Manbearcat
Legend
Well, there's a balance here. The human mind is only so creative. By your logic, would simply resolving all actions by rolling a d20 and having them succeed on a result of 10 or higher not encourage imagination? Ignore all those rules. Seems like it would.
Not "my logic". I didn't establish a premise nor did I pose an answer. Neither is it rhetorical device. I'm legitimately posing a question to focus the issue and refine the analysis of D&D mechanics and their relation to some quality of "imagination expansion/contraction. My rejoinder to the original premise was the "cognitive style" analysis well upthread. I'm just trying to get an evaluation of a singular mechanic within the confines of the proposition outlined in the OP (and expanded upon throughout).
First time I've ever heard D&D compared to surreal art.
Perhaps so. However, we have a metric here that we're evaluating (of which the OP invoked); "the quality of various D&D mechanics to expand or contract the imagination". I was just trying to pin down its boundaries. If someone posits that Fortune in the Middle mechanics (which require association to "game reality" due to their malleable nature) yields a net loss in the evaluation of "the quality of various D&D mechanics to expand or contract the imagination", I think a comparison to the work of Monet, Renoir, Dali is apt as their work is willfully malleable such that that association to reality by the audience is a requirement.