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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7732190" data-attributes="member: 42582">By player I assume you mean character?In any event, I'm assuming about something that gets easier, the more cloud there is (eg "I'm a vampire who wants to avoid being burned by the sun: I dodge from shadow to shadow, avoiding patches of sunlight"). If the state of the clouds is already established in the fiction, then it might provide a modifier to the check; but if it hasn't been, then the state of the clouds is one thing that might be read of the check result.But what are you going to say, when a player asks about the cloud cover? I assume there are metereological measures of degree of cloud cover, but (i) I don't know what they are, and (ii) I wouldn't be able to correlate them to what I can see in the sky on a day-to-day basis, and presumably neither would most PCs. If I tell the player "There's some cloud, but it's not raining and there are patches of sunlight breaking through", what does that mean to the player vis-a-vis his/her PC's clever scheme to exploit the cloud cover?This is what the dice are for.It can never be determined by internal causality from past events, because fictional events exert no causal power in the real world (only imaginary causal power in the imagined world).If the GM assigns probabilities and rolls, then the reason for outcome (1) rather than (2) - say, a bounty hunter seeking strangers rather than a bounty hunter seeking the PCs - is not internal causality either. The reason is (i) the GM's decisions about odds, (ii) the causal forces that operated on the dice, and (iii) the GM's decision to give effect to the rolled result.So then the question is - why is a game in which the GM makes determinations based on assigning odds and rolling dice per se a better RPG than on in which the GM makes decisions based on what's interesting? Here's one reason it might be better: the players can't make predictions about the future game state based on knowldege of what is interesting and engaging to them. Here's one reason it might be worse: it's more likely to produce a boring experience, which is not a virtue in a game.Neither has any particular connection to roleplaying, as neither is about the players' play of his/her PC.</blockquote>

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