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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6202435" data-attributes="member: 42582">In exactly the same way that when you read a novel or have a daydream there is something currently existent in in your head. But when you tell me about what you're reading, you're not reporting to me the state of your head - your thoughts are some higher-order thing that supervenes on the actual state of your head (as per standard functionalist theories of mind), and there are multiple realisations possible (ie there are many different physical ways your head might be which all involve thinking the same thought).D&D players aren't trying to work out the physical state of the GM's head. (Unlike, say, a boxer trying to work out the physical position of the other fighter's fists.) They trying to work out the content and implications of a serious of propositions (like "The door is made of thick oak, and so is hard to break down"). These propositions are in some sense asserted - ie the GM says "The door is made of thick oak" - but they are not true in the real world. So, then, in what sense are they true? They are true relative to a fiction. The metaphysicla status of "King Snurre is king of the fire giants. He likes to eat adventurers for lunch" is the same as "Sherlock Holmes lives at 222B Baker St. He likes to take cocaine." And the implications are worked out like any other counterfactual reasoning ie via projection according to permissible projection principles.There is no code, though, for being able to surf the doors over the tetanus pits in WPM; nor for differentiating between sticking a finger, a forearm of one's head into the devil mouth in ToH; nor for deciding how good a joke has to be to make the Hill Giant Chieftain laugh at it's teller rather than eat him/her.Evaluating any of these PC actions requires considering how they interact with aready-established elements of backstory.Likewise when Gygax says in his DMG that the orcs, or the giant ants, will react "appropriately" to PC incursions. That requires projecting an imagined future from an imagined past. There's no code for that.To relate this to the first half of this reply, what you are calling "the code" includes all the projection principles for deriving consequences of propositions like "This door is made of thick oak." There is no "code" that lets us infer "Therefore, it is hard to break down." In deriving that consequence, all the participants are bringing to bear all their pre-existing knowledge of how oak doors behave when struck.This "open-endedness" - ie this bringing to bear of all our knowledge of the real world, plus our "imaginary" knowledge that let's us apply projection principles to dragons, unicorns and fireball spells, is part of what distinguishes RPGs from boardgames. None of chess, poker or Monopoly requires this sort of projection based on imaginging something that is not real as if it were real. They only involve performing one of a finite list of potential modificaitons to a physically-existent state of affairs (the board, the cards, the pieces).You are making an error, in my view, of conflating the notion of "true relative to a fiction" with ideas of literary theory and literary criticism. They have nothing to do with one another. A literary theorist or critic can apply his/her principles of aesthetic evaluation to the Napoleonic wars (see eg Nietzsche) but this has nothing to do with making sense of a fiction. And a physicist who performs a thought experiement is evaluating certain truths relative to a fiction, but this has nothing to do with literary theory or literary criticism.RPGing has nothing inherently to do with literary theory - bringing literary criticism to bear is a purely optional extra. But it has everything to do with evaluating truths relative to a fiction. Without that, we can't tell whether or not this oaken door is hard to break down, or whether once I've broken it down I can surf it down the frictionless corridor and over the super-tetanus pits.</blockquote>

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