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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9368793" data-attributes="member: 42582">No. The player can read the rulebook, understand the rules of the game, and decide when their PC is doing something that falls under the game's account of what is good and what is evil. They can decide if their PC needs to atone. Etc.This is all one possible way of playing D&D. It is not the only way.I know that you think this is nonsense. This is why I say that you are making assumptions about  how RPGs must be played. I don't know how you reconciled that with your play of Fate, though - when you spend a Fate point to change a scene, for instance, what do you think is happening in the fiction?I mean, suppose you spend a Fate point to have some convenient exit be in the building - who do you suppose built the building with that exit. Or suppose you have the aspect Always Troubled by Suitors, and as your PC is staking out the enemy HQ you say to the GM, "Wouldn't it be cool if some admirers turned up about now?" and the GM says, "Yes, it would" and tosses you a Fate point: in the fiction, those admirers had a reason for being there, for coming past that point, which is not under your PC's control - which may (if we assume a deterministic world) have been caused by factors that have been unfolding since the beginning of time. Yet as creators of fiction you and the GM only bring them onto the stage because of a decision made on the spur of the moment in accordance with the game rules.The player is making things up - they are playing a game in which a key thing the participants do is make up fiction.The paladin is affirming his faith, and - given he is a powerful adherent of the Raven Queen, probably at that point the most powerful in the mortal world - I am confident that he is truthfully reporting her doings.Once again you equate the decision-making process at the table with how events work in the fiction. That equation is not required. You say that you have played Fate - but Fate only works if the equation is denied. Nothing in D&D prevents denying it either, and in fact both AD&D and 4e crucially depend upon denying it.Ditto. I posted two sentences, one true and one with an unknown truth value. You have presented no argument in relation to the second sentence, except to point back to the first.Why not?The fiction of a RPG is bound by what the participants agree to. The rule set the parameters within which they agree. And the rules text is not a property of the fiction. It is a property of the real world. For example, it tells us how long we, as players of the game playing by the rules, are obliged to agree that the person is frightened.What the cause of their fear is, what the cause of its duration is, etc, are all matters of the fiction. These can be whatever we agree to make up, provided that we keep to our agreed rules.Huh? That man is delusional. Whereas my players and I are authoring fiction. Your comparison makes no sense at all.I could equally sit down, with a plan in my mind from the outset, to write a story about the randomness or arbitrariness of the world - or about the importance of heroic choice at key moments. Either could be written from an existentialist perspective. I've never read an account of how Camus wrote The Outsider, but I very much doubt he did it by tossing coins, rolling dice, or making whimsical decisions.The manner in which a story is written does not bear upon the content of its fiction. It is not the manner of JRRT's authorship that makes his story a story about providential events. It is the content of the story (both its literal content, and its extensive allusive content).There is nothing that stops a RPG being about providence. Imagine a game of Fate in which one of my aspects is Chosen by Destiny. The fact that I might invoke that aspect on a whim does not mean that, in the fiction, what happens is not a manifestation of the destiny of my character.Would you? What is happening, in your fiction, that makes the day of the week salient? I'm prepared to be that in most FRPGing, most of the time, the participants don't actually even know what day of the week it is in the fiction.This is an illustration of why I don't think you have a very clear picture of how RPGing works. And as I've already said, it makes me very puzzled about how you played Fate.</blockquote>

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