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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7349959" data-attributes="member: 42582">Like [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] said upthread, if you think that imaginary things are engaging in causal relations, you're off the reservation!I've bolded the two key bits you've said about the fiction. The first is a game rule: in order to be permitted to make the "use a magic device" move, everyone has to agree that the shared fiction includes your PC holding a wand etc. If the fiction includes that, then the player of the character is allowed to say "I try and use the wand." The cause, here, is that everyone agrees on a story which includes the content of the player's act of authorship. The events of the story are not real, and are not causing anything.As for "the effect takes place in the fiction" - what that means is that there is another game rule: if the UMD roll succeeds, then everyone has to agree that the shared ficiton includes a fireball shooting from the wand. That is, there is a rule about creating new fiction. The causal process, once again, is a social process which involves everyone agreeing on what a rule requires, and then following that rule.If people decide to break the rule - eg the GM applies the 2nd ed AD&D/White Wolf "golden rule" advice to ignore the mechanics, because s/he thinks it would be more fun if the fireball didn't happen - then the fiction won't contain a fireball being shot from the wand. Because the GM has authored it differently.To reiterate: the cause and effect you are identifying are game rules that actual people in the real world are following: rules about what to do when a certain bit of fiction is authored; and rules about what fiction to author following a certain mechanical process being resolved.This is equally nonsense.In a Traveller session I GMed a few weeks ago, the PCs were at a market on a low-tech world, buying trinkets. How many stalls were there at the market? I don't know. The players don't know. They can't try and guess, as there is nothing too guess.You say "It just requires the DM to let the players know what that is." But I can't do that, as I DON'T KNOW IT. I could make it up, but the only causation at work there is causation in my brain.You also say "Once he does, that number given will have been the correct one the entire time." Which is absolutely confused. Because the bolded phrase clearly refers to real time in the real world, not imaginary time within the fiction.To elaborate: Suppose that I make up, now, that there were 17 stalls at the market. It's simpely not true that, yesterday, the story included there being 17 stalls. That's a bit of the story that I wrote just now. (Authorship is a process that happens in time. That's why sometimes authors die with unfinished books, which have correspondingly gappy stories.)But it makes no sense to say that "Yesterday, within the fiction, there were 17 stalls just as now, within the fiction, there were 17 stalls." Because, within the fiction, the "yesterday" and "now" of the real world have no purchase. As [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION] posted upthread, playing "let's pretend" can be fun. But trying to maintain the stories you imagined have real causal power, and trying to suggest that the author is really coming to know them - so that players wondering what the GM will decide should really be described as trying to guess the truth about the story - is deluded.Fiction is fiction. It's imaginary. Made up. You can make it be whatever you want. You can agree to whatever rules you want in respect of how you author it. It's all under you control, as author; or your collective control, as a group of authors. It doesn't, and can't, control you.</blockquote>

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