[Donjon] What is a fact?

[Gasten]

Here's the real question for Donjon, though, and one perhaps best saved for another thread: what on earth is a fact?

A fact is something that, when you say so, is real. No one can say that it isn't. If you state the fact that you found "the god of thunder", you have found him. There isn't more to it.

[James_Nostack]

A fact is something that, when you say so, is real. No one can say that it isn't. If you state the fact that you found "the god of thunder", you have found him. There isn't more to it.

Is "I find a stupid ogre" one fact, or two?  Is "There are goblins up ahead arguing about how to divide their treasure" one fact, or four?  It's not a purely theoretical question, since it affects the economy of the game.

My rule of thumb would be: each newly introduced noun, verb, or 'sufficiently unexpected' modifier counts as a fact.  But I'm curious how others do it.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

James,

In your examples, it's two and four. Facts should be broken into the smallest pieces of information possible for use in interpretation.

[Chris Peterson]

I'm having flashbacks of sentence diagramming from grade school. :-) Donjon Facts are like a linguistic point-buy system:

• A simple sentence with one subject and one predicate (and no adjectives or adverbs) costs 1 Fact (e.g. "I find an ogre")
• Adjectives and adverbs cost 1 Fact each (because "I find a stupid ogre" is just shorthand for "I find an ogre" and "The ogre is stupid.")
• Prepositional phrases cost 1 Fact each (because "I find an ogre in the pit" is just shorthand for "I find an ogre" and "He is in the pit."
• Treat compound sentences as multiple simple sentences: "I find an ogre and he does not hear me."

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Chris is right on the money. Sentence diagramming is the model for this.

One thing I feel I didn't get across well in Donjon is the amount of adversarial play that should be involved. The GM should press you to split your facts up and spend them, and then look hard for anything you didn't specify and use it against you.

"I find a goblin" is two facts, for example. There's goblins, and there's only one of them. Now, if you only have one fact, you might say "I find goblins," and the GM is encouraged to make it twelve of them.

[epweissengruber]

James,

In your examples, it's two and four. Facts should be broken into the smallest pieces of information possible for use in interpretation.

I used to think that subject + predicate = fact

But I like Clinton's suggestion of breaking things down even further.

Consider all victories to open a situation where "There is ..." is a free given fact.

1 victory = [There is] an ogre
1 victory = [There are] ogres
2 victories =  [There is] a gigantic ogre
2 victories = I find an ogre

In this last example a named subject takest the place of the given generic "There is ..." fact.

[Hans]

2 victories = I find an ogre

My only quibble with this is that usually success on your test is assumed without facts, isn't it?  Therefore, if I have tested my character's "Darkvision" ability, and succeed, I do not need to use a fact for it to be my character who sees ogre, do I?  That seems like it is implied by the fact that my character is the one making the test.

[Lxndr]

What you're doing is not paying for the "I", but rather, paying for the fact of the quantity being "one ogre".

[Hans]

What you're doing is not paying for the "I", but rather, paying for the fact of the quantity being "one ogre".

That makes more sense to me.  It doesn't quite jibe with Erik's original list:

1 victory = [There is] an ogre
1 victory = [There are] ogres
2 victories =  [There is] a gigantic ogre
2 victories = I find an ogre

Where the first two lines seem to indicate that whether there is one or more than one ogre is not an extra fact.  But, I agree that the quantity should be a fact.  Specifically:

1 fact = "There are ogres"
2 facts = "There are gigantic ogres"
2 facts = "There is one ogre"
2 facts = "There are some ogres" (implying more than one)
2 facts = "There are three ogres"
3 facts = "There are three gigantic ogres"

Which brings me to a question:

"There are two gigantic ogres and one small ogre"

I count 6 facts in that statement, how about you?

[Valamir]

4.

There are Ogres
There are 3
2 are gigantic
1 is small.

[Hans]

There are Ogres
There are 3
2 are gigantic
1 is small.

Nice analysis.  My original analysis was:

There are Ogres
There are 3
Some are gigantic
The number of gigantic ogres is 2.
Some are small
The number of small ogres is 1.

On reflection, it occurs to me the last fact is unecessary, by simple arithmetic, so it should really have been 5 facts.  However, if there had been four ogres, and you wanted the remaining two ogres to be small, it would have been necessary, since one can picture ogres in sizes other than gigantic and small (medium sized, tiny, lanky, squat, supergigantonormous, etc.) 

Practically, though, as someone who is about to GM Donjon in a week and a half, and at the risk of hijacking Gasten's original thread, here are my questions to those that have played Donjon a fair amount:

* Has the exact definition of a fact ever mattered in your games?
* How important has consistency in what a fact is been in your games?  That is, do some circumstances call for a looser definition of a fact and other circumstances require a tighter one?
* If it has mattered, under what circumstances, and how was it resolved?

I suspect this issue may one of those things that seems like it could be big deal in the rules, but in actual play people rapidly come to a common, even unspoken, consensus and move on.