clearstream
(He, Him)
Stepping away from our delve into philosophical backwaters, say the to-be-imagined fact must chime for all at table with some supposed constraint? I think that question contains two halves, which can be thought about separately or may be connected - group validation, and some sort of envelope within which the new fact must fall.In the context of playing a RPG, how do I learn about the fiction? On one very common approach, by being told by either (i) the author, or (ii) a mediator between me as player and the author. Namely, in both case (i) and case (ii), by having the GM tell me. That's it. There is nothing independent of the telling of the story to be "discovered" or "explored". No matter how skilled the GM, or how immersive the fiction they create, there is no independence of the "gameworld" from what they are narrating.
I've observed folk according such "justified" imagined facts a sense of greater legitimacy than those proposed heedless of validation or constraints. A common constraint is simply following from what has been said up to now. One method of validation is to adopt a normative principle that rejects "reaching". Another is of course to accord with familiar norms except where the game text has designed exceptions.
I then observe folk going on to feel that the resultant world is more "realistic", plausible, consistent, or credible - less suspension of disbelief taxing - than a comparable one in which the facts were determined randomly or heedlessly.
Perhaps we see ways to form imagined-facts that come closer to how we accept facts about real people, places and things that we have no direct or detailed knowledge of. Matamata New Zealand, say, if one has never been there. Or even our interlocutors here, some of whom could conceivably be AIs, or not who we think we know them to be... and whose sorts of underwear we cannot be sure of.
I'm picturing that TTRPG might lean on a human habit of accepting let's call it incompletely-justified facts, helping us to accept imagined-facts - so long as they are justified in workable ways - as referring to "real" (fictional) places. An important point being that we're somehow able to judge some proposed imagined-facts as wrong or jarring, and reject them. That dichotomy may separate a "realistic" imagined world from one folk'd call "unrealistic" in a way that is meaningful... that can't be dismissed as all being equally unreal.
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