Yes. It surprises me that you can see that it is limitless without seeing what that implies. The fictional position cannot be solely an enumeration of objects: there must be an aboutness or intentionality to know that we do/do-not agree what follows.
This makes no sense to me. I am currently sitting on my couch. That is my position. I am in my living room, and it is late at night. I could turn on the TV, play a DVD, lie down on my couch and go to sleep, get up and get a drink of water, and that's all before I think about leaving the house or going upstairs.
It does not follow from that partial list of things I might do, that my position is anything other than
sitting in the living room of a fairly conventional 21st century Australian house.
I feel that intentionality has to be included whether I like it or not because every example requires it. Perhaps take a look at the Stanford entry on Intentionality and come back to this question.
I don't feel the need to look at the Stanford entry. I'm reasonably well-read in the philosophy of action. I can't remember if my copy of Davidson on Action and Events is here or at work - maybe one of the things I could do from my current position is go to the room with the bookshelves, pick it up and read it! That would be an additional bit of information about my position. It doesn't require any elaborate account of my mental states.
When it comes to
fictional position, of course, notions like "I can't remember if <my position includes such-and-such>" and "I just discovered the there's a gelati truck outside, so my position includes easy access to ice cream", don't apply. Because fiction is not self-existent and amenable to discovery. It is authored, and in RPGing as Baker tells us it is authored collectively, by way of system-mediated negotiation.
Suppose my PC's fictional position is
on the couch at home. And then I declare the action, "I'm going into my library to look for my copy of Davidson on Action and Events!" There are a very wide range of ways of resolving this action declaration, but one might be that the GM calls for a Scholar check - how well stocked is your library? And let's suppose that our game has a rule like DW's Spout Lore: when you succeed on a Scholar check, you have to explain how you came by the knowledge, tome, or whatever it is in question. Furthermore, let's suppose that there's a rule that if it's self-evident to everyone at the table that no such explanation is available, then the check automatically fails.
So I make the check, and succeed. And I narrate, "I go to my library and pick my copy of Davidson of the shelf. It's the same copy I bought as an Honours student writing a research paper on Gilbert Ryle's essay on pleasure." We now have some newly-established fiction: my PC's fictional position has changed to being in the library and having a copy of Davidson ready-to-hand. And my PC's backstory includes new facts about an Honours research paper. But that backstory was not part of the fictional position that underpinned the action resolution. It bears the same relationship to the action declaration and resolution as Harguld's waiting too long does to Dro's action declaration and the resolution of that. They are both bits of fiction that are downstream of resolution, not upstream of it. They did not come "first".
Suppose that, instead of Davidson, my action declaration is "I'm going into my library to look for my copy of the Necrinomicon!". And someone at the table says, "Hang on, that's a notoriously rare book, with all the known copies accounted for and none of them is said to be in your house. There's nothing about your PC that suggests an antiquarian collector of rare books. We've never had cultists hanging around your suburb trying to catch a glimpse of your copy. Etc, etc." And I say, "Fair enough, I guess there's no way I would have a copy of the Necronomicon at home, I withdraw that action declaration." That would be an example of fictional position - the fact that my PC is at home, coupled with the established fiction about my home - ruling out an action declaration, similar to the "reaching" rules in Torchbearer ruling out the use of a trait.
That such a thing can happen doesn't make the narration that flows from the use of the trait, or (in my toy example) the narration the explains how I have a book on my shelf at home, part of the fictional position that leads up to that narration. In the real world, subject to possible weird exceptions that don't apply at roleplaying tables, effect follows cause and can't proceed it. If narration follows resolution, the fiction that is narrated cannot have been a component of the fictional position that underpinned the resolution.
Agreement on what may follow is changed by the tie.
How is this anything but a restatement of Baker's point that the purpose of mechanics is to mediate negotiation over the content of the shared fiction? If the tie didn't change anything about what people might agree to include within the fiction, then the mechanics would be pointless and epiphenomenal (now as it happens a fair bit of mainstream RPGing exhibits such epiphenominalism of mechanics, but in this thread we're talking about Torchbearer).
That doesn't make the tie a feature of the fiction. It is a cue.
It's consistent with the job being done by fictional positioning to describe that it has changed.
I don't know what the second occurrence of "it" refers to. What has changed?
Fictional positioning is changed by changing the fiction. The rolling of the tie leads to a change in the fiction, in accordance with the rules of the game. The rolling of the tie is not itself a change in the fiction.
Even in systems without FitM resolution, it is helpful to distinguish between the boxes and the clouds. For instance, in Rolemaster play I declare my attack (clouds, leads to . . . ), I roll the dice (boxes, leads to . . ), I add the modifiers (boxes, leads to . . .), I consult the weapon chart (boxes, leads to . . .), I roll the crit (boxes, leads to . . .), I consult the crit chart (boxes, leads to . . . ) I learned what happened to the victim of my attack (clouds). We can see that by distinguishing the boxes and the clouds, we can explain why RM is not a "lite" system and why some people find that it involves too much "search and handling" to be worth the resulting specific and visceral fiction.
We can also see that introducing called shots into RM is not trivial: where would the intention to strike at (say) the head - which is something in the fiction - be injected into the process just described? At my table, the rule -adapted from (I think) RMCIII - was that every 2 points of attack bonus allocated allowed 1 point of crit shift (with a special rule about not shifting to 66 unless the Ambush skill was also used). But notice that then produces the following sequence:
I declare my attack (clouds, leads to . . . ), I roll the dice (boxes, leads to . . ), I add the modifiers which include my crit shift (boxes, leads to . . .), I consult the weapon chart (boxes, leads to . . .), I roll the crit (boxes, leads to . . .), I consult the crit chart (boxes, leads to . . . ), I apply my crit shift (boxes, leads to . . .) I learn what happened to the victim of my attack and
I learn where I was aiming my attack (clouds). Reread that bolded bit: the crit shift rule means that RM, one of the most purist-for-system simulationist engines on the market, has suddenly become FitM - I don't know what I was aiming at when I declared my attack until after I resolve the attack having applied my crit shift to my crit roll!
We might end up having to accept our versions as simply definitional. When I speak of fictional positioning it's my version that I mean, and that results in differences between our analyses.
It's not just definitional. As best I can tell, you are asserting that the cues, which constrain the establishment of fiction, are themselves components of the fiction and hence of the fictional positioning. Which to me seems obviously false.
