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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bedrockgames" data-source="post: 8254471" data-attributes="member: 85555">Aldarc. The issue with Fiction and the term story, is both of them are particularly problematic when it comes to RPG discussions. And this is going to be doubly the case when many of the posters invoking The Fiction as their preferred term, both come from a GNS background and have a preference for story now approaches. n terms of ambiguity, if a term has two or potential meanings, then its ambiguous. Fiction even in its first definition includes both the idea of imagined stuff and a story. That it is used pretty interchangeably in regular speech to mean novel, I think also demonstrates the issue here. And then I would add the fact that it tends to get used in a way in this discussion where the fiction applies not just to what happens, but to the setting the stuff is happening in (which I would say is very much a literary mindset, and bringing in some of that literary meaning, even if it isn't proper equivocation) Look, you can mention your background. I am not as educated as you clearly. But I know what equivocation is. And unless you are arguing seriously that Fiction is not an equivocal terms in the way described (that one can shift from meaning 'imaginary stuff' to 'a story' or even 'a novel' quite smoothly and easily, then I think you are just drawing on advanced knowledge in a field to dismiss what is pretty hard to deny: fiction is highly equivocal; in RPGs especially this is going to be the case (it is a short leap from fiction to story). It isn't bullying. But I know enough about logic and equivocation to know your argument is a bit specious. Probably not enough to defend my position against someone with that advanced level of understanding (but enough to know and understand the dynamic going on here: because it is something I can do, if I choose to, with History, which i don't). Now none of this is a problem if you aren't equivocating. But there have been plenty of instances of the fiction in other threads where this happens; and the term story has a long, long history of being equivocated upon in this manner all the time (I think you would have to be very disingenuous not to see that: both in terms of equivocation to argue for railroads, but also in terms of the story game versus trad debates-----in the same way that people use specious arguments about the term RPG to argue that story driven RPGs are not real RPGs). Again, if we are talking casual use, its totally fine. But you guys are claiming to have precise and meaningful jargon here to describe stuff, and you opted for a term like "the fiction" in vacuum, now that it is coming into contact with other types of gamers, there is push back against it. I believe you haven't encountered the problems i am trying to bring to your attention, but believe me when I tell you this is going to be a line that gets equivocated on and it is going to be a problem for people coming from styles like sandbox (when they see a term like that, it is both going to raise suspicions and it is going to strike them as highly inaccurate).</blockquote>

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