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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9025945" data-attributes="member: 42582">I read a lot of social science. I've been a practicising academic for decades, working across two disciplines (philosophy and law), both of which are social science-adjacent and one of which is characterised by many as a social science (law). I have supervised PhD students doing social science in the strict sense.Social science does not get its utility primarily from being predictive. It gets its utility primarily from being explanatory - that is to say, it yields an appreciation of causal relationships and social processes.The idea that fictions like The World of Greyhawk, The Forgotten Realms, the Lord of the Rings, etc, in any way express social scientific reasoning at all (let alone predictive reasoning), as opposed to authorial inclinations, is impossible for me to take seriously. GH and FR are obviously based on the model of REH's Hyborian Age. LotR has slightly different literary antecedents, but the creative process - while more sophisticated - is at its core comparable.I mean, just to pick on some of the big ones: the Russian Revolution, the collapse of the Soviet empire in Central and Eastern Europe and then of the Soviet Union itself, the duration of the current war in Ukraine, the outbreak and duration of the First World War, etc.In my RPG scenario, when my Lenin-doppelganger returns to my oppressive traditionalist kingdom, and joining with his cabal of friends assassinates key ruling figures and asserts control of the government, what happens? Is it like The Hour of the Dragon or The Scarlet Citadel - REH's stories in which key figures rally around the deposed King Conan and help him restore his rule? Do the liberated people embrace their liberators? If they do, does this revolutionary zeal survive a crisis of administration caused by the loss of legitimacy the traditionalist regime provided? Etc, etc, etc.No GM can claim to be working out this sort of stuff in virtue of expertise. They are making authorship decisions, within some bounds of "plausibility" established by their knowledge and imagination.</blockquote>

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