thread: 2011-05-18 : Ben Lehman: Rules and their Functions
On 2011-05-24, David Berg wrote:
Here's a way to look at it:
How does fiction get established? By talking. What do we call fiction-establishing talking? Narration. How do we know what to narrate? Sometimes we use mediation, sometimes we don't. If we do use mediation, how do we know when and how to use it? Procedural rules tell us.
Procedures can be random or deterministic. Mediation can be random or deterministic. Unmediated narration is neither. It's unmediated narration. I think that's the best label for it in this schema.
That's my answer to Emily. More generally, I also think it's useful to think of fiction-mediating rules as existing inside procedural rules. "When you want to punch another character, you pick up the coin and flip it," is a procedural rule. "Heads you hit, tails you miss," is a fiction-mediating rule. I'd identify procedural rules that don't have mediating rules inside them by the label "purely procedural rules". That way we can talk about the random or deterministic nature of employing a procedure ("GM talks" vs "high roller talks") without conflating it with whether or not the procedure mediates the fiction.
