Because the idea of Providence, which you have pointed to repeatedly, is the realm of the Gods. And the Player is not the person who determines what the Gods think or how they act. So they are not the ones who can declare whether or not the Gods favor someone.
Aren't they? I must have missed that memo.
Upthread, I posted this:
The two big problems, in my view, endure into later versions of D&D: (i) how does this character fit into the standard tropes of D&D play (eg dungeon delving and looting); (ii) if the GM is expected to judge what counts as chaotic and/or evil, than the player is in effect subject to direction from the GM as to how they should play their PC. I prefer the player to be the judge of these things, in discussion with the GM.
In my view the problem is not the lack of coherence, but my points (i) and (ii). Trying to play a righteous knight errant in a dungeon crawl is absurd, doubly so if - as is the case for most D&D games as best I can tell - the assumed cosmology is nihilistic rather than providential. (I know that most D&D campaigns use gods. So did REH in his Conan stories, at least sometimes. That doesn't stop the cosmology being nihilistic.)
The terrible fit between archetype and default setting and tropes is only reinforced by the GM making unilateral judgements about alignment.
In my experience, across various players, once it is understood that the character is a knight-errant and the setting and tropes make room for that character, and once the GM lets the player take charge of what their vision of righteous knight errantry requires, then it is fine.
I've not changed my mind over the course of our conversation. My approach creates compelling FPRGing with knight errant tropes, crises of faith, and the like (and has done so for me since 1990). Whereas your approach seems focused on the GM telling the players what morality requires or permits of them.
And this is still a LIE. The Raven Queen did not intercede, because we know why the effect ended, and it had nothing to do with anything except time. The paladin would also be establishing the exact same level of fiction if they declared "But my anti-frog underwear turned me back!"
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the entire point of Providence is that there is no random chance, looking at random chance and declaring it Providence is used to undercut the entire literary point.
This is very telling, for a couple of reasons.
First, it is not a lie. It is fiction. Authorship. Suppose that the GM makes something up about the Raven Queen, and then decides to narrate that as part of the fiction. That isn't more true, less of a
LIE. The Raven Queen does not exist. We can make up whatever stories we like about her, using whatever methods we like. The method that I and my group use is roleplaying - with the rules of the game creating the constraints within which the fiction must fall. But nothing in the rules of 4e D&D says that the cause of a time-limit (as mandated by the rules) cannot be intercession by a god. Which is what it was, in our game.
If I didn't want the "literary point" of my RPGing to be influenced by dice rolls, I wouldn't use them. In fact I probably wouldn't play RPGs - I would engage in solitary or cooperative story-writing.
Second, you appear not to be able to tell the difference between (i) a fiction about a paladin's faith in his god, tested over many episodes in the fiction which have been dozens of sessions of play by the time of this particular event, and (ii) some nonsense about underpants. This reinforces my view that my method produces more compelling RPGing than yours.
the difference between a Providence and a self-aggrandizing story is whether or not it is actually TRUE.
Fictions are not true. They are made up. My player made up a story about the workings of the providence of the Raven Queen. It created compelling fiction in the moment of play. It created something memorable to me, more than ten years later. And that story was just part of an unfolding story about that paladin's faith, conviction and quests.
In the novel Watership Down, one of the villains is killed before they can kill the protagonists. The Rabbit Protagonists believe this was Divine Intervention, that the gods acted to defeat this evil villain... he was hit by a train. We, as the human readers, know that this was not Divine Intervention, the train was simply running like trains do, with no regard to anything that a bunch of rabbits were doing.
And this is a common descontruction of Providence narratives, of showing or revealing that it is all a lie, that what they thought was Divine Intervention was nothing of the sort. That it is a self-delusion, which is exactly what you are presenting here. The Paladin says the Raven Queen saved him, but the exact same thing would have happened if any other party member was turned into a frog, or if any random monster that cultist targeted was turned into a frog. Because we know the duration of the ability, and we know the truth. The Paladin is wrong.
There is a certain irony in presenting a fiction - Watership Down - as evidence of how RPGing, an actual thing that actual people do, works.
Here are two sentences:
*At my table, had I as GM narrated the enemy Hexer attacking a different PC, and - following the roll of the dice etc - had I narrated that that PC turned into a frog, and then had nothing else done by any of the participants triggered a rule about the ending of that effect, I would have narrated the PC turning back at the rule-specified point in the turn cycle;
*In the fiction of our 4e game, had another PC been turned to a frog by that hexer, they would have turned back after a short period of time.
The first of these sentences is a true counterfactual about the real world.
The second of these sentences is a counterfactual that has to be evaluated within the fiction. Is it true? I don't know. My players don't know. You certainly don't know!
The fact that you treat the two sentences as equivalent, or close to, is what I mean why I say that you seem to be only to imagine one way of playing RPGs.
Multiple stories have been written featuring religious characters who have believed random acts have divine significance, and shown them as frothing at the mouth fools for reshaping their entire lives based on a truly random event of no significance.
All I can do is reiterate - the fact that it is random at the table does not mean that it is random in the fiction. This is a
choice that you are making in your RPGing. It is not one that I make in mine.
the mechanics of Burning Wheel allow you to pray for divine favors. You are essentially rolling a persuasion check on the Gods, to convince them to do as you ask. That isn't anything like what you have been calling for, because it is a different system.
You are wrong about BW. I am not rolling a persuasion check. The test is not rolled on the Persuade skill. It is rolled on the Faith attribute. Success or failure tells me about the strength of my character's faith, and of the Lord of Battle's judgement on it.
To use this same character to form an example of what I feel like you have proposed, imagine for a second you rolled for this prayer, and the GM after you failed said "The Lord of Battle has found Thurgon is too cowardly to continue his quest, he has removed his favor so that he may find a more suitable champion". That could be a valid interpretation of the god not answering his prayers, but that would be a rather terrible way to respond to a single failed roll, to force upon your character a cowardice that previously did not exist, simply to explain why you failed. But, if you were truly meant by Providence to continue, then you wouldn't have failed, so if you failed, it must be Providence deciding you are unworthy. Which I find deeply problematic.
I don't. Fiction is replete with unworthy figures. FRPGing can be an example of this.
In this particular instance, looking at random dice and declaring them Providence is exactly in lie with the literary tropes that mock and subvert the tropes of Providence. You can do so, but you may as well say the story is showing the Divine Right of Kings by having a random person of common birth stumble into a coronation, get crowned, and run a state into the ground. You can claim it was their Divine Right to Rule, but you are engaging in the anti-thesis of that trope in the process.
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you can make up whatever you want, but once you are looking at random dice and making up whatever story they are telling, you have moved away from the conceit that an all-knowing higher power has pre-written the events. It is a false premise at that point, a self-delusion. Because you know that you are adding meaning on after the event has passed. And again, this is the EXACT thing that is done to deconstruct Providence stories. The character who loses, and thinks they lost their gods favor, but did not lose because of that, is a character whom I have seen in literature. And they are not a character who is blessed by Providence.
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the players at the table factually know why it happens. Any speculation we add on top of that is an excecrise in self-delusion.
You accuse me and my players of being deluded, but to me it seems the shoe is on the other foot. At the very least, you seem to be confused.
To begin with, there is no
factual reason as to why the paladin turned from a frog back to his proper form. Because it is a fiction. The reason can be whatever we author, consistent with the rules. At my table, the player of the paladin authored that the Raven Queen turned him back.
Second, you seem to be supposing that a
story about providence must itself be produced providentially. But that is obviously false - as is shown from the fact that we cannot infer,
from the fact that JRRT wrote LotR, a story about providence, that JRRT was guided by providence in his writing. In case there is any uncertainty, I do
not believe that my RPGing is ordained by providence. It would not be ordained by providence if the GM or players made something up without constraint. It is neither more nor less providential if the dice rolls and rules of the game are treated as constraints. And this is before we reflect on the fact that the Raven Queen is purely imaginary, and so cannot ordain anything at all!
This does not mean that the story is not a story about providence, or a deconstruction. If, in the fiction, it turned out that the Raven Queen was rolling dice, then it would be different. Or if we were playing Over the Edge, which permits the PCs to discover that they are fictions, imagined by players of a RPG. But in my 4e game the Raven Queen does not roll dice, and there is no ironic or absurdist breaking of the fourth wall.
When the Monks wrote tales of God's Knights being protected by Providence and allows overcoming their foes because they embodied the virtues of the church... they weren't secretly reaching over to their dice cups to roll and see if the Knight succeeded. They also didn't follow a real knight and record their real actions. They were writing a story that they already knew the ending to, and they knew exactly why those events were playing out the way they did. That was the origin of Providence in literature. It was not added into the story after the fact.
All you are doing here is pointing out the difference between writing a story, and playing a RPG. I'm quite familiar with that difference.
But the monks were just humans. Them having written a story about this or that does not show providence at work. They just made it all up! In RPGing, we also make things up, but using different methods from what the monks, or a contemporary novelist, uses.
I've already noted that your method for RPGing seems to rely very heavily on one participant, the GM, dictating things to everyone else. You seem to think that the GM dictating without constraint
what we are all to imagine the Raven Queen doing has some providential overtones that are lacking from a player saying
what we are all to imagine the Raven Queen having done when the rules of the game open up a space for the player to do so. But I don't see it. GMs are not gods. They are human authors, no more or less than monks, JRRT, and RPG players.
You can't play a game where you guarantee that Aragorn will rise to be the King of Gondor, because in his fight against the Ring-Wraiths he could be stabbed six times and die. IF you then still want to hold that he is going to be King, you need to bring him back from the dead, have him be king while dead, or have the real person who is going to be king name his son that, none of which was the original destined ending. Which means that there was no destiny.
All these strong claims, with no evidence provided.
I'm curious about what RPGs you have played other than pretty mainstream D&D.
