Quote from: ThatChrisGuy;862257Why does anyone care about "dissociated" character creation?  This is the kind of circlejerk nonsense that made the Forge and r.g.f.misc useless in the end.  There really aren't enough players who are worried about this kind of crapola to make a gaming group.

Yes. The question of associated or disassociated game mechanics is essentially irrelevant and a case of watching individual trees rather than the forest. The whole point of game's mechanics should always be looked at as whole. There is a lot of different game mechanics that you can employ and selecting those to use should always be thought as whole and design goal of whole game in mind.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;862356I told you I was done playing your silly semantic games.

And yet you just keep nattering on, and on, and on....

Can't help but notice that 'associated' here seems as a rule to mean close enough to 'random'. It's darned simple to let the dice decide whatever one wishes not to decide for oneself!

The really fundamental problem is fools who insist on making this or that actually a binding rule on themselves and then complaining that "the game" is this or that. They actually have themselves to blame, and can fix their self-inflicted problem in an instant; I find it hard therefore to take the complaint seriously.

Not necessarily. Chaosium Runequest II had training rules that basically let you improve skills (to a point) by paying money and spending time in school. No dice roll required. There's nothing random about that, although it's a little bit simplified and abstract. And it's much more obviously associated than either automatically going up levels based on gaining experience points, or (especially) "spending" experience points on a la carte improvements.

Quote from: Phillip;862422Can't help but notice that 'associated' here seems as a rule to mean close enough to 'random'.

No. Traveller, for example, gives you control over which careers you'll attempt. And RQ's advancement mechanics are based on the skills you choose to use.

There are also random components to those mechanics, but you could easily imagine versions which no random elements.

Quote from: Phillip;862422Can't help but notice that 'associated' here seems as a rule to mean close enough to 'random'. It's darned simple to let the dice decide whatever one wishes not to decide for oneself!

I wouldn't say "random" so much as "those factors outside of the character's control are random".  In Traveller and in RL, you can choose whether you want to join the army or become a merchant, but you can't choose whether the army or the merchants want you.  In RQ and in RL, you can choose whether to practice a given skill or not, but you can't choose whether you're born naturally strong or naturally sociable.  Etc.

Quote from: nDervish;862528I wouldn't say "random" so much as "those factors outside of the character's control are random".  In Traveller and in RL, you can choose whether you want to join the army or become a merchant, but you can't choose whether the army or the merchants want you.  In RQ and in RL, you can choose whether to practice a given skill or not, but you can't choose whether you're born naturally strong or naturally sociable.  Etc.

There is no "cannot" except what you choose. Since you can choose otherwise, there really is no "cannot" at all. Understand this fact of hobby games, and you will understand that there is nobody to blame but yourself. If you're complaining, then it's because complaining is your idea of fun; so really you have nothing to complain about.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;862524No. Traveller, for example, gives you control over which careers you'll attempt. And RQ's advancement mechanics are based on the skills you choose to use.

But that's not what people were pointing to. Repeatedly, the dichotomy was 'associated' randomness vs. 'dissociated' choice.

It goes both ways, too: just because Joe Blow writes in a book that we should toss dice to see whether a character is male or female doesn't mean we can't choose.

Grow a gonad (either kind) and get on with playing.

Quote from: Phillip;862667It goes both ways, too: just because Joe Blow writes in a book that we should toss dice to see whether a character is male or female doesn't mean we can't choose.

[get off my lawn rant]
The understanding  that the Rules as Written are not some kind of magical contract sealed in blood and broken only at peril to one's immortal soul does seem to be increasingly rare these days.
[/get off my lawn rant]

Quote from: Phillip;862666But that's not what people were pointing to. Repeatedly, the dichotomy was 'associated' randomness vs. 'dissociated' choice.

You may or may not have noticed some correlation in examples in this thread, but I assure you associated mechanics is unrelated to randomness.

Huh? Nobody's complaining. If you want to have your character do something or be something, whether the rules say you can or can't, of course you can if you feel like it and it's acceptable to everyone else involved.

Same thing for character creation/development applies to defeating a trap or slaying a dragon. Go wild.

The idea of "associated" in all cases is that the player's control over what happens is the same that the character would have, with the same abilities and constraints, and that the control is intelligible to the character.

I think it's reasonable to say that, in the real world, you don't choose your race, biological sex, genotype, parents, socioeconomic background, etc. In fact, you don't choose to exist at all, nor do you choose to be an intelligent, sentient being as opposed to a water molecule, a bacterium, or redwood tree. So obviously there is some element of shall we say "constructive voluntary choice" in deciding to play an RPG, deciding which RPG to play, and consciously or unconsciously not deciding to expand the rules to create a random ontogeny for each player character.

So obviously there is some degree to which the variation in "being" and "nature" is circumscribed when it comes to the entities that are "played" by players. But is it necessary to do any more than note this and move on? If you prefer to see the idea of dissociation vs. association in character creation as an imponderable, I won't press the point too hard.

On the other hand if you have character development mechanics that give free rein to adding features in the form of skills, advantages (feats, etc.), ability scores, etc., without reference to the game environment or past history--other than accumulation of abstract "experience points", then if the game-world is supposed to operate something like the real world, the mechanics aren't associated. For example if I can choose to spend my experience points (or my new ability slots from leveling up) on either "two handed smash" or "devious feint", that basically implies I'm decided to study and practice one combat technique or another. If so, why do I need to go out and get experience before I study? Or if instead we're pretending that the character learned the technique in the course of engaging in fights during the adventures that yielded the experience points, then why does the player have an option--shouldn't the technique learned be a direct consequence of details of those combats?

Or perhaps one simply prefers things more abstract.  Abstract is not necessarily unrealistic or "disassociated" as you use the term, but it focuses on different things.

You're not the first person to suggest that dissociation and abstraction are the same (in some or all cases), or that an apparent dissociation is really abstraction. In the example of character development I gave, though, in order for the mechanic not to be dissociated, you'd need to explain why, from the character's perspective, things work the way they do. Not saying you can't, but I think the most straightforward explanations for how & why improvement happens in game world terms don't match up well with the mechanics.

Dissociation isn't a death sentence or a mortal sin--the impact on someone's enjoyment of the game depends on a lot of specifics about the game and the person. E.g. as suggested by this thread I think people in general are more comfortable with dissociated chargen and advancement/development than they are by dissociated task resolution. In fact I think a lot of people really enjoy the type of advancement that amounts to picking from a menu of options.

Quote from: JoeNuttall;862671You may or may not have noticed some correlation in examples in this thread, but I assure you associated mechanics is unrelated to randomness.

It's not that we don't understand, but that when we give a shit about something so fucking trivial as tossing a die or picking a number we simply take care of it and move along.