All reproducible means here is that someone else can think of the same thing. That is not controversial. No one in this thread denies it.
No, I don't think this is the case at all. I don't have any sentences in my mind at all. I only have images. I am not going to say I imagine a whole world or anything. But if my players are standing at the entrance of a dungeon, I see the the entrance to the dungeon, its environs and the rooms of the dungeon in my head (obviously if it is a complex dungeon I may clearly imagine the first several rooms and hold a more general pattern of the rest in my head----again this is why notes are useful). World building is a combination of that and putting it down on paper.
If this was really true I do wonder how you would tell - from your mental image - whether the walls are 10' or 12' tall. Or whether the corner is a true right-angle or more like 85 degrees.
And no one is denying the role of speech. What is being debated is the significance of the image you are holding in your mind and how the communication between the GM and the players on the matter plays out (it isn't simply the GM telling them, they are also asserting how they want to interact with this model and there is synergy that takes place there)
The same way I estimate the height of the wall next to my house: I picture it being a certain height and then I guess at the actual footage of it (or if I want I can imagine a little line next to it indicating the height). Again, at some point you want to write these things down. My purpose in the post was to point out many of us do approach this visually and don't think about sentences at all. I think this is a big part of these disagreements. People imagine things differently. They understand things differently. Etc.
In the sort of play where maps and keys are important, I think that this is very important. As I've posted upthread, it dictates the outcomes of many action declarations the players make for their PCs.
I don't know what synergy means here. Gygax's explanation is very straightforward: there are notes that tell us how the limed-over skeleton will behave if prodded. If those notes weren't there, then the GM would have to extrapolate something from his/her notes.
I think one difference is that if you're not sure how high your house wall is you can measure it. But you can't measure the height of the wall you're imaging. When you imagine the measuring tape hanging down the length of the imaginary wall you have to further imagine what number it shows. There is no objective standard of correctness.
I think in most instances I wouldn't note something like a two foot difference. I am imagining something in my head and saying to myself "that seems about 10 feet high". But like I said, i can imagine a scale next to it if distance is very important (which it was in the session two days ago that I mentioned). The image I put on the page was in my head before I wrote it down. I am not claiming perfect measurement in my head by any stretch. I am saying I can imagine a workable model. And I think this is something you have to do a lot and cultivate if you run theater of the mind (which is what I always do because I hate tactical grids and miniatures). If you don't want players getting mad at you all the time, you have to really visualize what is going on so you can relay that to your players or note it on paper for them. This is especially the case if you are running theater of the mind, melee combat heavy (wuxia in my case) campaigns.
But numbers provide an objective measure. Again if height of a door is important, I can imagine that. Especially in the kinds of increments that are usually important to gaming (because it is ingrained).
I am saying it is a thought experiment in the sense of counterfactual history or in the sense of thinking about an imaginary situation. So I am using it in the sense of "What would a culture of people who can't die from old age, but can die a violent death look like". Most game worlds are filled with these kinds of thought experiments
