Changing the "Caster beats Mundane" paradigm

[GreatWyrmGold]

Which is perfectly fine if most people don't care about having it. "Having it" could apply to internally-consistent worldbuilding or keeping mundanes at guy-at-the-gym levels, but there are few people who care about both.

[Max_Killjoy]

Which is perfectly fine if most people don't care about having it. "Having it" could apply to internally-consistent worldbuilding or keeping mundanes at guy-at-the-gym levels, but there are few people who care about both.

They can have "keeping the mundanes at guy-at-the-gym levels" and "internally consistent worldbuilding" together -- that just means they have to give up one of the following: spellcasting demigod PCs or intercharacter balance (or playability of both spellcasters and "mundanes" together as PCs in the same campaign).

[Cosi]

"Nature powers" isn't very much of a "kind of power." It's super-duper vague. Anything can be fluffed as a nature power, or a demon power, or... If your only limitation is that you can convince the DM that it fits your broad theme, then it's not much of a limitation and might as well not exist. Choosing a theme should both open doors and close doors. Opportunity costs and trade-offs make for better games.

I still don't believe aesthetic/thematic limits are important, from a power perspective.

Actually, it's not. It's about ways to make sure that everyone in the game is at the same power level.

Which, given that everyone is not already on the same power level, requires changing the power levels of one or more things, which requires choosing a power level.

I'm looking for a reason why your character can only exist with that particular set of powers, if the concept for his powers is just "nature powers and demon powers". I never argued with the existence of those two powersets or their inclusion together, only why that needed to be the set of powers you mentioned and why the sheer power was so danged important to you that it was all you mentioned in your summary.

Because progress is important. And for that progress to be meaningful, it has to expand your character to new vistas of power and action.

So, wait. You think it's absolutely critical to the story of Iron Man that he was, specifically, locked in a cave, told to make weapons, and broke out with a suit of power armor strong enough to deflect bullets? Is this true, or am I reading something wrong?

I think that is an Iron Man story. If the character you are presenting as Iron Man is incapable of solving the problems various other Iron Men have solved, he is not Iron Man. No, that story isn't the make-or-break point, but the principal is important.

Anyways, the problem isn't that martial characters can't do everything that the casters can; it's that the casters can do more stuff than the martials, and do it better. Martial characters will never be able to single-handedly raze a kingdom, nor defeat any but the smallest or stupidest of armies, and they certainly can't defeat the greatest servants of the gods (let alone the gods themselves), no matter what you assert. If they could do those things, tiers wouldn't exist. (Probably.)

You are conflating how the game is balanced now with how it needs to be balanced.

Incursions (if it's the one I think you're talking about) isn't just a story about a few people going around destroying worlds. It's a story about a catastrophe which threatens everyone, where all parties involved fight and destroy each other in order to try and keep their own group alive a little longer. Aside from the "cleaning up our jumbled multiverse" angle, the same story could have been told on a smaller scale. Off the top of my head: An apocalyptic titan has come, and it will destroy anywhere that doesn't make enough blood sacrifices to it, so different nations start raiding each other. Or a kingdom starts to freeze, so people start killing their neighbors and burning their houses.
Chronicles of Amber isn't just about world-hopping, though if it was a few seconds' thought would reveal that the same could be accomplished by travelling to different places within one world/galaxy/unusually large city/whatever. But beyond that, it's a story about a man with amnesia discovering his past and claiming the power he feels should be his, then defending his realm from outside threats. Yes, this involves going from world to world to get things he needs or to deal with threats, but it shouldn't be hard to see that the actual location of these things is hardly essential to the plot. It would be much the same if Avalon and the Courts of Chaos and Earth and whatnot were replaced by different islands around the continent of Amber, or if they were different planets in a space opera, or even if they were different cities scattered across a harsh wilderness.
If the Dominions you're talking about is the one I found when Googling "dominions kill gods," well...its story is basically equivalent to Civilization or Age of Empires, crossed with a divine succession crisis. You could make a 4X game loosely based on the Westeros plot of A Song of Ice and Fire and have it work much the same, narratively and mechanically. Focusing on narrative, most of these works could fit the bill.

For time reasons, I'm going to ignore the fact that you are wrong about some of these (for example, Amber explicitly has questions about what the world walking powers mean as part of what the characters care about), and point out that you've basically missed the entire point. Yes, at a high enough level of abstraction, stories are similar to other stories. But that doesn't mean those stories are the same. Superman and Captain America can both be reduced to "symbol of an idealized form of America". That doesn't make them the same character, because the specific abilities they have, the specific powers they have, and the specific stories they engage in change how that theme is interpreted.

You seem to have a bad habit of latching onto some cool, surface-level element that you like and assuming that it's a core part of the narrative. But it's not, any more than skin color is a core part of skeletal structure. Sure, skin color has some indirect impact on the skeleton--they're part of a complicated interconnected system--but you can have essentially the same skeleton under any color of skin.

Insofar as this is true, it is essentially a demand to enforce your aesthetic preferences over all other aesthetic preferences, which is stupid.

[Frozen_Feet]

This actually false. Just in discussions like this thread, examples abound: "Why it important your Fighter not use magic?" "Why is it important your Wizard not use a crossbow?" "Why is it important your telekineticist not be able to change shape?" "Why is it important for your Wizard to not be able to use healing magic?"

Those are class distinctions. No one is asking people to justify why the game should support "badass mundane". That archetype is being taken as a given. So why do you need to justify the other end?

Oh hey, missed this earlier.

Anyways. My reply to your "no-one ever asks you to justify why your concept should not use polymorph" was that it's trivially false. I do not understand why you think placing emphasis on class makes any sort of difference, as each class is also a (set of) character concept(s). For example, any argument for the Wizard class to not be able to wear heavy armor is automatically an argument for each individual Wizard to be conceptualized as not wearing heavy armor in that system.

Second, for "No one is asking people to justify why the game should support "badass mundane".... don't be ridiculous. You know that's trivially false, people have been doing that in threads like these for ages, YOU'VE BEEN THERE, participating. People, in this thread, have argued that the concept of "mundane badass" has no place in a fantasy games. I've argued, essentially, that the word "mundane" does not go together with any sort of badass.

Yet, you keep asking, why do you need to justify the other end? Well gee, maybe I & others wouldn't feel a need to ask you to do that if the hobby wasn't full of people who cannot grok the genres of magical realism, realism and horror (to give few examples), claiming with straight face that if one thing is unrealistic, everything must be.

I will gladly stop complaining about people who want high magic, high fantasy, high power games, once "realism" is no longer a curse word.

[GreatWyrmGold]

They can have "keeping the mundanes at guy-at-the-gym levels" and "internally consistent worldbuilding" together -- that just means they have to give up one of the following: spellcasting demigod PCs or intercharacter balance (or playability of both spellcasters and "mundanes" together as PCs in the same campaign).

You misunderstand. I'm not saying people can't have both, I'm saying they usually don't care about either. So...basically the opposite of that.

Yet, you keep asking, why do you need to justify the other end? Well gee, maybe I & others wouldn't feel a need to ask you to do that if the hobby wasn't full of people who cannot grok the genres of magical realism, realism and horror (to give few examples), claiming with straight face that if one thing is unrealistic, everything must be.

I feel your pain. It's all the worse when 99% of everything actually is realistic without anyone thinking about it (which it usually is). When the laws of biology, chemistry, and physics end up with a world that mostly looks like ours, just with wizards and dragons pasted on top, fiddling with those scientific laws should have some kind of consequences that bubble up into the visible world.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I feel your pain. It's all the worse when 99% of everything actually is realistic without anyone thinking about it (which it usually is). When the laws of biology, chemistry, and physics end up with a world that mostly looks like ours, just with wizards and dragons pasted on top, fiddling with those scientific laws should have some kind of consequences that bubble up into the visible world.

As a biologist, you should be familiar with convergent evolution. That is, on the surface things are realistic (same macro-state, to borrow a statistical mechanics term). The reasons that underpin that "realism" are completely different, however. You can't use real-world physical reasoning to construct (for example) gunpowder--while it may be true that mixing bat guano, burned wood, and brimstone in the right proportions makes a powder that burns furiously, it's not because there's a reaction between the potassium, carbon, and sulfur in the ingredients and the oxygen in the air. It's because (to make something up) the decay elementals in the guano and the burned wood, plus the crystallized evil of brimstone react with the ambient mana field when exposed to fire elementals. Even if the planet goes in an oval orbit around a central star (which is by no means assured), it could be that there are legions of invisible angels dedicated to pushing it along a fixed track.

None of these necessarily impact play directly, so they're ignored. Very few setting materials go into enough detail to say why things work, only what things work.

Spoiler: My setting

Show

One thing I've tried to do is figure out why my setting is a kitchen sink (mostly). My goal is to figure out a reasonable place for all the races and classes in the official 5e D&D published materials. The setting itself is composed of the dream of a being who has become the "glue" that holds the setting together in the form of a great pseudo-mechanical interplanar construct. There are no atoms, no molecules. No evolution, no plate tectonics. What there are are sparks (intelligences, fragments of the Dreamer) and the anima (spirit energy) that they produce. Everything is built out of these building blocks. It results in a sorta-pantheistic/animistic environment, where there really are spirits in everything. Spells are resonances in this magic. The races have descended (through conscious modification by other races) from primordial races created by the Dreamer itself. Most of the weird ones (dragonborn, gnomes, halflings, beast-folk like lizardmen and tabaxi, etc) are descended from humans by direct "genetic" manipulation--blending the essences of animals or spirits directly with humans or goblins (who are human-kind's ancestors). Humans themselves were created, along with orcs, from hobgoblins by elves, who are themselves descended from the same root as modern angels (and devils, for that matter).

[Frozen_Feet]

As a biologist, you should be familiar with convergent evolution. That is, on the surface things are realistic (same macro-state, to borrow a statistical mechanics term). The reasons that underpin that "realism" are completely different, however. You can't use real-world physical reasoning to construct (for example) gunpowder--while it may be true that mixing bat guano, burned wood, and brimstone in the right proportions makes a powder that burns furiously, it's not because there's a reaction between the potassium, carbon, and sulfur in the ingredients and the oxygen in the air. It's because (to make something up) the decay elementals in the guano and the burned wood, plus the crystallized evil of brimstone react with the ambient mana field when exposed to fire elementals. Even if the planet goes in an oval orbit around a central star (which is by no means assured), it could be that there are legions of invisible angels dedicated to pushing it along a fixed track.

None of these necessarily impact play directly, so they're ignored. Very few setting materials go into enough detail to say why things work, only what things work.

Spoiler: My setting

Show

One thing I've tried to do is figure out why my setting is a kitchen sink (mostly). My goal is to figure out a reasonable place for all the races and classes in the official 5e D&D published materials. The setting itself is composed of the dream of a being who has become the "glue" that holds the setting together in the form of a great pseudo-mechanical interplanar construct. There are no atoms, no molecules. No evolution, no plate tectonics. What there are are sparks (intelligences, fragments of the Dreamer) and the anima (spirit energy) that they produce. Everything is built out of these building blocks. It results in a sorta-pantheistic/animistic environment, where there really are spirits in everything. Spells are resonances in this magic. The races have descended (through conscious modification by other races) from primordial races created by the Dreamer itself. Most of the weird ones (dragonborn, gnomes, halflings, beast-folk like lizardmen and tabaxi, etc) are descended from humans by direct "genetic" manipulation--blending the essences of animals or spirits directly with humans or goblins (who are human-kind's ancestors). Humans themselves were created, along with orcs, from hobgoblins by elves, who are themselves descended from the same root as modern angels (and devils, for that matter).

See, I can totally grok that. I could totally play or hold a game in a setting like that.

But just as well I know that no setting has to be like that, fantastic or not. A game can be literally set on Earth with the sole exception of one man having the powers of a Superman, and he's not a player character.

And there are games in that space too that I want to play and hold.

[PhoenixPhyre]

See, I can totally grok that. I could totally play or hold a game in a setting like that.

But just as well I know that no setting has to be like that, fantastic or not. A game can be literally set on Earth with the sole exception of one man having the powers of a Superman, and he's not a player character.

And there are games in that space too that I want to play and hold.

As long as you're willing to give up "realism" (scare quotes intended), that's fine.

But I'm one to prioritize verisimilitude over fun. I'm not particularly bugged by setting dissonance unless it affects gameplay. I'm good at rationalising things :)

[Frozen_Feet]

Realism in my post and "realism" in yours aren't really the same concept, so I feel we're talking past each other.

[GreatWyrmGold]

As a biologist, you should be familiar with convergent evolution.

I'ma stop you right there.
Convergent evolution isn't a thing where similar creatures in different circumstances evolve similarly, it's a thing where different creatures in similar circumstances evolve similarly. Moreover, like evolution in general, it relies on there being some notion of fitness by which creatures are measured.
Using convergent evolution as a metaphor to explain why different worlds look similar fails on two accounts. One, any changes anywhere near big enough to handwave some element of magic would cause serious enough divergences that near-perfect convergence would be implausible. Second, there can be no selective force on entire worlds. (Well, there theoretically can, but it requires worlds to breed and for some to die and it's hard to work that into worldbuilding without the multiverse ending up as a major focus.)
Let's take your example.

[W]hile it may be true that mixing bat guano, burned wood, and brimstone in the right proportions makes a powder that burns furiously, it's not because there's a reaction between the potassium, carbon, and sulfur in the ingredients and the oxygen in the air. It's because (to make something up) the decay elementals in the guano and the burned wood, plus the crystallized evil of brimstone react with the ambient mana field when exposed to fire elementals.

This is pretty much the worst possible example you could have picked, but it's great for illustrating my point. Combustion of anything, whether it's a carefully-crafted artificial powder or a pile of wood, is a form of redox (reduction/oxidation) reaction. There is a reason that scientists have a name for that kind of reaction--it comes up frequently in chemistry, especially biochemistry. In fact, the process your body uses to turn sugar into energy is essentially the same as the process used to burn sugar, just with a bunch of extra bits thrown in to extract energy more efficiently and safely (and slowly). If you remove redox reactions, you need a new set of explanations for every redox reaction in nature, which in turn requires new explanations for how energy is stored and why we need food and so on, and the problems all pile up. All because you don't like chemistry.

None of these necessarily impact play directly, so they're ignored. Very few setting materials go into enough detail to say why things work, only what things work.

My thoughts exactly. But isn't it much simpler to say that things burn for the same reasons they do IRL than to wave your hands and create whole new physics? Isn't it simpler to just add new laws on top, such as some sort of extra source of energy that can be tapped somehow?

As long as you're willing to give up "realism" (scare quotes intended), that's fine.

Please define what "realism" means in this context. Neither your distaste for it nor the scare quotes make sense to me, so there's likely some miscommunication somewhere.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I'ma stop you right there.
Convergent evolution isn't a thing where similar creatures in different circumstances evolve similarly, it's a thing where different creatures in similar circumstances evolve similarly. Moreover, like evolution in general, it relies on there being some notion of fitness by which creatures are measured.
Using convergent evolution as a metaphor to explain why different worlds look similar fails on two accounts. One, any changes anywhere near big enough to handwave some element of magic would cause serious enough divergences that near-perfect convergence would be implausible. Second, there can be no selective force on entire worlds. (Well, there theoretically can, but it requires worlds to breed and for some to die and it's hard to work that into worldbuilding without the multiverse ending up as a major focus.)
Let's take your example.

Analogies are analogous, not identical. All I meant was that things can look the same, but have very different characteristics "under the hood," so to speak.

This is pretty much the worst possible example you could have picked, but it's great for illustrating my point. Combustion of anything, whether it's a carefully-crafted artificial powder or a pile of wood, is a form of redox (reduction/oxidation) reaction. There is a reason that scientists have a name for that kind of reaction--it comes up frequently in chemistry, especially biochemistry. In fact, the process your body uses to turn sugar into energy is essentially the same as the process used to burn sugar, just with a bunch of extra bits thrown in to extract energy more efficiently and safely (and slowly). If you remove redox reactions, you need a new set of explanations for every redox reaction in nature, which in turn requires new explanations for how energy is stored and why we need food and so on, and the problems all pile up. All because you don't like chemistry.

My thoughts exactly. But isn't it much simpler to say that things burn for the same reasons they do IRL than to wave your hands and create whole new physics? Isn't it simpler to just add new laws on top, such as some sort of extra source of energy that can be tapped somehow?

Here's a big problem. I'm a physicist. There's exactly 1 known set of physical laws that produces anything like life. And that's ours. As soon as you say "oh, there's magic", you've thrown that out the window. Magic (anything not possible in real life) is definitionally incompatible with our real life physical laws. Your choices are:

1. Use the real world as a setting, with no magic whatsoever. Some do this, but :shrug: If I wanted to play in real life, I'd go outside. I'd rather not though--the sunlight, it burns me. And I'm allergic to all those green things.
2. Enable magic and come up with new explanations for everything, because the old ones don't work anymore.
3. Enable magic and paper over the cracks, relying on a suspension of disbelief and the lack of knowledge of most users.

There is no option 4. You can't say that things burn for the same reasons and throw away conservation of energy and mass and momentum (all essential to enabling dragons, for example). The laws of nature are self-consistent, complete, and minimal--you can change the parameters (changing any of which usually results in no matter, let alone life), but you can't alter the basic laws themselves without creating paradoxes. As a result, adding new laws isn't a possibility. You have to rewrite everything from scratch if you care about logical consistency.

Note: this also goes for science fiction (except for the really hard stuff). A setting where FTL travel is reasonably easy (as in, doesn't require super-giant-masses worth of energy) will, if you care about such things, be completely unlike real life. Most likely, it's one where carbon-based life as we know it can't exist. Causality is a mean mistress.

Most (all, in fact) settings that are actually playable take options 1 or 3. Creating a self-consistent set of laws for reality and tuning them to produce real-looking results is hard (as in, we can't do it for our reality with thousands of man-years of the best minds). The only difference is what the user is willing to overlook in the name of fun. None of the options are objectively better, only better for one purpose or another.

Please define what "realism" means in this context. Neither your distaste for it nor the scare quotes make sense to me, so there's likely some miscommunication somewhere.

"Realism" is the vain attempt to lock everything in a game setting into a fully-understood, logically-consistent framework. In my opinion this a waste of time. It's a waste of potential--the desire for the fantastic, to experience things that can't happen in reality, is a prime reason I play. It's impossible, since no setting builder (or even company of such) has the required expertise to even scratch the surface of what would have to be done. There will always be loopholes, places where there isn't a ready explanation. And that's ok. Heck--real life has those all the time. One-in-a-million coincidences that are not explainable, at least by mortals. The biggest poison to a game setting or system isn't logical inconsistency (there are systems built around illogic) but boringness. And not being able to include things just because they're fun is, to me, boring in the extreme.

Don't get me wrong. I don't do inconsistency on purpose, but I do consistency in a game setting as a retroactive explanation. I know where I need to get, what results I need and then come up with an explanation that fits. I know when I have the "right" explanation because it answers many further questions and enables fun, fantastic things to happen.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Analogies are analogous, not identical. All I meant was that things can look the same, but have very different characteristics "under the hood," so to speak.

Continuing to use the analogy: Convergent evolution works because there are similar forces working on (say) fish and dolphins. Both live in the ocean, both eat smaller marine animals, both have to deal with water pressure and (some) gravity, both are organic organisms, etc.
The idea of convergently-evolving universes requires that there be some underlying forces which direct universes to be the same. And, as I alluded to, that involves opening up a can of 4-dimensional eldritch worms.

Here's a big problem. I'm a physicist. There's exactly 1 known set of physical laws that produces anything like life. And that's ours. As soon as you say "oh, there's magic", you've thrown that out the window. Magic (anything not possible in real life) is definitionally incompatible with our real life physical laws.

1. Use the real world as a setting, with no magic whatsoever. Some do this, but :shrug: If I wanted to play in real life, I'd go outside. I'd rather not though--the sunlight, it burns me. And I'm allergic to all those green things.
2. Enable magic and come up with new explanations for everything, because the old ones don't work anymore.
3. Enable magic and paper over the cracks, relying on a suspension of disbelief and the lack of knowledge of most users.

There is no option 4. You can't say that things burn for the same reasons and throw away conservation of energy and mass and momentum (all essential to enabling dragons, for example).

Why would you need to throw away any of those? I see no reason why (as alluded to elsewhere) there couldn't be some source of energy external to what we consider "the universe," which some creatures can tap to (say) levitate or generate fire. Depending on how it's external, that might not require violating the laws of physics as we know them, but even if it does it only opens a small can of worms compared to rewriting everything.
(P.S. Why do dragons violate conservation of mass or momentum? Energy, I can see depending on the inherent assumptions, but the others confuse me.)

"Realism" is the vain attempt--

Automatic F. Define it without bias, so I can learn something other than the fact that you don't like realism. Because all I see there is a manifestation of your hatred towards certain implementations of so-called "realism," broadened to not only include similar implementations but the term itself.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Continuing to use the analogy: Convergent evolution works because there are similar forces working on (say) fish and dolphins. Both live in the ocean, both eat smaller marine animals, both have to deal with water pressure and (some) gravity, both are organic organisms, etc.
The idea of convergently-evolving universes requires that there be some underlying forces which direct universes to be the same. And, as I alluded to, that involves opening up a can of 4-dimensional eldritch worms.

When we're discussing fictional universes, there is an underlying meta-force. The writers. We want universes we can play in and understand, so we make them (at least on the surface) similar to what we do, sort-of, understand. Fictional universes that don't meet those criteria don't do well--they're too alien to set good stories in.

This illustrates a fundamental problem with the mindset I see here. Settings are just that--settings. They're not actual universes that have independent existences. They exist to be played in, to be a stage for the players to act on. Anything that detracts from this is a flaw--including, occasionally, too strong a need for consistency.

Why would you need to throw away any of those? I see no reason why (as alluded to elsewhere) there couldn't be some source of energy external to what we consider "the universe," which some creatures can tap to (say) levitate or generate fire. Depending on how it's external, that might not require violating the laws of physics as we know them, but even if it does it only opens a small can of worms compared to rewriting everything.
(P.S. Why do dragons violate conservation of mass or momentum? Energy, I can see depending on the inherent assumptions, but the others confuse me.)

Because, definitionally, there can't be anything outside the observable universe that can interact with the observable universe.

The laws of our present reality have certain properties--

1. They're self-consistent. Plugging in a result from one of them back into that law produces the same effect.
2. They're complete. All observations are based on these principles. This also implies isometry (same everywhere), isotropy (same in every direction), and isotemporal (unchanging in time) for reasons that are PhD level classes, with math to match. Been there, done that, passed those. Don't want to do it on a forum.
3. they are minimal. There are no redundant or extra laws.

Self-consistency means that you can't change things without bringing the whole tower down on you. Completeness/isotropy/isometry means there can't be anything outside the laws. No "well, it's different here." Minimalism means that there's no space to add more laws.

All together, there's good reason to believe that the set of laws we are living in is the only such set that can result in matter and life anything like we know it.

Breaking one of the fundamental conservation laws is not a small can of worms. It's the entire can of worms. Everything else, all other laws depend critically on those basic conservation laws. Any exceptions means we have to start over from scratch--the whole thing comes tumbling down on our heads.

And dragons break all the laws. Conservation of mass--as soon as you allow them to shapeshift, it's broken right there and then. And also--energy/mass conservation are actually the same law. There's no way to get enough energy from food to do even 10% of what they can do in fiction, let alone fly. Set aside that the square-cube law would make them paper-fragile or crushed under their own weight (or cooked from the inside out). Conservation of momentum--a beast that massive would crack it's own wings trying to fly, let alone do aerial acrobatics. You can get something that looks like dinosaurs, but not dragons. Or wizards. Or elves. Or...the list goes on. And certainly not all of those at once. Every change produces ripple effects that block out other possibilities. Paradox ensues.

This is what I meant--no one can do this right. You can't add laws and expect consistency. It all falls apart. Much better to accept the one-drop rule of magic--adding any magic means that everything has to be rewritten. Does it have to be rewritten now? Absolutely not. But none of what you knew is sacrosanct. It's all on unsteady ground as soon as you add in anything unreal. Better to accept that and suspend your disbelief. Judge a setting only on its own terms, based on what it claims to do. If it fails to meet its own claims, condemn it as a failure. If it doesn't claim to do anything you find useful, it can be set aside. But that doesn't make it bad. It doesn't make it useless, just not useful to you, for these purposes. If it doesn't claim to hew to reality, don't condemn it for failing to do what it never set out to do. That's judging a fish for being a poor climber, or a rake for being a poor hammer.

Automatic F. Define it without bias, so I can learn something other than the fact that you don't like realism. Because all I see there is a manifestation of your hatred towards certain implementations of so-called "realism," broadened to not only include similar implementations but the term itself.

Note--your tone is coming across as very supercilious and condescending. You're not a teacher, this is not a class. Don't grade me, bro (intentionally not blue text). There is no such thing as definitions without bias. I prefer to be open about my bias to hiding the bias.

That aside--I'm hostile to the idea that the objection "But in real life..." or "historically..." or any such thing holds any objective weight in TTRPGs, let alone should be the default or dominant criteria. Reality only holds if we're in reality or if we explicitly import it. But, in fantasy settings at least, we're not in reality. Things are different there by definition. Sure, we can add real-life science/history/etc back in, but it's an addon, not an intrinsic part of the foundation.

Settings should be designed as stages for characters to play on. As playgrounds for the mind. As places to have fun. Adding in real-world physics, chemistry, history, or any such thing can enhance that fun, if done right and with the right people. But they're flavorings, they're spices. They're optional considerations. Many fun stories have been told in cartoon settings, where physics and chemistry, etc are right out (except when adding it would be funny). Many fun stories have been told in settings that would crumble under any serious scrutiny. In those cases, adding in more consistency would have dulled the point, would have destroyed the spark that made them enjoyable by adding more words. I hate to see promising places for interesting "what if's" crushed under the weight of academic "but in reality..." complaints.

I guess what I'm trying (badly) to say is "why so serious?" Not all fiction should be "hard" fiction (in the sense of hard science fiction). In fact, when people try to hew too much to historical accuracy or "how things really work," they usually leave bigger holes than if they just glossed over things. I'm much more critical of works that claim to be accurate reflections of X than ones that are more light-hearted or more driven by other considerations. Character-centric fiction (which is what RPGs do best) often gets overwhelmed by trying to explain too much.

In my experience, the dominant majority of the time, the observed difference between my option 3 (papering over the cracks, backfilling where needed) and option 2 (rebuilding everything up from the ground up) is that option 3 leaves many more hooks for fun and has less of a chance of railroading, specifically because less is decided in advance. The extra consistency from option 2 goes unnoticed by anyone but the creator.

[Talakeal]

Talakeal on the other hand wants the game system to exclude anything that a mundane wouldn't be able to beat.

Not quite.

I am saying that printed D&D already doesn't include anything that a mundane character wouldn't be able to beat outside of people who abuse a handful of broken "I-win button" spells and that every other edition of D&D manages to allow both martial and magical characters to shine.

3.X nerfed the martials and has a few spells that are essentially win buttons.

Buff martials back to AD&D levels and they can handle any 3.X encounter that does not rely heavily on enemies abusing said win button spells.

If you also nerfed those win-button spells you now have an environment where any archetype can play the game and contribute without trivializing CR appropriate encounters.






AFAICT Cosi likes the 3.5 level of balance because he wants to play high powered characters who get to look down on all the muggles and don't have to worry about limitations.

I prefer an AD&D level of balance because it allows everyone to contribute while still being able to play the archetype they want to play.

[Frozen_Feet]

My thoughts exactly. But isn't it much simpler to say that things burn for the same reasons they do IRL than to wave your hands and create whole new physics? Isn't it simpler to just add new laws on top, such as some sort of extra source of energy that can be tapped somehow?

Depends. If the new rules (of "physics") are sufficiently simple, it may indeed be easier to use them than the old rules. Most RPG sets fit this criteria. A problem then arises that the new rules are not sufficiently complex to create all the situations and all the phenomena required for the game to be interesting, usefull and immersive. The handiest way to get around this is to have a real, human person capable of using real knowledge serving as an oracle for the game, overwriting the rules and filling in the missing phenomena and situations where the new, simpler rules are inefficient for creatig them.

You may have heard of such a person. They're usually called a "game master". There might even be a game you know of which includes one.

---

@PhoenixPhyre:

Why, exactly, do you think using "realism" for anal-retentive pursuit of logical consistency, instead of how the term is actually used in art?

[Satinavian]

And dragons break all the laws. Conservation of mass--as soon as you allow them to shapeshift, it's broken right there and then. And also--energy/mass conservation are actually the same law. There's no way to get enough energy from food to do even 10% of what they can do in fiction, let alone fly.

You could easily get around that by introducing new reservoirs/force fields that the dragon can access.
Which coincidently is how quite a few systems fluff magic. "Magic energy", "Magic fields" and stuff.

Also you only need conservation of energy if you want your physical laws to remain constant in time. But i would agree that it is usually worth keeping it. Well, except for settings full of time travel/timeless fey realms and similar stuff.

This is what I meant--no one can do this right. You can't add laws and expect consistency. It all falls apart. Much better to accept the one-drop rule of magic--adding any magic means that everything has to be rewritten.

That introducing magic somehow changes everything does not mean that it effects everything to some noticable degree It is completely viable to say "everything is as we know it until explicitely told otherwise".

In my experience, the dominant majority of the time, the observed difference between my option 3 (papering over the cracks, backfilling where needed) and option 2 (rebuilding everything up from the ground up) is that option 3 leaves many more hooks for fun and has less of a chance of railroading, specifically because less is decided in advance. The extra consistency from option 2 goes unnoticed by anyone but the creator.

That doesn't really match my experience. If the extra consistency is noted depends on if anyone is interested in those details. And railroading/no railroading has no correlation with how realistic the setting is whatsoever.

[Glorthindel]

What you CANNOT have is spellcasters on par with 3.5e casters, "not magical" fighters and rogues that aren't spellcasters but can still keep up with those spellcasters without any magic at all, no reflection of that in the worldbuilding, AND a setting that makes any damn sense at all.

Something has to be sacrificed.

See, this is where I disagree. The problem is we are wedding ourselves to some mechanics, and because of that we reach a situation where we reach a gulf in power we cant bridge.

When anyone who isn't a theorycrafter complains about balance between classes, what are they really complaining about? Damage. Every time. What is the single most popular Gish cantrip is 5th ed currently? Its either Booming Blade or Green Flame Blade. Why? It's certainly not because of the rider effects. It's the damage. They are a resource-free (unlike Fighter Maneuvers) means of getting extra damage on a melee attack, and for that reason every player who rolls up a melee class seriously considers whether to multiclass or take the Magic Initiate Feat in order to get it.

Nothing about worldbuilding mandates a longsword must always do D8 damage. So nothing would break if Fighters had an ability that increased the damage dice of weapons they weilded. A Fighter laying out 3 attacks, each with a higher crit change and doing multiple d10 damage with a single handed weapon (so he can still rock a shield, and not have to decide whether they need to run a Dex build in order to put out decent damage and have a high AC) suddenly doesn't look so weak compared to the Wizard. And no worldbuilding logic was hurt in the adjustment. I shook my head when I read the Battlemaster Maneuvers, because they were a perfect way to make Fighters awesome - but they couldn't resist limiting their use, and missing the mark (especially hilarious given that they chose to give Spellcasters spammable cantrips, but fighters got hit with the limited-use curse).

Its why I twitch when people start talking about what I class as manga-powers (leaping over buildings, causing walls to spring up by punching the ground), because this isn't what the fighter is, and what fighter players want the fighter to be. All it does is creates a different thing entirely. I firmly believe the solution with classes is niche-protection, not homogenisation - rather than giving Fighters utility abilities that make then wizards-by-another-name, give them things that strengthen their ability to get up in big creatures faces and lay out the pain. More damage dice, improved crit change, trips and knock back effects, and things like the 3.5 Cleave and Spring Attack Feats baked in. Now that is a bad ass Fighter. No Fighter player will be upset that a Wizard can throw fireballs and mow down the minion, if when the time comes to fight that Dragon, its the Fighter that gets to shine.

[Anymage]

You could easily get around that by introducing new reservoirs/force fields that the dragon can access.
Which coincidently is how quite a few systems fluff magic. "Magic energy", "Magic fields" and stuff.

Okay. Martials draw on chi to be able to perform anime-esque effects. Otherwise, please explain how huge swathes of the MM need to draw on this background magic in order to simply continue functioning (and in many cases, just to exist without collapsing under their own weight), while everybody else in the setting is limited to what earth physics and biology allow.

That doesn't really match my experience. If the extra consistency is noted depends on if anyone is interested in those details. And railroading/no railroading has no correlation with how realistic the setting is whatsoever.

Okay. Explain to me how elves can have human level metabolisms and similar biological rhythms on most levels, while having lifespans so much longer. Explain to me how dragon genes can interface with anything else to create viable part-dragon offspring, even when the dragon is shapechanged (and would presumably have the physiology - including the genes - of whatever they turned into).

And if we happened to be sitting around a table in real time instead of on an internet site where anybody could become an instant expert with fifteen minutes of google, I'd be asking you about the different kinds of rock, about the feed requirements for horses, or about how large a food base you need to support a certain number of apex predators. Requiring advanced knowledge of real-life scientific disciplines in order to be considered an acceptable DM is an even more ridiculous bar to set than expecting the DM to be able to perfectly account for the potential of every spell or ability ever published. I have enough work on my plate putting together an engaging story. Being allowed to default to action movie physics saves me a ton of hassle.

More damage dice, improved crit change, trips and knock back effects, and things like the 3.5 Cleave and Spring Attack Feats baked in. Now that is a bad ass Fighter. No Fighter player will be upset that a Wizard can throw fireballs and mow down the minion, if when the time comes to fight that Dragon, its the Fighter that gets to shine.

Absolute damage numbers mean little. 1 damage to a creature with 4 HP means more than thousands to a creature who has millions. So if the fighter has to sit around in noncombat situations twiddling his thumbs while the wizard has tailor-made spells, you have to figure out how the in-combat balance works. Does it become the wizard's turn to sit twiddling his thumbs? If the wizard is a bit behind the fighter, damage-wise, is the amount too small to be meaningful? If the wizard has abilities that blast right through HP (like 3.x's SoD/SoS), has the fighter been trivialized again? And if the wizard gives up damage in return for riders, have you just gone back to 4e's system where everyone's powers and roles have to be weighed against everyone elses?

I'm okay with fighters being action heroes while casters are mid-tier superheroes. But action heroes still have stuff to do even when they're not punching out bad guys. And most mid-tier supers have one shtick where they're good when they can apply it but let someone else take the lead when outside their niche. But "I'm good with a pointy stick and nothing else" vs. "I'm an omni-caster" is precisely what causes the problem.

[Glorthindel]

I'm okay with fighters being action heroes while casters are mid-tier superheroes. But action heroes still have stuff to do even when they're not punching out bad guys. And most mid-tier supers have one shtick where they're good when they can apply it but let someone else take the lead when outside their niche. But "I'm good with a pointy stick and nothing else" vs. "I'm an omni-caster" is precisely what causes the problem.

I get your point, but there are other classes for that. People who want to be toolboxes pick either Wizard (for magical toolbox), Rogue (for mundane toolbox), or Bard (for a bit of each). What does the player who "wants to be good with a pointy stick, and doesn't care about anything else" play if the Fighter gets pulled about all over the place to fulfill the roll of "just another toolbox".

For me, this is where the discussion starts to be unable to see the wood for the trees. We are wandering off into trying to make the Fighter as good as other classes in their niches (which it shouldn't be), rather than fix the true problem, which is making the Fighter competative in its own niche. THAT is the problem - that the Wizard is able to fulfill the Fighters (and the Rogues, which is a more tricky problem to solve) niche, whilst simultaneously filling its own.

And it leads to conflating the arguement, because there isn't a way to make a Fighter fill a Wizards niche without seriously crippling the Wizard (or transforming the Fighter into a superhero), which leads to replies from Wizard players like:

In favor, of course, of the "players of Wizards and Druids can just f*** off 'solutions'".

Which I most definitely don't want to do. When I play a Fighter, I want to be the best single-target direct-damage melee dealer on the field, not be "a bit worse than what the Druid and Wizard have just summoned" (But summoning should very definitely remain as an option for those times when I can't take 20 ogres on by myself). But I don't care that the Wizard can Teleport (as long as he brings me along - hell, it saves gold on buying horses), or that he can Fly (although, if there is a big flying nasty about, I would like it to be optimal for him to cast Fly on me, rather than do it himself or summon something that can fly instead). There is plenty of ways to make the Fighter the go-to heavy-hitter meatshield to a level that a Wizard cannot replicate, without crippling the Wizard or turning the Fighter into something that isn't a Fighter.

[Cluedrew]

To PhoenixPhyre: You have hit (part of) the reason I divided up "the literary definition of magic" from just "magic". I bring this up because of that exchange we had earlier where I drew that comparison what you have been saying recently has been making sense to me even though other people seem to not get it at all. I saw you define one side (magic as the impossible) but maybe pointing out it is different from the magic of spells and not we are trying to make everyone a caster might be useful? If I have understood you correctly.

There are many other things I could comment on, but I'm going to stay focused on something that might actually help.

[PhoenixPhyre]

You could easily get around that by introducing new reservoirs/force fields that the dragon can access.
Which coincidently is how quite a few systems fluff magic. "Magic energy", "Magic fields" and stuff.

Not if you want consistency. Add more mass (and energy is mass) and you suddenly have gravitational effects, up to and including the universe collapsing (slowly, but surely). You also have entropy effects that would be noticeable.

Also you only need conservation of energy if you want your physical laws to remain constant in time. But i would agree that it is usually worth keeping it. Well, except for settings full of time travel/timeless fey realms and similar stuff.
That introducing magic somehow changes everything does not mean that it effects everything to some noticable degree It is completely viable to say "everything is as we know it until explicitely told otherwise".

That's actually not possible--as soon as you step outside reality (by adding magic) everything falls apart. You can say "everything looks the same unless specified otherwise," (option 3), but you can't have everything be the same under the hood and still have magic. Unless you're willing to give up some amount of consistency (which is what people have been decrying).

That doesn't really match my experience. If the extra consistency is noted depends on if anyone is interested in those details. And railroading/no railroading has no correlation with how realistic the setting is whatsoever.

And most of the time, they're not. At least in my experience. Or they're interested in very different details than what you thought was important.

If you've built everything from first principles, there's very little room to modify if something else would be more fun. If a player suggests that maybe it's like X, but your explanations for things require Y and everything else depends on those explanations, changing is much harder. That is, enforcing hard consistency is harder to make a playable setting. That's why everyone who isn't playing in the real world (option 1) is playing in some version of option 3 (more or less fleshed out).

But this is very off topic at this point, so I'll stop there.

To PhoenixPhyre: You have hit (part of) the reason I divided up "the literary definition of magic" from just "magic". I bring this up because of that exchange we had earlier where I drew that comparison what you have been saying recently has been making sense to me even though other people seem to not get it at all. I saw you define one side (magic as the impossible) but maybe pointing out it is different from the magic of spells and not we are trying to make everyone a caster might be useful? If I have understood you correctly.

I thought I had, but you're right.

Magic: (n), anything that can't happen on Earth, anything that would violate Earth's physical laws.

Spells: magical resonances that produce effects.

Not all magic is spells, not all magic users are spell-casters. To take examples from 5e D&D--a barbarian's Rage is magical--it makes him harder to hurt, hit harder, etc. It can also only be used a certain number of times per day. It's magical (because real people can't do that), but it has nothing to do with casting spells. A rogue's Evasion? Also magical. Normal people don't get to nope a fireball. How does it work? Not really important. But it's magic, and not spells. And so on.

There are no mundanes, no muggles, but not characters aren't shounen anime heros or wizardly demi-gods. I'm not even talking about changing abilities, just how we see those abilities. I'm trying to dispel the idea that limiting one group of classes based on some strange sense of "this one must match Earth-reality" is useful. Let fighters (and rogues, and ...) do cool stuff.

You'll also never be able to balance an unbounded-potential set of characters (e.g. 3.5e clerics gain new powers every time someone publishes new spells, without spending any resources) against a sharply-limited set of characters (muggles). Since I'm not fond of unlimited characters (seems mary sue-ish--I always have the exact power I need!), I'd rather limit the unlimited, and relax the limits on the sharply-limited so they meet in the middle.

[Frozen_Feet]

@PhoenixPhyre:

That's actually not possible--as soon as you step outside reality (by adding magic) everything falls apart. You can say "everything looks the same unless specified otherwise," (option 3), but you can't have everything be the same under the hood and still have magic.

No-one is saying everything is "the same under the hood" when they're explicitly adding new rules. What you seem to forget that what's added does not have to have widespread implications, because in context of fiction it's totally legit to say that the new thing is restricted to specific black box oracle with limited impact.

Your entire argument seems hypocritical to me, really, because you are the one who is supposedly defending the fantastic, yet it is also you who can't step outside perspective of a physicist and acknowledge that in fictionland, the supernatural can be a thing, universality of physical laws can br false, and the notion that all things interacting with the universe are natural can vrphilosophically unsound.

---

Related, I've said it before, I'll say it again: redefining magic as "anything impossible in reality" is not usefull, it's not what people think or mean when they use the word in common parlance and it only confuses matters. Not the least because it is broad enough to cover hard scifi and other forms of speculative fiction which are a far cry from fantasy with faeries and wizards.

A speculative FTL drive in a hard scifi story is not and will not ever be magic, no matter how impossible it turns out to be in practice. So rather than endlessly, pointlessly redefining magic, you use the words that the wider spe-fi circles have been using for decades for your concept: speculative and novum (comes from Latin for "new thing").

[PhoenixPhyre]

@PhoenixPhyre:

No-one is saying everything is "the same under the hood" when they're explicitly adding new rules. What you seem to forget that what's added does not have to have widespread implications, because in context of fiction it's totally legit to say that the new thing is restricted to specific black box oracle with limited impact.

Your entire argument seems hypocritical to me, really, because you are the one who is supposedly defending the fantastic, yet it is also you who can't step outside perspective of a physicist and acknowledge that in fictionland, the supernatural can be a thing, universality of physical laws can br false, and the notion that all things interacting with the universe are natural can vrphilosophically unsound.

I think you misunderstand me. I'm specifically saying that if you demand that everything is the same as reality and all logical consequences are followed you can't add magic. You can't have your cake (magic) and eat it too (have everything else work like reality) and still claim consistency. One of those three has to go. You can choose to sacrifice consistency (magic as black box addition), you can choose to sacrifice magic (gaining consistency for free), or you can, as I prefer to do, accept that everything in a fantasy setting is magic and go from there. Any choice is valid, but we should be clear about which choice we're making. Personally, I prefer to jettison the laws of physics, then jettison consistency, and then jettison magic. Others can choose other priorities.

I was responding to a specific comment--that you have to follow the consequences of adding things like magic to a setting to their logical extent. I was showing that you can't do that in any reasonable fashion and still have a playable setting that looks anything like reality. That is, it was a disproof by exploring the consequences of requiring following the consequences.

Related, I've said it before, I'll say it again: redefining magic as "anything impossible in reality" is not usefull, it's not what people think or mean when they use the word in common parlance and it only confuses matters. Not the least because it is broad enough to cover hard scifi and other forms of speculative fiction which are a far cry from fantasy with faeries and wizards.

A speculative FTL drive in a hard scifi story is not and will not ever be magic, no matter how impossible it turns out to be in practice. So rather than endlessly, pointlessly redefining magic, you use the words that the wider spe-fi circles have been using for decades for your concept: speculative and novum (comes from Latin for "new thing").

When you're dealing with the consequences of changes to physical laws, it's all magic whether we call it speculative or novum, or magic. That's entirely semantic. Hard sci-fi and FTL travel don't go together. "Speculative FTL" is an oxymoron.

But in this context, I was specifically discussing fantasy worlds--hence the focus on things like wizards and dragons. In this context, calling anything impossible in real life "magic" makes complete sense and fixes a lot of problems. In a different context, I'd use a different definition. I'm fine with polysemy.

And I'd claim that my definition is useful because it obliterates the cause of the problem at hand--the restriction of "mundane" (muggle) characters to only those things possible in real life while allowing "magic" characters to do virtually anything because magic breaks the rules. Once we accept that they're all magic, just in different ways and using different tools, the conceptual barrier to letting fighters* have nice things goes away as does much of the barrier to focusing the caster-types down. It allows us to build useful models of how magic works in a particular setting that make predictions about the kind of powers certain characters would reasonably have in that setting.

*fighter here is metonymy for all muggle-type non-spell-casting archetypes.

[Satinavian]

Not if you want consistency. Add more mass (and energy is mass) and you suddenly have gravitational effects, up to and including the universe collapsing (slowly, but surely). You also have entropy effects that would be noticeable.

Maybe there is mass and thus gravity. How would you ever notice ? We have difficulties measuring small gravitational forces with modern equippment. Mass fluctuations the size of shapeshifting dragons would hardly ever be noticed by way of gravitational differences.

Also i never assumed we should get rid of entropy. I like the way my timeflow has a direction.

That's actually not possible--as soon as you step outside reality (by adding magic) everything falls apart. You can say "everything looks the same unless specified otherwise," (option 3), but you can't have everything be the same under the hood and still have magic. Unless you're willing to give up some amount of consistency (which is what people have been decrying).

I obviously meant "everything looks the same". Sure, it might be different, the real world physical laws might not discribe the world. But if the differences are beyond measurement tolerance in most cases that works pretty well. We never get to look under the hood.

And most of the time, they're not. At least in my experience. Or they're interested in very different details than what you thought was important.

That depends. You probably know your players and it's likely you share at least some social circles with them hinting at overlapping interests otherwise. One of my current groups has physicists, material scientists, engineers and a programmer. If you do SF there you should be careful with the science parts. Another group i played in had three postdoc historians. It was usually fine, as long as your fantasy counterpart cultures did resemble the inspiration and were not full of ahistoric clichees. Sure, you could make your own stuff up instead but should always be prepared of your players analyzing the setting with professional enthusiasm.

[Max_Killjoy]

For a fantasy setting, you couldn't have a (unspecified, even) set of "laws" that produce a reality that functions and appears very similar to ours in most instances, but also allows for extraordinary effects that aren't possible in our reality?

[digiman619]

About the whole "Once you add magic, all of Physics crashes" argument, you do realize that there are plenty of things in our actual reality that physics can't yet explain (dark matter, the oddness of Tabby's Star, etc.). Why is it then impossible to believe that, in a fictional version of physics at least, "compatible with magic" isn't one of the things it does and we don't know why?

[PhoenixPhyre]

For a fantasy setting, you couldn't have a (unspecified, even) set of "laws" that produce a reality that functions and appears very similar to ours in most instances, but also allows for extraordinary effects that aren't possible in our reality?

You could, and in fact must to maintain consistency. That's option 2 (rebuild the whole thing from the ground up). I'd say that that's the idea underlying option 3 (paper over the cracks)--the world only appears to work like ours, but is really different at the core level, but most setting builders have other things on their plate other than redoing physics, chemistry, and biology from the root level. Doing this for real is really really hard and outside the skillset of most writers.

About the whole "Once you add magic, all of Physics crashes" argument, you do realize that there are plenty of things in our actual reality that physics can't yet explain (dark matter, the oddness of Tabby's Star, etc.). Why is it then impossible to believe that, in a fictional version of physics at least, "compatible with magic" isn't one of the things it does and we don't know why?

I'm only speaking of the actual laws, not the ones we necessarily know right now. And anything like dragons, fireball-throwing wizards, teleportation (of non-quantum masses), etc would shatter those wide open. Unlike the laws of man, the laws of nature can't be broken and still remain--the existence of such things (like dragons, wizards, etc) would have direct, observable consequences in the same way that Neptune's orbit was predicted by noticing its effect on the orbit of the other planets. Especially if magic had any ties to belief. The laws of physics can't care about things like that (otherwise you open a whole 'nother can of interdimentional worms, the kind that make Dune's sandworms look like nightcrawlers).

Maybe there is mass and thus gravity. How would you ever notice ? We have difficulties measuring small gravitational forces with modern equippment. Mass fluctuations the size of shapeshifting dragons would hardly ever be noticed by way of gravitational differences.

Let's do some napkin math. An adult dragon weighs on order multiple tons (say 2000 kg to make the math easy). An adult human weighs on order 100 kg. If the dragon shapeshifts into a human, you have (order of) 1900 kg of mass to get rid of somehow. Conservation requires that that mass go somewhere. If it's converted to (magical) energy with 100% efficiency, you're looking at approximately 1.7 x 10^20 J of energy. That's an extinction-level event (gigatons of TNT, on the similar order to a medium asteroid strike). And yes, we detect things of that order using gravity all the time--it's one way we look for oil, by noticing the deviations in the path of satellites due to the reduced density of the oil-bearing rock.

Also i never assumed we should get rid of entropy. I like the way my timeflow has a direction.

But bolting on energy transformations of that magnitude (or even that of a fireball) would have detectable entropy effects (changes in temperature, etc.) Those would be obviously noticeable by even crude instruments.

I obviously meant "everything looks the same". Sure, it might be different, the real world physical laws might not discribe the world. But if the differences are beyond measurement tolerance in most cases that works pretty well. We never get to look under the hood.

If all you do is bolt on magic, the direct consequences would be directly visible even to crude instruments. Now whether that matters--depends on the group as you say.For most people that's fine, as long you don't think too hard.

That's what I'm desiring--either accept that you can't think too hard about things or they'll fall apart or accept that everything is really different and only conveniently happens to act (on the surface) as our world does and that your "clever" tricks (Polymorph Any Object a rock into uranium! Instant nukes!) may not work as written and no amount of "but in the real world..." will save you from having rulebooks thrown at you.

Basically, I'm fine with any approach as long as we're honest and upfront about it. Are we making a popcorn action setting? The physics don't matter nearly as much as the rule of cool. Are we making a serious historical setting? Then the details matter quite a bit. But we shouldn't judge the first by the standards of the second (or vice versa).

[Darth Ultron]

About the whole "Once you add magic, all of Physics crashes" argument,

I never liked the idea that magic and science can't co-exist. That magic is anti- science or something. That magic somehow breaks science.

I have always seen everything as part of one universe. So that magic obeys the laws of reality and science...but we might not know the laws.

This is really no different then anything in history that was once unknown. Radiation has all ways existed and all ways had an effect on things in the world...but humans did not even know it existed until recently.

[digiman619]

I'm only speaking of the actual laws, not the ones we necessarily know right now. And anything like dragons, fireball-throwing wizards, teleportation (of non-quantum masses), etc would shatter those wide open. Unlike the laws of man, the laws of nature can't be broken and still remain--the existence of such things (like dragons, wizards, etc) would have direct, observable consequences in the same way that Neptune's orbit was predicted by noticing its effect on the orbit of the other planets. Especially if magic had any ties to belief. The laws of physics can't care about things like that (otherwise you open a whole 'nother can of interdimentional worms, the kind that make Dune's sandworms look like nightcrawlers).

With respect, most of these have accepted in-universe scientific explanations. A fireball isn't creating energy: it's opening a tiny aperture to the Elemental Plane of Fire and the fire violently rushes out. A dragon polymorphing into a mouse doesn't covert the excess mass to energy and blow up the planet, its mass is displaced into the Ethereal Plane.

In fact, that's a major reason that you can't judge D&D physics by its real world counterpart, as there are other levels of reality there. If your argument is "Adding all these variables destroys the equation" fails to take into account the possibility of them cancelling each other out.

[PhoenixPhyre]

With respect, most of these have accepted in-universe scientific explanations. A fireball isn't creating energy: it's opening a tiny aperture to the Elemental Plane of Fire and the fire violently rushes out. A dragon polymorphing into a mouse doesn't covert the excess mass to energy and blow up the planet, its mass is displaced into the Ethereal Plane.

In fact, that's a major reason that you can't judge D&D physics by its real world counterpart, as there are other levels of reality there. If your argument is "Adding all these variables destroys the equation" fails to take into account the possibility of them cancelling each other out.

But the existence of those other planes involves literally infinite amounts of energy (mass). Thus if we include anything like normal gravity (general relativity), the universe (including those planes) collapses into a black hole. Thus, gravity in D&D can't obey general relativity and thus can't be anything like our gravity except on the surface. The effects may be similar (to an untrained eye), but the causes are completely different.

As I said--I'm not trying to judge D&D by real world physics. I accept that it doesn't follow our laws. I just want other people to also accept that. I'm trying to show that you can't a) add magic, b) keep everything else the same, and c) have consistency. Those three are incompatible. I prefer dumping b) (which is the same assumption made in D&D-esque settings generally) and relaxing c) until we have to deal with it (retroactively justifying a setting element, tweaking our explanations to fit).