The fiction exists. And if the group has agreed to address the fiction as part of a game, players' further actions must take it into account.
What is *worldbuilding* for?
The fiction exists. And if the group has agreed to address the fiction as part of a game, players' further actions must take it into account.
This is exactly the kind of dishonesty I would expect.
Is there a yellow teapot full of dragons in my garden or not?
Who gives a *bleep*? No one in this thread, except perhaps you, is claiming that the circumstances and situations presented at the game table are real to the players. There is no dishonesty in my statement. Indeed, in both player-facing and DM-facing games (to use Ovinomancer's terms), that game conceit is a requirement for play. The framing required in player-facing games establishes the fiction the players must work within until the scene is resolved and a new framing is presented.
If I frame a scene at sea with the players operating a pirate vessel that's approaching a potential victim, the players do not get to convert the vessel into a M1 Abrams' tank on a whim.
The topic was whether the existence of fiction means the content of that fiction must also exist.
If you'e going to butt in, try to keep up.
I'm keeping up fine; you're going for irrelevancies.
No the topic is can fiction exist if its constituent elements have no such existence. Holmes may not be real, but his causal influence inside the Hound of the Baskervilles is as real as the fiction itself is -- not just imagined by the reader. The fact the author made up the narrative and assigned the causal effects does not make his influence any less causal; in fact it makes it more since the reader can afford to ignore any other source of potential causation other than the viewpoint presented by the author* because that is a primary trope of fiction.
*save of course for those narratives that specifically upend that trope (by using unreliable narrators for example).
Michael Silverbane
Adventurer
Under the following assumptions, the answer is yes....
That you are the DM in a DM-facing game or that you are a dm or player in a player-facing game where the scene is framed such that establishing such elements in the narrative space makes sense.
That your front garden has been established as an element in the narrative space of that game.
That by "exists" you mean "is an established fact of the narrative space of the game."
Outside of those assumptions, the answer is no.
No. You are doing exactly what I predicted would happen and dishonestly avoiding the question.
Try again.
There is a giant yellow teapot full of dragons in my front garden.
(Fiction now exists)
Does that mean that there is a giant yellow teapot full of dragons in my garden?
(Do the constituent elements have existence?)
You're trying but failing to avoid the question that drives at the very essence of the matter because you don't want to admit the answer.
Try again - answer the question.
Or do you want to keep obfuscating and lying about 'causal power'? LOL!
Okay, just for laughs try question 2. The dragons just eat my neighbours unicorn. Are you saying they now have 'real' causal power because I wrote that?
Is there a teapot full of dragons in your yard? Sure. If you say so. What can I know from here? No, wait my cat told me he ate them so I guess they're gone.
The sudden disappearance of unicorns has been solved though. Good to know. The neighbours know who to sue now.
If a player in a game I'm playing makes that statement -- and has the authority to inject such elements in the fiction -- then I as GM or as another player have to take that revelation into account for any and all actions/reactions/declarations I will make. If a NPC acts plausibly after an in-game event, it is not appropriate for me to say "Well , that reaction is just the imagining of the GM and thus not really real." It is appropriate for me to say "The event caused <NPC name> to react".
The Crimson Binome
Hero
As far as the players are concerned, playing in a world where the backstory is authored by the DM is identical to playing in a world where the backstory is generated through internal causal processes, in every way that matters. In both cases, the agency of the player is limited to what the character can actually accomplish through their own means, and they don't have to worry about accidentally authoring backstory as a result of actions they take in the present.
If you can't understand that simple fact, then you will never understand the point of worldbuilding, or the concept of actually roleplaying as a character rather than telling a story about a character; and as such, this entire thread is a waste of time.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Good. You've just authored a bit of fiction about dragons in a teapot in a garden. That fiction - in the form of some words on a screen - is now something that's been added to my real-world frame of reference as something I have read (though for these purposes and to make the distinction clearer the Holmes example is better, as the words are contained in a real physical book you can hold in your real physical hand). But the fiction also exists within itself, and I'll get back to that in a moment. The dragons, however, do not really exist in your real garden; and neither does the teapot.
Where things are going sideways here is the concept of the fiction existing within itself - which it does - and what happens there. My PC exists within the fiction of the game just like Sherlock Holmes exists within the fiction as presented by Sir ACDoyle. The key difference between my PC and Holmes, however, is that within the fiction I can direct what my PC does and how it interacts with the rest of the fiction as presented.
So if an orc comes up and attacks my PC that orc exists within the fiction, even though there's no real orc attacking me as a player at the table. If my PC comes over a rise and sees a castle in the distance that castle now exists within the fiction, even though when I as a player pull back the curtain on my game room window there's no castles out there.
Where it gets fuzzy is when interacting with other PCs, as they in theory have vague real-world mirrors called the other players in the game; and here while I at the table am in reality talking to Joe the player what we should both be imagining is that Lanefan the character is talking to Falstaff the character.
And once it's established that the fiction exists within itself the door is open for causality and consequences and all sorts of other stuff to exist within the fiction; and then it merely becomes a question of how best to author and-or present these things in such a way that things remain believable.
So, back to the teapot full of dragons on your lawn. Having established the fiction of their existence and of some unicorns next door, within the fiction it's entirely possible to author or present a situation where the dragons annoy the unicorns enough (cause) that the unicorns come over and smash the teapot with their hooves (effect). This is in-fiction causality - nothing to do with reality but very relevant within the fiction itself. Meanwhile in reality all that's happened in the time it took me to type this is that the grass on your lawn has grown by a very tiny fraction of an inch and maybe become wetter depending what the weather's doing where you are.
And a lot of this discussion has been based on the idea of this within-the-fiction causality and how - and by who - it is authored and-or presented.
Lan-"that said, if you really are seeing dragons in a giant teapot on your lawn: whatever you're smokin', I want some"-efan
