Quote Originally Posted by Dion View Post
Ok, so I think what I’m hearing are that we are discussing two imaginary universes (neither universe is any any way similar to the real universe we live in):

Universe A, the railroad universe. The entire universe is pre-ordained from the beginning, and that some external entity knows every single event that will happen. There’s a book somewhere with a huge list like: Photon X will excite electron Y at time Z.

Universe B: the probabilistic universe. The entire universe is still pre-ordained from the beginning, and some external entity knows every single thing that *might* happen. There’s a book somewhere with a huge list of hyperlinks like; Photon X has a 23% chance of exciting electron Y at time Z. If that happens, go to page 23,058,324,831 in the book. otherwise, go to page 583,342,643,345 in the book.

And the idea that we’re arguing is that there is some definition of “free will” that is somehow compatible with Universe B, and we’re trying to come up with that definition?
Given the context of the comic, with most things literally relying on a die roll, I think Universe B is probably our best bet (though an argument could be made for Universe A, on the grounds that it's a webcomic with a preordained narrative created by the Giant).

Anyway, regardless of which interpretation you choose, the characters in the story are still free-willed in the context of the story. For instance, were we to put a bunch of wights in front of Belkar, he might choose to kill them dead-er, or wait until his party's been knocked around by them and then kill the wights, followed by looting is fellow party members' corpses. No matter what else is happening, that's his choice and his alone; the mechanisms by which that conclusion is drawn are entirely contained in Belkar's mind. If you know how Belkar weighs the factors that go into his decision-making process, you can predict what he'll do in a given scenario, with a degree of accuracy proportionate to the correctness of your knowledge (and thus, perfect knowledge of Belkar's decision-making process leads to perfect accuracy in predicting his decisions). At no point in this hypothetical kill-wights-now-or-later situation is the decision taken off Belkar's shoulders; he'll still be the one to decide what he does, prophecy and predictions be damned.