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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6521405" data-attributes="member: 42582">Board rules preclude teasing this out fully. But in the history of human thought there have been many influential writers who have defended arguments from the occurrence of religious experiences (eg Kant, or in a more radical existentialist mode Kierkegaard and Graham Greene) or from the subjective character of certain epistemic states (eg Plato, Descartes) to the conclusion that the objects of such experiences must exist.In other words, the epistemic situation of faithful people IRL is a matter of philosophical contention. I have views on that contention (and wrote on aspects of it for my MA thesis) but I think board rules won't let me spell them out here. But given that relatively clever and reasonable people can disagree in real life, I'm not sure why an RPG is bound to suppose that the more sceptical interpretation of claims of religious experience must be true within the fiction.But do these exhaust the scope of divine interference in mortal affairs? In 4e the default presumption is "no", because by default players of divinely inspired PCs, just as much as the players of any other sort of PC, have access to the rules for skill challenges, p 42 improvisations, etc.The reason I started my thread about miracles in 5e (which I think you posted in) was to see how 5e players think about this issue. I don't see anything expressly in the 5e rules that mandates spells and class features as the only manifestations of divine intervention in the world, but likewise the 5e rules don't have the same features as the 4e rules to make a contrary presumption the default.The purpose of the divine intervention ability is to have a percentage chance of having the deity cast a free spell, possibly of a higher level than you can cast, in your favour. In it's basic mechanical structure the divine intervention ability is no different from a 4e utility power.I don't see any connection between the presence or absence of that ability in the game, and a player narrating the end of an effect upon his PC as a manifestation of divine providence.This is not true by defaut in 4e - power source is a keyword, and keywords underpin the connection between the mechanics and the fiction. If you ignore the fact that clerics are servants of the divine while other characters are not, of course that's your prerogative. But nothing in the game dictates it, and it is hard to see how p 42 could be used if you didn't have regard to these keywords (as well as many others, of course).As   [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] indicated, this need not be so. The rogue PC will have his/her own basis/rationale for escaping from a Baleful Polymorph.Gygax talked about this in his DMG: a cleric's successful saving throw is a result of divine beneficence, a thieve's is a result of cunning of hand and mind, etc. (Gygax doesn't specify who narrates this: player or GM. I think he is probably assuming it will be the GM.)I'm not sure how you can say this about my game- wouldn't I know whether or not it's conjecture?I'm also not really sure how a Commune spell helps. First, look at it from the perspective of the fiction. What does a Commune spell consist in? The PC performs a certain ritual, and then is vouchsafed a certain experience. If the PC has the experience without the ritual, how is that any different? There are certainly D&D modules out there in which PCs have prophetic dreams without having to perform rituals prior to them.Now look at it from the perspective of the real world, rather than the fiction. How does a Commune spell help? The player of the paladin asks, via Commune, "Did you save me from the Baleful Polymorph?" How, as GM, am I meant to know what the answer is that the Raven Queen will provide? Either I have to make it up or the player has to make it up. If the player makes it up, what difference does it make whether the player makes it up when the Commune spell is cast, or when the curse ends?If you are saying that you, as a fellow player, are happy only when the GM makes it up, that's an important fact about you as an RPGer, but I don't see how it is relevant to me, given that we are not playing together.Again, that would be an important fact about you if you were playing in the game. But in my game the opposite is true: it makes sense that the gods protect their devout worshippers and servants.Also, I wouldn't necessarily call it an "arbitrary space" in the sense that was used in the article you cited. An arbitrary space is one with no reason. But in this case, there is a reason - it's just that the reason is supplied by the player.But I do fully agree that there is a blank that gets filled in. The existence of blanks is pretty much a necessary condition of player authorship: if everything about the gameworld is already known, then there is no space in which the player can author. For instance, to refer back to the paladin's warhorse, if the location of every horse, and every evil fighter, in the gameworld is already known, then that ability can't work as described in the AD&D DMG, because there is no scope to stick a new horse and a new evil fighter into the fiction. [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] and I have discussed this need for "blank spaces" to underpin certain sorts of action resolution in the past. And if you look at GM advice for games that support player authorship, they tend to discuss the significance of "blank spaces", and what details it is helpful to fill in in advance, and what details are better left loose and unspecifid so that they can be fleshed out in the course of play.This may all be true. So might the converse - I know that from my group (which is not just my current players but an overlapping continuity of players going back 25 years) I would get zero buy-in for a game in which players didn't have some degree of authorship over features of the gameworld and backstory in which their PCs are intimately bound up.My point remains - here is one instance in which player authorship did not impede, but rather fostered, immersion in the character.If the claim here is that process simulation mechanics tend to leave no room for player authorship, then I agree. But if the claim is that 4e's mechanics (and D&D's mechanics more generally) are per se process sim, then I don't agree.I guess people could run the Human Hexer's Baleful Polymorph ability as process sim if they wanted to, but nowhere do the rules tell you that that is what is going on, and plenty of the rest of 4e's mechanics tend to push against a process sim interpretation (as is pretty well known, I think). [MENTION=6781913]Rejuvenator[/MENTION]'s comment about "filling in the blanks" is spot on, in my view, but that only comes into play if you are not running the mechanics as process sim.Spot on. On both points: the truth of the narration is established by consensus (which, at my table, is generally evidenced by an absence of disagreement); and what makes it interesting is how the narration affects future play.In this particular case, its contribution to future play is mostly in respect of colour and theme - it reinforces the religious conviction of the paladin, the reality of the Raven Queen's actions in the world, the prospect that the non-Raven Queen devotee PCs (two of five) are nevertheless ultimately helping the Raven Queen realise her goals, etc.I'm not sure why you use the word "diversion". Diversion from what? In games in which player authorship figures, it is also generally accepted that it establishes the focus of play (goals and/or theme and colour).I'm not really sure what to make of these remarks in the context of my post. For instance, how does an assertion about the need for railroading relate to my example of player authorship as a source and expression of, rather than an obstacle to, immersion?Are you arguing that by using player authorship (plus other features of 4e, like inspirational healing, etc) to realise the sort of game I want I am doing it wrong (perhaps contradicting the ethos of D&D?). Is the next step in the argument that to get the sort of game I want in D&D I must use railroading, and that - because railroading is in my view, as I think in yours, a pretty obvious unsatisfactory game experience - D&D is therefore not suited for doing what I want?For the sake of clarity: I am not railroading. A player narrating the truth of divine beneficence in the gameworld is not an instance of heavy-handed GMing - it is not really an instance of GMing at all, except that I did not exercise any veto over the introduction of this content into the shared fiction. Furthermore, that bit of player narration did not clash with any of the game mechanics - it exploited them (taking advantage of what Rejuvenator called the blank space to be filled in). And it was one part of the overall game experience that produced, and continues to produce, an epic fantasy game in which the gods are real and the Dusk War is almost upon us, and which is not remotely Conan-esque.This is also a bit puzzling to me. Why are you assuming that heavy-handed GMing is the defaut, when the topic of discussion is an alternative to that, namely, player authorship? If the player is allowed to voice the ethos and convictions of the deity, then there is no need to assume the the sort of nihilistic religion that   [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] describes, but nor is there any need for the GM to heavy-handedly play the deity. The player does that heavy lifting.I'm not sure how seriously you are asking this question, given that you are familiar with RPGs in which, and RPG techniques whereby, players exercise narrative authority.In Marvel Heroic RP, a player of The Thing can narrate, as part of his/her action declaration, "I pick up a car and hit the Overmind over the head with it!" - thereby, among other things, making it true that at least one car was parked in the street. A player of The Punisher can't make the same narration. How do we tell? We look at keywords, the character history/description that appears on the facing page of the Datafile, etc.How do we know that the player in my 4e game can narrate the beneficence of the Raven Queen - we look at keywords, refer to the character history and description that is established via a combination of pre-game backstory and actual play, etc. Much the same things that led Gygax to suggest that saving throws be narrated one way for clerics and a different way for thieves.If an attack misses a PC, and the character's player wants the PC to respond "I'm invulnerable", s/he is free to do so, but subsequent events are likely to prove that narration false, because the default chance to be hit in 4e is around 60%.If the paladin PC is, once again, turned into a frog (I can't remember whether the ability is at-will, rechargable or 1x/enc) then that may provoke a crisis of faith - "Why has the Raven Queen abandoned me?" It may even provoke a retcon ("The world is a cold and random cosmos after all, with only the illusion of divine beneficence.") I don't see why that would be a problem - it looks to me like the game working as it should!But why would the active presence of a deity in a D&D gameworld have any sort of general tendency to intrude on immersion? (It may well do so in your case without there being any general tendency.) This is the stuff that D&D gameworlds tend to be made of, particularly the default setting for 4e, which consists of a backstory of mythic history rather than any detailed geography etc (there is also the Nentir Vale map, but it is completely orthogonal to the mythic history and I have never used it - as my campaign map I use the one from B11 Night's Dark Terror).It seems to me that a major point of having three devotees of the Raven Queen as player characters (see my post not far upthread), in a game in which the whole trajectory of play (per default 4e) is towards the culmination of history in an epic Dusk War between the gods and the primordials, is to explore and discover the ramifications of devotion to the Raven Queen in that context.For me, this tends to disrupt immersion. That's why I prefer an approach in which reasons emerge and are revealed in play. That they happen in play, and that some of them are authored by the players, tends - in my experience - to make them more salient and "real" (ie immersive).</blockquote>

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