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.
Characters can go to places for any number of reasons. Players may decide to go there. Or the GM may narrate that they've gone there. I wanted to be sure what you meant.
If the players choose to go to the wild west, then I'd have said it fits my B.
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.
You are. There are undoubtedly different methods to determine what happens to the characters.
All I'm focusing on is the claim that unrelated events happening to them are more realistic than related events happening to them is misguided.
You're attributing the interesting events to the location in the setting. But what if the characters leave the wild west and instead decide to go fight in the foreign legion? The interesting events don't stop, you just use a different table for rolling events.
RPGs are going to be about characters having interesting adventures... whether they're monster hunters, treasure seekers, criminals, revolutionaries, or Victorian era socialites. The adventures will be suited to the genre and setting, sure, but no matter what, they'll alwaysbe present.
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).
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.
I didn't say it wasn't about time skipping. I said that wasn't my main point, but that yes, there is some of that too.
Given the nature of RPG characters to have continuing adventures, I don't think there's a strong argument to state that adventures unrelated to the characters are more realistic than ones that are. I don't think we should be viewing this in that light at all... plausibility of this sort seems to be present in almost all play (except a few exceptions that actively eschew it).
So if plausibility is always a concern and we need not concern ourselves with how "realistic" our methods are, then what about our methods should we be concerned with?
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 don't think so... a sim GM wouldn't feel the need to craft events relevant to the characters for fear of being "unrealistic".
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.
They're not more realistic. They're all the same. The GM is deciding what happens. That's not how reality works. There's not a person who says "I don't care if this fits his dramatic needs or not, it's what's happening!"
We're choosing elements of fiction. We're deciding what happens in our make believe world. Whatever methods we choose to use may differ in ways, but none of them is more realistic than any other.
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 players causing interesting things to happen is one of the two things I suggested, my B. If they cause something to happen, then it is related to them.