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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 9369686" data-attributes="member: 6801228">The game does provide a reason. Duration. Time. You may as well say that the game offers no particular fictional reason that a torch only burns for one hour, and therefore when a torch goes out it is because of the God of Flame is demanding more sacrifices in his name and therefore it was divine action that causes the torch to go out after one hour. But that isn't what is happening. There is no divine intervention that causes a torch to stop burning after one hour, just like there is no divine intervention when a spell that lasts one round, ends after one round.Because you cannot have Providence, a Divine, Immutable Destiny planned from before your birth if you can die randomly at any point because of random events. The two concepts are incompatible. And just because you can declare after the random events that they were always planned, doesn't mean they were actually always planned. We, as the consumers of the story, know the truth of the situation.But if the fiction needs to constantly change because of the dice rolls, then it is just lying to yourself that the fiction was planned from the beginning. No it wasn't. It changed because you rolled dice. You are like a salesman whose product blew up and declares "it was meant to do that!" while shuffling it away in the bag to pull out the next thing.If you are randomizing events, there is no script that everyone is following. AGAIN, a classic example of Providence is Lancelot, seeking his name, coming across Dolorous Gard an ancient fort. Hearing that only a true hero can clear it, and that the hero's name is carved in stone in a tomb in the fort. He clears it, and he finds his name carved in that stone, marking the place he will be buried. If you were to play that event in an RPG, write down a character's name and put it in the envelope, could you guarantee that the name in the envelope will be the name of the character who clears the last room and enters the crypt to open the tomb and read their name? No. You couldn't. Unless it was a solo adventure and you refused to kill the PC, you have no idea who is going to succeed or even if they are going to succeed. Now, sure, you could simply declare that whoever does it was destined to do so and tell them they find their name, but it is a quantum ogre, a deception. You never planned who it was before the moment they succeeded, because you cannot know who will succeed. I understand that you can make it look like it was Providence, make it look like it was planned, but you are missing a key component. It ACTUALLY being planned and pre-determined.And how did your divine, immutable destiny change in six seconds?It is almost like you responded to a single sentence in a paragraph, instead of reading the entire thing. This is not a version of the problem of Evil. The problem of Evil only exists if the deity in question is Omnipotent, Omniscient and Omnibenevolent. I literally laid out in the paragraph that you seemingly skipped over that the Raven Queen is not Omniscient nor is she Omnipotent. And I don't think we really need to discuss whether a Goddess declared "unaligned" is Omnibenevolent. My point had NOTHING to do with the Problem of Evil.So, how about you go back and actually read the point I was making in that paragraph, instead of addressing something completely tangential to that point.If a caster casts a spell, then a caster has cast a spell. The effect of the spell did not materialize because the clock struck midnight, it was because the caster took the action to cast the spell. If the spell lasts one minute, and at 12:01 the spell breaks, then it was not because it is no longer midnight, it is because the spell lasted one minute. Yes, you can declare that the caster took no action while spending their action and their spell slot and that the spell would have lasted for much longer if it had been cast at any other time of day.... but those are falsehoods. The rules make it clear what happened. You may as well say that the spell ended early because the player had their lucky quarter in their left sock, or any other superstition. Just because you can declare two events are related, doesn't mean they actually are. This is not the same as calling an action that forces a reaction "mind control", it is not the HP is meat argument, it is "if something has a time limit and reaches that time limit and thus ends, it was because it reached the end of its time limit" Just because your character might BELIEVE it was something else doesn't mean it WAS something else.But the player does not get to declare authority of NPCs. And the Raven Queen is an NPC. And the Raven Queen did not act. Let me try again. Let us say that there is a trap that hits a target, and it deals 1d4 fire damage, every turn, for 1 minute, unless the fire is extinguished with water. IF the character spends that entire minute praying for deliverance and for the fires to be extinguished, it is NOT the divine intervention of the god that after 1 minute the fire stops burning. Yes, you can declare it is so. You can declare that it was because of their fervent prayers that the duration of the effect written in the rules was 1 minute... but that is false. Their actions had nothing to with the duration. They could have taken ANY action for 1 minute (except diving into water) and the exact same result would have occurred. And just because they did not take other actions, does not mean that the effect was changed. Again, I get that someone could believe it did. I get the character could declare it did. But that doesn't make it TRUE.It has been about... seven years? Since I touched the game. And I never played it much before that.Right. Go ahead and tell your DM at your next session that your character's personal gravity doesn't work in this dungeon, so you can walk on the ceiling. I'm sure that will work well for you. And yeah, maybe the DM will agree with you... but I bet that they would give a mechanical reason to alter gravity, like a spell affecting the area. Instead of it just being a "shared fiction". Look, I love when my players and even when DMs let me help craft the story. I do. I believe that Player's should have full autonomy over their character, and even a strong say in the fiction crafted around that character (I have told DMs in the past that when I create a married character, I am not interested in the wife cheating on my character, and I do not want to explore those stories) but that does not extend to declaring that the entire story is a pre-written script that must follow certain events and then randomizing the events and making up the script as we go along. Those two ideas are not compatible. I may as well say I am feeding the tiny gremlins in my computer when I plug it into the wall. I know it is a falsehood.</blockquote>

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