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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8162002" data-attributes="member: 42582">I've caught up on this thread and have written a series of replies in this long post.Right. I think I've made this exact post multiple times now! So has [USER=6785785]@hawkeyefan[/USER].It's about topic or subject-matter. Which I have posted many times now.Your (1) is a story about a person doing something. Your (3) is a story about a person being aware of something they didn't cause. I don't understand what your (2) is supposed to be because you assert both (i) that the character causes something to happen and (ii) that the character can truly deny that the character caused that thing to happen. It seems contradictory or incoherent, except perhaps in a very 4th-wall breaking scenario like some approaches to Over the Edge.There are no such actions. At least not in any RPG I've ever played. (Again, I flag Over the Edge as - appropriately - a possible edge case here, but I've never played it.)***********************************What if my Foraging action is to set snares, which rabbits then come to? I've never seen a D&D rulebook (or any other RPG rulebook) that suggests that setting snares should be resolved differently from foraging for berries.(I'm reading through the thread as I'm writing this omnibus post. And so I see that [USER=6787503]@Hriston[/USER] has made the same point as I just made now.)Evard's tower existed before Aramina remembered it. If it hadn't, she couldn't have learned about it and hence remembered it!Rufus was on his way to collect wine before Thurgon and Aramina encountered him. That was how they were able to meet him when and where they did!Also, the bolded sentence in your post is confused. Because the existence of the food is an imaginary state of affairs. It is an element of the shared fiction. Whereas the check is not part of the shared fiction. It's a real thing that happens in the real world. So is the introduction into the shared fiction of the element food exists and has been foraged by the PC. And that element was not introduced into the shared fiction until after the check is made. Introducing that element into the shared fiction is part of the process of resolving the declared action.This point can be driven home by considering the possible options the GM has in narrating a failed check to find food. S/he could say "It seems to be a good place to find rabbits, but there just aren't any about today." Or s/he could say "You snare a rabbit, but as you try to take it out it slips out of your hands and runs injured into the bushes." Or if s/he wants to do some foreshadowing, s/he could say "When you return to your snare, you see that something has already eaten the rabbit you caught. Judging by the frenzied tearing of the rabbit skin, whatever took your rabbit seems big and fierce."Each of these establishes something about what happened in the past relative to the temporal location of the PC at the moment s/he has the narrated experience. But, obviously enough, in the real world none of them will be narrated at a time earlier than when it is narrated!On Monday I was in the eastern suburbs. Once or twice in the intervening days I've been in the city. Today I was at the supermarket. I spent Christmas Day at my mother-in-law's place. Etc.In the first few chapters of LotR we learn about Gandalf having been in The Shire and in Gondor (reading the Scroll of Isildur). Later we learn that around the same time as is covered in those chapters he was at Isengard, at Bree, at Weathertop, and some other places too.I believe that I am the only person so far in this thread to give actual play examples of either BW's Circles being used, or of a MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic specialty being used to generate a contact.In the latter case, the PCs were in the steading of a Giant Chieftain and the NPC with whom a rapport was established was a Giant Shaman who took a similar view of the portents as did the PCs.In the former case, Thurgon and Aramina met Friedrich (twice) as he poled his raft along the river; and met Rufus as he was driving his wagon near the outskirts of his estate, going to collect wine.So I don't really understand what you are responding to in [USER=6923088]@Aebir-Toril[/USER]'s post. The fiction has no causality and no temporal integrity independent of what is narrated. Gandalf was not plucked from somewhere else by JRRT to be at the Shire for Bilbo's party. He is exactly where JRRT has written him to be.My rolling of a Circles check which then establishes that, in the fiction, Thurgon and Aramina encounter Friedrich so he can help them travel downriver does not pluck Friedrich from his "real" location. He has no "real" location. He's a component of a story. It has been established that, some days ago, he was poling his raft upstream. Now it is established that, some days after that, he is poling back downstream. Why? I don't think I know - as best I recall Thurgon didn't ask and so the GM didn't tell, although now that my mind turns to it maybe there was some discussion of him having followed the path of a band of Orcs. But in any event, as far as the behaviour of river rafters goes, it doesn't seem all that idiosyncratic.***************************You objected to my characterisation of your position as "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" and yet that's almost exactly what you say in the above two quotes.And on the matter of actions performed by characters:Remembering stories of Evard's tower is a definite action. It's not that easy to describe - the best account I know of memory remains William James's Principles of Psychology. But as someone who has had amnesia, I can tell you that you'll know if you can't do it!Looking out for one's friend in the hope of coming across them is also a real state of affairs. Frodo is in that state, vis-a-vis Gandalf, for many of the chapters in the first Book of LotR. At various times in my life I have walked through school yards and university grounds and office buildings and city streets in that state.Characters can also hope. They have inner lives. The mental states they form - recollections, hopes, looking out for things - are as much part of their fields of action as swinging swords.It's true that typical D&D play pays almost no attention to these elements of the character, but that's just an idiosyncratic feature of such play.************************************I'm not puzzled as to what you do and don't like. Your preferences don't seem particularly unique.But if someone said the reason they like pie but not casserole is because one is produced via cooking but the other is not, I would be curious. (Cf if someone explained that's why they like mangoes and not casserole.)I am very confident that if I had led with an explanation that referenced Ron Edwards you would have rejected it. Especially given that you "liked" this post:******************************So far as far as I can tell the only person who has successfully articulated the bolded relationship, in this thread, is me. Not doing my own original work, mind you, but drawing on an 18-year old and very well known essay by Ron Edwards.I'll restate the relationship: it is a mapping of the causal process of resolution onto the authorship of the imagined causal processes of the fiction. Of the RPGs I know, the one that comes closest to instantiating this relationship is RuneQuest. As I've said, D&D doesn't because combat resolution doesn't conform to it. Neither does foraging, in D&D or probably in most RQ games - the causal process of resolving a foraging check will very often establish shared fiction about the state of the forest etc which does not correspond to the imagined causal process of the character looking for berries and setting snares for rabbits.The more that the fiction is authored in advance, the more moments of resolution can attain this state. This is why games like RQ, Rolemaster and the like have all sorts of shorthand notation for marking up areas of wilderness in the GM's key, to then feed into foraging checks to minimise the amount of fortune-in-the-middle resolution required. (The only version of D&D I know that tries to approximate this is the Wilderness Survival Guide for late 1st ed AD&D.)When we come to the topic of participant agency, whoever gets to do that pre-authoring is clearly exercising a great deal of it. There is nothing about the mapping relationship that requires it to be the GM who does that pre-authoring, but in practice that seems to be the norm. It is certainly what you are advocating for.********************TL,DR:Thurgon is travelling through the land of Greyhawk, on the border of Ulek and the Pomarj, along the old border forts and ruined homesteads. The introduction of those things is enough to establish the presence of wizard's towers, and of former knights of the Order of the Iron Tower now living as itinerants or hermits.I wouldn't be interested in playing a FRPG where the participants took a different view. That would seem like a very boring game.</blockquote>

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