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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9466259" data-attributes="member: 42582">Here's a technical way to look at it (drawing on this technical work on counterfactuals: <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0068.2010.00810.x" target="_blank">https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0068.2010.00810.x</a> ; <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2660092" target="_blank">https://www.jstor.org/stable/2660092</a> ; <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/25001417" target="_blank">https://www.jstor.org/stable/25001417</a>):Fiction, like counterfactuals, involves disciplined/non-arbitrary reasoning despite denying truths and asserting falsehoods. The reasoning involves inferring from an asserted (but not doxastically asserted) starting point, to the conclusion, by drawing upon permissible background assumptions that are not themselves excluded by the entertaining of the initial falsehood. (This is a version of Nelson Goodman's co-tenability requirement for counterfactual reasoning.)The key question, in RPGing (and perhaps fiction more generally) is, what background assumptions are permissible. When people say it's real world physics except where it's not, they are getting at the permissible background assumptions. Now as it turns out, real world physics will not provide good background assumptions, because real world physics (eg thermodynamics, universal gravitation, etc) will - when combined with the sorts of things we assert in FRPG fictions - quickly produce contradictions and nonsense. (Eg that dragons crash, that giant insects suffocate, etc.)Rather than real world physics, it is some sort of folksy common sense that supplies most of the background assumptions. And a few truths are expressly or very strongly implicitly excluded - namely, those that obviously contradict the existence of magic, or would trivially produce contradiction when combined with premises about magical things happening.Folksy common sense is not capable of precise specification. I think that is a proposition that overlaps with your point about a lack of completeness.Well, as I've said, I think some of them or at least some bits of them are constructed prior to the play that they seek to engender. And while these might tend to be the weak bits of a ruleset, they're not necessarily going to be hopeless.I'm still not persuaded this is any different from recipes - I think most recipes are written after some relevant cooking experience. But maybe not always - I don't know how Heston works. And it is possible for composers to compose without instruments to "test" their compositions (I think Mozart did this; I don't know how much Wagner tested his compositions on a piano or similar instrument he may have had to hand, but he composed at least some of them without ever having heard them played in the way that he scored them.) The same might be possible for a genius RPG designer.Other storytelling games - eg A Penny For My Thoughts.That may be so. But am I insufficiently excited? Or are you insufficiently excited by other creative things that humans do, and the relationship between those things and the written manuals that make them possible (or that at least make dissemination of them possible)?</blockquote>

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