NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8132567" data-attributes="member: 82106">And now we get to the NUT of the OP's original question! It has been called 'illusionism' and 'GM Force' when the GM presents the same encounter to the players regardless of where they go. But what if I said to you this is incoherent? I present to you the thesis that THE GAME WORLD DOESN'T EXIST. What does exist? The NARRATIVE! So it is impossible to say that the GM gave you the same encounter either way. The players chose the Grim Chasm, and they got spiders. They never chose the Gnarly Forest! THERE ARE NO SPIDERS AWAITING THEM THERE. In fact there is NOTHING there, because it is an unexplored terra incognita within the narrative of the game, which is the only thing that is actualized and thus exists. Certainly from the player's perspective there was no 'force' applied, no illusion at all. The only question, in my thesis, which can be asked, is whether or not the players got WHAT THEY WANTED. Did they encounter a narrative of a type and character which they had asked to be served up by the GM? Did it meet their genre expectations? Did the milieu seem coherent enough to be described and for sufficient suspension of disbelief? Did they 'play to see what happens' when they explored the Chasm? Was it dramatic? These are good questions!None of this is to say that illusionism and force cannot and do not exist in some forms. It is just to say that we need to be careful, because if we aren't, we will be deluding ourselves by talking about literally non-existent things. See, we cannot even say for certain that the GM WOULD HAVE put the spiders in the Gnarly Forest. That is not a path that REALITY ITSELF took! It is just as unreal, even at the game table, as the imagined world of the narrative is unreal. Yes, the GM might have fully intended to do that, and we might rightly predict it, but he didn't do it. We will never know. You cannot condemn people for things they haven't done. This is a fundamental rule of ethics.</blockquote>

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