There’s a difference between abstraction (necessary for the game) and dissociation.

Hit points are a classic abstraction: we could track laceration, contusions, abrasions, and incisions per body part and factor in blood loss and other effects, but that’s not practical so we settled on hit points as an abstracted mechanic. That said, it’s not a dissociated mechanic: if you ask the fighter how he’s doing he might say “I’m beat up, but I can take a few more hits. One more fight like the last one, though, and I’m done.” If you ask the fighter’s player how the fighter is doing, you might get exactly the same response. It’s abstracted, but it’s not dissociated.

In Justin’s example of the fingertip catch, imagine that instead of a daily “Fingertip catch” power you have a “Fatigue” pool that you can use for exceptional abilities like “Fingertip Catch” or “Ridiculous Juke” or “Hurdle Tackler”. Now you might imagine the NFL player saying “I’m pretty fatigued; I have enough left that I could probably make that catch but that’ll leave me gassed for the rest of the game” and then decide whether to save that energy for another play or go for it this time. It’s still a gameable mechanic, but it’s associated in a way that the “daily power” isn’t.