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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6309593" data-attributes="member: 42582">I've asked you before to stop imputing to me things that I have never said.Imagination is not a fiction - it is a mental faculty.Imagined things, however, are fictions - that is to say, they (i) are not real, but (ii) are things that we talk and reason about as if they were real.Here are two relevant entries (#s 4 & 5) from the Random House dictionary definition of "fiction", as appearing at dictionary.com:* the act of feigning, inventing, or imagining. * an imaginary thing or event, postulated for the purposes of argument or explanation.All RPG play requires these. Multiple imaginary things and events (persons, places, doings) are postulated for the purposes of reasoning about them.The connection between fictions and stories is neither necessary nor sufficient. Not all imagining is story-telling. For instance, if I am training you to be a firefighter, describe a situation to you involving a burning building, and ask you what you would do in that situation, I am getting you to imagine a ficiton. But I am not getting you to tell a story.And if you write a narrative history or biography, you have produced a story, but (hopefully) have not produced any fictions.Here is Ron Edwards in his essay "Gamism: Step on Up":Gamism is expressed by competition among participants (the real people); it includes victory and loss conditions for characters, both short-term and long-term, that reflect on the people's actual play strategies. The listed elements [Character, Setting, Situation, System, Color] provide an arena for the competition. . . . "among the participants" is too vague, at least from the standpoint of most readers. I was thinking of anyone involved in the play of the game, permitting just who competes with whom to be customized, but most people seem to think I mean "players" in the widely-used, non-GM sense . . . Exploration is composed of five elements, no sweat: Character, Setting, Situation, System, and Color ... but it's not a hydra with five equal heads. . . Situation is the center. Situation is the imaginative-thing we experience during play. Character and Setting are components that produce it, System is what Situation does, and Color can hardly be done without all this in place to, well, to color. . . . Gamist play, more than any other mode, demands that Situation be not only central, but also the primary focus of attention. You want to play Gamist? Then don't piss about with Character and/or Setting without Situation happening, or about to. . . The players, armed with their understanding of the game and their strategic acumen, have to Step On Up. Step On Up requires strategizing, guts, and performance from the real people in the real world. . . For the characters, it's a risky situation in the game-world; in addition to that all-important risk, it can be as fabulous, elaborate, and thematic as any other sort of role-playing. That is all about playing a game. It perfectly describes, for instance, playing Tomb of Horrors or White Plume Mountain. It also seems to me to be the default approach to RPGing on these boards. The player characters face a risky situation in the gameworld (eg a dangerous dungeon that they are trying to loot). And the real world participants in the game have to "step on up", using their understanding of the game, and their cleverness, to perform well (eg building effective characters, making effective mechanical calls during action resolution, intuiting the nature of the ingame situation, such as where traps and secret doors might be found).There is nothing at all in this passage about storytelling. Which is to say, your claim about the Forge is flat-out wrong.</blockquote>

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