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Illusionism: Where Do You Stand?
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<blockquote data-quote="billd91" data-source="post: 9083791" data-attributes="member: 3400"><p>I think there are a couple of divergent things to address here, so bear with me.</p><p></p><p></p><p>There's a substantial benefit to maintaining the illusion of a permanent, (at least semi-)realistic world even though it's a game. Lacking the illusion of a world around the PCs robs it and what the PCs do of a lot of meaning. Why interact with the townsfolk and rescue their children from the goblin piper who leads them away to his lair to cook them in a stew if none of it is going to have a sustained, believable consequence? Why do anything of consequence in the game setting if it won't have implications farther down the line? What kind of meaning do our actions have in that game setting if they don't fit into a semblance of persistent reasonability?</p><p></p><p></p><p>All that said above, none of it really depends on the dungeon being completed independently of my interaction with the players as a DM. Nor does it have anything to do with there being no quantum ogres... as long as what happens at run time is reasonable and believable within the bounds of the setting and its assumptions. Would it make sense for an ogre encounter to be up either fork of the road? In most cases, if it's reasonable for one fork, it's probably reasonable for the other since it's possible to walk from one to the other as the PCs are doing now (one presumes that one fork isn't into a perilous forest and the other to a beach populated by bikini/speedo-clad elves and halflings with an admission fee the ogre can't afford).</p><p></p><p>Granted, there are players who don't care much about the meaning of their PCs' actions as long as they can kick in doors, kill monsters, and level up. That may be all the meaning they care about. But I think a lot of players, particularly these days, are looking for more. So the sense that the world is independent of them, persistent, and realistic to the point that they understand its basics within the genre they're playing is important. It's just not based on there being some inviolable written bible, some pre-defined random tables, some mechanistic procedure for building it, or even completion before the PCs are turned loose on it. All of those can be useful tools but they can all come off the cuff as well (just keep good notes in case the PCs come back to it later) and still give the illusion of an independent, persistent, genre-realistic world that gives or enhances the meaningful significance of what the PCs do.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="billd91, post: 9083791, member: 3400"] I think there are a couple of divergent things to address here, so bear with me. There's a substantial benefit to maintaining the illusion of a permanent, (at least semi-)realistic world even though it's a game. Lacking the illusion of a world around the PCs robs it and what the PCs do of a lot of meaning. Why interact with the townsfolk and rescue their children from the goblin piper who leads them away to his lair to cook them in a stew if none of it is going to have a sustained, believable consequence? Why do anything of consequence in the game setting if it won't have implications farther down the line? What kind of meaning do our actions have in that game setting if they don't fit into a semblance of persistent reasonability? All that said above, none of it really depends on the dungeon being completed independently of my interaction with the players as a DM. Nor does it have anything to do with there being no quantum ogres... as long as what happens at run time is reasonable and believable within the bounds of the setting and its assumptions. Would it make sense for an ogre encounter to be up either fork of the road? In most cases, if it's reasonable for one fork, it's probably reasonable for the other since it's possible to walk from one to the other as the PCs are doing now (one presumes that one fork isn't into a perilous forest and the other to a beach populated by bikini/speedo-clad elves and halflings with an admission fee the ogre can't afford). Granted, there are players who don't care much about the meaning of their PCs' actions as long as they can kick in doors, kill monsters, and level up. That may be all the meaning they care about. But I think a lot of players, particularly these days, are looking for more. So the sense that the world is independent of them, persistent, and realistic to the point that they understand its basics within the genre they're playing is important. It's just not based on there being some inviolable written bible, some pre-defined random tables, some mechanistic procedure for building it, or even completion before the PCs are turned loose on it. All of those can be useful tools but they can all come off the cuff as well (just keep good notes in case the PCs come back to it later) and still give the illusion of an independent, persistent, genre-realistic world that gives or enhances the meaningful significance of what the PCs do. [/QUOTE]
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