There are two sides to this thought. One of them, I can get behind, the other is problematic, IMO.-XXX- wrote: ↑Tue Dec 07, 2021 9:39 pmI would take IC driven false narratives over players quoting passages from their years old notepad files anytime.
Even many PC written historical records IG seem to have been warped by the lens of perception or IC agenda. Why not just take it for what it is and invent ways to work with what we have rather than engage in OOC arguments over what is or isn't "canon"?
The side I can get behind is that sometimes things are lost to history, and that's a valid pursuit, but PCs are the minority population of Arelith. You could argue that none of the characters from the fall of Benwick are around anymore to tell its story- but what about the thousands of NPC's on the island that were witness to it? Surely some of them wrote things down. Maybe there are conflicting stories, but there shouldn't be nothing. Taking these conflicting accounts and drawing an incorrect IC conclusion is fine, great even.
The mirror to this is the problem- falsely driven IC narratives that rely on a lack of players from the time to contradict them. This is, perhaps unintentionally in some cases, underhanded. It relies on not only not having any players from that time around to contradict you, but it also relies on the assumption that because they aren't, there were no NPCS around, which are supposed to factor into our IG decisions and actions, to go, 'no, my grandfather was there and that's not what happened.'
This side of the coin is where I dig in my heels and insist that there should be some documented history- because without it, you have people going 'there's no way you could know my character is lying, and, unless you can prove it IC, this is a fact, and you're metagaming if you don't agree.' My stance on this approach is that the player in question is, themselves, metagaming furiously to push their narrative with the knowledge that no pc's from the time can contradict them, just like it would be metagaming to look at the player list to make sure the owner of the quarter you're breaking into isn't on.
Just because Arelith isn't full of PC historians furiously scribbling the Truth down in their books for later generations of PC's to read, doesn't mean dozens of scholarly historian NPCs weren't doing it. Approached from this angle, using revisionist history IC encroaches very close to violating the rule of factoring the NPC's of the world into your narrative at all times.