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2016-09-19, 01:56 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
When I was young (I have no idea how young), I saw my father playing a text-based Lord of the Rings game (or something like that—my memory is hazy) and saw the word "orc" for the first time. For some reason, I assumed those were orca-people. Not like anthropomorphic orcas, but orcas with people-legs.
...Wouldn't it be easier to say "The world is flat" and be done with it? Or at least "The world is a cylinder"?
Your mistake was assuming that fantasy race stereotypes were sensibly compatible.
Same general issue, really.
Spoiler: Jay R's refusal to accept that fantasy and physics are not mutually exclusive
Most of the world follows all physical laws; it's just magic parts that bend the laws. I generally assume that fantasy worlds have laws of physics like my own except that magic is a source of energy and so on. And you know what? My assumptions have never been proved wrong.
The same set of physical laws that include a spectrum also prevent inter-species breeding, like dragons and humans, or owls and bears. They also prevent flying without wings or jet exhaust or being lighter than air.
Putting aside how you're assuming that owlbears and half-dragons are produced through normal reproduction (they are produced entirely or partly through magical means, respectively), and how you seem to think that "jet exhaust" is what makes planes fly...how are things things related?
When discussing universal laws, "Everything works exactly the same except when it doesn't" is semantically equal to "It doesn't work the same."
"There is a law of conservation of energy, except magic" is the same thing as "energy is not always conserved."
"There is a universal gravitational constant between two bodies unless magic changes it" means that there is no universal gravitational constant.
We don't consider something a physical law unless it's universal. Saying that mass & energy is conserved unless magic changes it is as meaningful as saying that an eggshell has never been cracked except once.
If there's a well-defined set of instances where a physical law is violated, it can still be used as a meaningful scientific law (assuming those instances are properly accounted for). As it so happens, typical fantasy settings do have (reasonably) well-defined sets of instances. They might not be defined well in the work itself, but a sufficiently dedicated thaumatologist could figure out how it works as well as a sufficiently dedicated physicist can figure out how, say, nuclear fission works.
In fact, I'd argue that the apparent violations of conservation of mass/energy/momentum are just the mass/energy/momentum coming from something unusual. Just because energy can be supplied by gods or souls or qi or draconic blood or multiversal space worms or whatever doesn't mean we can (or should) throw all physical laws out the window. And before you say something about nonphysical forms of energy not counting, I'd like to bring up potential energy and neutrinos. A rock at the top of a cliff is identical in every way to one at the bottom, but the former has more energy. Beta decay seemed to violate conservation of energy and momentum, but rather than throw the theory out the window, Pauli and others hypothesized that some unknown and then-undetectable particle was the source of the energy (and were proved right, of course)—so who's defining "physical," anyways?
One reason not to assume modern physical laws exist except when they don't is that the assumption serves no purpose. It doesn't help the game in any way, and it didn't even preserve the physical laws.
Another reason is to allow cool story ideas. In the same game, I introduced seven artifacts, in the hands of adventurers, called the Staves of the Wanderers. They turned out to be staves that each carried powers from the seven planets of the Ptolemaic system ("planetes asteroi" - the wandering stars). So they were themed to the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Note that I used the medieval assumption that the sun and moon are planets, and the earth is not. An unthinking assumption of modern physics would have prevented that entire adventure.
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2016-09-19, 02:55 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
In a D&D-specific misconception, when I read the 1e and 2e AD&D entry for "monks," for some reason the only image that came to mind was Friar Tuck. So I kept wondering why these (Catholic-style) monks were able to reach out and punch (with a very weak-looking, no-body-in-it-at-all punching style) and do so much damage, or why the "quivering palm" was there, or why they had such flowery titles (e.g. "Grand Master of Flowers"). I never once associated them with athletic or graceful motion.
It wasn't until I saw the picture in the 3.0 PHB that it clicked that they meant Xiao-Lin monks. I felt very silly.
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2016-09-19, 03:07 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2013
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
Pedantry: It's shao lin not xiao lin. Both mean small/little and pronounced very similarly, but they are different words. Shao is small as in a few things, a small number of things. Xiao is small as in not big, a little thing. The one used for the famous temple is shao. If I weren't on the phone I'd put the characters in.
The cartoon called xiao-lin showdown is purposefully using the other word, probably because the characters are little kids.
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2016-09-19, 04:23 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
Ironically, I initially spelled it "shao" and then "corrected" myself. Nice to know my instincts were right, and, more importantly, why!
Oh, and while I'm here: I also thought it was syringe-fanged vampires for a long time, and still prefer it at least as an explanation for how it gets into the mouth. Sort of a blood-groove thing, directing the stream to the throat to explain why they don't spill. Presumably, there's a coagulant they exude afterwards to keep the arterial wounds from bleeding when they're done. Totally draining the victim doesn't explain the survivors who didn't bleed out despite lack of EXTREME compression bandages to staunch the flow.
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2016-09-19, 05:23 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2007
Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
Dude, I just have to say, THANK YOU.
It always bugs me when people get on their high horse and refuse to even entertain the idea that physics might not function the same in fantasy worlds as they do in the real one. When Bob's level wizard has broken the laws of physics so often Newton and Einstein have a restraining order against him, and he's just third level, I'd say it's a pretty big clue that things don't neccisarilly work the same way as they do in reality. It's fine to assume normal stuff for a base line, and most of the time it's probally not going to come up anyhow, but in the event it does, I mean, if people've already accepted that things work different here, so why are they surrprised and upset to find out that things work different here.
Personally finding out that gravity works not becasue a natural phenomenon by which all things with energy are brought toward one another is in play but because greed spirits that live in the planet's core are constantly trying to pull everyone down too them is no more threatening to my verisimilitude than a 50ft tall Giant's spine not snapping like a twig in defiance of the square-cube law. "That's just how this particular world works"
oh, and with that out of the way, put me down for the syringe vampires too
I also thought the thing about invisibile people being able to see other invisible things too, for me it came from the eppisode of Rugrats where Angelica puts vanishing cream on the babies and tells them that's why they can see each other. I guess my six year old mind just kinda assumed that was a true thing about invisiblity, even if the vanishing cream itself wasn't really making them invisible
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2016-09-19, 06:00 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Apr 2014
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
Technically, yes (and, for most practical purposes, it acts as if it were a cylinder unless you actually cross the pole itself), but my way of doing it is less efficient and more needlessly complicated, and therefore contributes to a battle won in my life-long war against Ockham's Razor and/or Lean Six Sigma principles.
Last edited by bulbaquil; 2016-09-19 at 06:27 PM.
Planck length = 1.524e+0 m, Planck time = 6.000e+0 s. Mass quantum ~ 9.072e-3 kg because "50 coins weigh a pound" is the smallest weight mentioned. And light has five quantum states.
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2016-09-20, 03:00 PM (ISO 8601)
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2016-09-20, 03:32 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2014
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
There are some pretty glaring misunderstandings about science in this thread. Silly adulthood misconceptions of fantasy elements, perhaps?
Science is, at its heart, the method by which information about the world is gathered. If you applied the scientific method in the D&D world, you would not end up with the laws of thermodynamics and simply be baffled by magic's exception. You'd quite literally end up with rules which cover the way that magic operates, because magic is a real, observable phenomenon in the D&D world. It ticks every box necessary for scientific inquiry.
If they were born in a D&D world, Newton and Einstein wouldn't have restraining orders against Bob the Magician, they'd be the magicians researching new vistas of arcane understandings. D&D magic pretty much just is science in a world that happens to have different natural laws.Last edited by LudicSavant; 2016-09-20 at 03:55 PM.
Originally Posted by ProsecutorGodot
Nerull | Wee Jas | Olidammara | Erythnul | Hextor | Corellon Larethian | Lolth | The Deep Ones
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2016-09-20, 03:52 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
Now, that's definitely a perfectly fine way to describe magic. But I'd argue it's not the only one.
The other big way I see magic used is as a representation of everything that defies logic and sense. You have the way the world usually works, the way it's supposed to work, and you have science that can quantify and explain it. That science might produce information different from what we have in reality, but it still works the same way. But then you have magic, and magic, by its very nature, doesn't make sense. It's everything that should not happen, even under in-setting scientific assumptions, but it does anyway, because that's its role in the story--to embody the unknown, the nonsensical, the insane, and make it a real force capable of actively influencing events. This approach is more characteristic of so called "soft-magic" stories where magic is inconsistent, unpredictable, and has few to no rules governing what it can do, and is thus rarely employed as a tool by protagonists because of its potential to trivialize the challenges they face.
Basically, it comes down to whether you analyze a setting based on its in-world rationality, or the external narrative principles that govern its function. A world designed to run on the former requires magic as just different science; a world built on the latter doesn't.Last edited by Amaril; 2016-09-20 at 03:53 PM.
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2016-09-20, 03:58 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2014
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
There is not a single official D&D setting where magic defies logic and sense to such a degree that you cannot learn about it by applying the scientific method in-world. I haven't even seen a homebrew setting that does this (I have merely seen authors who are not great at logic and sense claiming that their homebrew settings defy logic and sense, even though they very obviously do not from a scientist's perspective).
If you can look at a Fireball being cast and notice something true about the Fireball, you can do science regarding Fireballs. It doesn't even matter if you can't perform the spell yourself, any more than our inability to make black holes stops us from being able to do science just by looking at them and noting their properties and/or the effects they have on their surroundings.
If you can say "hey look, I can notice that fireball spells burn things" then you can totally do science.Last edited by LudicSavant; 2016-09-20 at 04:04 PM.
Originally Posted by ProsecutorGodot
Nerull | Wee Jas | Olidammara | Erythnul | Hextor | Corellon Larethian | Lolth | The Deep Ones
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2016-09-20, 04:02 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
I was about to reply that I wasn't talking about D&D, but then I realized that your original post quite clearly mentioned D&D by name. So, fair enough, I'm the a**hole here
Yeah, it would be impossible to do magic like that in a game, or at least a game where players are allowed to use it themselves. That would require magic to have rules, and the whole point is that it doesn't. Even as a GM, you'd inevitably have players calling BS when you started just making up random stuff that happens because magic, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Better to restrict that type of magic to other media.
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2016-09-20, 05:52 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
"If you want to understand biology don't think about vibrant throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology" -Richard Dawkins
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2016-09-20, 05:56 PM (ISO 8601)
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2016-09-20, 06:28 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
As a counter-argument I'd like to bring the Psychic Maelstrom in Apocalypse World, which is chaotic, unexplained and has the same kind of unpredictability that you usually have in those various media. Well, countering my own argument it's magic that it is mostly limited mostly to divination until it narratively makes sense otherwise and Apocalypse World is built around the players and GM having both a high level of trust and equal excitement for the PCs suffering horrible fates. The point being, you can have soft magic just fine in rpgs in certain conditions.
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2016-09-20, 06:50 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
Try Brandon Sanderson or Patrick Rothfuss.
I'm not familiar with Apocalypse World. However, nothing in your description of it suggests to me that I could not, as an in-world character, potentially make informed observations about it.Last edited by LudicSavant; 2016-09-20 at 07:04 PM.
Originally Posted by ProsecutorGodot
Nerull | Wee Jas | Olidammara | Erythnul | Hextor | Corellon Larethian | Lolth | The Deep Ones
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2016-09-20, 06:52 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2013
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
I remember as a kid how utterly stupid the American gal named Toothfairy must be to hand out money for unusable teeth. Simultaneously it made incredible sense that the easter bunny brings me the colored eggs I helped my grandma to paint a day before because it is slightly warmer outside.
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2016-09-20, 07:50 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
Planck length = 1.524e+0 m, Planck time = 6.000e+0 s. Mass quantum ~ 9.072e-3 kg because "50 coins weigh a pound" is the smallest weight mentioned. And light has five quantum states.
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2016-09-20, 11:03 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Sep 2015
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- Orlando
Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
I used to think "Medusa" was spelled with an "n." "Mednusa." I'd even pronounce it that way.
Because of my cultural background, I never saw "applied knowledge" in the form of spells or magic items as something fundamentally different from a technology - I had to learn that - otherwise, the difference between casting a spell you call "Repair Vehicle" required getting out the tools and working on it was nonexistent, one was just faster. Kicking the door and shouting "come on, baby, I need one more mile." Magic was the world, and the world was magic. My settings still tend to look more like Symbiosis than medieval Europe. Magic, to me, was such a fundamental part of existence that Dispel Magic seemed like a godawful, stupid idea to me - in that it didn't straight up unweave reality.
I still believe the scientific method can be applied easily and quickly to D&D magic and I will FIGHT YOUUUU
I had to learn "future" and "past" as two different things and time as a line, rather than as a geographical location. That was probably the most difficult thing for me.
A non-fantasy related thing, but another funny fact - up until I was fourteen, nobody explained the Dewey Decimal system to me, and I thought that any time you came into a library you had to start at 000 and go up. That 000 is supposed to contain books about the Dewey Decimal system never came up - none of the libraries I went to as a kid had those books in them."Scary magical hoodoo and technology are the same thing, their difference is merely cultural context" - Clarke, paraphrased
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2016-09-20, 11:12 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
Since magic as science seems to be the topic of discussion at the moment, I will note that in The Dying Earth, i.e. what Gygax attributes with having stolen the magic system from, magic was the result of applying advanced mathematics (calculus) to the laws of reality after the age of science had passed and the new age of magic dawned. It was in fact science applied to a new set of physical laws and the writer made that clear.
Fred Saberhagen does similarly in his Empire of the East series.Peanut Half-Dragon Necromancer by Kurien.
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2016-09-21, 07:47 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
That's on the game designers, not you. That's a poorly chosen name for the class. It's not what people think of when they hear the word "monk". Hell, even if you specified a buddhist monk I'd think of something closer to the Dalai Lama and his crew than Shaolin.
We have the same problem with the "vermin" type, whose contents coincide exactly with the english word "bug" but are described in game using a word that generally also includes rodents"If you want to understand biology don't think about vibrant throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology" -Richard Dawkins
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2016-09-21, 08:12 AM (ISO 8601)
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2016-09-21, 08:16 AM (ISO 8601)
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2016-09-21, 08:41 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
D&D, in my teenaged head, was vaguely European fantasy. Thus, "monks" clearly made sense as a character class. They lived in monasteries and illuminated vellum and brewed beer...and apparently could shatter your heart with a touch of their palms, according to their class mechanics. Which was weird, but hey. Fantasy! I just never got WHY until I realized I was thinking of the wrong cultural reference.
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2016-09-21, 09:48 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
I am young enough that when I first read the monk class I immediately thought "Oh so it's like House of Flying Daggers or Naruto". Which I actually feel maybe a worse misconception, considering I was reading 3.0 where the monk Is closer in power level to a random medieval english monk than a martial art's master.....
Last edited by Milo v3; 2016-09-21 at 09:49 AM.
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2016-09-21, 09:56 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
"If you want to understand biology don't think about vibrant throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology" -Richard Dawkins
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2016-09-21, 10:33 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
My childhood fantasy misconception: there are not very many old people. Everyone you see who looks old is either the king, a witch, a wizard, or a disguised gnome/fairy/magic creature.
Last edited by Telonius; 2016-09-21 at 10:44 AM.
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2016-09-21, 10:40 AM (ISO 8601)
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2016-09-21, 10:41 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
Add me to the people who used to believe in syringe vampires, and the people saying Brandon Sanderson is an incredible author.
When I first read Lord of the Rings I got the wrong idea about hobbit feet. I thought their soles were thick and furry like a kind of reverse carpet. I think I only realised my misconception when I watched the films for the first time.
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2016-09-21, 11:01 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
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2016-09-21, 01:34 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2016
Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
"If you want to understand biology don't think about vibrant throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology" -Richard Dawkins
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