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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9320156" data-attributes="member: 42582">[USER=7025508]@Crimson Longinus[/USER], I already posed that the play of RPGs involves pretending - though I note that [USER=59]@Old Fezziwig[/USER] says that it needn't be about pretending certain things are real, and that's an interesting claim.My point is that pretending things and imagining things doesn't make them real. That's it.I'm not disputing that certain sentences may entail or suggest certain other sentences - eg if there are two Orcs, and two Orcs join them, then there are now four Orcs; if I'm thinking of a beach then that means there's sea nearby - but of course part of the magic of pretending is that we can pretend that certain entailment rules don't hold. For instance, we can pretend we are in a dreamworld where basic facts about physical endurance of Orcs over time don't obtain; and so maybe when the second two Orcs join the first two Orcs, now that means that I'm in a forest looking down on the domain of some Ogres.But these "associations of ideas" don't mean that the things we're imagining exist. There are no Orcs; no wharves of Hardby; no lands with floating mountains; etc. We don't perceive them; we don't move through them in our bodies; we don't learn about them by way of inquiry.And all this is fundamental to RPG play. You and [USER=7044566]@thefutilist[/USER] discusses a scene involving a PC on a motorbike, who sees a bus with people and loot on board. In the fiction, the PC hears the bus; sees the people, faces against the glass; smells the fumes; feels her heart beat speed up as she aims her weapon (or not - maybe she's so hardened that no emotion grips her - that might be an interesting detail). At the table, though, we have two people talking to one another. They see one another, and some bits of paper, and some dice. They hear words being spoken. Maybe the smell the potato gems that someone heated up for snacks.In the fiction, the bike is travelling smoothly, or the road is bumpy, or there is no road - just a gravel flat that the PC is travelling across. At the table, no one knows because no one has thought about it or said anything about it. Maybe the GM introduces that into the fiction as a consequence - something goes wrong with the player's plan, the GM narrates them coming off their bike, the Harm move is rolled, it indicates extra harm, and the GM narrates the extra harm as resulting from the PC sliding at speed across the gravel of the flat.We can't make any progress on talking about how this stuff is done by using the language of "discovery of an objective fact". It's not an objective fact if the GM made it up just now - whether "it" is the gravel, or the bus, or the fumes, or the faces against the glass, or whatever other bit of the fiction "it" is.</blockquote>

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