NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9719609" data-attributes="member: 42582">Yes. The player is playing a RPG. As part of that, the player authored some fiction. That's what happens when someone plays a RPG!The player calculates to hit bonuses, and estimates ratios of damage to hit points. Their PC, meanwhile, is fighting for their life and trying to read the Orc's footwork and anticipate the Orc's feints.The player is authoring, via a complex mechanical process. The PC is actually at risk of being skewered. Completely different decision spaces!Or if they're not, then nor is the one I described. You can't have it both ways.The character conjectured that the runes could reveal a way out, and read them hoping that they would do so.The player conjectured that Strange Runes could reveal a way out, and decided that his character would read them hoping that they would do so. Of course the player knows it's a fiction, but that is because the player knows they are playing a RPG.You want to argue that because the player contributes to the authorship of something (the meaning of the runes), whereas their character does not causally affect the authored thing (ie the meaning of the rune), their decision space must be different. But you're wrong. It's not. That's part of the measure of good RPG design - it allows a player to contribute to the fiction without having to step outside of their PC. 40 years ago that was a design puzzle, but it got solved in the intervening years.</blockquote>

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