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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8595721" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't understand this.Fictional positioning is normally used to refer to one of two (related) things:(1) A player's position, in the game, that results from what everyone agrees about their PC and their PC's potential for action in the shared fiction. (I take this from <a href="http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/690" target="_blank">here</a>.) (2) What everyone agrees about a character and that character's potential for action in the shared fiction.When used the second way, the term refers to the underpinning (in the shared fiction) of what is referred to when it is used the first way. The first usage is cognate with the general notion of a player's position in a game, but particularised having regard to the significance of the shared fiction in RPGing. The second usage is cognate with a person's position or circumstance in the world, but applied to an imagined person's position or circumstances in an imagined world.My reason for spelling all this out is that I don't see how either (1) or (2) is a model: both usages are references to reasonably straightforward states of affairs. Thus I don't see how the notion of prediction comes in: talking about a player's, or a character's, fictional position is a way of describing some current aspect of the play of a game, not a way of predicting or modelling anything.And I don't see how the notion of intention or motivation comes in either. To explain by way of example: used the first way, Dro's fictional position at step 2 (as per the last bit of my post just upthread) includes that Harguld is at the cave mouth with a loaded crossbow ready to shoot Gnolls. This is not a statement about Dro's intention or motivation. Used the second way, Harguld's fiction position at step 2 includes that he is at the cave mouth with a loaded crossbow ready to shoot Gnolls. This is a statement about (inter alia) Harguld's intention or motivation, but not about Dro's. When we get to step 3, and the GM introduces the emergence of a Gnoll scout into the tunnel not to far from Harguld, fictional position changes - Harguld is at the cave mouth with a loaded crossbow ready to shoot Gnolls and a Gnoll scout has just emerged from the shadows - but nothing has changed about Harguld's (imagined) intention or motivation, nor about Dro's (actual, real world) intention or motivation.I'm spelling all this out to explain why I don't understand what you mean by your idea of fictional positioning.I don't understand this either.First, here are my thoughts on your posited magic item (the signet of fostering quickness and bloodiness or something along those lines): I don't think it's an ideal design for Torchbearer, because it lets one player interfere in another's action resolution in a way that is at odds with the general design of the game. But I don't think this has anything to do with entailment. It's an item that gives one player a Call-On with respect to another player's test. That's a metagame effect, in the sense that, in the fiction, no one can "see" the tie; but in the fiction the item (presumably) fosters quick reactions in those who are caught in ambush situations, be that ambusher or ambushed depending on which way the player who is declaring the Call-On chooses to deploy it.Second, my comments upthread about entailment were not about feelings. I was referring to inferential relationships between things. In one case I was referring to inferential relationships between components of the fiction: if someone wearing a space suit on the surface of Pluto has their space helmet shattered, they are exposed to freezing vacuum and hence (all else being equal) begin to freeze, suffocate and decompress. The inference here rests upon a shared understanding of the fiction. (It's notorious that if that understanding is not shared - eg because not everyone regards all else as being equal - then disputes at the table can break out. See all the debates, in the history of RPGing, about whether a PC was standing in the right place or touching the right thing to trigger a trap.)In another case the inferential relationship was between a cue and a fiction: taking the high ground grants a +2 to hit. This inference rests upon the rules of the game - whether a specific rule about high ground (in AD&D, both OA and WSG state such a rule, though I think the bonus is +1 rather than +2), or a general rule about advantage (analogous to the advantage die rule in Burning Wheel).I don't see what the existence, or absence, of these inferential relationships has to do with a magic item - in game play terms, a cue that is a component of a player's position - that permits a player to activate an other-regarding Call-On in particular mechanical circumstances (ie when a certain sort of dice roll is tied).The written examples Edwards was referring to were stories. Not detailed, analytic accounts of the actual process of play.Of course, from the analytic account of Thor and Dro's play that I set out above there are things we can't tell: we can't tell whether or not Dro was enjoying himself, or whether or not Thor was bored or frustrated or sitting on the edge of his seat. Nor can we tell exactly what each was picturing in their mind's eye at various points - I've set out my picturing in general terms, and would imagine most people's to be similar, but similarity is not identity. Just to give one example: what people imagine when Thor describes the Gnoll scout emerging from the shadows is likely to vary quite a bit.All that said, I've done my best in my post upthread to explain what I take the actual process of making gameplay decisions looked like, and what the resulting fiction was.OK. The words "seeing" and "finding" seem, to me, to introduce obscurity. I mean, when Dro decides to spend a trait, he is not discovering something. He is choosing it. Hence why <a href="http://lumpley.com/hardcore.html" target="_blank">Baker says</a>Roleplaying is negotiated imagination. . . . Mechanics . . . exist to ease and constrain real-world social negotiation between the players at the table.Likewise when Thor decides that the crossbow shot drives off the Gnoll, but that Harguld feels fear. That's a choice, not a discovery.Describing what is negotiation, and decision-making, using the language of "seeing" and "finding", seems to me apt to introduce confusion.Again, OK. I still don't see the rationale for labelling processes of decision-making as if they were processes of discovery.I haven't made any reference to "abstract triggers", so I'm not sure what you're referring to. When Dro chooses to use a Fate point, the "trigger" is not abstract, it's concrete: there is a die sitting on the table showing a 6. And when Dro chooses to use his Cunning trait, the "trigger" is not abstract, it is concrete: there are two pools of dice, and in each pool the number of dice showing a 4, 5 or 6 is the same. Hence the tie.These are the cues (boxes) that I have referred to in my posts. They are real things that we produce through our game play, and that we use - in accordance with the rules of the game - to establish a shared fiction.I don't know what you mean by this. There is an actual moment, in the real world of gameplay, when Dro has declared that Harguld shoots, but the dice have not landed on the table. At that point in time, in the real world, no one knows what is happening to Harguld's bolt, no one knows how close the Gnoll is to Harguld, no one knows whether it is a hard or easy shot.The dice land, and are tied. Still no one knows those things, because everyone knows that there is stuff that Dro can do to mechanically manipulate the result. And in the example, he does those things. First, he spends a resource to reroll a die. But fails the roll. That decision does not represent anything new happening in the fiction. Perhaps it tells us how desperate Harguld is, how much he hopes the shot will land: but if so, that was a fact about Harguld that was already true at the moment the action declaration was made.Then Dro uses his trait. This makes it true that the Gnoll is close ("I wait for way too long trying to lure him in"). But that must have been true when the shooting of the crossbow was declared, as the waiting takes place, in the fiction, before the shooting. Hence why I describe it as a retcon. If you want to call that "updating continuously" that's your prerogative, but the "updating" in the real world does not correspond to the time sequence in the fiction: in the fiction the time sequence was gnoll comes close, Harguld shoots but in the real world the time sequence is Dro decides that Harguld shoots, Dro decides that the gnoll comes close. That's not ambiguous: it's crystal clear.Hence my point that there is a time, in play, when we know what Harguld has done - he's shot his crossbow - but we don't know what the circumstances were in which he did this - we don't know how close the Gnoll was. Given that we didn't know that, it wasn't part of Harguld's (or Dro's) fictional position - the Gnolls's proximity to Harguld was not something on which everyone was agreed, that was an element of Harguld's potential for action. It is something that everyone comes to agree upon after Harguld's action - shooting his crossbow - has already been introduced as a component of the shared fiction.I don't see what it adds to the analysis of RPGing to try and elide the roll of cues, to try and elide the roll of decision-making, and to speak as if elements of the fiction that get made up after actions are declared are constituent elements in the possibility of declaring those actions. It seems obscurantist to me.</blockquote>

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