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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6202568" data-attributes="member: 42582">[MENTION=3192]howandwhy99[/MENTION], you are imputing to me a a range of views I don't hold. I also think you do not have a full grasp of mainstream contemporary philosophy of mind and language.Given that you are the only person on this thread talking about story games, I guess you're entitled to put forward a stipulative definition. I don't know what games you think are instances of "story game" as you've defined it, but 4e is not, Burning Wheel is not, HeroWars/Quest is not, Marvel Heroic RP is not. In fact as far as I can see any game that relies upon the adjudication of fictional positioning for the resolution of action declaration is not a story game in your sense. (This is assuming that by "create a fiction" you mean "author a narrative", which seems to be the way in which you use that phrase.)I am not suffering from any such notion. The construction of the shared fiction is not fundamentally separate from the rules. It is fundamentally conditioned by the rules (this is Vincent Baker's well known "clouds, boxes and arrows"). For instance, in 4e, why does a fireball spell set things on fire? Because it has the rules property of doing [fire] damage. Or why can Icy Terrain be used to freeze a puddle or part of a stream? Because it has the rules property of doing [cold] damage.My claim is simply that there is no code that tells you whether or not a fireball spell is hot enough to melt the glacial ice that is Thrym's throne. That has to be extrapolated like any other novel question about a hypothetical or stipulated state of affairs is: by projecting from what is already known about the state of affairs via permissible projection principles. Which are not, in themselves, amenable to codification.I don't know where religion comes into it. The idea that thoughts are higher order properties that supervene on their realising brain states; and that multiple realising physical states are possible; is pretty standard in modern functionalist philosophy of mind (most of whose proponents are atheists, I would imagine).Me telling you how I feel is reporting some higher-order state realised in my nervous system. Me telling you that I'm perceiving at a door is reporting some higher-order state in my cognitive system. Me telling you that I'm imagining a door is reporting some higher-order state in my "hypothesising" system. But when, in D&D, people reason about bashing down doors, they are not reasoning about those mental states. This can be easily seen by considering the following examples: someone in the real world encounters a door and wonders how they might break it down. The things they have to think about are properties of doors like their construction, their density, their hardness etc. None of that requires reflecting on mental states. Now, in a game of D&D the adventurers come acorrs a door and wonder how they might break it down. The things that the participants in the game have to thik about are exactly the same properties of doors: their construction, their density, their hardness etc. They are not thinking about, and do not have to think about, mental states.The point can also be put in terms of propositional content. If I tell you "I am knocking down the door", the content of that assertion is settled by the meaning of the word "door" and the phrase "knocking down", as well as the reference rule for the subject pronoun "I". If a player, playing a game of D&D, tells me as GM "My character is knocking down the door", the content of that proposition is settled by the meaning of the word "door" and the phrase "knocking down", as well as the reference rule for the phrase "my character". The word "door", when used by a D&D player to talk about an imaginary door, does not change it's meaning and suddenly start talking about mental states. It has the same meaning as when used to talk about a real door.The point can also be put in terms of expertise. A D&D player who knows a lot about doors in the real world can be an excellent D&D player even if s/he knows nothing about the subtleties of mental states. Whereas a D&D player who knows a lot about the subtleties of mental states but nothing about doors is likely to be disadvantaged in classic dungeon play. And the reason for this is obvious: the subject matter of D&D is principally dungeons, doors, walls, stone, wood, orcs, dragons,etc. It is not first and foremost mental states, and certainly not the mental states of the participants.The gameboard is a piece of cardboard or timber that is a really existing physical object, tyically located between the participants.The GM's thoughts and imaginations are non-physcial objects that supervene on the physical state of his/her brain, and are located in his head. If you are a strict physicalist and regard them not as supervening on but as literally identical with certain physical states of the brain, then you will take the view that those thoughts and imaginations are located in the GM's head.But there is no door in the GM's head. (Apart from anything else it would have to be a very small door.) The door does not exist. It is like the objects in a physicist's thought experiment - a posit or stipulation. Assertions about it can be true or false relative to that stipulation (which is what anlaytic philosophers mean when they talk about "truth relative to a fiction"). The assertion "The dungeon and the doors within it exist" is true relative to that stipulation. But they are not real. They are imaginary.I woudln't know because I'm not a player of that sort. I learned to play RPGs in the early 1980s from Moldvay, Roger Musson, Marc Miller, Don Turnbull, Lewis Pulsipher and Gygax. (In roughly that order.)As for "making things" up, a physicist doing a thought experiment isn't "making things up". S/he is extrapolating from a posit via projection rules - in this case, codified ones. (That's part of the point of physics.) A player wondering whether or not a hand axe can break down a door isn't "making things up". S/he is extrapolating from a posit via projection rules - in this case, ones that aren't and can't be codified. In both cases, though, the posit is not true - it is a fiction - and in both cases the person doing the thinking is going to end up asserting things which are true relative to the fiction, but not true of any reality. (Eg "The light beams bouncing of the mirrors at the ends of the moving train will meet at this point;" or, "The door is too hard to be broken down by a hand axe.")I don't understand what you mean by "improvising" here. But if you are telling me that there is a codified decision procedure for every permissible player "move" in a game of D&D then I flat out disagree. Given that the possibilities of fictional positioning are limitless, so are the possibilities of reasoning required.The additional game material will still not supply anything in the neighbourhood of a code. There is no code, for instance, that tell's you how INT 0 creatures behave - because ants behave very differently from wasps which behave very differently from spiders. And even if you just confine yourself to spiders, there is no code that tells you how they will behave in all situations.My point is that any knowledge at all about how the world works can be brought to bear by a player of D&D. For instance, in the well-known ziggurat room in White Plume Mountain, a player can bring to bear such knowledge as that projectiles can shatter glass, and that water can drown air-breathing creatures, though the time is highly variable both across species and across individuals. And a player can also be stumped by such questions as "How do I extrapolate from real life to giant scorpions, when in real life the circulatory and "pulmonary" systems of scorpions only work because they are so small?" There is no code for this.Whether or not you want to call it improvising, if the players shatter the walls and try and drown all the creatures in the resulting flood, the GM is going to have to make a decision about how long it takes a giant scorpion to drown. There is no code for the game that I have ever seen that answers that question. The GM will have to project from what is known, and may - in this case - even have to make it up, given that we are talking about a biologically impossible entity.It's obvious to me that Lawrence Schick didn't play D&D this way - because the most famous environment he wrote for the game, White Plume Mountain, is not limited in this way. I don't think Gygax played this way either, whether as GM or player - because as GM the most famous environemtns he wrote are Tomb of Horrors, Keep on the Borderlands and The Village of Hommlet, and none of them is a limited envrionment. Each permits "moves" to be made by the players which cannot be resolved via any code, and require projection by reference to non-code-like principles.A Fighting Fantasy Gamebook is like what you describe - a game with an imagined state of affairs within a limited environment and with limited moves that are capable of codification - but precisely for this reason it would generally be regarded as a form of boardgame or wargame rather than an RPG.This does not cover the bulk of a referees job even in an austere game of D&D. The referee has to decide which PC a monster attacks. There are no rules for that. Even if the GM has written down that "Lareth the Beautiful hates good clerics, and will always attack them first", it is open to the GM to have Lareth change targets if, after attacking the cleric, he finds himself in danger of dying from the assault by the fighter.And if a player decides to drown the giant scorpions in the White Plume Mountain ziggurat room, there is no predetermined code for that.I think these sentences are pretty consistent with what I'm saying. The board is "imaginary" ie a fiction, a posit, a stipulation. And the board is not finite, and hence not limited.</blockquote>

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