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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8239505" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'll bypass Manbearcat's humour, because that's the sort of person I am, and cut to the issue of adjudication.I'm sure the GM who made the call about duration of oxygen supply in my sci-fi convention game hadn't set out to make the game feel less real. When I had unrealistically slow planes on Byron, that wasn't deliberate either. I just didn't know much about the speed of military prop planes! (Or even civilian ones - I've just Googled and learned that a Focker Friendship goes faster than what I called in our game.) Surprisingly, but also helpfully insofar as it avoided any issues, apparently none of my players did either, not even the military history guy.This drives home my point that we're not talking about &quot;thought experiments&quot; here. We're talking about the GM making stuff up, by reference to his/her conception of the thing which may include some stuff that's written down (ie notes). It's needless obscurantism to overlay this with metaphor such as &quot;exploring a world&quot; or &quot;really existing in thought&quot;. It's stuff that someone is authoring based on whatever considerations inform those authorship decisions.EDIT: An author extrapolating from his/her description of something to something else &quot;that feels right&quot; isn't a thought experiment. It's just more writing. It's not constrained by &quot;reality&quot; in any way beyond being constrained by the other ideas and beliefs and expectations and aspirations of the author.There's no need to complicate this, or use metaphor. It is what it is. Gygax is upfront about that. So is Moldvay. It's an approach that obviously&nbsp; puts the GM's conception of what is happening in the fiction in the forefront of framing and adjudication.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 8239505, member: 42582"] I'll bypass Manbearcat's humour, because that's the sort of person I am, and cut to the issue of adjudication. I'm sure the GM who made the call about duration of oxygen supply in my sci-fi convention game hadn't set out to make the game feel less real. When I had unrealistically slow planes on Byron, that wasn't deliberate either. I just didn't know much about the speed of military prop planes! (Or even civilian ones - I've just Googled and learned that a Focker Friendship goes faster than what I called in our game.) Surprisingly, but also helpfully insofar as it avoided any issues, apparently none of my players did either, not even the military history guy. This drives home my point that we're not talking about "thought experiments" here. We're talking about the GM making stuff up, by reference to his/her conception of the thing which may include some stuff that's written down (ie notes). It's needless obscurantism to overlay this with metaphor such as "exploring a world" or "really existing in thought". It's stuff that someone is authoring based on whatever considerations inform those authorship decisions. EDIT: An author extrapolating from his/her description of something to something else "that feels right" isn't a thought experiment. It's just more writing. It's not constrained by "reality" in any way beyond being constrained by the other ideas and beliefs and expectations and aspirations of the author. There's no need to complicate this, or use metaphor. It is what it is. Gygax is upfront about that. So is Moldvay. It's an approach that obviously puts the GM's conception of what is happening in the fiction in the forefront of framing and adjudication. [/QUOTE]

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