This is not a very accurate description of most of the TSR-published material that I have. It is game content, but it is not game structures. For instance, I have material that talk about stone walls and floors, about peasants, about plants and flowers, about food and drink, about kings and rivers and borders and countries. Countless pages of such stuff, mostly published by TSR between the early 80s and the late 90s. This is game content, but the expectation is that the players will know how to interact with it based on their knowledge of the real world, and imaginatively projecting. There are often few or no game rules associated with this stuff, and certainly not enough to regulate even half of what players might try and do with it.
2e did publish a some very bad game books which didn't even include game statistics for game components within them. But that's due to ignorance of design. Of course I'm talking about all the 1000s of books which actually do have game stats.
Just to give one instance - suppose a player says, during a bar-room situation "I spill my beer on such-and-such an NPC so we'll be able to identify him later by the smell of beer on his clothes". Nothing published by TSR that I'm aware of has any rules for resolving this game move. It depends entirely on imaginative projection of the properties of cups, of beer and of human noses as the participants know them to be in the real world.
Are you incapable of using game mechanics to provide for all those actions? D&D game books are not complete works. They are suggestions for DMs to create the codes they will use behind the screen. And alcohol, beer, scents, and tracking are hardly uncommon game components given everything that's been published.
This is just nonsense.
Seeing as you love talking about role playing in the social sciences, I'll give you an example. I teach in a law school. I therefore have to write moot problems and exam questions. Many of these involve fictions. For instance, here is one from last semester's exam:
SNIP
What your talking about is rhetoric and using reasoning to support such, which you've repeatedly put forth as what players in all role playing games do even though D&D and most every RPG were never designed to do this. You're simply feeding into the viewpoint of the Forge trying to purposefully confuse people into believing fiction producing games (and any conjecture that goes on about such fiction) are "the one true" role playing games and not another hobby entirely.
Games are patterns. People play them to engage in strategy. Rhetoric can be a strategy and players in D&D (not DMs) can engage in it to convince fellow players to follow their courses of action. But this isn't role playing.
And I can tell you, law students have been answering questions about made-up fact situations, and engaging in client interview exercise, long before Edwards ever set finger to keyboard.
So lawyers have been playing cooperative games hidden behind a screen tracking in memory and in their notes what the portions of the game map the DM relates? Because that's D&D and it is the unique identity which created the RPG hobby. People who hate that practice are the ones who are attempting to destroy one hobby and whitewash it with another. I trust you are educated and are who you claim to be online, but your single-minded understanding of role playing only feeds this culture of abuse whether you are deliberately part of it or not.
Your insistence on equating "fictions" with "stories" is a huge impediment to talking about this issue with you. I have just given an example of a fiction that is not a story. Thought experiments in special relativity are another example.
Fictions don't reference a real world noumenon. D&D has a game board (maps actually) that are referenced by the DM. They aren't fictional for that fact. They support imaginary structure which is fantasy, not fiction. That you refuse to see that difference keeps you locked in a vocabulary which closes off any other possible understandings about RPG and D&D.
And there most definitely are shared fictions. I shared the above fiction with over 100 students sitting last semester's exam.
In hardline postmodern theory "sharing" can only be done ironically or in delusion.
Can you not see how tortured this is? You talk about moving the players' pieces, and then talk about the game-defined ability of those pieces to sense. Sense what? The "pieces" are inanimate objects. They can't sense anything. And all that the players can sense is the GM's screen and the table in front of them. All the "sensing" is imaginary - it is the imagined sensing of imagined things by imagined characters. The content of all that imagining is a fiction.
Don't get caught up in game terminology. "Senses" are game abilities assigned to game pieces in the game. The abilities themselves are references to a game board (think spell area) and tied to other game boards all measurable by the DM.
Likewise your reference to "the reality the DM is relating". When the DM says "You see an orc" what reality is the DM relating? There is no orc. A fortiori, then, no one sees an orc. It's all made up.
DMs often do say "You see an orc", but they mean "Bob, your character sees an orc" all game components and game terminolgy. "Seeing" is referencing something happening in a game. And of course the orc piece can only be seen if its within the "sight" sensory ability of the PC piece.
Here is another example that proves my point, from Gygax's DMG p 71, discussing the resolution of a player's action declaration of hurling oil at a monster:
Gygax could not have been be discussing resolution mechanics. They didn't even exist in games until the Forge invented them.
What is Gygax talking about here, given that the oil, the pouch, and the indicated moments of time, all DO NOT EXIST? He is talking about imaginary oil, in an imaginary pouch, in which imagined time is passing. And the GM is resolving the action by reference to that imagined fiction. This is what is sometimes called "free form roleplaying" without the need to use mechanics.
Of course all those things exist, they must exist to occur in the game.
And this is not a special case. It's inherent to RPGing. It's the difference between RPGing and chess. Chess does not require imagining a pretend situation. It does not require asserting any propositions that are false when evaluated against the real world. Whereas RPGing does. It requires asserting propositions about the existence and location of oil, and the passage of time, all of which would be false if evaluated against the real world. (But the participants know how they are to be evaluated, namely, relative to the shared fiction.)
This also has nothing to do with storygaming, or The Forge. Gygax is not discussing storytelling. He's discussing playing a game. But part of being good at that game is having the ability to think of clever things relative to a fiction. It's not just pattern recognition, anymore than playing Pictionary, or "I spy with my little eye", is just pattern recognition. (Nor is playing basketball just pattern recognition, for that matter, though for reasons different from RPGing - in the case of basketball it's because the game has a huge physical/athletic component.)
Your repeated assertions that all gameplay is pattern recognition is more dogmatic than anything that ever came out of The Forge.
You keep repeating Forge theory as fact, not that many followers treat it as less. It's as far as fact can be considering how "agenda"-driven and deliberately falsifying of self-reported understandings of games that theory was. It's not a theory, it's an ideology pushed on an ignorant gamer population.
To be clear, I've not misunderstood your position here. You keep repeating it over and over as if I'm simply misunderstanding your one true way of believing. The fact is, you simply have no conception of why D&D was designed with 1000s of books and requires campaign worlds and adventures to even run. Why DMs are a necessity to playing the game. Of course those things are irrelevant in the game you play because you have no desire to play D&D as designed as you've made abundantly clear. You're pushing D&D as a storygame and not only that you're pushing all RPGs as exclusively storygames. Just about everything you purport here is just flat out wrong.
EDIT: To the last bit, games and puzzles are entirely about pattern recognition. That this is not the whole of existence is obvious, but it's a key component of what makes activities games and puzzles rather than something else.
