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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8162019" data-attributes="member: 42582">I believe that outside of deliberately surreal approaches to RPGing - eg Toon, perhaps Paranoia, some approaches to Over the Edge, maybe some approaches to Cthulhu Dreamlands - these preferences seem pretty ubiquitous.I think you are misunderstanding what [USER=6923088]@Aebir-Toril[/USER] means by "internal causality" and "temporal integrity". In the world, as a general rule and putting to one side the sorts of events that mostly happen in particle accelerators, an event cannot precede its cause. If a thing is in one place, it cannot also be in another. And where I or anybody/anything else is today is an effect of causes that took place yesterday.Fiction is not the same. JRRT can - and did - write a story about a Hobbit from the Shire before he had decided on the history of the Shire. It's true that, in the story, the shire has a history. But until JRRT actually wrote it, that history did not exist as a piece of fiction. No one in the real world knew what it was. Presumably Bilbo and his friends knew at least some of it, but given that their imaginary knowledge had never actually been imagined or written down by anyone, it did not exist as a piece of fiction any more than did the history that I am supposing they had knowledge of.A similar point: presumably Sherlock Holmes is wearing socks when he solves the mystery of the Hound of the Baskervilles. But does anyone in the real world know what colour those socks were? I believe that Conan Doyle never wrote that down (if I'm wrong, then let's instead make it the exact number of stitches in the waistband of his trousers). It is not an established piece of fiction, and yet the absence of any discussion of Holmes' blisters or sore feet certainly allows us to infer that he was wearing some sort of hosiery.It is in this sense that a work of fiction does not exhibit causality or temporal integrity in the way that the real world does. We can create new elements, and elide others, without having to be concerned that we haven't written down all the prior, in-fiction causes and necessary conditions of the events that we narrate. If it were otherwise, then no one could tell a story without starting at the very beginning. Yet almost no stories so begin.This just seems to be a restatement, for this special case, of the general principle that prior established fiction constrains new fiction.I understand that this principle is important to you. But again, I don't think you are very unusual or unique in that regard.From your repeated insistence on this principle which seems to me quite uncontroversial, plus some of your remarks about your GMing of Fate, I infer that you have found yourself in a RPGing situation where either you felt yourself obliged to flout this principle, or other participants were flouting this principle. If I'm correct, that sounds like it would have been an unsatisfactory experience. In fact it sounds a bit dysfunctional.But that's not a problem I've ever had. Nor can I ever recall having been concerned that there was a risk of such a problem. Upthread some posters have said that they don't see mechanics as a solution to GM trust issues. I would say, here, that I don't see constraining player agency (by eg having no Circles or contacts mechanics) as a very satisfactory solution to a more fundamental problem of some participants not caring about the integrity of the shared fiction.</blockquote>

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