Tony Vargas
Legend
Then you may have missed the best part, as I rapidly ran out not-hilarious ways of saying even-more-improved Sleep.I have to confess that I didn't read your treadmill word-for-word, I'm sorry - more of a quick skim to get the gist.
But, yeah, it was a literal treadmill, copy, paste, increment the numbers. No real change in the fiction, no net change in the mechanics, no expansion of possibilities in either...
...And, that last was hard, BTW, because D&D is loaded with expanding possibilities. So that example is not true to any edition of D&D. It has some in jokes from 1e & 3e, but in no edition does a wizard start & end a long career casting nothing but (Greater Improved Superior True Death-Like) Sleep and Magic Missile, nor however much it felt like it, a Cleric, Cure (Increasingly Gruesome Sounding) Wounds.
I think I can articulate it a little more concisely, now: the meaningful fiction isn't really the illusion, taking the maths as being the fiction, instead of modeling the fiction, is.I guess I don't think layering meaningful fiction over the maths of a RPG is an illusion. I tend to just call that playing the game!
So perhaps illusion is the wrong word..