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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4039390" data-attributes="member: 4937">Which in turn creates certain reasonable expectations on the part of the PC's on how the mechanics regulate adversity when they aren't direct participants.  If they for example are defeated in a contest of arms by the Kings champion, and then learn that the King's champion was killed in battle by a kobold, they are going to have reasonable expectations about that kobold and it isn't going to be 'The DM just decided Sir Reginald died from a single stab wound of a kobold'.   If there is any interaction between on stage and off stage, this is unavoidable.  It's just a question of when and where you are going to hit these sorts of stumbling blocks.  And if there is no interaction between on stage and off stage, then for all practical purposes the off stage stuff didn't happen except in the play ground of the DM's mind. Yes, but the narrative control would have been excercised much more properly if it fit the player's expectations about the world described by the rules - that is to say - if it fit the established setting.Again, unless you are willing to forgo the expectation of consitancy on stage, you have to be consistant off stage as well because there will be points of contact. That is strictly true, but in brief, suspension of disbelief.  By invoking that much luck (or unluck), you are making it clear that you are making no consession to consistancy.   You are putting an unnecessary stumbling block in front of your players because they are unable to draw conclusions about the world you describe.  Don't the players have a reasonable expectation that the rules will inform the playstyle?  And in particular, isn't it rather unavoidable that the action-resolution mechanics have a very large role in creating the playstyle?  How can you expect anything but conflict over what the playstyle is or is supposed to be when the players are forever recieving mixed signals from you because you are using two completely different sets of rules in what is unavoidably a somewhat arbritrary fashion?I don't think it is obligatory.  But if you do create two different game worlds, the one in which the PC's live which works according to one set of rules, and another one that the PC's can only hear about or perhaps catch glimpses of which clearly works by a different set of rules, then I think you are creating unnecessary problems for yourself.It is certainly not obligatory to go down the RM route.  The RM root comes from thinking that the universe being simulated must in some fashion have everything in it that exists in the real universe, plus ironically, a bit more that doesn't.  Trying to simulate everything in the real world by having formal resolution systems can be an exercise in futility, especially if you also want the story universe to work by different rules as well on a case by case basis.  Abstraction is your friend.  Use it.The last sentence is so vague as to have no real meaning.  I made a point of listing some of the ways that a sentence like that could become a red herring earlier.  Look, all I can say is that if you insist that you are happy with a game universe in which the PC's must be signalled that this event or the other is a 'cut scene' occuring outside of game context and that inferences about game state can't really be drawn from it, then fine.  I think however that you are making alot of trouble for yourself for no real reason given how easily you can make the story fit the universe.  Likewise, I can't imagine how you think you are making the universe fit the story if in fact you aren't shaping its physics, you are merely implying that you have.</blockquote>

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