Search results

If I were running a game for my friends with advanced degrees in things like particle astrophysics or developmental neurobiology or computational theoretical physical chemistry, we might have to work out what I needed to do, worldwise, to support their suspension of disbelief. (In the Fantasy...

Alas, that sort of heightened language simply does not convey to film. Also alas, it's fallen severely out of fashion.

I would have preferred to claw my way into middle management. :LOL:

I don't think I am. I mean, it wasn't a life-goal or anything. We were a federal contractor and the agency we contracted with yanked the work out from under us.

Mine is forced retirement. I can't recommend the "forced" part.

There was a point in my life when I would read more than one book at a time. At this point I think they'd all have to be non-narrative nonfiction for me to do that. Part of how many days a book will take me to read is how many hours per day I'll give it; that's a large part of what I'll have to...

I read a book every night I'm not ... doing something else (gaming, vacation, some other social thing ...). My wife reads more ... constantly than I do, and not all that much slower (and she just figured out that she can knit and read at the same time, more slowly at both, so long as the...

Or, uh, get ready to bounce off of the meta ... :LOL:

What matters is that the people at the table are able to anticipate how the world will behave. At some tables, in some games, that will be mostly genre logic; that's not necessarily universal (though I think I agree it's more common than a lot of people realize).

I don't think we're disagreeing much, just maybe talking from different angles? The game world needs to be comprehensible and consistent so the people at the TRPG table can make reasonable decisions based on their understanding of it, I think we agree on that? So for example, if at one table...

I was getting more at the idea that whoever's establishing fictional things needs to consider how what they're establishing changes the past (or how it looks). This pretty obviously more likely to be a problem for permanent things than for transient ones.

I think that we at the table care about the game world conforming to reality mainly so as to make it comprehensible to the people at the table. I think that what that means will probably vary table-to-table, both as a matter of knowledge and as a matter of ability to willingly suspend disbelief...

I did. It's not as much reading as I used to do (I'm sure there's at least one year in the 1990s when I read at least 500 books) but given that I more or less wasn't reading for pleasure at all, a little more than a year ago, I'm happy to be reading as much as I am. Eventually I'll start doing...

It's been a good year of reading for me. Somewhere over 180 books, like three DNFs. Mostly novels. Some really very good books, some really very not good ones even outside the DNFs. Found some writers to watch and some writers to avoid.

The metaphysics (so to speak) of my primary setting world seem as though even deific ranks would be a poor fit. I think the "plausible threat of death" just needs things that can plausibly kill the PCs to try to kill the PCs. It helps to have players who play their characters like people who've...

The only hiccup in the approach you outline is that the audience for a piece of pre-authored fiction probably needs to know if something isn't going to follow real-world physics--not even classical mechanics--before it turns out not to, especially if that ends up being to the protagonist's...

I don't have deities in my setting, for reasons. I drop PCs all the time, all the way through Tier Four, and I've killed at least one PC at high levels (she got better ...) without invoking that sort of thing to keep the PCs "in line." There were jokes throughout the one campaign about the PCs...

So if you had actually read my actual post, you would plausibly have figured out I mostly agree with you, that the players of a TRPG should have those sorts of expectations. That said, there are all sorts of good reasons one might use gamelike rules even if you have those--I'm sure you're clever...

I don't see what you saw in my post/s that indicated the players wouldn't contribute. No one has any stories pre-written, the story of the game emerges from playing the game.

Story--including expectations like plot armor--is best as an output, not an input.