Your god has deemed you worthy of receiving the benefit of a holy steed. Do you question the generosity and greatness of the deity you serve?
Yes he does.
Heathen.

Your god has deemed you worthy of receiving the benefit of a holy steed. Do you question the generosity and greatness of the deity you serve?
Yes and no.It's utterly crucial, if you are designing an RPG, to recognise that the play of the game is dictated by events and phenomena in the real world, and not by events and phenomena in the imagined world.
It's based on your success in championing the causes which grant your divine powers. Once the powers-that-be deem you have accomplished a certain amount, they send this companion to you. The knowledge that you can call your mount is granted in a flash of divine insight.What in game cause allows my paladin to call his warhorse? You may only reference in game elements to explain this. Why can I call it today and not yesterday? And why can I call it when I want to?
Ok. I'll bite.
What in game cause allows my paladin to call his warhorse? You may only reference in game elements to explain this. Why can I call it today and not yesterday? And why can I call it when I want to?
@pemerton ...pemerton said:It's utterly crucial, if you are designing an RPG, to recognise that the play of the game is dictated by events and phenomena in the real world, and not by events and phenomena in the imagined world.
No, not even a little bit. There's no reason to believe that his finding that secret door has anything to do with his invocation. There's no reason to believe that he wouldn't have found it, if he hadn't said it.
Except for the fact that it is narrative convention for things to happen when the plot demands it, or when it is most dramatic. Those rules don't apply within the game world, though; at best, they might apply to the game world, and even that is a matter of great contention.
There's a huge difference between a character believing something, and it actually being true. And even if it is true, for some high-magic settings, the player is playing the PC - the player isn't playing the guardian angel.It is perfectly reasonable for a character in a D&D setting to believe they have a "guardian angel" that can twist fate at critical moments and might be influenced by sincere words, regardless of whether there are mechanics that support that belief. Such a belief is undeniably plausible, based on the norms of a magic rich setting.
@pemerton ...
You're spouting the largest fallacy to come out of the Forge... that the in-story structure doesn't matter.
Sure, the real-world events generate the fiction... but the fiction is only satisfying to most if it has the appearance of internal logic and causality. When that fails, one no longer has any sense of story. And for many people, the reaction they choose isn't based upon the real world events, but upon how they perceive the story.
Sure, it might be mechanically better to face down the Half-Dragon... but the pattern of ass-kicking he's given in chapter I & II makes any players VERY reticent to face him in Chapter III... even tho' mechanically, they are far more than a match for him now.
That's in story elements combining to shape a player's decisions. Yes, it's all based upon things that happen at the table, but that's utterly irrelevant, because the player is deciding based upon the story as he remembers it, not based upon hit point totals nor AC's.
The ongoing narrative shapes the play as much as the rules and the events at-table do. You cannot divorce them and still be roleplaying. And I've had some absolutely wonderful boardgaming sessions using AD&D 1E rules... No story, just a dungeon to be cleared in boardgame style.
[MENTION=4139]Neonchamelion[/MENTION] - Not a mismatch - it's the way simulationist games have usually played out. Players usually react based upon the narrative, not the mechanics. There's a large enough subset who don't, however...
One of the elements most frustrating is that the forgites seem to think they are the only ones whose games involved roleplaying.
As for the post-forge narrativist games, the only one I've felt was worth a damn was the engine Wick used in Blood and Honor and in Houses of the Blooded. Make the game about who gets to answer the questions "Did I succeed? How Well did I succeed? What else happened."
Otherwise, give me a somewhat gamist-simulationist ruleset, any day.
There's a huge difference between a character believing something, and it actually being true. And even if it is true, for some high-magic settings, the player is playing the PC - the player isn't playing the guardian angel.
Unless you're playing a game where the players routinely have control over NPCs, but that isn't D&D (unless you're into DMG2 territory, for how to change the game dynamic).