They can play however they like.
But there's a problem with throwing around the term "Edition Warring" and somehow conflating some legitimate concern with a concrete quantifiable issue with a desire to dictate how other people should play. I have no idea, nor do I particularly care what you do at your table. (Although I do have a vested interest in making my own opinions clear and understandable).
However, If I point to the naked emperor and say that he has no clothes, then perhaps he should just get dressed, instead of having his subjects tell me why it's ok to make us look at his glory.
And before I get into this, I want to take a moment and give props to the fourth edition design team for making a game that's quick to DM - taking NPC and monster creation and making it easy. Props for giving good tools to estimate the difficulty of numeral comparisons of monsters.
Why disassociated mechanics are a serious problem.
There's a lot of talk over what dissociated mechanics are, but I can tell you why they are such a problem. Associated mechanics have an effect with a result - disassociated mechanics have a result caused by an affect!
What does this mean? Let's look at fireball.
An associated mechanic says "We are going to create a ball of fire! What are the effects of a giant ball of fire?" and then it describes a list of things that occur when a ball of fire is exploded! A disassociated mechanic says we're going to do X damage to an area Y large, and it has fire traits and arcane traits. | Associated Mechanic: Effect => Result Dissociated Mechanic: Result => Effect |
Now I don't know if this is true for you, But when I game for six hours, players will fight maybe 5 different times, and only spend about 90 minutes in combat. Can we see the problem?
The associated mechanic is useful as a tool for 6 hours of play. The dissociated mechanic is useful for only about 2 hours of play.
This is a serious real problem with every power in 4th edition. People defend the elegant math, but my math equation using real actual numbers comes out much differently then whatever math is being talked about when they talk about elegance. One common response is "Most of these are magic effects! Warriors don't have access to them!". That comment is made by people who don't have fighters with armies, or charismatic characters with followers, or magic items like they used to be - filled with strange and unique effects.
One way to make this work is to only spend the time fighting battles so that the the powers are useful more often.
What a terrible thing to do.
I say this because I have never seen any argument, discussion, or statement that address this issue in a quantifiable way. It is a serious concern for me as a player and the fundamental issue with nearly every single one of the endless arguments I had while trying to play 4e. I kept asking what was actually happening, and kept being told that it wasn't important.
In the spirit of this, I'll be archiving the excellent theory written by Daztur recently tomorrow and the next day here at Hack & Slash. His article led me to understand why this was so difficult for me and what those players were looking for.
They wanted an arena battle, two equal forces facing off. A game of chess. A game of equal (or nearly equal) starting conditions - even if those conditions were geared against the players.
It was not what I was looking for. I only hope that the recognize that even under a rules system that might be NEXT that I still won't be looking for those things. And the players that are, well, I probably won't be gaming with them. Do the makers of NEXT understand that? The only question I have left is will they sell anything I can use for my LL, ACKS, OSRIC, or DCC game?
