Doing stuff isn't solely authorship unless we have no context to weigh it within.
I have trouble making sense of this as a whole. But the first clause seems obviously true: human agents do things other than create fictions.
That doesn't mean that RPGing doesn't involve, of necessity, the creation of fictions and reasoning about them.
On the weekend I was playing Battleship with my child. In the course of play she made a mistake - she placed a white peg into a square that she hadn't called, and which happened to have my battleship in it. As a result she couldn't find my battleship - she thought she had eliminated all 4-square possibilities on the board - and I won.
After the game finished, and it became clear what had gone wrong, I made a joke about a "radar error". That is the creation of a fiction - an assertion of something imagined and known by all participants in the conversation not to be true. But it was at best ancillary to playing the game. You don't need to imagine untrue events, characters and situations to play Battleship.
An RPG is different. Consider, for instance, the following episode of play: player 1 rolls an attack against an orc, hits and deals damage, and the orc dies. The GM then announces "You slice off the orc's head, which goes rolling along the ground." Then player 2 says "How far is it from me? I want to pick it up and throw it at the skeleton - how much damage would it do if I hit?"
Now rolling the attack die is obviously not authorship, and has nothing to do with fiction at all. Nor is changing the hit point total on a record sheet - that's bookkeeping. The GM's description of the orc's decapitation is an act of authorship, but it is like my reference to the "radar error" in the Battleship game: taken on its own it is not strictly a part of playing the game, as - on its own - it has no consequences for how anything else in the play of the game unfolds. To use some Forge terminology, it is mere colour.
But when player 2 declares that his/her PC is going to pick up the orc head and throw it: now the imagined situation matters for the play of the game. The GM has to answer the question, What would happen if PC 2 were to throw the orc head at the skeleton? This is a counterfactual that has to be evaluated relative to an imaginary situation.
I think it has to be emphasised that there is no algorithm for answering the player's question. No D&D rulebook, for instance, has a damage listing for orc heads. (They don't even all have damage listings for thrown rocks - eg Gygax's PHB and Moldvay Basic don't - which is perhaps the nearest analogue.) Does it do bludgeoning damage (due to its thick skull) or slashing damage (due to its sharp tusks)? Which matter, given that slashing damage will be halved against the skeleton.
Moldvay Basic gives advice on how a GM should handle such situations: consider the imaginary situation, and the proposed action; work out how you think things would unfold in such circumstance; and then tell the player either you succeed, you fail (though Moldvay recommends avoiding this most of the time) or you have X% chance of success, now roll the dice!
As I said, this is counterfactual reasoning about an imagined situation.
Scientists do this sort of reasoning. They call it "performing a thought experiment". In a thought experiment, the imagined situation is specified with sufficient precision that the upshot of the counterfactual can be deduced as an entailment.
When a GM does it, there are no entailments: the imagined situations are not specified with sufficient precision, and the laws that govern them are not known in sufficient detail. Hence the GM has to stipulate. This is not arbitrary stipulation - it is reasoned within the imagined situation. But it is nevertheless stipulation. What word in English best describes someone stipulating an outcome (or range of possible outcomes) within a fictional situation? I think "authorship" is a good candidate.
Of course it doesn't follow from the fact that all RPGing involves GMs engaging in acts of authorship in the above sense - which is exactly what people mean when they say that in an RPG you can do
anything - that all RPGing involves storytelling. Storytelling requires more than mere authorship. I will return to this below.
Modules aren't required to provide mechanics and the game rules are suggestions, not universal. A DM needs to have rules for those items if they are going to use the module, but that's part of converting any module to anyone's game.
I am certain that hundreds, probably thousands, of GMs have picked up White Plume Mountain and run it without having a rule for handling the frictionless corridor. In fact, given that the number of crazy schemes players might come up with to shatter the pyramidal water-tanks, to cross the hanging discs, and to traverse the frictionless corridor is in practical terms unlimited, it would be futile to even try to work out rules for it all.
Rather, GMs do what Moldvay advised them to do: they reason counterfactually from the imagined starting point and the hypothesised PC action to a stipulated outcome (or stipulated probability of an outcome). This role of the fiction in RPG play is what distinguishes RPGing from other forms of game, in which the permissible moves are confined to a predetermined list. And it has nothing to do with storytelling.
One reason why RPGs need a referee is because a key element of RPGs as games is that adjudication requires counterfactual reasoning within imagined situations: RPGs need someone who is empowered to stipulate the outcome of such counterfactuals. (Scientists doing thought experiments don't need referees, because the outcomes are entailed. No stipulation by a reasonable but independent party is required.)
The thing is: the imaginary is existent
<snip>
Which doesn't make games fictional.
This is confusing and, I think, confused.
Games obviously are not fictional. For instance it is true, not fictional, that I played both D&D and Battleship on the weekend.
The imaginary, on the other hand, does not exist. There are no unicorns. There is no Middle Earth, nor was there ever a Hyborean Age. (Though obviously both Tolkien and REH drew on real things and real events in authoring those fictions.) Note that something being fictional does not entail anyone has told any stories: REH's essay describing the Hyborean Age is not really a story, for instance, though it is clearly the product of an episode of authorship.
Characterization has been called an emergent act of playing old school D&D. But since the characters are so much like us I think it's easier to say than about playing Tetris, which is also very much about game play IMO and not expressing a personality.
Characterisation may be an emergent property of playing old school D&D. But for many D&D players it is not an emergent element but a core goal. And this has been so for the 30-odd years that I've been RPGing.
Someone who purported to be playing Tetris, but who let a block go because s/he "liked the look of it", arguably is not playing Tetris at all. S/he is doing some other sort of thing with the Tetris machine.
But a D&D player who decides that his/her PC spares a rescued prisoner or defeated enemy because s/he "likes the look of it" is not failing to play D&D, and doing some other thing. Making action declarations for PCs on the basis of their imagined emotional responses to the imagined situations in which they find themselves is a core element of play for many people. At which point it is no longer "emergent". Nor is the imagined emotional response "mere colour". It has become a crucial contributing factor to the play of the game.
Could you source any of this terminology from the 70s, 80s, or even early 90s? Scene framing, conflicts, "resolution" mechanics and the rest were developed by the Forge, a community that left out every idea about pattern recognition (e.g. strategizing) in games altogether.
In 1995 Iron Crown Enterprises published GM Law for the Rolemaster Standard System. It has a 17-page chapter called "Story Design', which includes a sub-section on "Pacing". And in a different chapter, called "The Session", there is a heading called "Scenes and Events", which - on pp 69-70 - includes the following text:
A scene is a series of dramatic presentations that are related to one another by setting and time. Scenes are the primary tool you will use (as a GM) to deliver information about the game to the players. . . When you are preparing for each session, you should envision the upcoming session as a series of potential scenes to be played through. Even if you do not know exactly what the outcome of each scene is, you should have in mind a series of possible scenes.
I don't know that this is especially good advice, but it clearly illustrates that ICE regarded such matter as scene-framing, and the outcomes of scenes, and pacing, as important matters. And ICE and RM were hardly cutting-edge in this respect.
Another book I have ready to hand is Night's Dark Terror, a B/X module published by TSR in March 1986. On pp 2-3 it has the following text:
In the opening phases [of the adventure], the order of events is clearly defined, but as the adventure progresses, more opportunities are provided to let you shape the exact course of the adventure. . . For example, the adventurers must go to Sukiskyn . . . before exploring the surrounding woods . . . Similarly, some encounter areas can only be discovered after certain information has been gathered. . . [W]here the ordering of specific encounters is important, this is made clear in the text.
It strike me as obvious that "encounter" in the quoted passage is used in much the same sense as it is in the 4e rulebooks - namely, to describe an imagined situation described by the GM and obliging the PCs to act in some fashion - rather than as it is used by Gygax, to describe a meeting between the PCs and some monster or NPC that results from adjudicating the PCs' movements on the GM's map.
The authors don't use the language of "scene-framing" but they are clearly thinking about it. And in fact if they had had the term available, they might have been able to give better advice about how to run their adventure, which I know from experience need not be as railroad-y as the quoted passage might suggest.
Another distinctive feature of Night's Dark Terror, which relates to the idea of "characterisation" and also to the idea of a scene being an imagined situation that "obliges" the PCs to act, is that the module takes for granted that some of the players' choices for their PCs will be governed by the imagined emotional responses of the PCs to various NPCs and monsters. (For instance, the authors take for granted that the PCs will try and rescue captured homesteaders, and seek the defeat of their persecutors, because the PCs feel sympathy for the former and antipathy towards the latter.)
Unlike White Plume Mountain, therefore, Night's Dark Terror assumes not just what all RPGing assumes - namely, that a fiction will be authored - but that the participants care about generating a story via play, with scenes connected not just by whim but by an underlying emotional or thematic logic emerging from the protagonists.
As I said, Night's Dark Terror is 1986. But of course it's not the first module of this kind; the Dragonlance series begins in 1984, and has similar aspirations and rests on similar assumptions, although I personally think Night's Dark Terror is much more successful. But I doubt that these published examples of this sort of approach were spun by their authors from whole cloth. As with most RPG publishing, I believe they will have had their origins in the prior actual play experiences of their authors.
To reiterate: story telling is not inherent to RPGing, although the authoring of fictions (which is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of storytelling) is. The existence of modules like ToH and White Plume Mountain is sufficient proof of both these claims. (And you are just wrong to say that The Forge thinks all RPGing, let along all gaming, is story telling. Ron Edwards has an essay on
non-storytelling RPGing. He can also tell the difference between an RPG and a wargame. The former involves fictions - imagined situations - as a necessary component; the latter doesn't. He correctly identifies M:tG as a wargame, not an RPG or a near-RPG. Someone who plays a Shivan Dragon might emulate it's roar, but this is like my joke about a "radar error" in Battleship: the authored fiction is mere colour that has no bearing on gameplay. Whereas in an RPG it would matter to resolution: my PC can try and fry eggs on a red dragon's scales, for instance, and the GM has to adjudicate that attempt even though there is no algorithm in any edition of D&D for egg-frying via draconic heat.)
But though story telling is not inherent to RPGing, the idea that RPGing might be done in some way that involves story telling (or something very like it) as an important aspect or aim is not some 21st-century novelty: the existence of a mid-80s module like Night's Dark Terror is sufficient proof of that.
