Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7732261" data-attributes="member: 42582">I put fantasy into basically two camps.There's romantic, providential fantasy - King Arthur, JRRT, Dragonlance, etc - in which atheism is as you say absolutely preposterous, and PCs should absolutely take &quot;narrative causality&quot; as a given within the world they inhabit.And then there's modernist, even existentialist fantasy - REH, Elric, etc - in which there is no providence. In the optimistic version of this (Conan), individual human will can triumph. In the pessimistic version (Elric), the world is doomed to eternal recurrence resulting from the interplay of forces which frame human action ultimately as meaningless. In this sort of fantasy, the only causation that is of an significance is human will. Thus, the GMing &quot;sin&quot; in this sort of fantasy would be to fudge the dice when resolution is taking place - because that would be to replace will and action with providence. But manipulating events up to that point is neither here nor there: if the world the character inhabits appears to be a &quot;narratively caused&quot; test of the individual, that's no matter, because the will can work upon that as much as upon anything else.The idea that the events of the game have purchase or meaning only if the GM deliberately takes no interest in setting them in motion strikes me as a very strange premise for a game that involves shared fiction (because a premise for boring fiction), and as not connecting to any vision of fantasy at all. Consider even HPL: in his fantasy he asserts that the world is uncaring and indifferent, but that's not the actual stories he tells - these involve any number of opportunities for the characters to discover and react to this notional cosmic indifference. You don't simulate HPL fantasy by actually indifferently framing events and encounters so that's their's a meaningful chance of the PCs never experiencing anything of interest or significance.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 7732261, member: 42582"] I put fantasy into basically two camps. There's romantic, providential fantasy - King Arthur, JRRT, Dragonlance, etc - in which atheism is as you say absolutely preposterous, and PCs should absolutely take "narrative causality" as a given within the world they inhabit. And then there's modernist, even existentialist fantasy - REH, Elric, etc - in which there is no providence. In the optimistic version of this (Conan), individual human will can triumph. In the pessimistic version (Elric), the world is doomed to eternal recurrence resulting from the interplay of forces which frame human action ultimately as meaningless. In this sort of fantasy, the only causation that is of an significance is human will. Thus, the GMing "sin" in this sort of fantasy would be to fudge the dice when resolution is taking place - because that would be to replace will and action with providence. But manipulating events up to that point is neither here nor there: if the world the character inhabits appears to be a "narratively caused" test of the individual, that's no matter, because the will can work upon that as much as upon anything else. The idea that the events of the game have purchase or meaning only if the GM [I]deliberately takes no interest in setting them in motion[/I] strikes me as a very strange premise for a game that involves shared fiction (because a premise for boring fiction), and as not connecting to any vision of fantasy at all. Consider even HPL: in his fantasy he [I]asserts[/I] that the world is uncaring and indifferent, but that's not the actual stories he tells - these involve any number of opportunities for the characters to discover and react to this notional cosmic indifference. You don't simulate HPL fantasy by actually indifferently framing events and encounters so that's their's a meaningful chance of the PCs never experiencing anything of interest or significance. [/QUOTE]

Verification