Some people are simply not willing to perform any suspension of disbelief or thinking about mechanics whatsoever.
Yes. years later "dissociated mechanics" still means "I have infinite amounts of mind-caulk for magical characters and zero mind-caulk for non-magical characters because of realizarm".
I remember at the time being particularly amused by The Alexandrian saying "I refuse to have anything to do with dissociated mechanics" and then later following up with "Check out my new version of the Polymorph Self spell -- if you try to do anything with your polymorphed form other than run/fly/swim, it fails for unspecified reasons!"
Yeah, it's all over the Alexandrian articles on it. Associated is where the Wizard's brain breaks if he tries to fireball twice because he only has room for one fireball in his brain, but disassociated is where fighters hitting things a cool way can't be once per day because that makes no sense.
And to some extent that's true, because as humans we have swung bats, but not cast fireballs, so total nonsense is just more forgiveable at the fireball end. Apologies to all the people who've cast fireballs and know damn well it's not a limited thing, you just need fuel.
But of course, 4e could've made it less head-scratching about the whole "what the fuck is even going on here" part of the RPG, by having martial head-fuckery be per-encounter (because they've seen already it now and won't fall for that again), and martial physical exertions be things that lasted a whole encounter but were 1/day (because it hurts too much to do it again after), and that sort of thing. Which they probably were in the original design, back in Orcus I, and then they had to take everything they'd written and squeeze it into everyone having a certain order of encounter, daily, and other powers.
And it just left a mess where the explanatory text that the power was based around, didn't match up to the power usage scheme in any way, a whole lot of the time. "I trickily unbalance my opponent into swapping places with me", but 1/day, for no reason, and also, it doesn't matter if they're a hedgehog or a large dragon, you still just swap places, albeit the dragon is maybe harder to "hit" with the "pull", or not, depending on what level monster the hedgehog was.
Like, the powers in the Book of Nine Swords are essentially all perfectly well associated, kinda winds of fate with the deck draws or whatever, but had internal consistency, That's probably what 4e fighters were like before they shat the bed on the design, and there's a bunch you can do about smoothing that sort of thing over which some things do not bother with. Especially when "it's magic".
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Like, different power schedules are fine, mostly, and martial characters having a lot of 1/encounter stuff is fine, and it makes them more interesting to have in the game, in general, if they don't just spam whatever works situationally best constantly. And you can do that, it makes sense a lot for martial trickery. Just that's not what 4e did in the end. And of course, all that mini-battle-game shit is still with us, in so many ways.
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.
