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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 8228043" data-attributes="member: 29398">Given this context, yes.  Absent context, a big pendulum swinging in a bigger chamber could be highly relevant, tangentially relevant, or not relevant at all to what the PCs are doing; and they won't know until-unless they investigate further.Then what is naturalistic extrapolation, if not a fancy term for consequences (or cause-and-effect, same thing)?You're comparing apples and rabbits here...and at the same time, not.  Both things really break down to being glorified if-then-else loops nested within others; only in the psionics-use case the if-then-else is written down in the notes and the branch taken each time is determined by the PCs' actions where in combat the if-then-else is coded into the game rules and the dice determine which path is taken each time.The apples-and-rabbits bit is that one is reliant on rules coding and the other not; also greatly different degrees of granularity.  IMO a better comparison at the scale/granularity level might be a step up, at the point of the PCs' decision whether or not to engage in combat.It's a question of scope and available time.  A movie has a limited run-time and thus has to harshly limit* the scope of what it covers in terms of both in-setting time and in-setting story.  An RPG, on the other hand, has no such limits; the scope and period of what it covers can be immense if so desired, and things that happen elsewhere in the setting now could have knock-on effects later that impact the PCs.  Which perforce means that even if the focus of at-the-table play is on the here-and-now PCs, someone (usually the GM) has to keep an eye on the bigger picture with a view to what events are happening elsewhere and how said events might (or might not) impact the PCs depending what they do and-or where they go in the future.So in Indy's case, in the movie we don't hear about random German military operations elsewhere but in an RPG - where Indy's going to do many more things (i.e. have many more adventures) than just recover the Lost Ark; and where his movements are controlled by his player and thus unpredictable, knowing what the Germans - and other armies - are doing elsewhere could come in really handy in terms of determining what he's liable to bump into on his travels and when. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  (personally for this I'd likely just quietly haul out a history of WWII-era military movements and keep it behind the screen for reference)* - sometimes much too harshly, IMO: the LotR movies should have each been about three hours longer in order to do full justice to the tale.</blockquote>

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