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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7087666" data-attributes="member: 29398">Yet sometimes those same things happen simply due to dice luck.  What then?  Sometimes you're simply going to lose - or win - no matter what you do, just because the dice have decided it that way.  I don't claim to have "finely honed and well developed skills at playing" and nor do I really want to, as mistakes are a lot of what makes it fun; in that way I suspect I qualify as more of a "casual" player type in that the more seriously I take it all the less fun it becomes.And I favour some realism where possible, and realism tells me you're simply not always going to have all the information you really need.  Sometimes you will.  Sometimes you'll have more than you need, false rumours and so on being what they are.  If in the fiction the Baron is secretly possessed by a demon and your character has no way of knowing that until (for whatever insane reason) you walk up and hit him in the face, so be it.  Same goes in reverse: if the fiction (via rumour etc.) has it that the Baron's been possessed and you try to deal with him on that basis only to find there's no demon at all, he's just evil in his own right, so be it.I just don't think this deeply about it.  I know pretty well what makes my character(s) tick, what their strengths and weaknesses are, what they have in mind as goals if anything, and if there's anything specific I need regarding game-world information I'll just ask.  I don't see my role as a player as advocating for my character so much as simply playing it according to what it would reasonably (if not always rationally <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    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> ) do.Ah, now here we come to it.  If there's to be foreshadowing in any effective way that means someone (and I nominate the DM) has to know ahead of time what's coming so as to be able to drop in those hints and breadcrumbs and foreshadows.In this real-world age of the internet, perhaps.  Our characters, usually in a low- or no-tech medieval setting, don't have that.  Sure, some divinatory magic can compensate (though in more recent games divinatory magic seems to be a dying art) but it's not the same.  So, to play our characters we have to think like they would...largely (and wonderfully!) unburdened by the information overload we have in real life.Funny you should mention this, as I just watched Fight Club the other night for the very first time.  Sure, thinking back over it it's easy to see the foreshadowing and breadcrumbs, but at the time they meant nothing.But again, though, if nobody including the DM knows what the twist is it's impossible to foreshadow to it or build up to it.  With Fight Club, obviously pretty much the whole thing is building to the reveal right from the beginning and that's possible only because it has a DM (a.k.a. author) who has a specific end point in mind and has figured out an interesting way to get there.  How can you replicate that sort of long-term foreshadowing in a game where nobody knows what's coming next?I do agree with you in that a strong reveal-based narrative shouldn't rely on contrivance.  At the same time, however, in the game setting there's far more likely going to be things one doesn't know than in the real world; and so what may on the surface appear to be contrivance may in fact be a simple inability to either gather or parse enough informaton...you can't find the breadcrumbs either because you didn't notice them (your characters had always put the rumours of the Baron being evil down as malicious gossip, as he'd always been upright with you) or couldn't notice them as they too were hidden (until going to dinner with the Baron you really knew nothing about him beyond his name, and even that was hard to learn as he lives in a shroud of reclusive secrecy).Lan-"and sometimes what seems like a breadcrumb can in fact just be a red herring"-efan</blockquote>

Verification