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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 9367206" data-attributes="member: 6801228">But that action is pre-ordained and inevitable. JRRT did something slightly different, but in Chivalric tales, knights are chosen for their innate goodness, recognized and given tasks because of their innate goodness, and set out to complete those tasks because of their innate goodess. Lancelot goes to Dolorous Gard and single-handedly takes the castle, despite hundreds of knights falling to its enchantments and him needing to defeat all of those knights by himself, where he finds the tomb where the name of the person who will free Dolorous Gard is carved, and it is his own name, revealing his true noble origins, and becomes his castle that he is eventually buried in. It was fate, it was literally ordained, and that sort of thinking was bog-standard in Chivalric stories, because there is a plan, and you are just part of that plan and need to play your part. Human inaction is not possible, because the people destined to act are told to act and are made to be the people who will act appropriately. That is the entire concept of Providence.Are you constantly shifting the goalposts in your fiction then? Declaring that one of your PCs is destined to do something, then going "oopsie, must have actually been someone else" when they fail to do it? Look, you and your players can lie to each other, and say that certain things were pre-ordained to happen, but after actually trying to run a "destiny states" style game... it was a mess. Because the dice will not cooperate with your grand plan. So you either need to ignore the dice (which means ignoring how the game is played) or make things so vague that any potential outcome is actually what the prophecy means. Also, I REALLY find it rubs me the wrong way, that a character's rolls in combat would be used to tell the player that their character has some moral failing that they did not put in their character. I don't like forcing story beats on character's to begin with, but "you lost the duel, therefore you must not be as pure-hearted a character as you claim" is so many steps too far, I don't even know where to start. Especially since, those rolls are random, no matter how you might want to pretend they aren't.</blockquote>

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