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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7349772" data-attributes="member: 82106">I don't find this to be a cogent line of reasoning. Gravity isn't a convention in the real world. It happens. We describe it as a 'law of nature'. Take 100' fall onto a concrete surface, there's nothing like "just because I got 42 fractures last time doesn't mean it will hurt this time." People get locked up for their own good when they reason like this. So clearly there is something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT about the causality that exists in the real world vs whatever you are talking about, which is simply "some people agreed to pretend to believe that their characters fell 100' and took 10d6 damage." I'm arguing that PHYSICALLY THE FICTIONS ARE NOT the cause of other fictions, period, full stop. Its absolute. We aren't arguing about an opinion or something here, this is just reality talking. You can make up a story under which fiction A FICTIONALLY caused fiction B, and that's fine, I am totally all for you doing that, but when you say that one fiction actually caused another, you have left the reservation. The two things are qualitatively different and should not be named using the same name.Again, this is apples vs oranges. Causation isn't a convention, not in the real world, its an absolute objective property of the Universe we inhabit (@Pemerton, and all other philosophers in this thread, NOT A PEEP!!!!). Huh? Fiction is fiction! Experiencing fiction can of course have, WILL have I should say, some sort of real-world consequences, but the fictional narrative and its fictional causality is only very tangentially related to any ACTUAL causality in the real world. I don't entirely agree even with the aesthetic element of this argument. I think there are plenty of times when we agree (often, maybe even typically in a silent understood fashion) to just 'let it go' and make a narrative that has some aesthetically pleasing character to it (a moral tale, or just a pleasing story of revenge, survival, whatever) and not even worry about some critical thing would make the narrative utterly unbelievable if you attempted to pass it off as a description of events in the real world. I don't mean some spell or monster, I mean just basic stuff we know about how the world works. I don't even think D&D worlds FAINTLY RESEMBLE something that anyone would agree, on careful observation, can exist. The ecology is crazy, the economics are crazy, the politics are crazy, everything is crazy and pretty much exists to service telling a certain kind of story. Creating a certain narrative logic, rising and falling tension, etc. Those are the things that matter, not pretend causality that we mostly turn a blind eye to anyway except when people mysteriously get hung up on one tiny detail even though the whole forest is really paper mache.</blockquote>

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