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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 6990701" data-attributes="member: 6775031">Right. The big difference between an RPG and any one of those other story-telling methods is that an RPG demonstrates internal causality. The reason we care about what happens in the story is that the outcome follows impartially from the mechanical processes which represent the narrative, rather than the players manipulating the story directly. That impartiality lends integrity to the story, and that's why we care about the story. (At least, that's why I care about what happens in an RPG, and why I don't care at all about the story in any game that features player narrative control.)Players don't choose for an enemy to die, and then roll to see if they have enough narrative control to make it happen. Players attempt to strike an enemy in the hopes of it dying, but the attempt is the extent of player influence. Upon making the attack roll, they've already succeeded in shaping the fiction to the maximum extent that it is possible for a player to shape the fiction.Everything that happens after the attack roll, whether or not that includes the enemy dying, is out of the player's hands in the same way it is out of their character's hands. After you swing your sword, what happens next is entirely up to the physics of the game world, although you can certainly speculate upon various probabilities by considering the underlying factors involved.Cubes are definitely important. They are important because they bear the responsibility of generating clouds. A cube which doesn't lead back to a cloud at any point would be meaningless, unless it can suffice as a cloud in its own right. (Remember, cubes are a subset of clouds which happen to be quantifiable; if your goal is to save the world by throwing the ring into the volcano, then success in doing so is still meaningful even if it involves erasing the ring from your character sheet.)</blockquote>

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