psychohist wrote:
> Any suggestions on how to explain the issues here? If Russell Wallace
> or some of the other people with somewhat dramatist preferences is
> still around, I'd especially appreciate your input, but any
> suggestions are welcome.
Let me try this way that I've recently figured:
What, realistically, were Luke Skywalker's chances of winning the battle
of Yavin versus just being shot down over the Death Star? After you've
finished smacking me over the head for thus abusing the word
"realistic", let's suppose for the sake of argument he had a 25% chance
of success and a 75% chance of death and defeat. (We can also suppose
for the sake of argument that nobody else would have pulled it off in
time.)
That means there were two Everett branches (well, groups thereof, but
this distinction is the one we care about for the moment): one in which
Luke dies and one in which he wins, the latter with 25% amplitude, the
former 75%.
By strict simulationism, this should be converted into two Everett
branches in _our_ universe: one in which the dice determine that Luke,
the game character, has died, and one in which they determine he has
won. (In practice this would typically be done with a series of rolls,
e.g. using the d6 or d20 Star Wars systems, rather than a single
percentage roll, but the principle is the same.)
These days I'm a dramatist with a simulationist streak, so the way I
come at it is this:
I want a consistent game world. Nothing with an amplitude of zero (or as
near zero as makes no practical difference) is going to happen in my
games.
But I play the story, not the world - I make up settings for the sake of
the story and the protagonists thereof, and I use each setting once only.
This is different from your style, as I understand it - in your style
(correct me if I'm wrong), the world is the only protagonist; the PCs
are not protagonists, they are merely people on whom the camera happens
to be for the moment, and are not supposed to be considered more
dramatically im****tant than any similar group of NPCs. Therefore the
obvious approach for you to take is to convert Everett branches from the
game world into our world.
For me, there is no good reason I should take that approach any more
than Lucas did. I still use dice as a tool on the small scale - a good
servant but a bad master. On the large scale?
Suppose the battle of Yavin - or more practically, something resembling
it - happens in my game, and suppose I believe the odds are as above. I
now have a preference between the outcomes. The game-world Everett
branch with the undesired outcome may have thrice the amplitude of that
with the desired outcome, but why would I want to convert that to equal
amplitudes in our world? I have no good reason to do so and a very good
and obvious reason not to. Instead I choose the branch with the desired
outcome, the one that makes the game fun by my group's criteria -
provided of course it is realistic in the sense that its amplitude is
non-negligible. (And as Lucas did, I go for verisimilitude. I won't have
the TIE fighters all suffer inexplicable malfunctions at a critical
moment, but I will have the number that show up, be not so many as to
seal the Rebel pilots' fate.)
There is no reason you should think on those lines, because to you the
Rebels are not protagonists, they are merely inhabitants of the sim
world; if the Empire wins, then that's just what happens. (Again,
correct me if I'm wrong.)
Does that help?
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