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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7392536" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is like saying the PCs dying in a by-the-rules TPK is just the same as "rocks fall, everybody dies" except the former involved some dice!The fact that it's an action declaration that is resolved at the table is what makes it completely different, for present purposes, from "winging it". Upthread various posters, talking about "winging it", said that if it's done "properly" then the players can't even tell it wasn't in the notes. A player who declares an action and as a result has his/her PC find a secret door knows what is going on.This is like asking, "If the GM had known all along that the PC would miss the orc, what would have been done differently or occured differently in the fiction?"The difference at the table would be: the player knows that s/he is rolling to find out what the GM already decided. If the player rolls a miss, s/he doesn't know whether that's because the GM had left it to the mechanics, or the GM had already decided the orc, at that moment, was not goingto be hit. But if the player rolls a hit, then s/he learns - when the GM declares a miss as the outcome - that the GM has decided the orc, at that moment, will not be hit.Of course the ingame fiction might be identical, but what does that tell us? The GM telling a story all to herself can produce the same ingame fiction as a RPG session, but that doesn't mean there's no difference between turning up to a session and listening to the GM's story, and turning up to a session and actually playing the game!I don't really understand.I mean, if the orcish shaman had known - via Augury, say - that the orc was going to die, maybe the shaman would have done something else (eg sent two orcs to fight the PC). From the fact that the shaman didn't do something else, maybe we can infer that the shaman didn't cast Augury. Generalising the point: there are so many moving parts in any fiction of even the most modest complexity that - if it matters at all - something can be narrated to establish the necessary links.You've already posted that, in your style of play, much of the time the players may not know what is going on in the GM's unrevealed backstory. Which is to say, from there point of view the ingame events are indeterminate or even apparently incoherent. What difference does it make if the GM doesn't know the truth either? I mean, I can see the aesthetic difference - if the GM doesn't know then it's no longer the case that the players are being told a story by the GM. But I don't see how it can affect the validity of the event of RPGing.All the actual example of this you give involve minutiae of dungeon layouts and other geographic elements. These simply aren't a big deal in most "story now" play.And in any event, as I said, there are so many moving parts that I think this is just a non-issue.The volume of a spher is 4*pi*radius_cubed/3. For a 20' radius fireball, that's 32000 cu ft * pi/3. Pi/3 is approx 1.047 (I'm rounding down a tad), so that makes approx 33,504 cu'.So all these years your MUs have been getting away with unrealistically low-volume fireballs!Most adventure fiction depends upon contrivances,in the sense of things happening that are either literally impossible, or are possible but extremely unlikely.My understanding is that the way Batman, Daredevil and the like routinely catch themselves on swinglines, the edges of buildings, etc are literally impossible, in tha a human shoulder joint can't endure that much force without tearing/breaking. This is nevertheless acceptable in those stories, because there are cases in the neighbourhood - eg where the fall is one storey rather than twenty - that are possible for a strong and skilled person.In adventure stories that involve boats, there will typically be interactions with rapids, waves, sharks etc whose literal possibility or impossibility I'm not able to judge, but which clearly - even to a person like me with no boating experience - I can tell would require signficant skill and also luck to get through with boat unscathed and hair unmessed.Gygax's design of the D&D combat rules is intended to recognise this: the rules don't simulate sword-fighting, but rather establish a framework in which adventurous types can survive implausibly many (were it the real world) deadly fights without dying or being permanently maimed.I want boating rules in an adventure RPG to similarly allows unrealistically many lucky escapes and maneouvres. Each one should fal within the bounds of genre plausibility. The sequence of them does not need to come anywhere near tracking a realistic distribution of successes vs washups.If a RPG constrains the space for adventure-story, genre-style luck - as, for instance, RQ does in respect of combat - then the natural result will be that players cease to act adventurously in respect of the domain of activity governed by those rules. (Or else will drift to exceptions in the rules that make luck possible - eg magic-using builds.)That may be something someone wants, or not. But it's not, per se, a mark of good RPG design. (RQ is a great RPG, but not because it is more "realistic" ie reduces the prospects of adventurous luck in combaWhat does this mean? Obviously things fall, but gravity in the real world is more than this: it's universal gravitation between all masses. (Apologies to physicists reading this thread: my physics is high school Newtonian, not properly relativistic.)We know that lift doesnt work the same in the gameworld as in the real world (due to things like dragons, pit fiends etc); we know that a whole lot of physiology and related biochemstry is different (eg giant insects can breathe); and there's no particular reason to think that the gameworld is a c 4.5 billion year old sphere in orbit about a star.Gygax suggested in his DMG that it might be possible to ride a pegasus to the moon - that certainly means that physical phenomean don't work like they do in the real world.So I suggest that there is good reason to think that gameworld gravity doesn't work the same as real world gravity - things generally fall to the ground, but for some reason dragons, pit fiends and the moon don't, and that's about all we can say.</blockquote>

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