What brings the game to the wild west? Did it start there? Did the players decide to go there? Did the GM decide to bring them there? When they get there, do they have an agenda? Do they just wander around and experience random events?
If I didn't know you were arguing in good faith because of prior discourse, this question would give me pause and make me wonder about your motives, because the answer is part of the definition of C:
C) unrelated remarkable events often happen
if they go to the places where remarkable events happen (Wild West or equivalent)
In context it should be clear that "the players decide to go there" is the answer. Otherwise it would be A instead of C.
The players may have an agenda, but even if they don't, the Wild West (not the historical version, the tropey version) will have improbable events built into it, maybe in the form of random tables. For as long as the players stay in the Wild West they will experience improbable events regularly; if they leave, they will stop. This distinguishes C from A: the events are not "continually happening". They are conditional upon the players staying in a place where interesting events happen.
I feel like I'm stating the obvious here.
That's my fault, I had mixed up my A and B. I've edited my last post.
I view it as A. I think it's A because the things happening are unrelated to the characters goals or themes.
If D is A then either you're wasting tons of table time waiting around growing crops and doing household chores/etc. until the next interesting thing five or ten years later happens, or you're zooming out/skipping forward is involved, which is my point--controlling pacing via time-skips/zooming out is the only way to resolve the tension between realism and the need for drama. You said it wasn't essential but it is. Otherwise it's either unrealistic [edit: i.e. contrived] or boring (or both).
If you're making the interesting things happen, then I think it would be a case of my B. The weirdness magnet angle is more A, where remarkable events keep happening around the characters that are unrelated to them.
I thought your (B) was about the orcs showing up instead of the goblins? I don't think there's anyone on this thread who would object to remarkable things happening in an otherwise-unremarkable context purely because the PCs made them happen (murdered an emperor, seduced a president, went looking for orcs). The discussion you're having with MaxPerson is not about the presence of interesting consequences to PC actions, it's about the absence of unrelated events happening (and you've said that this absence is not necessarily due to timeskip/zoom-out).
Funny how the conversation keeps coming back to subtraction vs. addition. Maybe that's my cue to bow out because last time that discussion went nowhere. I'll finish this post though.
But here's the thing. Even a "random encounter" can be made dramatically relevant to the players' characters. So you roll brigands on your random encounter table, and we know that the Knight character has a Drive of "Justice". The PCs are on their way to the kingdom to prevent a major threat, but this random encounter occurs. They can avoid it and be on their way for their important goal... but does the Knight's sense of Justice supersede that goal? What does his decision say about him as a character?
That's dramatically relevant.
I think this idea that everything needs to be specifically connected to the PCs at all times is misleading. There's no reason even random encounters can't be made to be dramatically meaningful to one or more PCs.
That's fine. Then they can meet the goblins instead of the orcs--if your hypothesis is correct, then dramatist-leaning players can be completely satisfied in a 100% simulationist ("realistic") campaign.
I think your C, D, and E can all be categorized under A or B, so I don't think I'm excluding anything. My point is that A and B are equally realistic (or equally unrealistic, depending on how you want to look at it), so any distinction between the two is simply a matter of preference. So using it as a measure of play doesn't really seem too meaningful.
C, D, and E are all more realistic than A (Weirdness Magnet) or B (Personalized Weirdness Magnet). If you deny their existence and then use that denial to focus on strictly A vs. B then we have nothing to discuss; you're simply rejecting my perspective out of hand.
You could point at my game and say "wow, everything seems to revolve around the players' characters, that seems a bit too coincidental, no?" and I could point at your game and say "wow, nothing that happens to the players' characters has anything to do with them, that doesn't seem believable".
It wouldn't be "too coincidental" if for example E: the players are the ones causing unusual things to happen by taking unusual actions first.
I will stop repeating myself now. Hopefully SOMEONE out there on the Internet got some insight out of reading this. I wish it could be you.
The term I like to use is "contrived". And IME when plot elements are contrived such that the PCs happen to run into them just when they need to, it very quickly comes across to the players as being contrived; and thus makes it all neither realistic nor believable (I hit this issue with just about every book and-or movie I ever encounter).
Yeah, "contrived" is a good word. E (from above discussion with Hawkeye) is less contrived than A or B.