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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9369490" data-attributes="member: 42582">Your assertion that it is unrelated is just that - mere assertion. The game rules do not specify any particular fictional reason for why the fiction will include the victim of the baleful polymorph turning back to their normal shape. My player supplied one. You are in no position to say that he was wrong, or lying, or self-deceived: the fiction at our table is not something that you are a part of establishing.OK.What does that have to do with my point? I didn't say anything about when a PC dies. I said that, from the fact that something is rolled up on a table (and so, in the real world, is shaped by randomness) doesn't mean that, in the fiction, it is random.There is no changing of the fiction in the examples that I have posted, so I don't know what you light you think your posts are shedding.The actions of my RPG characters do not depend on dice rolls. The dice rolls happen in the real world, not in the fiction! In the fiction, they live and die for whatever reasons are apposite in the fiction.To reiterate, the use of dice rolls in a sci-fi RPG does not mean that, in the fiction, mechanical determinism is false. If I'm playing a historical RPG in which my PC is Newton, or Einstein, it doesn't refute my conviction that the world is deterministic to point out that, at the table, we use dice!This is obviously false. From the fact that I am playing a game of Fate, nothing follows about whether the fiction affirms Calvinism, existentialism, mechanistic determinism, Hegelianism, Buddhist "emptiness", or any other position on the causal nature of the universe and the relationship between and meaning of events.Would it? Or would it suggest that something else has happened between the two events?You make these dogmatic assertions about what must be possible in RPGing, but all they actually reveal is the narrowness of your conception of what is possible.This is a version of the problem of evil. Theodicy is a well-ploughed field. It doesn't raise any particular puzzle, in the context of RPG play, that is distinct from the general ones that it raises in the real world, and that real world believers resolve using the various intellectual and emotional devices that are open to them. The two that I'm most familiar with are the best of all possible worlds and mystery.This is all just repetition. You are asserting that the rules of the game must be part of the causal process in the fiction. This is the same thing that makes people conclude that hp are meat, that Come and Get It is martial mind control, etc. Suffice to say that other approaches to RPGing are possible - Gygax identified them in his PHB and DMG 45 years ago, and subsequent designers have developed them further.More dogmatic assertion! The reason why the player of paladin has authority over what happens to him, and how that relates to the Raven Queen, but not over another player's character, is obvious: RPGs distribute "ownership" of different elements of the fiction to different participants. It is then the job of the rules to integrate these cohesively (and it a sign of a poor ruleset that it doesn't do this very well).And you say it is not faith, it is mechanics as if these contrast. Which is bizarre: one (faith) is fiction, the other (mechanics) a real-world process used by the players of the game to help determine the shared fiction. You may as well say that the reason a fighter PC killed an Orc is not fighting prowess but mechanics. I mean, that would be an absurd thing to say, and your example is the same. Similarly, we may as well say - in our game of Fate in which a character's aspect is Always Troubled by Suitors - that the reason the suitors accost the character is not because they are besotted, but because the player spent a fate point.It's not possible to say anything useful about how RPGing works until we distinguish events in the real world and the imagined events of the fiction.No. The rules text first and foremost tells us what we have to agree to about the shared fiction, and what the process is that governs the establishing of that agreement.You said upthread you've played Fate. Fate does not tell us anything about the "reality of the game world". What it does tell us is that, under certain circumstances, a player is entitled to insist that something-or-other (typically connected to an aspect) is part of the fiction. This is why, in my earlier post, I expressed surprise that you were able to successfully play Fate while holding such dogmatic views about the relationship between RPG rules and the fiction that is created and shared among the participants.In my post I was proposing it as an aspect, that would work the same way that any other aspect does in Fate. Upthread you said that you have played Fate, but now you do not seem to be very familiar with some of its basic features.Now you seem to be getting it!Fiction is not self-creating, or self-validating. In the context of RPGing, it is joint. It is shared imagining.</blockquote>

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