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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8610628" data-attributes="member: 42582">Fictional position is not a player's cognitive state. It's one of the factors that determines a player's total set of legitimate moves/gameplay options. It is the factor that consists in the "fictional stuff" ie the shared fiction. As I've already posted, I don't think we need to get deeply into the metaphysics of fiction. But clearly one player's cognitive state doesn't settle the content of a shared fiction. And there are parts of a player's cognitive state - eg wishing that they'd rolled higher on the dice - which are not relevant to the content of any shared fiction.You seem, here, to be disagreeing with Baker that fictional position can only be known retroactively.As I already posted, all I think he is getting at with that is that you can't really be certain that what you think is part of the shared fiction is really shared until you put it to the test by using it as the basis of a declared move. At that point you learn whether or not everyone else shared your conception of that element being part of the fiction!I'm not sure what you mean by a "system event" - do you mean creating or referring to a cue? Eg rolling dice and reading the result; deciding to use a trait to break a tie; etc?In which case, I think it's uncontroversial that <a href="http://lumpley.com/hardcore.html" target="_blank">the purpose of referring to cues is to generate updates to the fiction</a>:Roleplaying is negotiated imagination. In order for any thing to be true in game, all the participants in the game (players and GMs, if you've even got such things) have to understand and assent to it. When you're roleplaying, what you're doing is a) suggesting things that might be true in the game and then b) negotiating with the other participants to determine whether they're actually true or not. . . . So look, you! Mechanics might model the stuff of the game world, that's another topic, but they don't exist to do so. They exist to ease and constrain real-world social negotiation between the players at the table. That's their sole and crucial function.But that doesn't tell us anything about what the arrows are, in any given episode of play, between cues and cues, cues and fiction, or fiction and fiction.</blockquote>

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