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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6202038" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't agree. That is mostly found in DMG 2, and is highly optional. I think you are working here with a notion of "reality" that is not just at odds with 80s postmodernism, but with mainstream analytic metaphysics also.If you are playing White Plume Mountain, and a player wants to know whether or not his/her PC can surf across the tetanus pits on doors, then we have to evaluate the truth of the following proposition: My PC can surf across the tetanus pits on doors, taking advantage of the frictionless nature of the corridor floor. How is the truth of that proposition to be evaluated? The standard answer is contemporary anlaytic philosophy would be that this is a question of truth relative to a fictional (ie not really existing) domain of objects. Once the domain is established the truth is objective, but the domain has to be established by stipulation.Talking about the players introducing content into the fiction of a game is simply talking about extend the stipulated domain of objects against which the truth, within that fiction, of propositions such as the above are evaluated. There is no other adequate account  of what it means to treat the thing in and of itself as real. (There are important technical variants, but they are all going to need the notion of an interpretation relative to a stipulated fiction.)The presence in an RPG of this sort of "truth relative to a stipulated fiction" - what the Forgeites call "fictional positioning" - is what distinguishes it from a board game or a Fighting Fantasy Gamebook or anything else which has colour and flavour text, but has no provision for that non-real "reality" to shape the parameters of what is possible, within the game, for a player to try and do.The difference between "gamism" and "step on up" is not in relation to the theory of fiction. It's in relation to the motivation of the choices made for PCs. That's an important difference, that leads to very different play experiences, but I don't think it changes the fundamental metaphysics of RPGing.That they're tropes isn't at odds with them connecting to reality; nor does it entail that they were fabricated in any deliberate sense of fabrication. But the connections are symbolic, not causal. A rumbling tummy is a causal sign of hunger; a dragon, to the extent that it is also a sign of hunger, is not a sign for causal reasons. Its relationship to hunger is symbolic.As to whether or not it is possible to connect to others via illusion: I think that's pretty ubiquitous. People on these boards connect to one another, for instance, via the notion that they are all playing D&D, even though many of them are not doing anything much like what I'm doing, and probably not much like what you're doing either.</blockquote>

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