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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7344806" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is just confused.There is no difference between your PC and Holmes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle authors stuff about Holmes. You and your friend author stuff about your PC. You, the human being Lanefan, do not do anything "within the fiction" - you write the fiction. Or perhaps your GM does.Right. Fictions don't write themselves. They are authored. This is true whether the fiction is a Mickey Mouse, Santa Claus, The Hound of the Baskervilles, or the content of an RPG session.In the context of RPG play and design, the important question is who gets to add to the fiction and subject to what parameters. Eg most RPGs (Toon is one obvious exception; the use of wish spells in D&D is another) don't permit the dragon turned into a trampolining swan as an addition to the fiction. This is a more extreme example of hoping to find beam weapons in the Duke's toilet.Typically, these parameters are established both informally (genre expectations; table understandings) and via the detailed rules (eg maybe when a character disarms someone, a die is rolled to see how many feet away the opponent's sword lands - if that die is a d10, then the game simply doesn't permit adding to the fiction I disarm the orc and send its sword flying 15' away). The more the game relies on "free descriptors" for action resolution, the more the informal methods come to the fore - eg in my 4e game, there is no rule that tells us whether or not the epic-tier sorcerer can make an Arcana check to seal the Abyss (whereas there is a rule - the description of the Arcana skill - that tells us that, if your action declaration is "I seal the Abyss with my magic" then Arcana is the skill that is relevant). That the answer, at our table, was "yes" followed from a set of shared understandings built up over the years of play of the game. One side effect of a multi-year, start-at-Heroic-and-gradually-move-to-Epic style of play is that, as the scope and gonzo-ness of feasible action declarations grows over time, so does the group's shared understanding of what does or doesn't fit as an action declaration. I would expect that just turning up and running epic-tier 4e for a group of strangers as a one-shot would be much more challenging in this respect, as the scope of permissible action declarations would be quite unclear.But anyway, all this is actual social processes taking place in the actual, real world. The fiction itself doesn't - and, obviously, can't - generate any answers as to how additional bits of it are to be authored, by whom, and what they might contain. I think that it obviously conduces to the social character of the game for the informal parameters on authorship to be established collectively (both organically as I've described for 4e, and occasionally via deliberate discussion and decision among the group); and as I've already said again and again in this thread, there's no reason at all from the point of view of technical design why rule-generated constraints have to take only the GM's ideas for the fiction as inputs.EDIT: More confusion:It is a premise of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories about Sherlock Holmes that Holmes not only exists within the imagined London of those stories, but that he can and will react independently to other elements of that fiction: eg when Watson says "Hello" Holmes may reply, or may moodily ignore him, or may suddenly launch into a tirade of some sort, or . . .You seem to want to say that the player's responsibility in relation to his/her PC - which is a real-world fact about the way RPGs are played - somehow manifests itself in the fiction. This is bizarre in and of itself; and it also seems to contradict your reasonably frequent assertion that PCs and NPCs are indistinguishable in the fiction.</blockquote>

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