Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9020131" data-attributes="member: 42582">What you describe is not sufficient.For instance, in real life Pia can judge the swell of the ocean, the depth of the water, the distance to the boat (that Pia is going to swim out to), the strength of the wind, etc.In a shared fiction, someone has to author all that stuff. Which is not about norms that exist in virtue of a common experience of life - it's quite normal for swells to be low or high, for wind to be weak or strong, etc. It's about authority and purpose: who is entitled to author it, and to what end. And saying &quot;keep it real&quot; or &quot;follow the fiction&quot; isn't and end of any utility here, because - as just noted - reality encompasses a very wide range of possibilities.It's not a coincidence that classic D&amp;D happens in unrealistically austere environments (&quot;dungeons&quot;) with a shared social understanding that architecture is salient but (say) height above sea level is not.Does it? Does it smash the plant pot sitting on the floor not far from the chair? Does the chair fall beside the pot? Does the chair have vertical slats in its back sufficiently far apart that the plant pot goes through them (like the Buster Keaton of plant pots)?If, in real life, Pia upends a chair near a plant pot the answer to all those questions will be revealed, by way of a mundane physical process. In a shared fiction, if imaginary Pia upends an imaginary chair near an imaginary plant pot, any of the possibilities I've mentioned is within the range of the realistic. Who gets to choose which one happens?Not at all. If Jo just declares &quot;The upended chair smashes the plant pot&quot; then Jo has dictated Pia's act - her act becomes (inter alia) one of smashing the plant pot by upending the chair.I dispute it, for the reasons just given, which in my experience affect nearly every moment of RPGing if the setting lacks the artificial austerity of the Gygaxian dungeon.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 9020131, member: 42582"] What you describe is not sufficient. For instance, in real life Pia can judge the swell of the ocean, the depth of the water, the distance to the boat (that Pia is going to swim out to), the strength of the wind, etc. In a shared fiction, someone has to author all that stuff. Which is not about [I]norms that exist in virtue of a common experience of life[/I] - it's quite normal for swells to be low or high, for wind to be weak or strong, etc. It's about authority and purpose: who is entitled to author it, and to what end. And saying "keep it real" or "follow the fiction" isn't and end of any utility here, because - as just noted - reality encompasses a very wide range of possibilities. It's not a coincidence that classic D&D happens in unrealistically austere environments ("dungeons") with a shared social understanding that architecture is salient but (say) height above sea level is not. Does it? Does it smash the plant pot sitting on the floor not far from the chair? Does the chair fall beside the pot? Does the chair have vertical slats in its back sufficiently far apart that the plant pot goes through them (like the Buster Keaton of plant pots)? If, in real life, Pia upends a chair near a plant pot the answer to all those questions will be revealed, by way of a mundane physical process. In a shared fiction, if imaginary Pia upends an imaginary chair near an imaginary plant pot, any of the possibilities I've mentioned is within the range of the realistic. Who gets to choose which one happens? Not at all. If Jo just declares "The upended chair smashes the plant pot" then Jo has dictated Pia's act - her act becomes (inter alia) one of [I]smashing the plant pot by upending the chair[/I]. I dispute it, for the reasons just given, which in my experience affect nearly every moment of RPGing if the setting lacks the artificial austerity of the Gygaxian dungeon. [/QUOTE]

Verification