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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8497767" data-attributes="member: 16814">I'm uncertain why I'm being fisked, here.  There's a number of these responses that, in going line by line, are missing the points being made in an attempt to rebut the individual lines with a touch of a Gish Gallop.What you're defining as "ludic" state appears to just be a causal relationship - a leads obviously to b and so on until we get to the current framing.  Your example of cliffs being established and thereby continuing to be an obstacle (for a given set of fiction) seems to confirm this.  And this is what I understood your arguments above to be as well.  And, in this case, my arguments as to why this is a false dichotomy hold.  You seem to have separated play into a mode where such "ludic" concerns are paramount and a mode of play where they have near to no bearing.  My argument was that this is, indeed, a false dichotomy because tension between these two is present in any mode of play -- hence why I said I could argue for both in any given moment of play and why I used [USER=29398]@Lanefan[/USER]'s arguments to showcase that his supposed "lucid" frame (and the one you established your arguments on) is really just a matter of timing, not actual causation.  [USER=29398]@Lanefan[/USER] established his causal patterns prior to play, whereas SYORTD does is mostly in play.  The resulting fictions from each are just as causal, and the motivations can be just as dramatic (here meaning acausal in your framework).  The idea that SYORTD using dramatic needs as it's call for challenge doesn't mean that it's absent causation at all. It's does often use a reverse chain, but causation is still generated.  For example, in trad play, the GM may have prepared a daunting cliff obstacle between location a and location b.  He may have done this before play started or between sessions after players declared intent for their PCs to go from A to B.  Doesn't matter, and this is the acausal part of generation -- there's no cause to make this cliff other than the GM's desire to do so.  Any other causal factors here are rationalizations of this, not actual causes.  It's fiction.  So, when the party travels, they encounter the cliff, and have to overcome it.  Dice will likely be used to resolve this uncertainty, but traditional D&D tends to focus on the task resolution rather than intent resolution.  This means it doesn't matter what their players' intent is when climbing (get to the top, camp halfway up in cliff bags, getting to a nice nesting area to steal eggs, whatever) but rather what task they are undertaking -- you make climb checks until the intent is met or you fail and cannot continue.  In SYORTD, a similar cliff would be generated because players have declared an action to go from A to B, but the reason holds dramatic tension -- they want to go to B for an important reason, not just a quick change of scenery.  This is the dramatic driver to call for challenge, and so a cliff could be introduces as a challenge (likely because climbing is something a PC is invested in or has a motivation for or against).  Here, again, the introduction of a cliff is acausal -- nothing causes this.  However, once it is introduced, an entire causal chain is introduced just like it would be in the trad D&D prep scenario.  Further, once this is introduced, it would remain a challenge to be overcome when going from B back to A (unless effort is made to avoid it, just like with Trad D&D).  So, here the differences between your ludic and dramatic premises are just in timing of application (and there's nothing in the D&D framework that prevents a similarly ad-hoc introduction), and both causal and acausal fiction is created and rationalized.As I said above, there's a mythology that's built up around worldbuilding and prep that supposes that prior imaginings are somehow reified as more real than current imaginings -- that there's some form of real causal chain that is created.  This is false -- it's all authoring fiction and when you author fiction doesn't really make much difference to the next bit of fiction authored, which could be immediately after or weeks from now.  It's a false dichotomy to attempt to separate fiction into causal and acausal modes to begin with because you can't really have just one, and further because all fiction is actually acausal entirely we just imagine causes that don't actually exist.  Within the framework of the fiction it's good to imagine causes that can create a sense of reality, and it's perfectly fine to state that your (general you) personal preference is for fiction that adheres to certain imagined causal pathways over others, or that possess enough imagined causes to satiate.  No issues here.  But when claims start to be made that there's some actual difference other than preference -- that there's causal chains and acausal chains -- this is incorrect.  It's all acausal imaginings, we just can acausally imagine that there are causes.</blockquote>

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