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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Xetheral" data-source="post: 7059100" data-attributes="member: 6802765">I think some of the disagreement related to "consistency" is related to the concept of <a href="http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/17231/roleplaying-games/dissociated-mechanics-a-brief-primer" target="_blank">Dissociated Mechanics</a>. The comparison isn't perfectly apt, but I think it's close:When Pemerton decides, as a consequence of a player failure, that the brother was Evil all-along, it's effectively creating a dissociated mechanic for the player on-the-spot (instead of in the game's rules, where the label is usually applied). OOC, the player's decision to search for the mace has causally resulted in the brother's retroactive classification. But IC, the charcter's decision has causally resulted in a failure to find the mace (and finding the arrows instead). I think it's that OOC/IC inconsistency, analogous to a dissociated mechanic, that's causing some posters, like me, who react badly to dissociated mechanics, to feel that Pemerton's approach itself will necessarily lead to an inconsistant game world.I came to this conclusion trying to reconcile my visceral agreement with the posters claiming that Pemerton's style would create inconsistencies with my intellectual awareness that I've run interally-consistant games while making on-the-fly changes nearly as big as Pemerton. So I know from experience that it can be done consistantly, but it still felt like it shouldn't be possible. Hence my conclusion that the inconsistency I felt was based in the mechanic itself, rather than in the game world.For reference, my style is a hybrid of Saelorn and Pemerton's approaches. Like Saelorn, I approach playing D&D as analogous to a (casual) modeling exercise, with the current state of the model (the game world), the rules (part of the modeling engine), the GM's judgment/discretion (the other part), and player decisions (external input) used to determine how the model evolves. Unlike Saelorn, however, I don't view the model as sacrosanct; I will liberally tinker with it on-the-fly as a tool to achieve my ultimate goal of maximizing player enjoyment. (This includes being careful to make sure that the players are all on board with my style.) Consistency tends to be important to my players, so I'm careful to keep the game world internally consistent as interacted with by the PCs, even as I'm freely making changes behind the scenes based on OOC considerations. So my game worlds are in many ways as fluid as Pemerton's, despite my overall approach having more in common with Saelorn. (Ironically, earlier in this thread I considered my approach to be antithetical to Saelorn's: the conversation has certainly been an eye-opener.)</blockquote>

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