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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7351631" data-attributes="member: 82106">No, that's the point YOU CAN'T! Because each one of those events which you are discussing as 'in game fiction' is related to the others by way of the game happening at the table in the real world! They cannot be analyzed on their own. This is also why my somewhat 'far out' comment about dependent origination is germane, because it points out that you cannot determine what was a chain of causality without understanding the TOTALITY of the context. In the case of an RPG narrative that totality simply doesn't exist. There is no world in which it happens. The context, AT BEST, is so fragmentary and threadbare that we could propose almost any outcome to events and it would be equally plausible.For example, in reference to the fiction you just created there any of 1000's of things could result from an attempt to swing a sword at someone. You could slip on a banana peel (sorry, patch of green slime!) and fall on your arse. Your blow could be deflected by the orc's steel collar. Your grip on the sword could falter (for any of many reasons). The sword itself could break (for any of 1000's of reasons). All of these things are possibilities (and I'm just naming things I can imagine that could happen which are reasonably mundane and plausibly could be part of a real-world narrative, aside from the target being an 'orc'). BUT we don't know enough about the game world, and EVEN IF WE PLAYED vs just this exercise of examples, we wouldn't know. We don't know how slippery the floor is, maybe an ogre hockered on the spot the character puts his forward foot last week and the character slips on it. That's the sort of thing the real world is made up of. Now, what we CAN do, and what both you and [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] are doing basically all the time as a GM, your constant function, is to simply make up these causes to explain the dice, or to engineer the fictional positioning so that the players continue 'on track' instead of wandering off into some place that isn't prepared for them, or, in Pemerton's case, to frame the next scene to address character needs and player agenda. Nor did you really exclude the people at the table, you still had to refer to the guy rolling a d20 to make the narrative complete and totally coherent. If you leave that part out of your analysis you are really missing the whole nut of the entire thing!</blockquote>

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