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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7396418" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't think you think a secret door is created in real life.But I do think that you think that, in real life, the player is searching for a secret door. Where is the search taking place, under ths analysis? S/he's searching the GM's notes - of, if the GM has no relevant notes, then s/he's searching for the GM's response generated through some appropriate heuristic - the one I described above, which you seemed to accept as fairly described, is roll dice, or "objectively" extrapolation from what is in the notes.My point is that the PC can search without the player searching. That is to say, the action at the table need not be the same as the action in the fiction. How do I know? Because it happens all the time in my RPGing! (We already know this for killing: the player isn't trying to kill anything when s/he declares an attack for his/her PC. She's just trying to change the state of the fiction. Searching can be the same.)And the remark about "Schroedinger's secret door" again shows this inability to distinguish the action at the table from the action in the fiction.It's a long time since I've read A Study in Scarlet. I'm pretty sure, though, that it doesn't tell us whether or not John Watson had any nieces or nephews. Does this mean that Watson is, throughout the story, "Schroedinger's uncle?" No - either he has nieces and/or nephews, or he doesn't - it's just that no one has written it down yet, and so no one in the real world - not even Arthur Conan Doyle - knows whether or not Watson is an uncle.Now, suppose that one day Doyle is dictating a new Sherlock Holmes story, and he dictates a sequence in Watson tells Holmes that he has to go and see his nephew sing in a choir. In the real world, this is a creative act - Doyle has introduced a new element into the fictional world of Sherlock Holmes. But of course, in the fiction, no nephew has been created! That happened long before, when Watson's sibling had a child.The secret door is no different. In the real world, if the check is a success then we all learn a new thing about the fiction. But there is no "Schroedinger's door", any more than your PC is "Schroedinger's orphan" because you never bothered to write down any backstory about his/her parents!</blockquote>

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