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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8156745" data-attributes="member: 42582">Yes. That is my point.The fact that you and [USER=6795602]@FrogReaver[/USER] differentiate between the "narrative power" to bring it about that Orcs are dead and the "narrative power" to bring it about that walls have secret doors is a fact about your aesthetic preferences. But it doesn't tell us anything about what is involved in creating a shared fiction - because changing a fiction to have the Orc in it be dead is no different an act from changing a fiction to have the wall in it contain a secret door.By "normal" you mean as you play D&D?I've already pointed out that what you describe as not "normal" was contemplated in Classic Traveller in 1977. In precisely the circumstances one would expect, that is, when map-and-key resolution becomes impossible (ie Streetwise checks).Yes it is. The fiction contains a live Orc. The player declares an action. The action resolves successfully. Now the fiction contains a dead Orc. That is a change in the fiction, produced by the resolution of the player's declared action.Of course, in the fiction, a killing took place. But in the real world, what took place is what I have just described - the resolution of a declared action which leads to everyone agreeing that the fiction has changed, so as to include a dead Orc where previously it contained a live Orc.Presumably the "narrative power" is a power a player has in the real world, not a power a PC has in an imagined world. Your sentence here seems to confuse those two things.In the fiction, the PC kills the Orc by (let's say) running it through with a sword.In the real world, the player gets everyone at the table to agree that the fiction contains a dead Orc by declaring an action and then successfully resolving it via whatever method the system dictates (eg in D&D this is the attack roll compared to AC and then the damage roll compared to the Orc's hit point tally).The player doesn't discover a secret door. S/he is sitting at a table in someone's living room (or gaming den or whatever). The PC discovers a secret door. There are different ways this component of the fiction might be settled on. One method - favoured by many D&D players - is for the GM to have already decided what the fiction is going to be, and then the player declaring an exploration-type action (eg I tap on the walls to see if they are hollow or I search for signs of secret doors like movable torch sconces or similar) and if that action resolves successfully (maybe the GM says "yes" because s/he is satisfied that the described action would reveal the fictional detail; maybe the GM calls for a check) then the GM informs the player of the upshot of that earlier decision about the fiction.Another method - standard for Cortex+ Heroic and Burning Wheel; quite feasible in 4e D&D - is for the player to declare an action and for that to be resolved just the same as the I attack an Orc action. If the action succeeds, now we have a fiction in which the PC discovers a secret door.Never really there in the first place just means not made up unilaterally by the GM.No one thinks that, in the fiction of my Burning Wheel game, Evard's tower was brought into existence by Aramin's recollection of it. No one in the fiction thinks that. I trust that no one in the real world thinks that either - that would show a significant failure to understand the story being told (eg it is a story about Aramina recollecting the tales she has heard of the Great Masters).This is just like in any other fiction - eg no one thinks that the planet Hoth didn't exist when Luke blew up the first Death Star, although when the first Star Wars movie was released no one had dreamed up the planet Hoth yet.Fiction is authored. That authorship takes place in the real world, at definite times, through definite processes. The secret door is not more "real" because the GM first thinks of it rather than a player; or because the GM thinks of it yesterday rather than today.The only flaw here is that you seem unable to disentangle your preferences about distribution of authorship or "narrative" power in RPGing from a general analysis of what authorship actually involves.That apparent inability is most obviously manifest in your repeated description of things that happen in the fiction as if they happen in the real world, and things that happen in the real world as if they happen in the fiction. Which I actually find quite odd.</blockquote>

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