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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7083883" data-attributes="member: 42582">There is a lot going on here. I don't know that I'll respond sensibly to all of it, but will try to convey some of the thoughts I had.(1) Not necessary to break immersion: I don't think that's a significant object of dispute. But, as per the disussion upthread between [MENTION=6802765]Xetheral[/MENTION], [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] and me, what breaks immesion vs what preseves immersion can be rather variable. As I said in a few posts, I find that depending up on the GM as sole mediator of the gameworld, so that players never (as their PCs) have their own perceptions/intuitions/understandings to rely upon, quite immersion breaking. (Unless the PC is literally meant to be an alien in the fictional world.)(2) Anyone could have been Obi-Wan's apprentice: Luke's name is Skywalker; his father was a great pilot and a great Jedi who left him a lightsabre as an heirloom; his father was killed by Darth Vader. These are the things that make Luke the appropriate heir to the Jedi tradition, and cast him in dramatic opposition to Vader and the Empire. (In a very different way from Leia, whose opposition is political, not personal/spiritual in the same way, at least before the Death Star is used to blow up Alderaan.)(3) Star Wars as a railroad: as with the discussion, way upthread, of LotR, we can't tell simply from a recount of the fiction whether or not an episode of RPGing was a railroad. But whether or not it is a railroad, my point is that you are not going to get a story in which the droids carrying a message for Obi Wan Kenobi end up, by coincidence as it were, in the hands of the prospective heir to Obi Wan, simply via random determination of encounters, droid malfunctions etc.There are multiple alternatives to random determination: railroading is one; what I have been referring to as player-driven RPGing is another.But consider using (say) the Stormtrooper massacre at the farm as a framing device. I think it would be harsh for a GM to just do that willy-nilly! It makes sense, rather, as the consequence of a failure. (Say, a failed Navigation roll to travel from Obi-Wan's house back to the farm, having realised the threat posed by the Empire's hunt for the droids.) But to know that that would be an appropriate consequence for failure, one needs to understand what is at stake for the player in declaring that action for his/her PC. This is what I'm saying I couldn't judge without knowing what is motivating the action declaration, which was the trigger for this particular discussion.(4) The writer provides the world and the characters react to it: the writer of a fiction is a person in the real world; the characters exist only in imagination. So the two can never interact.The writing of a fiction includes the writing of the actions of persons who are elements within that fiction. The question about RPGing is who gets to write which bits, according to what sorts of procedures. Eg does the GM frame Luke (as a PC) into a confrontation with the Empire because the GM wants to run an Empire-oriented game, or the table as a whole does, or the player has written something about opposition into the Empire into the PC's backstory, etc.The same sorts of considerations apply to the farm massacre. Who wrote in these family members of Luke the PC? Is the killing off of the farm providing the player/PC with something that s/he wanted (freedom from farming) though at a high cost (death of family members)? Or is it undesired through-and-through?These are all questions about authorship, not about in-fiction events.</blockquote>

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