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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8234902" data-attributes="member: 42582">When I say "literal" I mean that word in its literal meaning ie contrasted with figurative or metaphoric. It may be true or false - [USER=16814]@Ovinomancer[/USER] and [USER=5142]@Aldarc[/USER] both appear to accept it as a description of RPGing they've done, and I know it's true of plenty of RPGing that I've done - but that has no bearing on the fact that it is literal.As to why the distinction between literal accounts and metaphor matter: because in any field of analysis or criticism, metaphor can tend to obscure. If someone says "I play to explore the GM's world" what are they actually doing at the table? They're not literally exploring a world. The participants are saying things to one another, which is talking about various imaginary things. How do they decide what to say? How does what one person says affect what another person says? What is the actual process of play at that table?I don't think that is the big debate. Which RPGs feature (2) as you describe it? OGL Conan is one. MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic has hints of it. It's not found in Prince Valiant unless an optional rule is used. It's not found in Apocalypse World or Dungeon World unless a small number of the very many player-side moves are chosen.But consider the following in your post: the world operates independently of the characters; the events plotted out for the future are able to be impacted by the PCs; the PCs are constrained by the world's reality. None of this is literal, because there are no actual causal processes at work that flow from the imagined world to the participants in the game. The world doesn't literally "operate" or "constrain" the outcomes of players' action declarations for their PCs - someone makes decisions about these things. The players action declarations don't literally impact the unfolding of events in the fiction - someone rewrites that fiction having regard to what has happened at the table.Surely it is possible to describe these things without using metaphor, by talking about who makes what decisions. And as part of that, it should be possible to talk about the role that the GM's notes play.EDIT: I'm catching up on 8 pages of this thread. I see that [USER=6785785]@hawkeyefan[/USER] has also given a good answer along somewhat similar lines to the above. Which is not to say that hawkeyefan is beholden to everything I say! But on this particular point we seem to agree.</blockquote>

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