5 ms·

The real world is full of contradictions. If anything they would make your built world more lifelike.

by CatWChainsaw 4y ago

actionfromafar 4y ago
Yeah, just this morning, the coffee in my cup transformed to orange juice while I looked away.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  So either a) you live in a world full of magic (the mysterious, unpredictable kind) or b) you have a small child at home But there is a challenge in building fiction that even things that can reasonably happen will often be rejected by the reader if they are strange and unexplained. The saying "truth is stranger than fiction" actually tells you more about fiction than about truth.
- Dudeman112 4y ago
  I mean, George Lucas transformed his magic into counting magical mitochondria while people looked away and that universe is still as successful as ever Popular fiction doesn't give a shit about contradicting itself
  - discreteevent 4y ago
    The root of this thread is a comment about "not contradicting yourself too much" yet there are a couple of comments within the thread that seem to imply that because we can find some examples of contradiction in fiction then uncontrolled/unlimited contradiction should be fine. This "I can think of a counterexample - let's make it a rule" seems to appear more frequently now but maybe that's just me.
    - Dudeman112 4y ago
      >in fiction then uncontrolled/unlimited contradiction should be fine I'm not saying it's fine in general. I'm saying it doesn't matter for pop fiction Popular fiction gets retconned all the time. I'm fundamentally disagreeing with "not contradicting yourself too much" mattering at all for fiction that's successful with the masses If you ever feel tempted to think that quality writing matters for popular success, just remember that lewd Twilight fanfic has sold more than a hundred million copies
    - hombre_fatal 4y ago
      On the other hand, the thread is a comment about the challenge of not contradicting yourself too much, not a claim that doing so is going to substantially impact the work. Pretty much every creative work has contradictions and discontinuities that people gloss over, even (or especially) stark ones in critical success. The people who really get riled up about it are a very particular kind of person and not one I even meet outside of internet forums.
  - anotherman554 4y ago
    The Star Wars Mitochondria revelation was unpopular, but it didn't contradict anything. The original movies never address whether you could detect force users with a blood test.
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  Perhaps the reason you're being snarky is because you didn't get your caffeine fix. So glad I never developed that dependency... Here's a contradiction: we expect "free markets" to outperform national or otherwise government services; now square that with East Palestine and the fact that by averages, we have more than one derailment a day. Another contradiction: we exhort the value of "hard work" even as we build AI to do all the work for us, if the hardcore singularitarians have it their way.
  - SkyBelow 4y ago
    People working with definitions of words that the experts in the field don't share isn't the sort of contradiction being discussed. Things like the location of towns, how physics works, history of a place. These are things that are expected to stay consistent, and when that expectation is broken, it needs to be handled with care. History being uncertain is one thing, but the author directly stating that history is X happened before Y and later in the story stating that Y happened before X creates a problem. If the author is purposefully going for an unreliable narrator or implying that history literally changed then that can work (if the author has the skill to pull it off), but having it change because the author forgot to stay consistent is quite immersion breaking and creates an issue of an unreliable author, which is much worse than an unreliable narrator. Can a language model keep straight things like "Kingdom M thinks X happened before Y" vs "X happened before Y"? Even humans commonly make mistakes with things like this.
  - vintermann 4y ago
    These aren't the sort of contradictions you care about in a literary or role-playing fantasy world. Players typically cut you a lot of slack when it comes to economics and ecology. But they do care about what you've said. If you told your players that all magic comes from the sun, those creatures from the deepest caverns better not have any magic. You can make up excuses as you go along, but they will think you a worse GM for it. If they draw an inference that was valid from what you'd said, ("Hagrid said every single wizard who had gone bad was in Slytherin. At the time he said it, everyone thought Sirius Black had gone very bad indeed. Ergo, Sirius Black must have been in Slytherin! See, they can be good!"), that's annoying in a book, but in a role playing game it's downright frustrating.
canadianfella 4y ago
[dead]
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> The real world is full of contradictions So it was you who wrote the script for last season of GoT!
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  Look over there, a distraction! (cue smoke bomb exit)

The real world is full of contradictions. If anything they would make your built world more lifelike.

actionfromafar 4y ago

Yeah, just this morning, the coffee in my cup transformed to orange juice while I looked away.

wongarsu 4y ago
So either a) you live in a world full of magic (the mysterious, unpredictable kind) or b) you have a small child at home But there is a challenge in building fiction that even things that can reasonably happen will often be rejected by the reader if they are strange and unexplained. The saying "truth is stranger than fiction" actually tells you more about fiction than about truth.
Dudeman112 4y ago
I mean, George Lucas transformed his magic into counting magical mitochondria while people looked away and that universe is still as successful as ever Popular fiction doesn't give a shit about contradicting itself
- discreteevent 4y ago
  The root of this thread is a comment about "not contradicting yourself too much" yet there are a couple of comments within the thread that seem to imply that because we can find some examples of contradiction in fiction then uncontrolled/unlimited contradiction should be fine. This "I can think of a counterexample - let's make it a rule" seems to appear more frequently now but maybe that's just me.
  - Dudeman112 4y ago
    >in fiction then uncontrolled/unlimited contradiction should be fine I'm not saying it's fine in general. I'm saying it doesn't matter for pop fiction Popular fiction gets retconned all the time. I'm fundamentally disagreeing with "not contradicting yourself too much" mattering at all for fiction that's successful with the masses If you ever feel tempted to think that quality writing matters for popular success, just remember that lewd Twilight fanfic has sold more than a hundred million copies
  - hombre_fatal 4y ago
    On the other hand, the thread is a comment about the challenge of not contradicting yourself too much, not a claim that doing so is going to substantially impact the work. Pretty much every creative work has contradictions and discontinuities that people gloss over, even (or especially) stark ones in critical success. The people who really get riled up about it are a very particular kind of person and not one I even meet outside of internet forums.
- anotherman554 4y ago
  The Star Wars Mitochondria revelation was unpopular, but it didn't contradict anything. The original movies never address whether you could detect force users with a blood test.
CatWChainsaw 4y ago
Perhaps the reason you're being snarky is because you didn't get your caffeine fix. So glad I never developed that dependency... Here's a contradiction: we expect "free markets" to outperform national or otherwise government services; now square that with East Palestine and the fact that by averages, we have more than one derailment a day. Another contradiction: we exhort the value of "hard work" even as we build AI to do all the work for us, if the hardcore singularitarians have it their way.
- SkyBelow 4y ago
  People working with definitions of words that the experts in the field don't share isn't the sort of contradiction being discussed. Things like the location of towns, how physics works, history of a place. These are things that are expected to stay consistent, and when that expectation is broken, it needs to be handled with care. History being uncertain is one thing, but the author directly stating that history is X happened before Y and later in the story stating that Y happened before X creates a problem. If the author is purposefully going for an unreliable narrator or implying that history literally changed then that can work (if the author has the skill to pull it off), but having it change because the author forgot to stay consistent is quite immersion breaking and creates an issue of an unreliable author, which is much worse than an unreliable narrator. Can a language model keep straight things like "Kingdom M thinks X happened before Y" vs "X happened before Y"? Even humans commonly make mistakes with things like this.
- vintermann 4y ago
  These aren't the sort of contradictions you care about in a literary or role-playing fantasy world. Players typically cut you a lot of slack when it comes to economics and ecology. But they do care about what you've said. If you told your players that all magic comes from the sun, those creatures from the deepest caverns better not have any magic. You can make up excuses as you go along, but they will think you a worse GM for it. If they draw an inference that was valid from what you'd said, ("Hagrid said every single wizard who had gone bad was in Slytherin. At the time he said it, everyone thought Sirius Black had gone very bad indeed. Ergo, Sirius Black must have been in Slytherin! See, they can be good!"), that's annoying in a book, but in a role playing game it's downright frustrating.

canadianfella 4y ago

[dead]

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

> The real world is full of contradictions So it was you who wrote the script for last season of GoT!

CatWChainsaw 4y ago
Look over there, a distraction! (cue smoke bomb exit)