Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7085205" data-attributes="member: 42582">I know. That's what I said in the post you just replied to: "Ovinomancer accused me (more-or-less) of engaging in ridicule, or deliberate distortion of what had been said."My point is that I was neither ridiculing you nor deliberately distorting what you said. Indeed,    [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] then went on to say exactly what I had taken you to say: "NPCs do exercise that power over events." I don't agree with this, but given that    [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] actually said it, I didn't take it as ridiculous to intepret you (having nothing to go on but your post) as also saying it (less plainly).Eg you said "The players were successful which means you have to honor their intent going forward -- the advisor cannot mitigate the result". Read literally that seems to posit the advisor (a fictional entity) mitigating the players' success (an event in the real world). You have since clarified that you intended this as a shorthand for something like "The GM cannot undo or lessen the result - ie the players' success - by having the advisor achieve some feat or feats of mitigation". But that was not evident to me upon my initial reading of your post.Connecting this to the topic of the thread: I think it is a significant source of distortion in discussion/analysis of RPG methods to refer to elements of the fiction as if they have causal power. Yet it happens very frequently: eg you'll see someone say that the reason something-or-other happened at the table was [such-and-such], where [such-and-such] is not a description of events in the real world, but simply a recount of the fiction. And hence is incapable of being a reason that anything happened in the real world.</blockquote>

Verification