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.
It's not at all unique to me, but almost lost in our time.
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.
Edwards is playing with Social Contract as sociologist's typically stipulate then. Unspoken agreements of "I won't hit you, if you don't hit me" are strategies in D&D and not ones you must keep. Make them rules and you lose the cooperation element of D&D for collaboration - a rule the players must follow to play. They have no choice, so those games aren't about cooperating at all, unlike D&D.
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.
"The referee has to decide which PC a monster attacks." was what I was responding to. Add a hard return before Lareth.
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.
And I say you are using fiction (like the illusion of some "shared" cloud space) to refer to fantasy, what comprises my imagination, but are claiming it is not in the world. Your thoughts are in the world. You can say they belong in some special "beyond reality" second reality, but I don't accept that. Fiction and non-fiction are actually labels about referential status, not the actuality of the referent. (Books are called fiction, but don't exist in a "higher order" state.) I'm talking about an actual imagined fantasy world. Narrative and fiction don't apply, though those terms for forms of expression often for sharing fantasy world.
That is not in dispute. But imagined things do not exist. They are not real. Which is to say that they are fictional.
The game of D&D requires all participants to have an imagination. If someone doesn't have one, then they won't be able to play. No one is referring to an unimagined state of affairs. At best you might be meaning a fictive.
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).)
Yeah, Einstein was an Eternalist. People called him a follower of Parmenides. I think he was more on my side than I am. (BTW, I'm not actually arguing for sides, just against absolutist certitudes like those put forth by the Forge, especially when it harms our hobby).
Searle's speech-act theory, added to by Barker, is considered quite radical actually. Though I like of what I read of Searle's, I don't see him as conclusively as you might (especially with how he treats A.I.). Also, considering you were talking about how truth in roleplaying is propositional a couple of days ago, I don't think you are fully on board with Barker either. ...But I admit I haven't read his book. So his understanding of propositions in regards to speech acts might be in line with your own. I don't know.
But here's the thing, D&D isn't about speech. Or storytelling. Those are necessary evils to get to the good stuff: Game Play. D&D is about playing the actual, imaginary game board in the DM's head by the players. Speech is used like any game players might need to if they didn't have hands to move their pieces and needed to tell another to do so. Their references are to an imagined fantasy world, but not a fiction, as the reference of those imagined items to our non-imaginary world never comes into play.
So, in my very real imagination I receive the image of your word from my computer screen. I attempt to comprehend them using the code of language called English I've also attempted to puzzle out throughout my life (even as it is changing). If we were conversing textually in French, I believe you that I would receive more "E" & "Q" symbols into my imagination. But by your supposition... we never do. Neither in or out of our imaginations does a French conversation occur. So your supposition is referring to a fictional (i.e. non-existent) state of affairs. My actual and not pretended questioning of you about what exists in your interior world is not me asking about fiction. For example, "How do you feel?" "What are you thinking about?" "If I say 'white elephant', what image comes to mind?" These are not ironic questions as I accept you have an interior -reality- as you are a living, breathing person.
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.
Yes, but like any code where it isn't the language, syntax, or common use semantics, those communicating still need to have a shared language to address it. Because of that, like any simulated reality game, a good code designer begins with pieces of a believed actually pre-existing shared reality with his or her players. So we get dogs as well as lizard scales, fire, talons, and such made into dragons in D&D.
In any RPG, we can speak, gesture, draw, maneuver miniatures on a spatial map, even sculpt, and paint to better understand each other. There aren't many limits here. Of course, in my experience players are more likely to go the formal arts direction when demonstrating to me how their character is comprised. But those avenues are not closed off to me as DM when attempting to convey, say, the intricacies of Ravenloft Castle or how Marduk grasps his magical 3-handled, triple-bladed sword.
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.
That's clearly a high level challenge you had no capacity to deal with, especially in cruddy one-shots like that. Con games were long considered the worst, but the fan base's lack of a shared proficiency in a single code is what I believe led Gygax to assert the (hit and miss rules of) AD&D to be "Official" for all conventions
and the only "real" D&D. Not the way I would of gone, but he got his share of flack for it.
What your GM should have done is create a player-level appropriate challenge where failure didn't end in "game over", or at least have extra PCs on hand and a word of warning about the adventure's deadliness.
Games requiring game experience in my book are actually asking for level of player proficiency. Like you might sign up for Intermediate at a Chess convention. But RPGs are not well designed for convention play, at least not traditionally. They are way, way too long, but that's what is good about them. They are this awesome, long sustained build with repeated pay offs.
EDIT: On your definition I'm not sure that Runequest comes out as an RPG, nor perhaps Traveller.
Little made after D&D in the 70's or early 80's was anything other than a different set of possible system or code suggestions for D&D put out as its own game. And none were all that clear on why they were designed as such (just like OD&D assumed a lot and had its share of designer uncertainty). It took a few years for adult, hard core gamers, the engineers and math-heads of the community to really figure out what this new game was. And by the time they did post-modern denial of pattern recognition hit hard and many dropped out of the hobby or went back to wargames. Once the game became "for kids" it popped out from behind the screen (in the mid-80's?) and those games following in D&D's footsteps were widely out of sorts and at best innovative code suggestions if implemented by a DM who knew what he or she was doing.
Let me know why you think that about Runequest and Traveller.
The boundaries may not be clear, but I don't think there's much ambiguity as to which side of it Sorcerer falls on. It is written and sold as an RPG. The only people who have ever heard of it, much less played it, describe themselves as RPGers. It won an RPG design award, I think. And it involves each of the players taking on the person of an imagined character in an imagined world confronting adversity that is managed and introduced into play by a distinct participant, the GM/referee.
I'm not sure that it gets much more RPGy than that!
For the definition of Role Playing until the mid to late 1980s it isn't at all an RPG. It might be a game, but Ron Edwards worked very hard to redefine the community at large's understanding of what RPGs are (and therefore were) using the new and inaccurate for D&D definition of role playing to his advantage. Role playing means story telling a character dontchaknow? Not playing a role.
