Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7350776" data-attributes="member: 29398">Mirrored in the fiction by Falstaffe drawing a knife, throwing it into the orc's chest, and the orc dropping dead as a result of this wound.I'm not so concerned with the social stuff at the table as I am with internal cause and effect within the game world as seen/felt/experienced by the characters.  Why?  It all comes back to my 'falling dominoes' idea, where one thing leads to another within the game world on a nice simple cause-effect basis.  That's what I want to look at - the validity of in-game causes-effects that reasonably and logically allow the DM to narrate event K as a later result of action A and all the subsequent actions and reactions and events B through J that the players (and PCs) don't know about.Never done any circle magic or been a member of a fraternal order, have you. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Yes the DM has embellished the narration (nothing wrong with that) of the effects caused by the Death spell.Magic in the game is not immune to cause-effect.Seems very realistic, though.  Some guy walks around the corner in front of real-world me on the street - I've no idea why he's there or what he's doing, but he's become a part of my reality; and his presence there has been established before (in my view) his reason for being there.  Now obviously he HAS a reason for being there...and the same is true of the orcs in the game world...but neither I-as-me in the street nor I-as-character in the game world knows what that reason is, to begin with, and might never know.Well, I can't think of a better way to put forward the concept I'm trying to get across.Either one can offer all kinds of insight for why those characters did certain things by explaining it from the character's point of view, however; and that's more what I'm after.I've never read the book but I've seen the movie about a gajillion times; and perhaps it's reflective of my immersion preferences that I unfailingly find the scenes where they cut to the kid and his grand-dad to be no more than a jarring and annoying interruption in the story.Of course, if the DM's doing it right the player shouldn't be able to tell whether these orcs are 'wandering monsters' or not; and also shouldn't be able to tell whether the DM made up their backstory after rolling their existence or had it pre-authored all along.Yes she is, and if she's any good what she makes up will be indiscernable from what she had pre-authored.If she's really on her game she'll build in their reason for being there right in the initial narration of their presence: "You hear a noise ahead just before three orcs come around a corner about 20 feet ahead of you.  Two of them are carrying large buckets, probably empty, while the third holds some sort of metal implement - a crank handle, perhaps?"Pretty much everything I've said here assumes all-round acceptance of that convention; otherwise what's the point?Even something bizarre that happens at the will of the gods still has internal cause and effect: the cause is the deity exerting its will, and the effect is (usually) exactly what the deity wants it to be. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Lanefan</blockquote>

Verification