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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8265726" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think you're missing the point.In order for my PC to remember that X, it has to be the case that X. (Otherwise it's a delusion, not a memory.)So the fact that I narrate some recollection on my PC's part - of drinking, or not, the coffee - also establishes something prior ie that my PC did or didn't drink the coffee. And this happens at the table after I am prompted to by another character asking the question of my PC. So at the table we have (1) (a) Question asked which establishes, in the fiction (b) that my PC was asked a question about what s/he did earlier that morning and then (2) (a) My narration of my PC's answer, which may also include a recollection, but which - crucially for present purposes - establishes (b) that my PC drank, or didn't drink, some coffee earlier that morning.At the table, the (2)(a) event comes after the (1)(a) event. In the fiction, the (2)(b) event (drinking, or not, the coffee) comes before the (1)(b) event (being asked the question).That is my point, and as far as I can tell is also [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER]'s point.Notice that if we change coffee to potion of longevity and we change the situation from after-breakfast free roleplaying to an encounter with an AD&D ghost, nothing changes about either the (a) sequence or the (b) sequence, but that [USER=6698278]@Emerikol[/USER] and [USER=29398]@Lanefan[/USER] would insist that the player can't "retroactively" change the fictional past to make it the case that his/her PC drank the potion to get younger and hence build up a buffer against the ghost's aging power.That is why I assert, and as far as I can tell [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] agrees, that what is at stake in relation to BitD flashback is not temporal sequence but rather a rule about when important stuff has to be established as part of a "plan than act" play priority (best elaborated, I think, by Gygax in the pages of his PHB just prior to the Appendices).Exactly the same "non-linearity" is present in the coffee example - first we establish, in the narrative, that the character is asked an after-breakfast question about what happened at breakfast, and then we establish, as a component of the fiction, that something-or-other took place at breakfast.If we imagine a film with this particular coffee example, there are (at least) two ways it could be done: the character is asked the question by X, and then narrates an answer; or, the character is asked the question by X, and then we have a flashback scene (perhaps in B/W or sepia or vaseline lens to make it clear) of the breakfast event taking place. But the use of either expository technique doesn't change the fact that the events of the fiction are being revealed in a sequence that differs from that in which they occurred in the fiction.I don't know BitD, but I doubt that the Flashback mechanic cares whether a player narrates it as his/her PC recollecting his/her prior cunning planning, or narrates it in a somewhat impersonal past tense (as might happen in an omniscient narrator novel) or narrates it with a vivid sense of having been there (a RPG approximation to the cinematic flashback scene). What is fundamental is that the events of the fiction are established, and hence revealed, in a sequence that differs from that in which they occurred in the fiction.Hence the identity of structure to the coffee example. And hence the assertion - given the ubiquity of stuff like the coffee example in RPGing - that the objection to the flashback mechanic must be grounded in something other than general aesthetic preference.EDIT: I saw this in reply to [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER]:If this means what I think it means, then I don't understand why you're disagreeing with me and arguing that the coffee example exhibits a different relationship of real-world narrative events to imagined in-fiction events from a BitD flashback.</blockquote>

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