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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6434100" data-attributes="member: 42582">I made an observation in my post to which you didn't reply, so I'm going to have another go.Gygax's Town &amp; City encounter table allows for all sorts of creatures to turn up. Suppose the GM rolls a lich - s/he is expected to have the GMing skills to narrate this lich into the ongoing fiction, and make sense of it, whether or not s/he had anticpated in advance the possibility of a lich turning up.This is an example where ingame causality - the origins of the lich, for instance - is narrated as an afterthought to event generation - the PCs' encounter with a lich. Traditional D&amp;D, based heavily as it is on random encounter tables, is rife with this sort of post hoc narration of newly-determined story elements into the ongoing fiction.I'm not sure that this is true - I think the easiest way to avoid fourth-wall breaking in-character talk is to think oneself into the fiction and narrate from that perspective.But in any event, I don't see that you can avoid doing things for metagame reasons. The encounter table tells you that the PCs encounter a lich - that's a metagame event. Now you, as GM, have to locate that lich within the existing backstory and ongoing flow of events. Being able to do this creatively and engagingly is a core GMing skill. The two best proponents of it that I know on these boards are [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] and [MENTION=6680772]Iosue[/MENTION].</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 6434100, member: 42582"] I made an observation in my post to which you didn't reply, so I'm going to have another go. Gygax's Town & City encounter table allows for all sorts of creatures to turn up. Suppose the GM rolls a lich - s/he is expected to have the GMing skills to narrate this lich into the ongoing fiction, and make sense of it, whether or not s/he had anticpated in advance the possibility of a lich turning up. This is an example where ingame causality - the origins of the lich, for instance - is narrated as an [I]afterthought [/I]to event generation - the PCs' encounter with a lich. Traditional D&D, based heavily as it is on random encounter tables, is rife with this sort of post hoc narration of newly-determined story elements into the ongoing fiction. I'm not sure that this is true - I think the easiest way to avoid fourth-wall breaking in-character talk is to think oneself into the fiction and narrate from that perspective. But in any event, I don't see that you can avoid doing things for metagame reasons. The encounter table tells you that the PCs encounter a lich - that's a metagame event. Now you, as GM, have to locate that lich within the existing backstory and ongoing flow of events. Being able to do this creatively and engagingly is a core GMing skill. The two best proponents of it that I know on these boards are [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] and [MENTION=6680772]Iosue[/MENTION]. [/QUOTE]

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