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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6418772" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>Putting to one side the meaning of "could" in this sentence, when the world contains features that violate all knonw canons of physical reality . . .</p><p></p><p>The world in which the NPC <em>has</em> a beard is no less a candidate for reality than the one in which the NPC has a beard.</p><p></p><p>The presence or absence of the beard <em>does</em> depend up external factors, though.</p><p></p><p>Most obviously, it depends upon the GM making a decision about whether or not the NPC has a beard. If this was decided in advance and written into the GM's notes, how was it decided? By whim? By rolling on a random appearance table? None of these authorship processes is a part of the fictional world.</p><p></p><p>If, as is often going to be the case, the GM doesn't even think about the issue until the players ask, how is the presence or absence of a beard decided? By whim? By rolling on a table? Deciding that the NPC has a beard because that would be more fun for the players is no more external than any of those other processes.</p><p></p><p>And if GM whim was fine for writing the script, and fine for making it up on the fly, it is hard for me to see how changing the script on the fly crosses some notional line of fictional integrity. (I can see that it could violate gameplay integrity, if the script is pre-written and the players are meant to be gaming the script, as in a module like Tomb of Horrors. But that's not the sort of gameplay that was being discussed in the series of posts that have led up to this one.)</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 6418772, member: 42582"] Putting to one side the meaning of "could" in this sentence, when the world contains features that violate all knonw canons of physical reality . . . The world in which the NPC [I]has[/I] a beard is no less a candidate for reality than the one in which the NPC has a beard. The presence or absence of the beard [I]does[/I] depend up external factors, though. Most obviously, it depends upon the GM making a decision about whether or not the NPC has a beard. If this was decided in advance and written into the GM's notes, how was it decided? By whim? By rolling on a random appearance table? None of these authorship processes is a part of the fictional world. If, as is often going to be the case, the GM doesn't even think about the issue until the players ask, how is the presence or absence of a beard decided? By whim? By rolling on a table? Deciding that the NPC has a beard because that would be more fun for the players is no more external than any of those other processes. And if GM whim was fine for writing the script, and fine for making it up on the fly, it is hard for me to see how changing the script on the fly crosses some notional line of fictional integrity. (I can see that it could violate gameplay integrity, if the script is pre-written and the players are meant to be gaming the script, as in a module like Tomb of Horrors. But that's not the sort of gameplay that was being discussed in the series of posts that have led up to this one.) [/QUOTE]
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