Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8161722" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is no different from remembering where a tower is, which leads me to finding the tower; or looking out for my brother, which leads me to notice him.But looking for for food doesn't make there be rabbits around. Sometimes someone who is expert at looking for food nevertheless fails to find it simply because the rabbits are all somewhere else.In this respect rabbits are no different from Evard's tower or Rufus.I actually used the phrase "chance meeting" - that phrase is borrowed from JRRT and of course is gently ironic, because in the world of JRRT's writing nothing happens literally by chance. More than any other fantasy writing I'm aware of (including Dune and Star Wars), JRRT presents a world in which providence is at work.As I have posted repeatedly upthread, Thurgon and Aramina met Friedrich on the river in the area of the old border forts. And met Rufus upon crossing the border into Auxol, Thurgon's ancestral estate.Overall your approach to setting - at least as evinced by your posts - seems to rest on two assumptions that are fairly common to a lot of D&D play but are typically not true of BW or AW games: (1) that the protagonists are strangers to the place in which the action is taking place; and (2) that generica like rabbits are no big deal and can be narrated or presupposed freely by all participants (perhaps subject to some overarching GM veto power), whereas towers and bridges and brothers which are a big deal are the exclusive province of the GM.To put the same point another way: you are happy for the player, without any prompting from the GM, to imagine the GM-narrated forest as containing rabbits and herbs and roots and berries and so on - which the player than takes for granted in declaring his/her PC's foraging check; but you object to the player, without any prompting from the GM, imagining the GM-narrated fantasy world as containing Evard's tower or imagining the GM-narrated river as containing a bridge that crosses it.[USER=29398]@Lanefan[/USER] seems to use some sort of appeal to likelihoods to explain the contrast in preferences. I don't know if you think of it the same way: to me, as I've indicated in my posts, the contrast seems to be between no-big-deal generica and individuated/unique/specific things. As I've already posted, it's an aesthetic preference based on topic/subject matter.I quoted Ron Edwards, and used the word as he does.What Edwards is focusing on is a mapping of the causal process of resolution onto the authorship of the imagined causal processes of the fiction.That is not a feature of all RPGing or all RPGs. For instance, a check made to establish what it is that a PC recollects has the same real-world causal structure as a check made to establish whether a PC defeats an Orc in combat. But the causal processes in the fiction are different in each case. Hence there is no mapping of the sort I described in the previous paragraph. Hence games which feature both sorts of checks are not simulationist in Edwards' sense.(A footnote: D&D combat is not simulationist in Edwards' sense either, because the individual processes used to determine whether a PC defeats an Orc - to hit rolls, changing hp tallies, etc - don't map onto any imagined causal process. Often there in fact is no fiction that correlates to those checks - the game participants just make the rolls and do the maths - or if there is fiction it is established post-hoc (eg the GM looks at the change in the Orc's hp total and then narrates something about barely blocking a forceful blow with its shield). This sort of thing was discussed at great length in the "dissociated mechanics" thread I linked to upthread.)</blockquote>

Verification