Oberon wrote:Once the rules are understood, they must remain. To have them change is to invoke Dieu Ex Machina, the fiddling with the very framework of the story by forces suddenly introduced. The RCC side could not dance fight. Parson knew this, he based his plan on it, and his casters who could see Archon abilities just by looking at them and are also completely familiar with the mechanics of Erf supported his plan. And then the DDR came. This is flawed writing.
There is a concept in fiction called "the unreliable narrator", and it is quite similar to a real-world concept that I like to call "conventional thinking". There is also a real-world concept called "surprise".
To use a real world example, a man named Guderian worked out an idea to use armored vehicles as a type of strike force. The country he worked for (Germany), decided to implement these plans, while the country that they planned on fighting (France) had a different concept of how armored vehicles should be used.
The French thought that armored vehicles should be used primarily as infantry-support vehicles, so they made huge, heavy, and powerful tanks (Char B1 bis) and then divided them up among all of the infantry units, so that each unit had a few of the armored vehicles.
Guderian's idea was to make light, maneuverable, and fast armored vehicles, and then to bunch them all together in armored vehicle groups, so that they could be used to smash through the enemy's front line, and charge into the rear areas.
Guderian didn't make any secret of his plans. His ideas on "lightning warfare" were published in book form years before they were ever used in a war, and the Germans didn't hide the fact that they were making small, light, and fast tanks... and the Germans didn't hide the fact that they *weren't* making any of the big heavy tanks like the French were making.
So, anyone who cared to read Guderian's book, and anyone who cared to look at what kind of tanks the Germans were driving around in parades, and anyone who cared to notice that Guderian had been promoted into the ranks of the German General Staff, could pretty much have read the writing on the wall, and known exactly what the Germans were going to do with their armored vehicles when a war came.
And yet... in the real world... every one was shocked, surprised, and horrified at how easily and quickly Poland fell, and was even more shocked and horrified when the Germans simply drove through the "impassable" Ardennes Forest, and completely sliced through the British and French forces in Northern France in a matter of weeks.
So... Oberon... do you think that the real world history of WW2 was "badly written", or could it be that your theory is flawed?
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