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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 8266845" data-attributes="member: 6696971">If that is how you read it, then my words weren’t clear.Perhaps you read it that way because my statement that characters in an imagined space don’t experience temporal continuity. That is my position because (as I put in a previous post), the volitional force of the imagined space (us at the table and the table time we allocate to the imagined space and the characters in it) invest them with only about 30 % (at best) of their “lives” with “online” (table time) activity. Outside of that, they’re “offline.”That 70 % that is elided is only back-filled when prompted (by some participant at the table or the system itself). This is why I invoked Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and the 4th Wall.Now these characters don’t suddenly “experience” yesterday’s events for the first time today when we’re backfilling the elided time. So this isn’t some blip on the temporal continuity through line of their (imagined) “lives” (because there is no through line). We at the table experience it now. They in the shared imagined space don’t know the difference (because they have neither cognition, nor volition, nor do they experience temporal continuity or any other kind of continuity). They’re game pieces in an imagined space given onscreen time and “life” only when we care to give it to them (and they lose it when we take it fro them; eg elide the generous portion of their “life”) in order to facilitate the play of an RPG.Now this doesn’t mean we can’t imagine their offscreen “life” is filled with all manner of typical mundane and atypical interesting elements of orthodox living. But that is just imagining it. It only becomes “real” when it’s relevant to play and we devote table time to it (when it enters the shared imagined space).</blockquote>

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