I apologize if you don't hold the opinions I thought you did.
I disagree with your assessment of The Forge - I don't think they are trying to destroy traditional or classic RPGing (who is more sympathetic contemporary exponent of Tunnels & Trolls than Ron Edwards?); they are trying to
save (as they see it) RPGing from White Wolf and 2nd ed AD&D.
I don't disagree with all of your presentation of classic D&D play, but I think your account of how it plays is somewhat idiosyncratic; I think a lot of groups played it differently, even back then.
The Big Model puts it forth that rules are social contracts and nothing else.
That's not correct. Edwards makes the point that rules are an alternative to social contract. Part of his objection to "storyteller" play is that it dispenses with rules and puts everything back into social contract, which creates intolerable conflicts of interest which in turn undermine the play experience. Whether he is right or wrong in his claims here, he is pretty clear that social contract is not a substitute for rules.
If you as a referee are in the position of deciding what a player is going go do: STOP
Why would the referee be deciding what a
player is going to (have his/her PC) do? I was talking about a referee deciding what Lareth the Beautiful, an NPC, is going to do.
There is no shared fiction being constructed or utilized during game play or in reference with the rules. Rules addressing a shared fiction don't have a place in an RPG. That's my direct point. Games reference a game construct, they require a field of play, but not a narrative.
And my direct point is that you are conflating "fiction" and "narrative". It's obvious that RPGing does not require a narrative (I give you Keep on the Borderlands). Though it may have one (I give you Dragonlance). Or it may have as a goal the emergence of one out of play (I give you Burning Wheel).
But they all need a
fiction: an imaginary world in which the imagined action of various imagined beings takes place.
D&D is a "fantasy game of your imagination". It's right there, all three words.
That is not in dispute. But imagined things do not exist. They are not real. Which is to say that they are
fictional.
The physicist is positing based upon his experiences in the actual world. His posits are called fictional by you (rather than speculative, which is what they are called as fiction an assertion of falseness) because he isn't sure that what he posited is actually what will happen.
I am not sure what aspect of physicsts' methodology you have in mind, but I have in mind thought experiments, of which the most famous are the ones around special relativity, involving infinitely long mirrors, trains moving close to the speed of light with lanterns and mirrors at each end and running past stations with clocks on them, etc.
When Einstein, or anyone else, invites us to engage with these thought experiments, they are inviting us to imagine a fiction. But of course they are not inviting us to construct a narrative.
Here is another example: I now invite you to imagine us having this same conversation in French, and to consider that there would be even more occurences of the letter "e", and definitely more occurences of the letter "q". The state of affairs -
that were are having this conversation in French - from whic I infer my conclusion -
that there would be more occurences of certain letters - is not real. It is a fiction. That doesn't mean inferences can't made from it. But it does mean that those assertions, detached from the supposition, are not true. (The best treatment of the semantics of supposition that I am familiar with is found in S J Barker,
Renewing Meaning (OUP 2004).)
There is a game construct termed a "door" within the game that is.
<snip>
The players are determining how to break down a "door" as constructed by game mechanics and existent in the DMs imagination. This is why they keep asking him or her questions about it in the form of perceptions and actions by their PCs (also existent in the DMs imagination). They do this as that's where the thing they are inspecting exists.
<snip>
Game definitions refer to game content, not common language understandings of the world outside our heads. As a code, each DM uses whatever shared language he has with the players to refer to it. But everyone understands the terms themselves are game specific. The GM refers to a door like any Chess player talks about a King.
This is the bit where I think the real point of discussion about the nature of RPG play is. And despite your many posts over many years I have not realised before that
this is what you are saying.
I think that the approach you describe is not the only way that D&D was played, even back in the 70s, and certainly not the only way it can be played, even if one wants to play in a classic style. For instance, on your account one of the players being a carpenter, and therefore having a reasonable sense of how hard a door might be to break down, would have no relevance to gameplay. Because they are trying to break the GM's "door" code, and that code might have only the slightest of connections to the reality of how doors really work in the real world.
I have never played like that. For example, if someone wants to know how heavy a boulder is, I've always taken it for granted that we would work out it's volume from the GM's description via standard geometry, and then calculate its mass by looking up the density of the material in question in an encyclopedia. Sometimes the table might agree to fudge it for the sake of expedience (eg I think 150 lb per cubic foot is within the ballpark for a reasonable range of rocks). But we would assume that in these respects the game is simply following reality.
This once came up in a Traveller (or similar sci-fi) game that my group played at a convention. We got stuck in a burning building, and the GM declared that we were all out from lack of oxygen within seconds. When we suggested that it would take more than a few seconds for the fire to consume all the oxygen in the building, the GM was not interested in hearing it.
There's no doubt that we figured out the referee's code for "how long does a fire in a building take to suck up all the oxygen", but we didn't much enjoy the experience.
EDIT: On your definition I'm not sure that Runequest comes out as an RPG, nor perhaps Traveller.
