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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8692393" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, my feeling is that people have a very fixed idea of what an RPG experience is and what it is not. Anything which strays outside of that mental model is 'wrong', and most of the explanations of that wrongness are post hoc attempts to explain something that isn't necessarily explainable in any systematic or logical way. I think, in the case of flashbacks there's a fixed idea that the play of a character is only to happen in linear fictional time. That also probably can be generalized into a principle that covers some other objections too. So, [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] for instance points out that knowledge checks have a similar structure. This is rejected because there (generally) isn't a 'playing out', even implicitly, of the acquisition of such knowledge. Because it can be assumed to have simply been carried around in the character's head all this time and have some vague origin that need not necessarily be examined, there isn't a feeling that it has a NARRATIVE to it. Buying a piece of rope has to have played out somehow, even implicitly, as a narrative, somewhere definite in time. It must have happened since I lost my backpack in that horrible boat incident, etc. Where do these fixed ideas about play come from? What purpose do they serve? These are interesting questions, but don't appear to be within the scope of this thread (and I have a bad feeling that if a thread was created in which to examine them it would probably get ugly fast...).</blockquote>

Verification