Providence stories function by declaring that the actions that happen were always going to happen. That there was never any chance of a different result.
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we saw you roll the dice. We saw that there WAS another possibility.
The necessity or inevitability is a property
that obtains within the fiction. Not a property of the process of authorship. For instance, and as is well-known, JRRT took several goes to get Strider's identity and lineage sorted out in his writing of LotR. So it's simply
not true to say that - from the point of view of the process of composition - Strider was always going to be Aragorn, the destined scion who would restore Gondor to grandeur.
But this fact about the contingency of the process of authoring the story does not affect the
content of the story.
Likewise in RPGing. You, the player, see me roll the dice. That doesn't mean that your character saw dice being rolled "in the heavens". Contingency in the resolution process does not preclude necessity in the fiction. I mention, again, the example of Traveller, which uses dice at many points in the resolution process without therefore being committed to any view on whether the physics of the sci-fi world is deterministic or not.
I am aware of the Quantum Ogre, and the ability for a DM to alter the structure of the story on the fly, to make it appear as though it was all planned... but this is not Providence. This is not an immutable, divine plan of action.
But of course it can be. A tale about an immutable, divine plan of action can be conjured up on the spot, spontaneously, just as much as it can be written carefully and with revisions. The GM can roll the Ogre up here-and-now on a random encounter table, and then - when framing the encounter with the Ogre, decide that the Ogre's presence right here and now, in this very spot, is some manifestation of a providential plan.
The group could even do this
retrospectively if they wanted to, just as JRRT did in respect of Bilbo's encounter with Gollum.
Maybe you think I don't understand meta-mechanics that allow the shaping of the narrative? But that has never been what I am talking about. I understand and accept those. I also would say that those ARE NOT examples of Providence
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The game of Fate doesn't countermand this. Dice are still rolled, the results are still random. You keep insisting that just because they are random in game does not mean they are "random" in-fiction. Which might be true, but that is subtly different than it being Providence or the Will of the Gods. Sure, I can roll that an NPC has a love of dancing, and then I can back-fill why that is, so that their love of dancing isn't "random" but a feature of their continuing narrative. But I cannot say that I planned from the beginning for the party to meet this Dancer. I didn't. It wasn't planned, it was not inevitable.
Do you have a god complex? I don't. I am not talking about whether or not the GM, or anyone else, willed something or made it inevitable. I am talking about the content of the fiction, not the process by which it is created.
This is why I mention Fate. Suppose that my Fate character has the aspect Chosen by Destiny, or (even better) Providential Purpose. And then that is used to trigger some event which reflects my character's destiny or purpose. By definition, that event was (in the fiction) fore-ordained from the beginning of time, even though (at the table) we only decided here and now to make it part of our story, as part of the process of bargaining over fate chips.
More boringly, and linking Fate to my Traveller example: in a sci-fi game using Fate, all sorts of events will happen as the result of fate chip bargains. That does not mean that, in the fiction, those events were not the result of mechanical causation that has unfolded, deterministically, from the beginning of time.
Even your example of Thurgon fails this, because when you first mentioned that event, you indicated that the roll could have failed. So you cannot tell me that it was never possible in the fiction for any other result to happen, because you ALSO told me that another result was possible. And, as a reader/player/watcher the moment I know that there was more than one possible path, then I know there was no Providence at play.
But you don't know that it was possible
in the fiction for another thing to happen. All you know is that,
at the table, it was possible for us to narrate a different fiction. The latter does not entail the former. Obviously so. It is obvious that
from the fact that people write fictions in which determinism is true, or in which determinism is false, we can infer
nothing about whether determinism is true or false in the real world. And the converse is likewise obvious:
from the fact that there was a random element in what fiction was narrated, and hence it was (in some sense) not
necessary or
inevitable that that fiction be narrated, it does not follow that
in the fiction, the narrated event was not necessary or inevitable. If things were not as I am saying, then it would follow that - if the universe is, in fact, not deterministic or foreordained, then
no one could ever tell a story about providence because there would always be some random or contingent factor contributing to their decision as to what to narrate.
If I am sitting at the table with you, and you insist that the only possible result is the one that just happened... I'd ask if you were okay, because clearly there is another possible result.
This gets to the crux of it. Your PC can't talk to the GM. The process of authorship of the fiction is not itself an element of the fiction. Unless you are breaking the fourth wall in an ironic or absurdist RPG (like Over the Edge).
