Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 8828601" data-attributes="member: 29398">No, that's just the 21st-century version of the PC / NPC forehead stickers. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Exactly.Imagination is great.&nbsp; It's why we do this.However, in a typical RPG we're also trying to build a setting that's solid and consistent enough and has enough integrity that players can run their characters in it without fear of things not working in the setting physics (and yes, magic is 100% a part of a setting's physics) the same as they did in-game yesterday.The type of flexibility you seem to be after where things are not elaborated and thus can change on a whim, yes.&nbsp; If my character does magical action X today and repeats the same action tomorrow, the same result should occur, much as if my character did physical action Y today and then repeated it tomorrow.Expand that a step: if two characters are equally capable of doing some action and both character A and character B do it, the same result should occur for each one, right?Now expand that to the setting as a whole.Without this sort of consistency, in the fiction you've got Calvinball and at the table you've got a whole lot of very needless and avoidable arguments.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Lanefan, post: 8828601, member: 29398"] No, that's just the 21st-century version of the PC / NPC forehead stickers. :) Exactly. Imagination is great. It's why we do this. However, in a typical RPG we're also trying to build a setting that's solid and consistent enough and has enough integrity that players can run their characters in it without fear of things not working in the setting physics (and yes, [B]magic is 100% a part of a setting's physics[/B]) the same as they did in-game yesterday. The type of flexibility you seem to be after where things are not elaborated and thus can change on a whim, yes. If my character does magical action X today and repeats the same action tomorrow, the same result should occur, much as if my character did physical action Y today and then repeated it tomorrow. Expand that a step: if two characters are equally capable of doing some action and both character A and character B do it, the same result should occur for each one, right? Now expand that to the setting as a whole. Without this sort of consistency, in the fiction you've got Calvinball and at the table you've got a whole lot of very needless and avoidable arguments. [/QUOTE]

Verification