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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6299184" data-attributes="member: 42582">You are correct that football has no representation aspect. RPGing manifestly does.For instance, no part of playing football involves a participant responding to a question "What do you do now?" with a remark like "I walk down the corridor". RPGing does. Hence, in RPGing, there are depictions of things (characters, corridors, monsters) that don't actually exist.Gygax, on p 7 of his PHB, states that "As a role player, you become Falstaff the fighter. You know how strong, intelligent, wise, healthy, dextrous and, relatively speaking, how commanding a personality you have [sic]. . . You act out the game as this character . . . You interact with your fellow role players, not as Jim and Bob and Mary who work at the office together, but as Falstaff the fighter, Angore the cleric, and Filmar, the mistress of magic!"That's not very ambiguous. The "become" isn't literal, as the reference to "acting out" indicates. Roleplaying involves a certain sort of pretence, evaluating propositions not in relation to the real world (in which, for instance, neither Falstaff nor Angore nor Filmar exists) but in relation to an imagined state-of-affairs (which, following the usage of contemporary analytic philosophers, plus ordinary language, can be termed a fiction).And? Did anyone assert that games are good or bad because of how well they depict something else? That's typically seen as a feature of certain representational art forms. I've never seen anyone suggest that RPGs are a representational art form.But the play of a game might produce a depiction of something else, and some people might think it matters to the quality of the game how well that depiction turns out. For instance, the star-ship building rules in a space opera game would be liable to criticism if they didn't let you build a ship something like the Millenium Falcon or the Enterprise. (I think the original Book 2 Traveller rules are subject to criticism along such lines. The publishers seem to have agreed to some extent, because Book 5 gave us new rules.)And this is apropos of what? The most frequent instance of such "short-circuiting" that I see discussed around here is the role of Save-or-Die in pre-4e D&D, especially 3E/PF.There is no special connection between game rules intended to facilitate dramatic contrivances and the "short-circuiting" of game play. For instance, a player spending a healing surge during the course of resolution of a 4e combat is not short-circuiting game play; s/he is playing the game. That's as true at a gamist table (eg Lair Assault organised play) as it is at my table.</blockquote>

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