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2016-09-21, 01:41 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
Chalk me up to 'thought that monks were Friar Tuck' camp. I was a small (6 maybe 7) child when I first played and was not allowed to read the PHB myself (older brother) so I was just being told about all the unarmed combat abilities of monks and going 'what?' as I had never heard monk used for kung fu martial artists before.
It didn't last long (by which I mean more than a week) because I asked why Friar Tuck would have martial arts but.Peanut Half-Dragon Necromancer by Kurien.
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2016-09-21, 02:22 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
Oddly enough, the "Friar Tuck Monk" thing made total sense to me - then again I knew that Father McClanahan used to be a bareknuckles fighter before he was ordained, and could totally see Sister Mary Joseph using a quarterstaff instead of a ruler.
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2016-09-21, 03:08 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
I've often thought that fantasy worlds probably run off debunked science. For example, the presence of the (ever increasing number of) elemental planes suggests a different elemental system, closer to the classical system than Mendeleev's. The existence of alchemists and elementals suggests that proto-sciences work just fine. Magical healing runs off "positive energy", just as today's psychic healers will tell you it does, and medical scientists won't. The possibility of half-dragon suggests that genetics is not behaving itself at all.
The entire world is controlled by 5 Platonic solids, after all...
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2016-09-21, 07:43 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
Even from a strictly historical perspective, many European monks practiced wrestling-so it isn't as big of a stretch as one might think.
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2016-09-21, 11:43 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
Friar Tuck was pretty badass in the original Robin Hood stories as well.
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2016-09-22, 07:24 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
I'm surprised that the words mean roughly the same thing despite being different enough to be Anglicized differently.
In a world where the gods intervene to put a Band-Aid on your fallen comrades because a priest said pretty please, I'd say any holy man has a decent claim of being combat-viable.
Plague must have gotten them.
Spoiler: Science and Physics
I'd like to refer you to my post on that subject (look in the spoiler).
TL;DR: Even if there are extra things that are possible in a fantasy setting, everything else works exactly the same as in our own, so why should we assume that those parts work differently?
Also true. Though arguably less relevant to the anti-physicists' point.
Science doesn't work like that. If there's something which violates the apparent laws of physics, scientists don't throw up their hands and declare that this is something that doesn't make sense and shouldn't happen—they leave that to philosophers and theologians. Instead, they quantify the something and try to understand where they went wrong when describing the laws of physics.
This exact thing happened with neutrinos, though on a less interesting scale. Conservation of energy and momentum seemed to be violated, so the scientists worked to figure out why; they made theories and figured out how to test them, and understood the universe better as a result. In a world with magic, the same thing would happen—except these "violations" would be incorporated into the laws of physics from the very beginning!
And just because people conclude something is "random" doesn't mean it necessarily is; there could well be patterns they haven't managed to figure out. A lot of biological patterns started out this way, such as species distribution ("Why are these species here but not there?"); then evolution and continental drift and so on came along, and we could piece it together, and now species distribution is...well, it's not as certain as the orbits of the planets, but it's still well-understood.
And the funny thing is, Discworld is the closest thing to "Magic doesn't follow any kind of proper magical laws" that I can think of.
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2016-09-22, 07:52 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
That's because they're not that similar. Shao means "a few", or little as in "a little bit". Xiao means "small-the opposite of big". In Chinese their meanings are significantly different and you're in for either a long debate or the more likely "shut up you're an idiot" from native speakers.
Why am I going on? Because when you go to school in China they pound in the lesson and make square holes and round pegs fit.I used to live in a world of terrible beauty, and then the beauty left.
Dioxazine purple.
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2016-09-22, 09:50 AM (ISO 8601)
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2016-09-22, 11:29 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
Spoiler: Science and PhysicsIn real life, that's all true. But fiction, or at least a certain subset of fiction that can use this kind of magic, doesn't run on real-life logic. It runs on symbols, on meaning. Within the context of a story, magic is perfectly capable of being inherently nonsensical and nonscientific, because that's what it represents in the story's allegory. I think the appropriate term might be Doylist vs. Watsonian thinking: in this case, you're concerning yourself with the Watsonian explanations for the way magic works in a story, while I'm focusing on the Doylist. My point is that you can't apply both perspectives to every kind of story. Some fictional settings are constructed specifically to appeal to Watsonian logic, to be internally consistent in a way the characters can understand just as well as the reader (that'd be your Sanderson); conversely, there are settings where Doylist logic is the only thing that's reliable, because they make symbolism a priority over in-world consistency (that'd be your Tolkien).Last edited by Amaril; 2016-09-22 at 11:29 AM.
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2016-09-22, 12:57 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
You're missing the point. "Science" isn't something that excludes magic, and magic doesn't escape science.
Science is a process. You can easily have "magical" and "non-magical" things, just as we have in the real world "electrical" and "non-electrical" technology. "Magic" is just some set of things which operate using rules that are part of that...magic. Whether it's "magic energy" that enables things otherwise impossible, or something else entirely.
If magic defies scientific inquiry, that means it is highly inconsistent. You can do the same thing 11 times and come up with so many different results that you couldn't begin to even do statistics on them. At which point, magic isn't something you can "do."
The moment magic is something one can "do," it becomes subject to meaningful scientific study, as you can document it, do experiments, and at least get a probabilistic sense for how things will go.
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2016-09-22, 01:22 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
Imagine if all real-world conversations were like internet D&D conversations...
Protip: DnD is an incredibly social game played by some of the most socially inept people on the planet - Lev
I read this somewhere and I stick to it: "I would rather play a bad system with my friends than a great system with nobody". - Trevlac
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2016-09-22, 01:51 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
Except science already has answers to that: observational studies. Modeling. Simple observation (separate from observational studies). Thought experiments. Not to mention the existence of unethical scientists who are willing to do it anyway.
Spoiler: Science! Because off-topic
Actually, though there's four things (that I can think of) that science can't/doesn't do: it doesn't make moral judgments. In D&D, it can tell you whether an act is Good or Evil or Lawful or Chaotic, but it can't tell you whether it's right, wrong, good, or bad (because alignment is something you can observe through any number of methods in D&D). Likewise, it can't tell you whether something is beautiful or unpleasing (because those are entirely subjective measures that vary person by person and isn't a quality of the thing) except for Nymphs in D&D, which science would conclude is supernaturally beautiful because that's an observable effect. Third: science can't tell you what to do with the scientific knowledge, whether you should summon demons or cure curses or fetch water or whatever: it only tells you that it is possible to do those things and how to do them, not whether or not you should do them. Finally, science doesn't draw conclusions about supernatural explanations (but this definition of "supernatural" doesn't match how D&D uses it: in this case, it means "unobservable" or "lacks disprovability"). As an example, in D&D settings, ghosts can be observed so science can determine whether or not they exist and how they work. In many D&D settings, gods can be observed (as well as their effects) so gods don't fall under this category of "supernatural". In D&D, magic and the sources of magic and the effects of magic can be observed and repeated: you can get magic from studying, you can get magic from genetics, you can get magic from gods or demons (which are also observable and their effects can be clearly pointed back to them), you can observe the explosions/cold/wellsprings of willpower/etc and measure their effects so D&D magic isn't considered "supernatural" under science's definition of "supernatural" either. In fact, there's very little in D&D that science would consider "supernatural".
Back on topic...
Actually, when I was 7 or 8 I thought floating cities really could and did exist (and usually hung out around clouds), so I was surprised when more fantasy books didn't have them or that treated flight as a difficult thing.Last edited by 5a Violista; 2016-09-22 at 01:51 PM.
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2016-09-22, 01:52 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
1) No different than doing science on any other poorly-understood and dangerous phenomenon
2) Doesn't change that you CAN apply the scientific method. Remember, "science" is a method. That's why we have social sciences - they literally are applying scientific methods to studying human behavior in order to attempt to discern rules that govern it.
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2016-09-22, 01:56 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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2016-09-22, 02:11 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
Assuming it's not one of those "your language doesn't have words to succinctly explain the distinction" things, they still sound closely related. I mean, yes, you wouldn't want to use one to describe the other (just as you wouldn't say you have a few waters or lots of shoe in English), but they're both clearly describing lesser amounts, just varying if the number or size of the units is being changed. And in cases where the object is a mass of units, I can see the two being almost interchangeable (fewer gallons of water, less water).
So? Even in Doylist settings, readers can (and, for reasonably popular ones, probably have) come up with explanations or at least patterns that are never mentioned in the works set in said settings. Imagine what someone who lived in the world could do.
Putting aside observational studies, models, scientists who accept the danger, etc, in most settings that stuff is in some way related to what the magic-user does (uses magic maliciously, gives a poorly-considered order, fails to properly bind the demon). I'd be willing to bet that a scientist could design safe experiments for almost any kind of magic that exists in fiction.
Respectively:
1-3. It's true, science can't deal with subjective stuff. It's simply not designed to do that.
4. I generally take the stance that if you can't observe a force/object/entity or its effects, it doesn't exist in any meaningful sense. Obviously, some people disagree, but I guess that's one of those subjective things. You can't really prove the value of objectivity or logic or anything like that without taking it as an assumption that such things are how to judge things.
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2016-09-22, 02:43 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
They are different. The difference may sound subtle to non-Chinese speakers, but it is distinct. Shao is pronounced pretty much as it looks, "show" which rhymes with "now". Xiao has the extra "ee" sound before the "ow", like "sheeow" (still rhymes with "now).
That's not even getting into the different tonalities and contexts which distinguish different words that are Romanized exactly the same.
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2016-09-22, 03:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
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2016-09-22, 03:54 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
But that's not necessarily what science is in a story; it might be any number of other things. Maybe it's the danger of humanity overstepping its natural boundaries, and playing with forces it doesn't understand. Maybe it's an imbalance of power between social classes. Maybe it's our salvation, something we should all praise and seek to advance. What's important is what it represents. Things in fiction don't have static, singular definitions the way they do in real life--they can change according to what the writer wants to communicate about the real world. Science doesn't have to be all-encompassing in a story if the writer doesn't want it to be, and there can be room for things beyond its scope.
But those explanations by the characters don't exist. You can't judge a text based on things that aren't part of it; if you make up explanations for things in a setting that don't appear to make sense, that's no indication that characters in the text have done the same. The only thing that can indicate that is if the text says so. The worlds fiction takes place in are not, by definition, complete worlds, and the logic on which they function isn't complete either; they exist only as much as they need to for the story to be told. If they were complete worlds, they'd be real.Last edited by Amaril; 2016-09-22 at 03:54 PM.
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2016-09-22, 04:29 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
Er... no. None of those are "science." Somebody calling those things "science" is like somebody calling them "hat." It's taking a word that has nothing to do with them and redefining it.
Now, you can use technology as a metaphor for those things. Or as a vehicle to illustrate them. But technology is a consequence of science.
I do understand the urge to assert this, however. "Science" in today's world is often an abused term, being used to refer to political and religious beliefs in hopes of shielding them from the scrutiny they deserve by cloaking them in an aura that declares anybody who questions them "anti-science," which is distorted to mean either "stupid" or "intellectually dishonest" or "corrupt," depending on context.
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2016-09-22, 05:30 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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2016-09-23, 07:18 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
We're not talking about "science" as misdefined by a work, we're talking about real science. Don't move the goalposts.
But those explanations by the characters don't exist. You can't judge a text based on things that aren't part of it; if you make up explanations for things in a setting that don't appear to make sense, that's no indication that characters in the text have done the same. The only thing that can indicate that is if the text says so. The worlds fiction takes place in are not, by definition, complete worlds, and the logic on which they function isn't complete either; they exist only as much as they need to for the story to be told. If they were complete worlds, they'd be real.
*The scientist, not the food.
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2016-09-23, 08:11 AM (ISO 8601)
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2016-09-23, 08:56 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
I still feel like I'm not communicating my point properly, but I'm not sure how else to explain it. Anyway, I've derailed the thread too much, so I'll stop for now.
Last edited by Amaril; 2016-09-23 at 12:47 PM.
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2016-09-23, 09:59 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
To continue the tangent, it's pretty clear the words are etymologically related when you look at the characters for 小
xiǎo and 少 shǎo. You could also read 少 as shào meaning young.
I never thought of it before reading this thread but I think I might have believed in syringe vampires too.
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2016-09-23, 12:22 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
That might be because in books (outside of the young adult vampire romances*) more often than not it is syringe vampires.
Polidori's "The Vampyre" (first English Vampire story) specifically likened to a pair of bug bites.
Dracula is questionable in the books, and even in the films (Hammer Horror, i.e. the birth place of 60-70% of our modern movie vampire tropes, likened them to giant bug bites, but also had the trickle of blood... once Christopher Lee removed his mouth which is consistent with syringe).
Vampire$ (the film John Carpenter's Vampires was based on) specifically mentioned syringe bites.
Salem's Lot specifically mentioned bug-like and syringe bites.
Even in Anne Rice it's questionable.
So yeah, outside of Buffy syringe vampires are the norm.
*I haven't read these save the first 2 Anne Rice books and the first Twilight book, my gf who does says that chompy chomp or unspecified is more common because eww you don't want to liken the love interest to a mosquito.Peanut Half-Dragon Necromancer by Kurien.
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2016-09-23, 02:47 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
I would really like to see a game made by Obryn, Kurald Galain, and Knaight from these forums.
I'm not joking one bit. I would buy the hell out of that. -- ChubbyRain
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2016-09-23, 06:20 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
Well, yes and no. There are those who contributed to science before Bacon and the scientific method as far back as ptolemy and archimedes but it's not quite accurate to call them scientists, as such. Certainly brilliant men, well ahead of their time, but Bacon was the first to posit that -all- of the knowledge that men wield should come from empiricism and bring the disparate fields together under one umbrella idea of science in a way that became largely accepted by his peers.
Haytham certainly had the right idea though. I won't deny that what he did was great work that contributed to science but I wouldn't call him a scientist.
Though, in the end, I suppose there's an argument to be made that this is a distinction without a difference.I am not seaweed. That's a B.
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2016-09-23, 07:31 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
Knaight is correct. It is perfectly appropriate to use the word scientist to describe Ibn al-Haytham, and to use the word science to describe the work he did.
GreatWyrmGold is also correct in his main point; whether or not anyone in the world is using science has no bearing on whether science can be done.Last edited by LudicSavant; 2016-09-23 at 07:48 PM.
Originally Posted by ProsecutorGodot
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2016-09-26, 03:24 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
Really? Because this thread is the first time I've ever heard about syringe vampires.*
To me it made perfect sense that they could make those tiny bite wounds and then drink from them without spilling.
A)They already have all kind of weird tricks and aren't human anyway, so being a tidy eater wasn't really a stretch. If anything it made them creepier.
B)Vamps are nobles, rich folk and stuff. Those people learn to eat without making a mess. It's in their blood.
Plus vampires drinking from (wine) glasses (or bottles)- without straws -was a thing in at least a few stories.
*Outside of cases where they explicitely feed in more exotic ways I mean. But I don't think I read (many of) those as a kid."If it lives it can be killed.
If it is dead it can be eaten."
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2016-09-26, 04:00 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Silly Childhood Misconceptions on Fantasy Elements?
I just listed books that actually liken them to bug bites which implies syringe. Either they use syringes or they inject something to prevent blood from leaking freely... which still requires syringe teeth. Or else blood not following the rules of how blood flows. And there's no reason a vampire with syringe teeth couldn't drink from wine glasses.
Peanut Half-Dragon Necromancer by Kurien.
Current Projects:
Group: The Harrowing Halloween Harvest of Horror Part 2
Personal Silliness: Vote what Soulknife "Fix"/Inspired Class Should I make??? Past Work Expansion Caricatures.
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