As for me, I tend to think that philosophers should worry less about playing with definitions and more about interpreting the concepts that actually shape our experience. I e, given that we actually experience something that we tend to call “existence”, what is this something, and what does it mean to us?

Damn. The entire discussion about existence, as practiced in the field of philosophy, is utterly confused mess of terminological muddles. That we can, for example, discuss and think about Tolkien’s Middle-earth implies that it exists on some level, in some way, for any (IMO) meaningful definition of existence.

Which, now that I read it, is close to the thing you stated, but in different words.

Whether there exists some metaphysical criterion of things really existing is a matter of definitions. I did not define much anything when writing the post. (Neither did the lecturer whose work inspired this post, so I have an excuse of naively thinking there were implied definitions there.)

In order to believe, for instance, that the world might not exist, one would need to believe that there is some ultimate metaphysical authority that determined whether things existed or not, forever outside the reach of human knowledge. But the concept of “existence” is a human concept, and there is no reason to assume that when we predicate “existence” on things we tacitly assume the existence of such a metaphysical authority that nods its head in approval. We are forever caught inside the world of our experience, and it is only within this world that the predicate “existence” is employed. So if you claim that the world might not exist, then I claim, on the contrary, the world exists BY DEFINITION.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty puts this nicely in the introduction to “The Phenomenology of Perception”: “we must not [...] wonder whether we really perceive a world, we must instead say: the world is what we perceive”.

I eyed two things you have up there: one that can be potentially really cool and one that is (from what I’ve read so far). The first is the NPC essentials … I’ve been thinking about getting this book for a long time, and have not done so just because I haven’t been buying stuff at all until recently. It comes with very good reviews and seems to have very good advice. From what I’ve read, it’s not d20 dependent and is packed full with content.

The second is the Mythic gamemaster emulator. I recently purchased the Mythic bundle which contains, the core book and Variations. Now, the mythic GM emulator is about 50 pages long, and is about $6,50 … the whole book is now $8 something and is 150 pages. ALSO from what I’ve read so far you probably should go with the whole book even if you just want the GM emulator (I think they left out a few things that can be useful, although I’m just drawing that conclusion from the number of pages). The book presents interesting concepts (I’m sure as hell going to use the system in the next game I run) and is modular enough that you can take what you want and leave the rest aside.

Hope that helps a bit.

The author,
opusinsania

Gadamer, Hans-Georg: Truth and Method. Sheed & Ward ltd., Lontoo 1985.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg: Truth and Method. Continuum, Lontoo 2004.

I’ll contact the author, he can probably be more helpful.

This is a nice rule! I really wanna get Lady Victoria (the lady from my first session if I remember correctly) “tied”, not necessarily in bondage way (curse my dirty mind) … But yeah, an interesting gameplay consept nonetheless.