Flat world, or round?

[Cluedrew]

I like flatworlds. Ever since Golden Sun.Golden Sun did a very good job. Not that it had every answer, I remember a boy standing at the edge of the world, watching the waterfall and asking why we didn't run out of water. Perhaps there was an answer, but I didn't look for it, I was saving the world (and wandering about talking to random people). It didn't have any obvious gaps that I noticed though, the world just felt bigger than I understood.


And how does the inclusion of Fantastic Element A automatically justify or require the inclusion of Fantastic Elements B-Z?Does A->B? Because, as you have pointed out a number of times, things aren't disconnected from each other. So a flat world implies that gravity doesn't work the way we expect it do and (depending on details, its actually not automatic in that sense) creates room for areas with no or suddenly changing gravity. So justification (this is justification as in making it fit right?) depends on the details.

And sometimes I just want to make a setting with A, B, R (lots of R), J, K, a bit of Y with some imagery of L. So I do that and figure out how to make it work after. Some of my best settings do that because the results tend to be interesting.

[Max_Killjoy]

Golden Sun did a very good job. Not that it had every answer, I remember a boy standing at the edge of the world, watching the waterfall and asking why we didn't run out of water. Perhaps there was an answer, but I didn't look for it, I was saving the world (and wandering about talking to random people). It didn't have any obvious gaps that I noticed though, the world just felt bigger than I understood.

Does A->B? Because, as you have pointed out a number of times, things aren't disconnected from each other. So a flat world implies that gravity doesn't work the way we expect it do and (depending on details, its actually not automatic in that sense) creates room for areas with no or suddenly changing gravity. So justification (this is justification as in making it fit right?) depends on the details.

And sometimes I just want to make a setting with A, B, R (lots of R), J, K, a bit of Y with some imagery of L. So I do that and figure out how to make it work after. Some of my best settings do that because the results tend to be interesting.

A specific fantastic element requiring or leading to another specific fantastic element, is not the same as "Any fantastic element automatically opens to the door to all other fantastic elements" -- the later is the "But dragons!" Fallacy (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?427268-Does-quot-Rogue-Space-quot-Exist-in-Pathfinder/page2&p=19524815#post19524815), and leads to All The Kitchen Sinks settings.

[pwykersotz]

Who said anything about this being specific to D&D?

And how does the inclusion of Fantastic Element A automatically justify or require the inclusion of Fantastic Elements B-Z?

I certainly didn't say it was only about D&D. I merely used it as a common example.

And it doesn't justify or require anything. How does inclusion of science element A justify or require science elements B-Z? It doesn't. The only thing that is required is for the world to function to a degree of familiarity that the GM and table are willing and able to conceptualize in order to play in it. Explanations as to the how are entirely optional.

[golentan]

A specific fantastic element requiring or leading to another specific fantastic element, is not the same as "Any fantastic element automatically opens to the door to all other fantastic elements" -- the later is the "But dragons!" Fallacy (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?427268-Does-quot-Rogue-Space-quot-Exist-in-Pathfinder/page2&p=19524815#post19524815), and leads to All The Kitchen Sinks settings.

So. What?

What's wrong with having a fantasy kitchen sink? What's wrong with adding additional fantasy elements? Why is realism a sacred cow for you, when people have just as much fun with verisimilitude in games, in novels, in all sorts of things?

And hell, if we're talking about fallacies, what about the slippery slope fallacy? What, any change in cosmic constants requires me to have particle physics numbers worked out ahead of time? Any inclusion of additional mythological or discredited theories results in every idiocy being true, a kitchen sink clogged with refuse and unplayable? No, I reject that.

How sad is it that even in our fantasies, many people are so tied to their preconceptions of what reality is that they can't even contemplate a world which works differently in a game where they can ride airships without lift gas or truck with demons?

I said in my first comments that I choose a flat world because it saves questions about inappropriate applications of real world physics and immediately tells the audience (IE, my players) that things work different here, and I stand by that 1000%.

[gkathellar]

Golden Sun did a very good job. Not that it had every answer, I remember a boy standing at the edge of the world, watching the waterfall and asking why we didn't run out of water. Perhaps there was an answer, but I didn't look for it, I was saving the world (and wandering about talking to random people). It didn't have any obvious gaps that I noticed though, the world just felt bigger than I understood.

IIRC, the water actually was running out, as was everything else. The lighthouses replenished the world's supply of elemental material, and because they were turned off, the world had physically diminished in size over several centuries. Restarting the world's alchemical engine made this a non-issue.

An interesting case of totally otherworldly physics being carried to their logical conclusion.

[Max_Killjoy]

How sad is it that even in our fantasies, many people are so tied to their preconceptions of what reality is that they can't even contemplate a world which works differently in a game where they can ride airships without lift gas or truck with demons?


So people who don't agree with you have inferior imaginations, or something?

Whatever.

[Max_Killjoy]

I certainly didn't say it was only about D&D. I merely used it as a common example.


Your wording implied otherwise.




And it doesn't justify or require anything. How does inclusion of science element A justify or require science elements B-Z? It doesn't. The only thing that is required is for the world to function to a degree of familiarity that the GM and table are willing and able to conceptualize in order to play in it. Explanations as to the how are entirely optional.


You said (paraphrasing) that the world had other fantastic elements (note that "fantastic" here does not mean "pulled from fantasy fiction or gaming") and therefore it was strange that people would worry this one fantastic element not working.

That is pretty much the "but dragons!" fallacy in a nutshell.

[golentan]

So people who don't agree with you have inferior imaginations, or something?

Whatever.

No. Some people have different tastes. There are plenty of people who like round worlds for perfectly good reasons, plenty of people who like different settings and gaming systems and novels and what have you from me.

But when someone refuses to countenance deviations from their expectations, that IS a problem for me. We have a Standard Fantasy Setting (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StandardFantasySetting) and THAT bothers me. Most fantasy is so steeped in Tolkien and a glammed up version of medieval europe (especially england) with the same half dozen-ish humanoid races that things which deviate from that template are the exception, not the rule. Which wouldn't be a problem if further iterations on it were well executed, but usually they are not, they don't add anything new to the understanding. Further wrapping it in the trappings of the real world when there are other options, flowing toward mundanity as a lowest creativity cosmic denominator, just adds insult to injury for me unless it's intended to say something about fantasy or reality. No need to invent, no need to explore, nothing to cause that oldest, most sacred cry of human curiosity and science of "Huh... that's not quite right."

Deviations from reality should be the norm, not the exception, in fantasy. A flat world is not essential to that for me, far from it, but it is a shorthand which says that the setting is not from around here, that the rules are different.

[LordCdrMilitant]

No. Some people have different tastes. There are plenty of people who like round worlds for perfectly good reasons, plenty of people who like different settings and gaming systems and novels and what have you from me.

But when someone refuses to countenance deviations from their expectations, that IS a problem for me. We have a Standard Fantasy Setting (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StandardFantasySetting) and THAT bothers me. Most fantasy is so steeped in Tolkien and a glammed up version of medieval europe (especially england) with the same half dozen-ish humanoid races that things which deviate from that template are the exception, not the rule. Which wouldn't be a problem if further iterations on it were well executed, but usually they are not, they don't add anything new to the understanding. Further wrapping it in the trappings of the real world when there are other options, flowing toward mundanity as a lowest creativity cosmic denominator, just adds insult to injury for me unless it's intended to say something about fantasy or reality. No need to invent, no need to explore, nothing to cause that oldest, most sacred cry of human curiosity and science of "Huh... that's not quite right."

Deviations from reality should be the norm, not the exception, in fantasy. A flat world is not essential to that for me, far from it, but it is a shorthand which says that the setting is not from around here, that the rules are different.

Huh. Okay.

I think I dislike flat worlds for the same reason you like them. I always get the feeling that flat worlds are trying to be different for the sake of being different, and are generally poorly executed.

[Knaight]

And how does the inclusion of Fantastic Element A automatically justify or require the inclusion of Fantastic Elements B-Z?

It doesn't mandate them, but if you're willing to accept things of a given level of weirdness (e.g. magic) then things that are substantially less weird (e.g. a flat world) really shouldn't be an issue from a weirdness perspective. Not liking it from an aesthetic perspective or something is much more reasonable.

[Milo v3]

That is pretty much the "but dragons!" fallacy in a nutshell.
Not really "The only thing that is required is for the world to function to a degree of familiarity that the GM and table are willing and able to conceptualize in order to play in it." isn't "It's fantasy so I don't need to explain ****". It's saying how much description you need is only necessary up to a certain degree.

No, we don't know all the physics that would be broken by adding in x element.... but we don't need to know all the physics. We only need enough information so that the world is consistent. We all know that dragons in D&D probably shouldn't fly if there was realworld physics involved, but we're willing to suspend disbelief for that, but if the players then cut off that dragons wings but it can still fly your going to have a moment of dissonance because it's not consistent with the physics of that has been portrayed so far.

[Mechalich]

No, we don't know all the physics that would be broken by adding in x element.... but we don't need to know all the physics. We only need enough information so that the world is consistent. We all know that dragons in D&D probably shouldn't fly if there was realworld physics involved, but we're willing to suspend disbelief for that, but if the players then cut off that dragons wings but it can still fly your going to have a moment of dissonance because it's not consistent with the physics of that has been portrayed so far.

A flat world is not 'adding in element X.' A flat world is either a bizarre megastructure that functions according to normal physics and therefore has some really weird features and is probably a science fiction setting not a fantasy one or a complete reimaging on how physics works to produce a wholly mythic reality.

Dragons that fly in defiance what we know about the properties of powered flight and gravity represent an element that defies known physics. A flat world represents new physics.

Most fantasy settings operate with the presumption that physics are normal except when explicitly overridden by magic. A flat world floating in the endless chaos operates on the presumption that physics are completely different from first principles. This, taken to its logical endpoint, leads to bizarre surrealist realities with mind-bending rules.

Those worlds can be fun - I love Planescape and it is exactly that sort of setting, but such worlds have inherently low verisimilitude - they cannot feel real because they aren't even attempting to be real. They also can struggle as TTRPG settings because the kind of achievements that are meaningful in such settings do not map well to traditional RPG storytelling goals. That's why Planescape came up with its complicated faction system to provide an alternative pathway for achievement within its setup.

The real problem is when you have a surreal world but the material attempts to pretend the world is otherwise normal and to tell everyday fantasy stories for worlds with normal physics using them. That's when you have a need to project out what the fantasy physics actually mean and the results tend to be ridiculous. Spelljammer has this problem, where they tried to rewrite how gravity worked and the results just were not good.

[Xuc Xac]

Most fantasy settings operate with the presumption that physics are normal except when explicitly overridden by magic. A flat world floating in the endless chaos operates on the presumption that physics are completely different from first principles. This, taken to its logical endpoint, leads to bizarre surrealist realities with mind-bending rules.

You could say the same thing about quantum physics in the real world (and many learned scientists famously have). If we have a flat world and say that the world has a universal "down" direction toward which everything falls at 9.807 m/s2, what does that actually change as far the characters adventuring in the world are concerned?

It means that stars aren't massive balls of gas held together by their own gravity. I guess those points of light in the sky are something else then. So what? Did you have a plan to defeat the villain of the adventure that depended on stellar fusion millions of light-years away?
It means that there is no gravity between you, your chair, your hat, and every other object in the world. That force is so small that it's overwhelmed by everything else so you'll never notice it's missing. You have it now and you don't even notice it.
Every thrown projectile still travels in an arc, but you can't put one into orbit by throwing it hard enough. Too bad. When your fighter builds his own castle, his units of archers will be unaffected but he won't be able to have a space program.
If the tide goes in and out, it's not because of the moon's gravity. That doesn't mean that the tide doesn't go in and out on a predictable schedule. We tracked the tides before we ever knew what made them after all. I've been in nautical campaigns where tides were important. We never kept track of moon phases or a calendar. The tide was just a mcguffin along the lines of "Oh, you're stuck in this lagoon until high tide, so you might as well look around the island for a while".


I can't think of anything else. Did I miss something critical to fantasy adventurers? The rest of the universe might be drastically affected, but life on the ground would still work in the same way. Things like seasons and days will be caused by something other than the world rotating, but so what? Even meteorologists who study this daily still refer to "sunrise" and "sunset" instead of the rotation of the earth. The important thing for the people on the ground is that the days keep happening and not why they keep happening. I've been in many fantasy games (and sci-fi games too) where we said things like "we'll sneak in after dark" or "we'll strike at dawn". Even in the sci-est sci-fi settings, we never said "let's sneak in when this side of the planet rotates away from the local star".

[LordCdrMilitant]

You could say the same thing about quantum physics in the real world (and many learned scientists famously have). If we have a flat world and say that the world has a universal "down" direction toward which everything falls at 9.807 m/s2, what does that actually change as far the characters adventuring in the world are concerned?

It means that stars aren't massive balls of gas held together by their own gravity. I guess those points of light in the sky are something else then. So what? Did you have a plan to defeat the villain of the adventure that depended on stellar fusion millions of light-years away?
It means that there is no gravity between you, your chair, your hat, and every other object in the world. That force is so small that it's overwhelmed by everything else so you'll never notice it's missing. You have it now and you don't even notice it.
Every thrown projectile still travels in an arc, but you can't put one into orbit by throwing it hard enough. Too bad. When your fighter builds his own castle, his units of archers will be unaffected but he won't be able to have a space program.
If the tide goes in and out, it's not because of the moon's gravity. That doesn't mean that the tide doesn't go in and out on a predictable schedule. We tracked the tides before we ever knew what made them after all. I've been in nautical campaigns where tides were important. We never kept track of moon phases or a calendar. The tide was just a mcguffin along the lines of "Oh, you're stuck in this lagoon until high tide, so you might as well look around the island for a while".


I can't think of anything else. Did I miss something critical to fantasy adventurers? The rest of the universe might be drastically affected, but life on the ground would still work in the same way. Things like seasons and days will be caused by something other than the world rotating, but so what? Even meteorologists who study this daily still refer to "sunrise" and "sunset" instead of the rotation of the earth. The important thing for the people on the ground is that the days keep happening and not why they keep happening. I've been in many fantasy games (and sci-fi games too) where we said things like "we'll sneak in after dark" or "we'll strike at dawn". Even in the sci-est sci-fi settings, we never said "let's sneak in when this side of the planet rotates away from the local star".

Wait, do all things always fall at 9.81m/s2, irregardless of their mass? Also, if I keep teleporting higher, what goes on with the atmosphere? Does the air get thinner and thinner in line with the Standard Atmosphere model, until I'm in vacuum? Is it at constant density all the way up? How does that work?

Also, what keeps the world together and vaguely planar?

You've missed one critical thing: the world is interesting because it's flat. So we're going to explore the effects of its flatness. That wizard's tower is significantly less interesting that the possibilities that can happen if you break gravity.



On a mostly unrelated note: I also thought that the whole "fire, earth, water, air" element thing wasn't very cool either. I'd rather have the elemental planes of hydrogen and iron and astatine and uranium, etc.

[raygun goth]

I can't think of anything else. Did I miss something critical to fantasy adventurers?

Yeah.

All forms of navigation that we know of are only usable if the world is round. Trigonometry with a sextant? Useless. Latitude and longitude? Useless. Planning flights over large distances becomes an enormous headache just due to timekeeping alone, not to mention the weird results this is going to have when anyone tries to chart anything. The calendar is borked; you have to invent a completely new calendar because seasons don't operate the same way anymore, either. Basic, day to day life is effectively drastically altered. It should be remembered that even in the time of the Greeks, trade with China and India were basic components of daily life, and it should be so with a fantasy world, as well - no kingdom exists in a vacuum. It trades with its neighbors and even the far-flung reaches of the world. Are there potatoes? Tomatoes? Chili peppers of any kind? How did anyone navigate the damn ocean if stellar navigation doesn't work (moving away from an object in parallax on a flat surface results in varying angles of inclination of that object, you can't use any fixed points in the sky because there aren't any on a flat world)? You could also see the sun from anywhere on it, because there's nowhere for the sun to go, and solar inclination is another method by which navigators guide themselves and measure seasons.

Navigation questions should be important questions to any adventuring party. So should seasonal travel and religious holidays. These things are all affected and need to be accounted for.

There ain't no moon phases no more.

Eclipses can't happen the normal way anymore.

Cultures living on a flat world, of course, would have "grown up" on it and might have answers to this, and if you're going to flatten the world, you should worry about this stuff.


If some deity decided to unroll the Earth's surface like a flat map projection while you sleep tonight, you'd wake up tomorrow and see nothing different unless you went along the lakeshore and noticed that you can suddenly see Canada/Wisconsin across the lake. There would be differences on land too, but you would need surveying equipment to spot them, because they aren't different enough to stand out.

I live in Florida. It cannot get any flatter than this. Kansas is straight up jagged compared to Florida. But we have a big sandbar structure running through the center of the peninsula. If I was in Clermont, I would be able to see Zephyrhills and Tampa on a flat Earth. I have also lived on the ocean for six months. I can eyeball Polaris practically in my sleep. I would know the instant I looked up, night or day.


On a mostly unrelated note: I also thought that the whole "fire, earth, water, air" element thing wasn't very cool either. I'd rather have the elemental planes of hydrogen and iron and astatine and uranium, etc.

Oh, man. I use the Platonic five in my main setting, mostly because I like Earth wheels (and the center is the fifth point), but I've never actually had elemental planes attached to it, and it's gotten more complicated as time has gone on, now it's like... five elements, then two modifiers (though there's a null modifier, so technically three), and three sub-elements which serve less as elements in their own right and more instigators. It actually gets pretty fun when players start tinkering with the way their states work.

Elemental plane of Iron sounds awesome, though.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

If some deity decided to unroll the Earth's surface like a flat map projection while you sleep tonight, you'd wake up tomorrow and see nothing different unless you went along the lakeshore and noticed that you can suddenly see Canada/Wisconsin across the lake. There would be differences on land too, but you would need surveying equipment to spot them, because they aren't different enough to stand out.

I live on the tenth floor in the Netherlands, which is flat and has lots of medium sized cities (say a few tens of thousands to a few hundreds of thousands of people, those count as medium to me, I understand this is really subjective and a person from Beijing would not see it the same way). My view would improve spectacularly by gaining quite a few secondary skylines wherever nothing higher than my own building is standing in the way. Ones you get above tree level or in an area where there are very few trees (even without looking out of my window I'd pass through places where I would see the effect within a week) you're going to notice. It might be even better on mountain tops. Sure, the next mountain range is quite some distance away (European context, in the US they're probably a little too far away), but it's also really really big. I think you should be able to see the Pyrenees from the Alps. Maybe make out a blue stripe where the sea separates Germany and Sweden. That sort of stuff.

It'd be pretty cool, but kind of exhausting to have to be remembered off all the time while playing a game.

[Xuc Xac]

Yeah.

(A bunch of stuff based on the world being round)

None of that is affected by changing the direction of gravity, which is what I asked about. Those differences are caused by changing the shape. (And a lot of them don't apply to a typical medieval fantasy setting on a round world either. Longitude is a modern invention, for example.)

[raygun goth]

None of that is affected by changing the direction of gravity, which is what I asked about. Those differences are caused by changing the shape. (And a lot of them don't apply to a typical medieval fantasy setting on a round world either. Longitude is a modern invention, for example.)

If by modern you mean 200 BC, then sure. It was only the invention of the chronometer that was recent. The Antikytheria mechanism could precisely adjust for that, too.

But I'm certain the settings people play in have smoked meat, potatoes, non-vellum paper, full plate, and platinum but also somehow don't have common guns, printing presses, or compasses.

But, hey, you were looking for things that impacted adventurer lives. I gave some. That's all.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

O wait, I just realized how to approach the horizon thing.

An ant is a few millimeter in size, and you can see it from a few meters away. So providing line of sight, and assuming a very clear day with little fog and dust, that's about the conversion factor, something can be seen from roughly a thousand times as far away as it is thick. This idea seems to hold up reasonably well if I try to think of how far away I can see stuff, it even comes with a cap for things smaller than a few tens of micrometers in width, because our eyes can't focus at stuff closer than a few tens of centimeters away.

So, a thing that's a few meters in size, like a car or a shed, would be visible from several kilometers away. The normal horizon for an adult sized person standing in a flat field is about 5 km, so for these objects it doesn't really make a difference. Large buildings and ships about tens of meters in size are visible from tens of kilometers. That's still not too big of a difference. If you're looking from a tall tower in our world you can probably already see cities roughly that far away. The main difference is that they do not disappear when you go down. I bet in a flat world you could find a spot on or close to the ground in the Netherlands where you could clearly see the cities of Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam and Utrecht. Sure, those are only about 55 km apart, but it's still something you couldn't do today.

But then the fun starts. Objects a few hundred meters in size are visible from a few hundred kilometers away. The Ardennes mountain range in southern Belgium sits about 175 km from my house. I bet there would be at least one clear line of sight from my tenth floor window to those. I could see mountains from my house. (Mountains are a lot wider than they are tall of course, but similar to how you can't really see the great wall of China from space and how roundworms can be close to a millimeter in length but still invisible to the human eye, it's the smallest dimension that counts.) And on a very clear day it gets better, because to the side of the Ardennes, speaking from my view, sit the Alps. They're 550 km away, but they're also several kilometers high, meaning they're not just visible, but pretty clearly so. like a mouse at several meters away, rather than an ant. The Scottish Highlands sit around the same distance in the other direction, with a lot of the space in between being sea. I'd probably be able to see those, if I can find a north facing window to look out of.

A flat world, it's a small place.

Almost as small as a world with modern cars.

[gkathellar]

Yeah.

All forms of navigation that we know of are only usable if the world is round. Trigonometry with a sextant? Useless. Latitude and longitude? Useless. Planning flights over large distances becomes an enormous headache just due to timekeeping alone, not to mention the weird results this is going to have when anyone tries to chart anything. The calendar is borked; you have to invent a completely new calendar because seasons don't operate the same way anymore, either. Basic, day to day life is effectively drastically altered. It should be remembered that even in the time of the Greeks, trade with China and India were basic components of daily life, and it should be so with a fantasy world, as well - no kingdom exists in a vacuum. It trades with its neighbors and even the far-flung reaches of the world. Are there potatoes? Tomatoes? Chili peppers of any kind? How did anyone navigate the damn ocean if stellar navigation doesn't work (moving away from an object in parallax on a flat surface results in varying angles of inclination of that object, you can't use any fixed points in the sky because there aren't any on a flat world)? You could also see the sun from anywhere on it, because there's nowhere for the sun to go, and solar inclination is another method by which navigators guide themselves and measure seasons.

Navigation questions should be important questions to any adventuring party. So should seasonal travel and religious holidays. These things are all affected and need to be accounted for.

There ain't no moon phases no more.

Eclipses can't happen the normal way anymore.

See all of these statements run on the assumption that the flattening of the world is the only thing that's changed. That's obviously pretty silly - a flat world requires, by necessity, a totally different set of physical laws and underlying principles. Lunar phases work fine if the moon is a giant, divine eye that slowly succumbs to exhaustion and sleeps for one night out of 29. Eclipses may not happen the regular way, but they can definitely happen when the sun does battle with the serpent of chaos. Night falls when the Sun reaches the Western edge of the sky, gets bored, and parties its way back East on foot. The seasons are the waxing and waning of the five planets, and their relative positions allow for navigation by night. I can go all day with this - the point is that just because a setting's underlying causes follow a mythopoetic logic instead of a more familiar one doesn't mean the setting is noticeably different in matters of day-to-day life.

(Also, a bone to pick: trade between Classical Greece and India or China was indirect, not a basic component of everyday life. Yes, currency from one place would end up in the other, but that was because of trade routes, not because the two had any kind of relationship with one another.)

[Mutazoia]

https://pics.me.me/if-the-earth-was-flat-cats-would-have-pushed-everything-21413617.png

[Anonymouswizard]

https://pics.me.me/if-the-earth-was-flat-cats-would-have-pushed-everything-21413617.png

Thank you, but I see enough of that one on Facebook

[Segev]

First time I saw a graphic put to it.

[raygun goth]

See all of these statements run on the assumption that the flattening of the world is the only thing that's changed. That's obviously pretty silly - a flat world requires, by necessity, a totally different set of physical laws and underlying principles. Lunar phases work fine if the moon is a giant, divine eye that slowly succumbs to exhaustion and sleeps for one night out of 29. Eclipses may not happen the regular way, but they can definitely happen when the sun does battle with the serpent of chaos. Night falls when the Sun reaches the Western edge of the sky, gets bored, and parties its way back East on foot. The seasons are the waxing and waning of the five planets, and their relative positions allow for navigation by night. I can go all day with this - the point is that just because a setting's underlying causes follow a mythopoetic logic instead of a more familiar one doesn't mean the setting is noticeably different in matters of day-to-day life.

Thus, my closing statement. Of course it requires a new set of physical laws. I'm a fantasy writer, I am more than familiar with this concept.

And yes, it is different. That's the whole point of making it different. If it isn't going to look different from the ground up, then why would you do it in the first place?


(Also, a bone to pick: trade between Classical Greece and India or China was indirect, not a basic component of everyday life. Yes, currency from one place would end up in the other, but that was because of trade routes, not because the two had any kind of relationship with one another.)

Oh, yes it was. Pepper, both black and red varieties, apples, citrons, almost all dye, cotton, glass, clay, paper, cinnamon, almost everything used as medicine, and tea came from the greater Asia area; contact with the Chinese, Africa, and India were established by the Greeks and almost never went away. It was nearly impossible to turn around in medieval Europe, even in districts full of commoners who'd never left their own street, without seeing something that came from a foreign land. That's not counting the huge influx of goods and information that started happening during the Crusades.

The Greeks had colonies in India; Greek's obsession with yogurt and dill is actually historically difficult to track because a large chunk of the base types of food in greater India and Greece are practically identical. The Greeks were eating miso and egg drop soup. India and South China statuary is based on Greek designs. The physical appearance of Buddha is based on Apollo. These routes continued to be active and regular throughout the Middle Ages. In 1200s Spain you'd be buying your damn silverware and discover "Made in China" stickers. Samurai were a feature of Iberia, because when Japan closed their borders, they wouldn't let an entire clan back in, and there are even people now in Spain with the family name "Japon."

[Xuc Xac]

Wait, do all things always fall at 9.81m/s2, irregardless of their mass?

It seems like it. How are you proposing to find out to a more accurate degree than "It's 10ish or so m/s2"?


Also, if I keep teleporting higher, what goes on with the atmosphere? Does the air get thinner and thinner in line with the Standard Atmosphere model, until I'm in vacuum? Is it at constant density all the way up? How does that work?


Which Standard Atmosphere model? Despite the name, it's hardly "standard" because there are several different ones. I would say the air gets thinner as you go up, just like climbing a tall mountain. If you had sensitive enough instruments, you could see that gravity also gets weaker with increased altitude. If you get far enough above the ground, gravity is theoretically reduced to zero. This is probably why stars don't fall (unless they're attached to something up there, which is a competing theory).



Also, what keeps the world together and vaguely planar?


What keeps you together? Are you operating on the assumption that it has to be kept from flying apart like a rotating planet?



All forms of navigation that we know of are only usable if the world is round. Trigonometry with a sextant? Useless. Latitude and longitude? Useless. Planning flights over large distances becomes an enormous headache just due to timekeeping alone, not to mention the weird results this is going to have when anyone tries to chart anything.


All the forms of navigation that you know, not "we". Those examples only work on a round world because they are specific to a round world. You might as well complain that an underwater mermaid campaign wouldn't work because their boots wouldn't fit. In a standard medieval fantasy world, there is no longitude. It's a thing that exists in theory when mathematicians talk about globes, but nobody navigates with it because they can't measure it without really accurate clocks that don't get screwed up by being carrying on a ship that moves around. Nobody plans long distance flights! When is the last time anyone in a D&D game teleported a long distance and felt jet-lagged because the sun was suddenly in a different part of the sky? (If they had the technology to have regular passenger plane service, I'm sure flatworlders would just schedule things with clocks like we do, but it would be simpler because they don't have to deal with time zones.) On a round world, there are many difficulties in making maps and charts of large areas because we have to figure out how to project the round surface onto a flat map. On a flat world, it's easy because the world and the map are the same shape.

A lot of these complaints (time zones for example) seem like they would also apply to a round fantasy setting but the flat world is held to a stricter standard of scrutiny. The party teleports around the world? Nobody notices or cares that the sun just skipped forward or backward several hours. But travel across a flat world and suddenly it's all "but what about...?" It reminds me a lot of the objections to gunpowder in fantasy. "Oh, nobody would use gunpowder because one fireball would blow you up if you carried it!" and yet nobody ever asks if the archer snaps a bowstring no matter how many times he gets roasted by fireballs and dragon breath. When something is different than the usual standard, they look a lot more closely for problems. That doesn't mean there are really more problems. It just means that they are looking harder for them.



The calendar is borked; you have to invent a completely new calendar because seasons don't operate the same way anymore, either.


We live on the same planet with the same axial tilt. Guess how many calendars have been used in history. How many different calendars do you think are being used right now? On a flat world, maybe seasons work differently or maybe they do work the same way. They just don't have the same cause. Instead of axial tilt to the sun, it could be something mystical: "The far north is perpetually cold and frozen around the palace of the god of ice. To the far south, the land is scorched around the palace of the goddess of fire. They constantly struggle to force their dominance over the world. The ice lord pushes his power south, which causes winter, until he gets pushed back by the lady of fire in the spring. When she pushes farther north, it gets really hot for the summer, until the ice god forces her back in the autumn." I could make up mystical seasons all day and there's no reason to stick to summer/autumn/winter/spring cycles.



Basic, day to day life is effectively drastically altered. It should be remembered that even in the time of the Greeks, trade with China and India were basic components of daily life, and it should be so with a fantasy world, as well - no kingdom exists in a vacuum. It trades with its neighbors and even the far-flung reaches of the world. Are there potatoes? Tomatoes? Chili peppers of any kind? How did anyone navigate the damn ocean if stellar navigation doesn't work


If you mean the modern Greeks, they use GPS just like everyone else. If you're talking about the ancient Greeks, they didn't navigate the ocean. They sailed along coasts or sent caravans over land. Potatoes, tomatoes, and chili peppers have nothing to do with the shape of the world. They came from "somewhere else", but nothing about that "somewhere else" depends on the world being round. The ancient Greeks were big fans of bronze and used a lot of it. They got tin from Britain. Do you know how to find Britain from Greece by boat? Sail along the coast with the land on your right until you see the White Cliffs of Dover across the water on your left. To get back to Greece, just turn around and follow the coast back the way you came.



(moving away from an object in parallax on a flat surface results in varying angles of inclination of that object, you can't use any fixed points in the sky because there aren't any on a flat world)? You could also see the sun from anywhere on it, because there's nowhere for the sun to go, and solar inclination is another method by which navigators guide themselves and measure seasons.


Why would they not be fixed? On a round world, stars appear fixed relative to each other (planets are named "planets", meaning something like "wanderer", because they appear to move relative to the other stars. The field of stars appears to rise and set as the Earth rotates. On a flat world, there can still be stars in the sky but they probably won't rise and set. If the stars are really far away, you wouldn't be able to move far enough to get out from under the ones directly over head or change which ones are near the horizon. Instead of saying things like "when the sun goes down, watch for the dog star and mark the point where it rises, because that is East by Southeast", they could just say "the dog star is east by southeast" because stars don't rise and set in the sky.

How do you know there's nowhere for the sun to go? That's one of the questions that needs to be answered for a flat world. How does sunrise and sunset work? Is the world finite in size and the sun goes over it in the day and under it at night? If the world stretches out to infinity, how does the sun work? Does it rise out of a hole, travel across the sky for a day, then drop into another hole to travel back to the beginning? Is it always nighttime outside of that narrow path? Is the sun actually an endless series of suns that travel across the sky one day apart? It doesn't depend on the world being flat. The important thing is how big the world is and whether or not it has an edge.

If you can't use stars, you can still navigate by landmarks, which are a lot more useful on a flat world if there are mountains around. At sea, you could still use all of the Polynesian tricks that weren't based on stars. Some Polynesian techniques are very clever tricks, such as using hydrophobic birds as aerial spotters (if you let the bird go and it can see land from up in the sky, it will fly that way, otherwise it will land back on your boat). Other techniques just seem like sorcery, like recognizing places at sea by the shapes of the waves or recognizing distant islands by the color of the clouds floating over them. If you made that up for a work of fiction, people wouldn't believe it because it sounds too fantastic.

There are a lot of ways to navigate that don't rely on a simple coordinate system. I've seen medieval maps of Italy that were just shaped like a U, because they didn't map the shape of the country. They just listed which town is next if you move up or down the coast. A flat world version of medieval Italy would probably have much more accurate maps because they would be able to see the mountains as a landmark.



So should seasonal travel and religious holidays. These things are all affected and need to be accounted for.


Seasons aren't caused by roundness. You could have a round world with no axial tilt and a 413 day year, which would screw up the Gregorian calendar and have no seasons. Religious holidays might use an arbitrary calendar that doesn't care about seasons or leap years. Some churches in the real world still use the Julian calendar and celebrate Christmas in January because their leap years didn't accurately correct for the length of a solar year and they're now two weeks behind. I've lived in places with four distinct seasons and places with only two (and I've visited places that had three). All those places are on this same round planet.



There ain't no moon phases no more.


That depends on several factors unrelated to the flatness of the world:
Is there a moon? What shape is it? The sun and moon can still be spheres that move around the flat world and eclipse each other. How is the moon illuminated? Does it reflect sunlight or does it produce its own light? Moon phases could be the result of a rotating spherical moon that only produces light on one half of its surface. When deciding the shape and size of the world, you also have to decide the shape and size of everything else. That's probably better quality world-building than just assuming there's a moon just like Earth's because you assume "everything is the same except magic".



Cultures living on a flat world, of course, would have "grown up" on it and might have answers to this, and if you're going to flatten the world, you should worry about this stuff.


You should worry about this stuff no matter what shape the world is.



I live in Florida. It cannot get any flatter than this. Kansas is straight up jagged compared to Florida. But we have a big sandbar structure running through the center of the peninsula. If I was in Clermont, I would be able to see Zephyrhills and Tampa on a flat Earth.


From Clermont, you could actually see the tops of the high rises in Tampa now on a round Earth if there weren't trees in the way. 100 North Tampa is tall enough that you could see 29 miles to the horizon from the top floor (if there were nothing blocking the view to the horizon) which is 7 miles past Clermont. You still can't see it from Clermont because there are trees between them. The trees are much shorter but they're also much closer and fill more of the field of view. If Clermont had highrises too, they could see each other.

Edit: No, that's wrong. I was thinking of Clermont to Orlando. Looking from Clermont to Tampa, the biggest building at 100 North Tampa would be just under 0.09 degrees. Big enough to see with the human eye but small enough that it would blend in with everything else on the horizon. You could probably see a bright beacon blinking on the top at night though.


If you're looking from a tall tower in our world you can probably already see cities roughly that far away. The main difference is that they do not disappear when you go down. I bet in a flat world you could find a spot on or close to the ground in the Netherlands where you could clearly see the cities of Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam and Utrecht. Sure, those are only about 55 km apart, but it's still something you couldn't do today.

But then the fun starts. Objects a few hundred meters in size are visible from a few hundred kilometers away. The Ardennes mountain range in southern Belgium sits about 175 km from my house. I bet there would be at least one clear line of sight from my tenth floor window to those. I could see mountains from my house. (Mountains are a lot wider than they are tall of course, but similar to how you can't really see the great wall of China from space and how roundworms can be close to a millimeter in length but still invisible to the human eye, it's the smallest dimension that counts.) And on a very clear day it gets better, because to the side of the Ardennes, speaking from my view, sit the Alps. They're 550 km away, but they're also several kilometers high, meaning they're not just visible, but pretty clearly so. like a mouse at several meters away, rather than an ant. The Scottish Highlands sit around the same distance in the other direction, with a lot of the space in between being sea. I'd probably be able to see those, if I can find a north facing window to look out of.


You can see about 35km from the top of the Maastoren in Rotterdam. The tallest peak in the Alps is 4810m above sea level. If you were at sea level and had an unobstructed view of it from 550 km away, it would be half a degree of arc tall. That's about how big the sun and moon appear to be from Earth and about half the width of your little finger held out at arm's length. However, it's too far to see through the atmosphere. Rayleigh scattering (what makes the sky look blue) sets an upper limit of about 296 km through air. When you get close enough to see the Alps through the blue haze of the sky, the tallest peak would be close to 1 degree of arc. If you're within 3 km of a tree, you won't see the Alps over it at that distance. It doesn't take a lot to block the view, but looking across the sea would be impressive. In the real world, you can see across the narrow part of the English Channel. On a flat world, you could (just barely) see across the wide end too.

If you want to, you can calculate the apparent size of objects with trigonometry (or use an online calculator like http://www.1728.org/angsize.htm). Just find the angle between the top and bottom (or sides) of the object to see how much of your field of vision it would take up. The smallest things humans can see are about 0.02 degrees. Things get smaller with distance and disappear when they are smaller than 0.02 degrees (and they get really hard to see long before that). Everything disappears once it gets past the limit of light scattering in the air (296 km under ideal conditions and much less if the air is humid/dusty). Red light can travel further than blue so light sources that are bright enough to be seen from that distance will turn red before they vanish.

[pwykersotz]

Stuff

A magnificent post. Well said.

[Mechalich]

Look, it is entirely possible to build a setting with weird physics and to take those physics seriously. However, unless you are an actual physicist and a pretty darned careful you are likely to get something dramatically wrong and have left in a massive plothole. In a novel that's an 'oops!' in a TTRPG that's a potentially game-breaking problem. If you choose to have a crazy-wild set of physics in play, you're going to have to spend an immense amount of time working on them and trying to get them correct enough to maintain verisimilitude. There's two very substantial consequences to that: first, time spent on the physical world-building is time not spent on cultures, history, or themes. Second, the weirdness of your world-building has a tendency to overwhelm your storytelling, since it may require thousands of words to explain how the heck everything operates now. In a novel this can be derailing to the story. This is a common objection regarding the works of Greg Egan - who basically does weird physics as a career path - in that his stories devolve into weird math problems you, the reader, do not care about and that overwhelms the drama. In a TTRPG this can simply prevent your game from happening because the several pages of material needed to make the characters understand how your bizarre world works in the most basic way simply will not be read and if your game happens at all the players will not understand the implications. The test case here is Exalted. That game would be much better if Creation was simply a normal spherical world and the Wyld emerged in remote areas, it would be less complicated and not have stupidly huge ocean and desert distances and confusion about how seasonality works.

Having a flat world carries costs to any and all games set on it. The benefits it provides are minimal any story a TTRPG is capable of telling that takes world-building seriously. It is not worth it.

Important: that calculation is not the same as for narrative production. A truly bizarre backdrop that functions according to its own special rules might be essential for a particular narrative vision even as the world produced is remarkably ill-suited for a game. The Exalted example is once again telling. Tales from the Flat Earth is a particular set of novels invoking a particular form of mythic despair and horror. They make for worthy literature, but if you actually read them, thinking 'this would be a great setting for a game' is the last response that should come to mind.

[Milo v3]

The test case here is Exalted. That game would be much better if Creation was simply a normal spherical world and the Wyld emerged in remote areas, it would be less complicated and not have stupidly huge ocean and desert distances and confusion about how seasonality works.
I think many people would disagree with this (myself included).

[Max_Killjoy]

Look, it is entirely possible to build a setting with weird physics and to take those physics seriously. However, unless you are an actual physicist and a pretty darned careful you are likely to get something dramatically wrong and have left in a massive plothole. In a novel that's an 'oops!' in a TTRPG that's a potentially game-breaking problem. If you choose to have a crazy-wild set of physics in play, you're going to have to spend an immense amount of time working on them and trying to get them correct enough to maintain verisimilitude. There's two very substantial consequences to that: first, time spent on the physical world-building is time not spent on cultures, history, or themes. Second, the weirdness of your world-building has a tendency to overwhelm your storytelling, since it may require thousands of words to explain how the heck everything operates now. In a novel this can be derailing to the story. This is a common objection regarding the works of Greg Egan - who basically does weird physics as a career path - in that his stories devolve into weird math problems you, the reader, do not care about and that overwhelms the drama. In a TTRPG this can simply prevent your game from happening because the several pages of material needed to make the characters understand how your bizarre world works in the most basic way simply will not be read and if your game happens at all the players will not understand the implications. The test case here is Exalted. That game would be much better if Creation was simply a normal spherical world and the Wyld emerged in remote areas, it would be less complicated and not have stupidly huge ocean and desert distances and confusion about how seasonality works.

Having a flat world carries costs to any and all games set on it. The benefits it provides are minimal any story a TTRPG is capable of telling that takes world-building seriously. It is not worth it.

Important: that calculation is not the same as for narrative production. A truly bizarre backdrop that functions according to its own special rules might be essential for a particular narrative vision even as the world produced is remarkably ill-suited for a game. The Exalted example is once again telling. Tales from the Flat Earth is a particular set of novels invoking a particular form of mythic despair and horror. They make for worthy literature, but if you actually read them, thinking 'this would be a great setting for a game' is the last response that should come to mind.


If these forums EVER needed the ability to upvote posts, it's right now, for this post right here ^.

[Milo v3]

In a TTRPG this can simply prevent your game from happening because the several pages of material needed to make the characters understand how your bizarre world works in the most basic way simply will not be read and if your game happens at all the players will not understand the implications.
Wait, wouldn't that mean it'd take years to play something like any official D&D setting considering how basically everything in it goes against physics and biology and how everything in it is made from supernatural elements rather than real world ones, how life works is determined by positive energy rather than biological signs, how there is perpetual motion, how there are liquids like holy water which have negative weight, where there are solid objects made of Nothing, how giant lizards made of crystals with mind powers which can breath out "Cold Energy" can interbreed with a gelationous cube, forms of vision which require no actual light, where physical locations can be sentient, where the physics of other realms can overlap and take over, where time travel exists, where darkness is an actual thing rather than a lack of light, where there is whole planes of existence where basically everyone can teleport an infinite distance at their whim, where magic comes from special radiation called the weave, where Acid and Cold is a friggin energy, where bases are Acidic, where you can have creatures made from solid evil, etc.

The amount of magical stuff which should require an explanation in games like D&D is immense, and based on what you've said apparently attempting to play in such a world would require a massive amount of text to explain all of this away and then probably contradict itself because of how much it has to explain of it's own unique physics. But people all over the world are still able to play D&D.

[golentan]

It's a game. There's a measurable cost to using real world physics too vigorously, even in straight sci fi games like my beloved traveller. That's what caused the catgirls meme in the first place, and a quick perusal of various optimization or weirdness discussions for games will reveal the idiotic things you can do through the application of real world monatomic substances or engineering or what have you.

Damage is measured not in kinetic energy, or in permanent organ degradation and scar tissue, it is measured in dice, and applied by weapons and removed by various healing methods, the most mundane of which cause my medical soul to growl with envy at their effectiveness.

It is a game. It requires some amount of suspension of disbelief, and some amount of opt-in on the game being played, and some amount of agreement not to break it. The real world's rules are not special, not somehow immune to requiring suspension of belief when translated into a game governed by dice and minds.

And I disagree creation would be better as a globe.

[CharonsHelper]

Wait, wouldn't that mean it'd take years to play something like any official D&D setting considering how basically everything in it goes against physics and biology and how everything in it is made from supernatural elements rather than real world ones, how life works is determined by positive energy rather than biological signs, how there is perpetual motion, how there are liquids like holy water which have negative weight, where there are solid...

Those aren't different rules of physics.

Physics works pretty much the same as in our world, there are just a lot of different magic things which can break those rules. Because magic!

[Cluedrew]

You know I just don't understand why people say that the physics have to be worked out so much to avoid plot holes. The idea has been forwarded several times but I don't think it has ever been explained. If someone has a good explanation for it please share it.

As I see it, it is unlikely to matter. If you are playing a game about scientists in a sci-fi or modern setting it might matter. But a lot of times, society doesn't understand the inner workings of the universe well enough for them to actually be knowable by the characters anyways, and if they are the characters probably haven't studied them that well anyways.

So that leaves only the day-to-day interactions, the surface, open for observation. That's all that should have to hold up. Even if the "laws of physics" behind them would be involve 10 fundamental forces, properties of matter that change due to sub-atomic changes and a boat load of special cases on top of that what does it matter?

Is the game suddenly not fun when you haven't named every turtle in the stack? Anything beyond what will come up in the game (maybe a bit beyond that for safety or for fun) shouldn't be detailed, because it will never come up and hence, how could it matter?

[2D8HP]

All forms of navigation that we know of are only usable if the world is round. Trigonometry with a sextant? Useless. Latitude and longitude? Useless. Planning flights over large distances becomes an enormous headache just due to timekeeping alone, not to mention the weird results this is going to have when anyone tries to chart anything...


Since getting lost is an adventure, lack of ability to navigate sounds more like a feature than a bug.

Let me try and take my DM horned helmet off, and think like a player

.....

Didn't work.

I just don't think "shenanigan" enough.

I just don't try to act out Lest Darkness Fall scenarios.

I know there's precedents in fantasy literature (Fafhrd putting rockets on his skies in The Snow Women), and definitely in RPG's, but the kind of inventiveness of say @Anonymous Wizard just doesn't come to me.

So a flat world just doesn't bug me.

I seek wonder in the setting, I don't wonder how to break the setting.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Fantastic worldbuilding is so much more easier, fun, and interesting than realistic worldbuilding (http://spriggans-den.com/2017/03/23/fantastic-worldbuilding-is-so-much-more-easier-fun-and-interesting-than-realistic-worldbuilding/)

[Xuc Xac]

Look, it is entirely possible to build a setting with weird physics and to take those physics seriously. However, unless you are an actual physicist and a pretty darned careful you are likely to get something dramatically wrong and have left in a massive plothole.

That's not a "flat world" problem, that's just a "world" problem. I remember someone once asked in a forum post "How much would a gem of this size and weight be worth? I just made it up for my players to find but now they want to sell it." The answer turned out to be "It isn't worth anything because at that size and weight, it's apparently made of styrofoam." Even G.R.R. Martin was apparently shocked when he saw the set design for "Game of Thrones" and realized that he had made the wall much too big.

On the other side of the GM screen, players who don't think things through might think something is a plot hole when it isn't.


Since getting lost is an adventure, lack of ability to navigate sounds more like a feature than a bug.

Yes. The downside to things like teleportation, air ships, or really good sea navigation tools and charts is that you can go straight from point A to point D without having to adventure your way through B and stop to ask directions in C. All that cool geography stops being important.

[LordCdrMilitant]

It seems like it. How are you proposing to find out to a more accurate degree than "It's 10ish or so m/s2"?

Which Standard Atmosphere model? Despite the name, it's hardly "standard" because there are several different ones. I would say the air gets thinner as you go up, just like climbing a tall mountain. If you had sensitive enough instruments, you could see that gravity also gets weaker with increased altitude. If you get far enough above the ground, gravity is theoretically reduced to zero. This is probably why stars don't fall (unless they're attached to something up there, which is a competing theory).

What keeps you together? Are you operating on the assumption that it has to be kept from flying apart like a rotating planet?


By teleporting high enough. Greater Teleport has no maximum range and no error chance, and Planar Adaptation can specifically allow me to survive in vacuum, so I can determine at the very least that gravity does, in fact, fall off with altitude. Then, I can bring with me an immovable rod of known length, and measure the time it takes for objects of known mass to travel the length of the immovable rod, thus allowing me to determine their net acceleration. There will be some minor error due to air friction, but it is fairly negligible over the low speeds and distances.

ISA.

[Mechalich]

That's not a "flat world" problem, that's just a "world" problem. I remember someone once asked in a forum post "How much would a gem of this size and weight be worth? I just made it up for my players to find but now they want to sell it." The answer turned out to be "It isn't worth anything because at that size and weight, it's apparently made of styrofoam." Even G.R.R. Martin was apparently shocked when he saw the set design for "Game of Thrones" and realized that he had made the wall much too big.

On the other side of the GM screen, players who don't think things through might think something is a plot hole when it isn't.


G.R.R. Martin is bad at math and a bunch of other things. That the wall was way to big was obvious to many readers (myself included) from the get-go. More relevantly: snow causes crop failure, ergo, 'summer snows' mean the North is incapable of supporting an agrarian society.

The thing is, the level of changes Martin introduces at the world scale were small, extremely long seasons (highly plausible) and seasonal irregularity (less so) are small change in the scale of potential weirdness, much smaller scale than the kind of changes your talking about if you go for a flat world.

Committing to a flat world means that, as a world-builder, you are saying 'I'm going to make a fantasy world that behaves massively different from the Earth from first principles and when I run into any trouble I cannot default back to baseline conditions at all.' That's a Nintendo Hard problem.

You're never going to get everything right in world building, nobody's perfect, and readers and players will be required to mind caulk together a set of rationalizations to plaster over the errors. However, the more changes you make and the more bizarre your setup is, the less likely it will be for that mind caulk to hold together, especially across multiple tables. Committing to a flat world means taking on a massive additional burden in this regard for minimal benefit.

Note: this doesn't apply if your setting is not intended to retain verisimilitude at all and has gone full-on surrealist. That's certainly a thing you can do and it can be awesome, but doing that has its own set of consequences.

[Xuc Xac]

Then, I can bring with me an immovable rod of known length, and measure the time it takes for objects of known mass to travel the length of the immovable rod, thus allowing me to determine their net acceleration. There will be some minor error due to air friction, but it is fairly negligible over the low speeds and distances.



Here's your clock:
http://i1243.photobucket.com/albums/gg552/picarys/medieval%20clock_zpsixu24lla.jpg

It has an hour hand. I don't think air resistance over the length of your immovable rod will be the biggest source of error.

[5a Violista]

Here's your clock:
http://i1243.photobucket.com/albums/gg552/picarys/medieval%20clock_zpsixu24lla.jpg

It has an hour hand. I don't think air resistance over the length of your immovable rod will be the biggest source of error.

So you're basically saying that hourglasses, magically-regulated time-keepers (Many spells do last for an exact multiple of 6 seconds in certain interpretations of D&D, after all), pocketwatches, pendulums, springs attached to gears, mental clocks that allow people to count out time, etc are all incapable of existing in flat worlds? Or are they merely desynchronized whenever they go through some sort of teleporting spell?

Because if teleporting messes up all timekeeping equipment, that would be pretty neat and have interesting cosmological implications.

[ImNotTrevor]

This all assumes a world that runs on Realworld Scientific Principals and that can be explained through such.

I usually get around this by giving answers that actively oppose one another when people start poking, or observations that could not possibly exist. Or I just stare at them and tell them to put away the physics textbook so we can play.

A world that runs on Mythopoetic theory functions just fine so long as it is internally consistent in its logic, flatworld or no.

Allow me to worldbuild real quick:

Tyr is a great disk floating in Void, one of many such disks that fill Void. Around the disk moves Tuva, known also as The Father Star. His wife, Lyrian, also moves around the disk as Mother Moon. The two gods give life to Tyr as it tumbles through Void.

Tyr is a disk because Creation, at his birth, had only so much clay to give. So he shaped his worlds into disks and cast them into Void. With each disk, Creation left a touch of himself upon it. Tuva, Father Star, is a Son of Creation.

Tuva looked down upon his great clay disk and decreed that it should be beautiful. So he set forth to shape it, pulling up mountains and pushing down riverbeds and canyons. His salty sweat became the oceans and rivers. The blood of his blisters became the mud and soil. The broken pieces of his toiling fingernails and tools became the ores in the earth. He allowed Tyr to thrive for a time, but became lonely. He made himself a bride. From the softest petals he made her lips. From the most precious sapphires he made her eyes. From the north wind came her breath, and her skin woven from the finest silk. And as he gave her the spark of his life, he spoke her name: Lyrian.

----

I could go on but I needn't. This world runs on Myth, not Logic. The answers to its questions will come in the form of parables and tales.
"The sky is blue because old Mata the trickster painted it that way to fool his brother Kingat."
And that's why.

For pretty much any question of how a thing works, there is probably a story about it. And the stories may not be consistent (Myths rarely are. Vocal tradition, etc) but the consistency lies in that natural phenomena are, 99% of the time, the result of gods or demigods screwing around.

To quote a part of Moana, "I killed an eel, buried its guts, then grew a tree now you've got coconuts."
That's where coconuts come from. Maui killed an eel, buried its guts, and a coconut palm grew. Because that's what happened.

Make it doubly fun by letting players who make high knowledge rolls tell their own little story about who or what made the thing how it is. (At least, I would find that really fun.)

There's no reason you can't have a world that runs on this logic, so long as everyone agrees that Mythopoetic explanations are just as fun as Emprical ones, just for different reasons. (And yes, I have a world with enough gods and demigods to make this a reality and have their behaviors be consistent with their characters.)

[Xuc Xac]

So you're basically saying that hourglasses, magically-regulated time-keepers (Many spells do last for an exact multiple of 6 seconds in certain interpretations of D&D, after all), pocketwatches, pendulums, springs attached to gears, mental clocks that allow people to count out time, etc are all incapable of existing in flat worlds?

They do exist. That's how you measure as accurately as "it's about 10". My question was how he planned to get a more accurate measurement than that. By the way, pocket watches also lack a minute hand until well into the modern period. If you want to play medieval scientist, you get medieval tools.

[LordCdrMilitant]

They do exist. That's how you measure as accurately as "it's about 10". My question was how he planned to get a more accurate measurement than that. By the way, pocket watches also lack a minute hand until well into the modern period. If you want to play medieval scientist, you get medieval tools.

That clock is good enough to tell me gravitational acceleration is less at ten-thouand kilometers altitude than it is at ten kilometers altitude.

[Fiery Diamond]

You know what I don't get? "The game world is assumed to be as our world except plus fantasy as noted." That... isn't even remotely how I handle fantasy worlds. "The world is assumed to RESEMBLE our world except as noted (or assumed) to function differently for reasons including magic and ease of playing." That's my starting point. Any fantasy world isn't assumed to have "real-world physics, except as noted," it's not even assumed to have "a different set of physics." It's assumed that physics, as we understand it, does not exist. The world may resemble ours in various ways, but the underlying reasons it functions that way are assumed to be NOT THE SAME as our world, and furthermore, those underlying reasons are assumed to not matter unless they're relevant to characters or story.

So the whole "a flat world would function in a specific way" bit is completely nonsensical from that standpoint. Why are you even assuming vision works by reflected light rather than, say, something in our eyes going out and seeing things (an actual historical theory) or something even more fantastical?

I would never game with someone who started from a different starting assumption.

ANYWAY...

I gamed with a world a made that was a cylinder. The game map was the surface of the cylinder. The "ends" of the cylinder were special locations where time and space got all wonky and no-one ever returned after voyaging to. Embedded in the crust of the world were "climate nodes" that controlled the local weather. The interior of the cylinder was a distorted space that made up the elemental planes. The cylinder spun around with the sun stationary on one side (and actually was its own plane of the sun god) with the moon (also a plane of existence) on the other. Gravity on the cylinder was always defined as "toward the nearest point of contact with the elemental planes" (which was always what the people would see as straight down). Seasons existed because of the climate nodes, so some places had all four seasons, some had fewer, some had wonky seasons that went through multiple irregular cycles within a year, and so forth.

[Mutazoia]

You know what I don't get? "The game world is assumed to be as our world except plus fantasy as noted." That... isn't even remotely how I handle fantasy worlds. "The world is assumed to RESEMBLE our world except as noted (or assumed) to function differently for reasons including magic and ease of playing." That's my starting point. Any fantasy world isn't assumed to have "real-world physics, except as noted," it's not even assumed to have "a different set of physics." It's assumed that physics, as we understand it, does not exist. The world may resemble ours in various ways, but the underlying reasons it functions that way are assumed to be NOT THE SAME as our world, and furthermore, those underlying reasons are assumed to not matter unless they're relevant to characters or story.

Except that you do assume that the standard laws of physics (except as noted) apply in a fantasy world. Do you REALLY want to have to sit down to pick and choose what laws apply and what laws do not? We can assume gravity works just like it does in the real world, unless you specifically want to play in a world that has zero-g year 'round. Then you specifically note that there is no gravity.

We assume up is up and down is down, that fire is hot, that we need light to see (unless you have Infra-vision or other specially noted vision mode), that when we swing a sword, it's not going to crumple like tin-foil, when you drop something, it falls down, not up or at an angle (unless you drop it mid swing, then the laws of physics apply again) or dances a jig....I could go on, but I'm sure you get the point.

Even magic follows the laws of physics. Cast a 30' radius fire ball in a 10 x 10 x 30 corridor, and see what the rules say happen...yup, the blast follows the laws of physics. How the blast is generated is an exception as noted, but the end result still obeys the laws of physics. The speed of magical flight is still governed by weight and speed restrictions...

Very few magical effects are immune to the natural laws of physics in some way (Teleport with out error being the first that springs to mind).

[BeerMug Paladin]

I hate to mention this, because I suspect it will become a massive derail, but I have to ask.

For those who critique the idea of a flat world because it would "require" changing all the laws of physics and demand player participation mostly to center around studying physics for the game...

Is the only acceptable setting for 3.5 D&D the Tippyverse (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?222007-The-Definitive-Guide-to-the-Tippyverse-By-Emperor-Tippy)? Because that is the logical result of that player behavior as applied to the core magic system. If this isn't the only acceptable setting, why does this aspect of the game have a hands-off exception to it, but a flat world setting does not?

I'm genuinely curious, here.

[Mechalich]

I hate to mention this, because I suspect it will become a massive derail, but I have to ask.

For those who critique the idea of a flat world because it would "require" changing all the laws of physics and demand player participation mostly to center around studying physics for the game...

Is the only acceptable setting for 3.5 D&D the Tippyverse (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?222007-The-Definitive-Guide-to-the-Tippyverse-By-Emperor-Tippy)? Because that is the logical result of that player behavior as applied to the core magic system. If this isn't the only acceptable setting, why does this aspect of the game have a hands-off exception to it, but a flat world setting does not?

I'm genuinely curious, here.

Personally, yes, if you play 3.X D&D or Pathfinder with the full implications of the rules in play then yes, your world evolves into the Tippyverse (or some other hyper-magic insanity or possibly the wightocalypse or whatever but ultimately in no way resembles the kind of fantasy world that gets written up in setting books) if no other actions are taken. Ed Greenwood put a sidebar in the FRCS that flat-out admitted to this very early on when he basically said 'please don't have Elminster and co. break the world, even though they totally can.' The 3.X/PF rule set is deeply flawed and the game breaks down completely starting with Teleport and going from there. At even a moderate level of optimization everything from levels 15 onward might as well be tossed int he trash can (and the epic level handbook is a giant waste of space). So yeah, building a world according to strict 3.X mechanics is something you shouldn't do, because it won't work. Worth noting, OOTS has departed by ever greater degrees from said mechanics (and has incredibly low-op builds in play) as the party members have gone up in level in order to make things remain workable.

That being said, it is relatively easy to house rule in some limits that prevent Tippyverse-style shenanigans and many of the other craziness that starts sprouting when high-level spells get throne around. Chain-gating efreet, mass planar binding, demiplane abuse and any number of other issues can be blocked - and let's be honest were never intended to be possible in the first place - by someone paying any real attention. Or you can just cap levels - which PFS did and which playable alternatives like E6 also do.

Also, with the partial exception of Eberron, none of the main D&D settings where designed to accommodate 3.X rules, they were built considerably earlier and no one changed them accordingly because that would both anger the fanbases and because none of the designers really fully realized what they had done when 3e was released (and in some ways until a lot of the options books emerged a lot of the high-op stuff wasn't so viable, Core-only is much more manageable).

[Cluedrew]

Committing to a flat world means that, as a world-builder, you are saying 'I'm going to make a fantasy world that behaves massively different from the Earth from first principles and when I run into any trouble I cannot default back to baseline conditions at all.' That's a Nintendo Hard problem.Nintendo Hard?

Honestly, people operated completely fine (mostly) for hundreds or thousands of years on completely wrong ideas about how the world operated. I still don't understand how changing the underlying explanations that people often don't know and clearly don't need to get along on a day-to-day basis, causes problems.


That clock is good enough to tell me gravitational acceleration is less at ten-thouand kilometers altitude than it is at ten kilometers altitude.Cool. How is that setting breaking?

Also, what is your in-character reason for trying this? Is it just a what if?

[2D8HP]

....Is the only acceptable setting for 3.5 D&D the Tippyverse (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?222007-The-Definitive-Guide-to-the-Tippyverse-By-Emperor-Tippy)?...


With the very big caveat of my never playing 3.x (0e/1e years ago, and a little B/X and a bit more 5e recently), I think the standard D&D 'verse is a post-apocalyptic "Tippyverse" (all those Dark age scale villages and giant magic item filled ruins).

[Max_Killjoy]

Nintendo Hard?

Honestly, people operated completely fine (mostly) for hundreds or thousands of years on completely wrong ideas about how the world operated. I still don't understand how changing the underlying explanations that people often don't know and clearly don't need to get along on a day-to-day basis, causes problems.


Because if you change the way the world operates, if you change the underlying "explanations", then you change what it's like to live in that world -- the more you change the former, the more you change the latter.

The changes needed to make a flat world work at all, drastically alter the nature of the world.

[D+1]

As DM I tend to think of my game worlds as flat, but it ultimately doesn't matter because unless the PC's spontaneously decide to just march in a straight line until they die, get back to where they started, or fall off the edge they'll never, EVER know and there's no reason they should even be curious. IF I ever did let them get out to where MY map ends then I'd have to make a choice whether the world is a globe, or if there's an edge - or to just continue to dodge the question by expanding the map. If one of them just gets a bee in their bonnet and has to know the answer to this unsolved mystery I would finally actually make a choice based on the likelihood of the answer making a difference at any future point and what kind of adventures I might want to run based on that answer. But likely it STILL wouldn't make a difference because even if they start adventuring on other planes, the adventures on the prime material plane are almost certainly going to remain within a practical circle on the map, regardless of whether it's a map of part of a sphere or part of a flat disc.

[gkathellar]

Except that you do assume that the standard laws of physics (except as noted) apply in a fantasy world. Do you REALLY want to have to sit down to pick and choose what laws apply and what laws do not? We can assume gravity works just like it does in the real world, unless you specifically want to play in a world that has zero-g year 'round. Then you specifically note that there is no gravity.

We assume up is up and down is down, that fire is hot, that we need light to see (unless you have Infra-vision or other specially noted vision mode), that when we swing a sword, it's not going to crumple like tin-foil, when you drop something, it falls down, not up or at an angle (unless you drop it mid swing, then the laws of physics apply again) or dances a jig....I could go on, but I'm sure you get the point.

Those aren't the laws of physics. Those are outcomes. What we generally assume is that, whatever ruleset we're working with, the outcomes are going to be similar or identical to those in the real world unless otherwise stated. That doesn't actually mean the mechanisms by which we arrive at those outcomes are the same. Gravity can be the result of an imprint against spacetime, or it can be the result of all material things possessing the essence of yin, which by its nature travels to the lowest point. As long as the outcomes are pretty much the same in the vast majority of circumstances, we're pretty much set.


Because if you change the way the world operates, if you change the underlying "explanations", then you change what it's like to live in that world -- the more you change the former, the more you change the latter.

The changes needed to make a flat world work at all, drastically alter the nature of the world.

This keeps getting asserted, but it sort of assumes that by "changes," we mean things like adjustments to the positive charge of a proton or the number of electrons in an orbital or other things that keep most of physics intact while making small adjustments to physical constants. I agree that such would be a fool's errand, but the nice thing about creating a fictional world is that (a) you get to work backwards towards your explanations, and (b) fictional worlds are only composed of atoms if their creator says so.

I hate to bring up the example of Exalted again, but, "the world is a simulation created out of pure magical energy for the amusement of conceptual beings, acted out by millions of tiny, non-sentient deities, themselves part of a programming hierarchy that scales up to sentient deities responsible for tuning and refinement, all regulated and kept deterministic by way of a motherboard/web in an alternate dimension," is a perfectly adequate explanation for why the sky is blue and the tides move and rocks fall when you drop them. One doesn't then get to ask, "but shouldn't the horizon not exist because light would keep going across the," no, light as you understand it doesn't exist. The world I've described much as the one we're used to, but for very different reasons, and those different reasons mean some of the implications of adjustments made are also absent, allowing us to treat this very different world as if it were more familiar for purposes of play. And the reason for that is because internal consistency and such is fun, and so is mythopoetic logic, and because this is a ttrpg we can have your cake and eat it too.

[Zombimode]

The changes needed to make a flat world work at all, drastically alter the nature of the world.

More drastic then a continent where travel distances actually run on "speed of plot"?

More drastic then a world where everthing is a composition of the 4 classical Elements plus positive and negative energy?

More drastic then a world where human concepts of virtues influences the phyiscal shape of the world?


If your answer to any of those questions is "no", then you don't have a problem with "flat world" specifically. You have a problem with "fantasy".

[Lord Torath]

By teleporting high enough. Greater Teleport has no maximum range and no error chance, and Planar Adaptation can specifically allow me to survive in vacuum, so I can determine at the very least that gravity does, in fact, fall off with altitude. Then, I can bring with me an immovable rod of known length, and measure the time it takes for objects of known mass to travel the length of the immovable rod, thus allowing me to determine their net acceleration. There will be some minor error due to air friction, but it is fairly negligible over the low speeds and distances.Within the gravity well (varies based on the size of the body) dropped objects accelerate at 9.81 m/s, with a maximum impact damage of 20d6 for falling man-sized objects. One millimeter outside the gravity well, the object does not fall, but sits in place relative to the central body in the sphere (which is not necessarily the body whose gravity well you are just outside of). I can write an equation out for the gravitational acceleration (G) based on height above the surface (y), assuming the gravity well ends at height Y.

For y≤Y, G=32.2 ft/s2; for y>Y, G=0 ft/s2

This is valid for any celestial body with a volume of 100 cubic yards or more. Anything less than that has G=0 ft/s. Any body inside the gravity well of a larger body is subject to the acceleration of that larger body, and has no gravity well of its own until it leaves the larger body's well.


Is the game suddenly not fun when you haven't named every turtle in the stack? Anything beyond what will come up in the game (maybe a bit beyond that for safety or for fun) shouldn't be detailed, because it will never come up and hence, how could it matter?The one on top is named "Yertle". The one on the bottom is "Mack".

[Max_Killjoy]

More drastic then a continent where travel distances actually run on "speed of plot"?

More drastic then a world where everthing is a composition of the 4 classical Elements plus positive and negative energy?

More drastic then a world where human concepts of virtues influences the phyiscal shape of the world?


If your answer to any of those questions is "no", then you don't have a problem with "flat world" specifically. You have a problem with "fantasy".


"Fantasy" is defined by "speed of plot travel", "classical elements", and "virtues physically shape the world"?

I'm pretty sure there's plenty of fantasy fiction in which all or some of those things is absolutely not true, or at least other people call that fiction "fantasy", even if you personally wouldn't.

[Cluedrew]

Because if you change the way the world operates, if you change the underlying "explanations", then you change what it's like to live in that world -- the more you change the former, the more you change the latter.But do you? Does any change to the explanation always change the surface experience? I don't think so, nor would the change in explanation always have a proportional effect on the day-to-day lives of people.

It took them hundreds of years (depending on how you count) to figure out that the world was made of atoms instead of four elements. And it wasn't (just) because of stupidity, its because the model of four elements worked well enough that they couldn't tell the difference until they got better instruments and got a lot of random measurements with them. The explanation produced the same day-to-day effects and matched the science of the time close enough.

So I don't think a change in one forces a change in the other, especially if your goal is to keep the visible effects similar.

[Max_Killjoy]

But do you? Does any change to the explanation always change the surface experience? I don't think so, nor would the change in explanation always have a proportional effect on the day-to-day lives of people.

It took them hundreds of years (depending on how you count) to figure out that the world was made of atoms instead of four elements. And it wasn't (just) because of stupidity, its because the model of four elements worked well enough that they couldn't tell the difference until they got better instruments and got a lot of random measurements with them. The explanation produced the same day-to-day effects and matched the science of the time close enough.

So I don't think a change in one forces a change in the other, especially if your goal is to keep the visible effects similar.


The general idea of "atoms" is older than most people realize. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism


The model of the "four elements" didn't work at all at a functional level, and always faced skepticism from certain quarters because it just didn't seem to do anything.

[pwykersotz]

The general idea of "atoms" is older than most people realize. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism


The model of the "four elements" didn't work at all at a functional level, and always faced skepticism from certain quarters because it just didn't seem to do anything.

It's weird to me how unwilling you are to concede, not that your way is wrong, but that there can possibly be any other sensible alternative. I might be wrong, but I think that you're just arguing for the sake of it at this point.

Edit: Not that you're beholden to do so, I just don't understand it.

[golentan]

The general idea of "atoms" is older than most people realize. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism


The model of the "four elements" didn't work at all at a functional level, and always faced skepticism from certain quarters because it just didn't seem to do anything.

From your article:


The rejection of atoms[edit]
Sometime before 330 B.C.E. Aristotle asserted that the elements of fire, air, earth, and water were not made of atoms, but were continuous. Aristotle considered the existence of a void, which was required by atomic theories, to violate physical principles. Change took place not by the rearrangement of atoms to make new structures, but by transformation of matter from what it was in potential to a new actuality. A piece of wet clay, when acted upon by a potter, takes on its potential to be an actual drinking mug.

Many ancient alchemists believed the key to turning base materials to gold was heat and pressure. They were technically right, but that doesn't mean they were envisioning atomic fusion.

I agree with pwykersotz. The problem is not that you have a preference: Everyone does. The trouble is you hold your preference up as inarguable, indisputable fact.

[Max_Killjoy]

It's weird to me how unwilling you are to concede, not that your way is wrong, but that there can possibly be any other sensible alternative. I might be wrong, but I think that you're just arguing for the sake of it at this point.

Edit: Not that you're beholden to do so, I just don't understand it.


I'm unwilling to "concede" to bad evidence, mistaken claims, and common canards and fallacies.




From your article:

Many ancient alchemists believed the key to turning base materials to gold was heat and pressure. They were technically right, but that doesn't mean they were envisioning atomic fusion.


That Aristotle and alchemists believed something, doesn't actually mean that everyone from 300 BCE to 1750 CE took it as absolute truth.

As noted previously, there's a lot of things that "people used to believe" that turn out to be Victorian "everyone who came before us was a dirty ignorant idiot, except some of the Greeks and Romans" nonsense masquerading as historical fact.

I'll try to find the article I recently read that absolutely blows the whole "Aristotle was gospel" thing out of the water.

[Jay R]

Guys, give it up. What matters to Max, matters to him, even if it doesn't matter to you or me.

Whatever makes a world and a game real to you is necessary for you to settle into the world and play a game. I don't have to agree with him to see that these are real, honest emotions that will affect how much he enjoys a game.

Max_Killjoy, hold to what matters to you. I don't have to share your concerns to support your belief in them.

[pwykersotz]

Guys, give it up. What matters to Max, matters to him, even if it doesn't matter to you or me.

Whatever makes a world and a game real to you is necessary for you to settle into the world and play a game. I don't have to agree with him to see that these are real, honest emotions that will affect how much he enjoys a game.

Max_Killjoy, hold to what matters to you. I don't have to share your concerns to support your belief in them.

I only speak for myself, but it's not about getting Max to agree. It's about understanding why he disagrees. Because only through that understanding can I better myself.

But to be honest, I'm much more interested in this world where the sun does battle with the serpent of chaos. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=22019015&postcount=270) :smallsmile:

[Mutazoia]

Those aren't the laws of physics. Those are outcomes. What we generally assume is that, whatever ruleset we're working with, the outcomes are going to be similar or identical to those in the real world unless otherwise stated. That doesn't actually mean the mechanisms by which we arrive at those outcomes are the same. Gravity can be the result of an imprint against spacetime, or it can be the result of all material things possessing the essence of yin, which by its nature travels to the lowest point. As long as the outcomes are pretty much the same in the vast majority of circumstances, we're pretty much set.

Which requires me to ask: "If the end effect of the "fantasy" physical law, is the exact same as the end effect of the "real world" physical law, why bother noting it at all?"

Stating that gravity is, in fact, not the product of the greater mass of the planet attracting and holding the lesser mass of objects upon it's surface, but is, in fact, the action of quadrillions of Flibbityboops per square inch of dirt using a form of telekenesis to pull everything down, adds nothing to the game...it's fluff for fluff's sake, and therefore irrelevant, and dosen't need to be noted. If it doesn't need to be noted, then it might as well just be the same as the real world equivalent. Fluff should never be added, unless it has a direct impact on the game (and players can have a direct impact on said fluff).

In the end, it doesn't matter HOW things function in your fantasy world, because, truth be told, your players are probably not going to give a rats patooty about it. Unless they are all playing Fantasy Physicists, and every adventure takes place in a Fantasy University lab while they do experiments to unlock the secrets of the universe....pretty dull RPG in my book.

[ImNotTrevor]

I'm unwilling to "concede" to bad evidence, mistaken claims, and common canards and fallacies.


So we need to provide evidence that other ways of envisioning/measuring fictional worlds exist beyond the fact that we use these other ways and are talking about them?

His question was literally "Why are you asserting preference as fact" but worded nicer. I don't understand this position of forcing other people to defend their opinions as if they were wrong for holding them instead of letting go and letting other people game how they want to.

I wouldn't enjoy the way you run your worlds, you wouldn't enjoy the way I run mine, so what?

Stop parading opinion around as fact and these problems go away fast.

[Cluedrew]

Which requires me to ask: "If the end effect of the "fantasy" physical law, is the exact same as the end effect of the "real world" physical law, why bother noting it at all?"Because people up thread asked us too. People, either because they are genially curious or because they are being smart about it (I got a friend who always and openly does the latter, its a really good check for consistency), will ask these questions. Sometimes I do while writing. And you can reply with "that's not the point" or you can give these answers.

To Max_Killjoy: I was aware of both of the things you mentioned, the fact other models exists shows that the Aristotelian model was being questioned, but I don't understand how that disproves my point which is simply that: "Different underlying mechanics can create similar surface results."

[Mutazoia]

Because people up thread asked us too. People, either because they are genially curious or because they are being smart about it (I got a friend who always and openly does the latter, its a really good check for consistency), will ask these questions. Sometimes I do while writing. And you can reply with "that's not the point" or you can give these answers.

To Max_Killjoy: I was aware of both of the things you mentioned, the fact other models exists shows that the Aristotelian model was being questioned, but I don't understand how that disproves my point which is simply that: "Different underlying mechanics can create similar surface results."

If you're just looking for a thought experiment, sure, go ahead. But for an actual game, with actual players, do you actually think that they are actually going to care, or even remember it 5minutes after the game starts?

If you are spitballing ideas, then they ALL are technically correct, because literally everything is possible when you design a world, and trying to prove that your way is THE correct way, or at least better than the rest is an exercise in futility.

[Cluedrew]

If you're just looking for a thought experiment, sure, go ahead. But for an actual game, with actual players, do you actually think that they are actually going to care, or even remember it 5minutes after the game starts?Some of them will, many will not. I know some people who will usually absorb every detail I give them, others who will check some things that interest thing and a few that just what to know where they are.

It also depends on the type of game and how "deep" we are talking about. So the space ship goes fast is good enough sometimes. Other times you might want to say "it creates a pocket of space in 'warp space' with haidrion coils and that propels that pocket across true space with a link drive". Especially if the engineer can rig the haidrion coils to hide the ship in warp space even when the link drive is busted.


If you are spitballing ideas, then they ALL are technically correct, because literally everything is possible when you design a world, and trying to prove that your way is THE correct way, or at least better than the rest is an exercise in futility.What is my way? Are we talking about design methodology or underlying systems, I haven't meant to be saying much about either. The only thing I have been forwarding (recently) is that you can change the underlying rules in a role-playing game and not get a setting filled with holes. There is a how, but probably more than one.

[Mutazoia]

Some of them will, many will not. I know some people who will usually absorb every detail I give them, others who will check some things that interest thing and a few that just what to know where they are.

It also depends on the type of game and how "deep" we are talking about. So the space ship goes fast is good enough sometimes. Other times you might want to say "it creates a pocket of space in 'warp space' with haidrion coils and that propels that pocket across true space with a link drive". Especially if the engineer can rig the haidrion coils to hide the ship in warp space even when the link drive is busted.

This goes back to a previous comment I made: If it's fluff for fluff's sake, it doesn't need to be noted. If said fluff can be altered or effected by direct or indirect PC action, then play ball. How the laws of physics work on your world is only important if the PC's can turn them off/on or cause a malfunction.


What is my way? Are we talking about design methodology or underlying systems, I haven't meant to be saying much about either. The only thing I have been forwarding (recently) is that you can change the underlying rules in a role-playing game and not get a setting filled with holes. There is a how, but probably more than one.

At this point, I'm making a general statement. In an RPG, you can create literally anything you want. It's your world, what ever way you want it to work is right for you. Debates on line should be fun, but as I said, there is no right answer here, unless you are having an actual physics debate on how a REAL LIFE flat world could possibly function, that is.

[2D8HP]

...for an actual game, with actual players, do you actually think that they are actually going to care, or even remember it 5minutes after the game starts?..


Remember what?


...unless you are having an actual physics debate on how a REAL LIFE flat world could possibly function, that is.


Real life?

Noooo!

Hates it! Hates it forever!

[gkathellar]

Which requires me to ask: "If the end effect of the "fantasy" physical law, is the exact same as the end effect of the "real world" physical law, why bother noting it at all?"

A wide variety of reasons. Sometimes it's for the purpose of satisfying Sanderson's law, such that when things happen, they're not happening baselessly, and there can be no "because magic". It might be for the basis of establishing thematic elements as intrinsic to a setting, or staying true to source material - a setting based in Chinese folklore, for instance, has ample tonal and textual cause to describe the universe in terms of Yin and Yang and their interactions. In a TTRPG context, it can explain why certain things work in familiar ways despite changes - see the whole lengthy discussion about the horizon on a flat world. Occasionally, it's just Rule of Cool, or personal preference.

I, for one, like my settings internally consistent for reasons no better than, "It makes me happy." If it makes someone else happy, too? Awesome. If it doesn't? Still awesome.


Stating that gravity is, in fact, not the product of the greater mass of the planet attracting and holding the lesser mass of objects upon it's surface, but is, in fact, the action of quadrillions of Flibbityboops per square inch of dirt using a form of telekenesis to pull everything down, adds nothing to the game...it's fluff for fluff's sake, and therefore irrelevant, and dosen't need to be noted. If it doesn't need to be noted, then it might as well just be the same as the real world equivalent. Fluff should never be added, unless it has a direct impact on the game (and players can have a direct impact on said fluff).

Are you alleging that feel and tone and style don't have an impact on games? Aesthetics matter, yo - they are a fundamental part of any play experience. I can think of no shortage of settings that have what you would describe as fluff-for-fluff's sake, and don't seem to suffer from it.

In any case, these things absolutely can have a direct impact on the game, hence this extended argument about range-of-vision.


In the end, it doesn't matter HOW things function in your fantasy world, because, truth be told, your players are probably not going to give a rats patooty about it.

It can matter, and sometimes they do. Sometimes a DM want to be prepared for situations or questions that may arise ("how far away is the horizon?"), or they simply want to know for themselves. That this doesn't seem relevant to your play experience does not validate your maxims in the lives of others. You are in no position to judge thoroughness on account of your disinterest in it.


Unless they are all playing Fantasy Physicists, and every adventure takes place in a Fantasy University lab while they do experiments to unlock the secrets of the universe....pretty dull RPG in my book.

Okay, so you're not interested in playing Ars Magicka. What's your point?

Really, where does any part of what you're saying go other than, "the ways you have fun are wrong because they disinterest me"?

[Mechalich]

Are you alleging that feel and tone and style don't have an impact on games? Aesthetics matter, yo - they are a fundamental part of any play experience. I can think of no shortage of settings that have what you would describe as fluff-for-fluff's sake, and don't seem to suffer from it.


Changing fundamental physical laws for fluff's sake and no other reason is generally a bad idea (https://xkcd.com/483/). Changes of that nature are more likely to confuse than they are to support anything, especially given the minimal amount of effort the average player will spend paying attention to them. There's a reason most fantasy worlds have 24 hour days and 365 day years and all the other accouterments of Earth even though you don't have to change any physical laws to alter those. Krynn went to three moons, and actually made mention of how that impacted tides and the like and that was more than enough variance from Earth to establish a unique feel to the planet.

There's all sorts of things you can change - really significant things in many cases - without needing to alter physical laws that are both thought provoking and dramatically alter a world's aesthetics. For example you can totally rearrange an ecology by banning grasses (why not, they didn't evolve until quite recently) or getting rid of a major vertebrate clade 'no birds, pterosaurs instead' and reasoning out the impacts that would have.

Serious, detail-driven world-building intended to produce settings with high verisimilitude can absolutely be different from Earth. Personally I like a few small differences to spice things up (when I did Resvier, I eliminated leap years). However, if you change too many things those changes and the consequences of those changes and the interactions between those consequences become too much to keep a handle on and the setting becomes gobbledygook. Ultimately saying 'the world is flat' isn't one alteration, it's hundreds, and it necessitates hundreds of choices more. That's just too much to handle - especially in the case of a world representing an actual setting that people will live on and that will produce cultures and sustain campaigns. The burden is admittedly lower for say, one-shot science fiction situational environments that might get visited for a few hours at most, especially if you're in one of those universes that has an 'ancients of godlike power' function you can place responsibility for such things on.

[Milo v3]

Changing fundamental physical laws for fluff's sake and no other reason is generally a bad idea (https://xkcd.com/483/).
Question. Does aesthetics and atmosphere not count as reasons to you?

[Max_Killjoy]

Question. Does aesthetics and atmosphere not count as reasons to you?

There's a huge difference between actual aesthetics and atmosphere... and the sort of "rule of kewl" / distinction-without-a-difference fluff in question here.

[Milo v3]

There's a huge difference between actual aesthetics and atmosphere... and the sort of "rule of kewl" / distinction-without-a-difference fluff in question here.
Except people in this thread disagree on whether or not it is "actual aesthetics and atmosphere" (which I view things like that as) or ""rule of kewl" / distinction-without-a-difference fluff" (which you and some others seem to view it as).

I mean, I made full descriptions on how the metaphysics of souls, reincarnation, and being turned into outsiders worked because my setting is a planar one with bhuddist/daoist/hindu aesthetics involving prana matrixes, etheric bodies, yin and yang energies, bardos, psychopomps, etc. It might never come up in gameplay, does that mean it's "rule of kewl"?

[Max_Killjoy]

Except people in this thread disagree on whether or not it is "actual aesthetics and atmosphere" (which I view things like that as) or ""rule of kewl" / distinction-without-a-difference fluff" (which you and some others seem to view it as).


And yet in response to "how do you account for all the immediate and interwoven differences that come with a flat world", many of the responses were either "it's just a flat world for the sake of being fantastic, none of that other stuff changes" or "actually the difference is hardly noticeable".




I mean, I made full descriptions on how the metaphysics of souls, reincarnation, and being turned into outsiders worked because my setting is a planar one with bhuddist/daoist/hindu aesthetics involving prana matrixes, etheric bodies, yin and yang energies, bardos, psychopomps, etc. It might never come up in gameplay, does that mean it's "rule of kewl"?


Does that actually somehow tie into it being a flat world or otherwise oddly shaped?

[erikun]

As a general rule, I tend to prefer to keep things similar to how people would expect them to be unless there is a good reason to alter them. Therefore, the world is round, it's a solid crust with a liquid mantle, you can't dig through a significant enough portion of it to matter, volcanos bubble up magma from under the crust, etc. It makes it far easier to judge what happens when something extremely strange, outside the scope of the rules, takes place. It also helps to avoid breaking immersion - the people of the world would not be so blasé about digging holes if a few dozen feet were all that was needed to dump yourself into a bottomless void.

Players would also likely not be thinking about such things - not because they weren't immersed in the world, but because there wasn't a meaningful reason to expect such a thing... especially if there were good reasons not to.

And sure, I would run a setting with a flat world. Perhaps goblins live in the vast hollow world underground, and perhaps the dead below that, and perhaps an internal sun and the magma people below that. Maybe the world really is a disk on the back of a flying space turtle. Perhaps the world is simply a square which loops upon itself and repeats indefinitely - because it was easier to make a square world map than compose a round one. My point being, I'd be fine with a flat world. But unless I had a reason to make it flat, I would assume that it is round, primarily because anyone playing a character in the world is likely to assume the same.

[Mechalich]

Question. Does aesthetics and atmosphere not count as reasons to you?

Um, I said 'for fluff's sake' and no other reason. Fluff reasons encompass all possible aesthetics and atmosphere functions, but does not include mechanical effects of any kind.

So basically, if you are going to change fundamental physics in your game world, it should have a mechanical effect of some kind. If you change how gravity works, that should actually do something, there should be some scenario that could occur in game wherein a roll is altered because gravity functions differently. It might be a rare situation (for example, something that only alters behavior in a vacuum won't occur in Pathfinder very often but it will matter to Outer Dragons). One thing Planescape does preserve is that the bizarre planar environments all have different mechanical effects in plane designed to represent their weirdness.

Note that you can change things from standard Earth conditions an awful lot without needing to violate fundamental physics (especially if you're willing to handwave superstrength materials), but having a flat Earth-sized plate floating in a sea of infinite chaos or on the back of a turtle in the great void is not among them.

Anyway, with regard to aesthetics and atmosphere I have mentioned several times in this thread that no such world-building limitations apply if you are being surrealist or operating on rule of cool = winner or any other setup that has disregarded simulationist aspects in total and does not care about internal consistency. That's all good, if that is what you're doing. However, because TTRPGs are a collaborative enterprise verisimilitude is import to keep all members of the party on the same page and even more important if you're actually designing a world for someone other than you and your buddies to use.

[Cluedrew]

And yet in response to "how do you account for all the immediate and interwoven differences that come with a flat world", many of the responses were [...] "actually the difference is hardly noticeable".Considering that they provided very reasonable explanations why it would be hardly noticeable in many situations, I think that might be the correct response. Maybe not quite, it depends on other details of the setting. As I see it, it is an entirely workable change. Yet you act like it is not and I still don't get why.


\So basically, if you are going to change fundamental physics in your game world, it should have a mechanical effect of some kind.I'd like to introduce magic. That by itself renders most standard physics models mere special cases of the new world's physics. (When magic use is zero.) Also I think they can also serve a narrative effect, which is really to say "any effect not directly represented by mechanics". Like not being able to go around a thing that stretches all the way to the end of the world, or not that way around at least.

[Max_Killjoy]

Considering that they provided very reasonable explanations why it would be hardly noticeable in many situations, I think that might be the correct response. Maybe not quite, it depends on other details of the setting. As I see it, it is an entirely workable change. Yet you act like it is not and I still don't get why.


If their argument for why a flatworld isn't a dissonance generator is that it's barely distinguishable from a spherical world... if it's a distinction without a difference... then why bother having a flat world in the first place? Just to say it's different, or for the "wow" factor of having nonspherical world? That people living there supposedly won't notice and not be wowed by anyway?

On the flip side, if the difference is noticeable to those living there, including to those individuals who are actually the PCs, then the fundamental underlying "rules and mechanisms" by which the world operates from the smallest to largest scale, and there are countless interconnected changes to the world that would be blatantly obvious were we to "visit". The PCs are interacting with a world where every last thing is alien to us, and all those differences need to be apparent in the crunch and fluff of the game, and in very interaction the characters have with the world they inhabit. If you aren't going to do that, then you've created a dissonance generator... you're telling the players one thing, and showing them something entirely different.

On the flip flip side, one might suggest that the different rules and mechanisms could be contrived in just such a way that everything appears the same as our world, other than, you know, that other world is flat. And that takes us right back to the start, with "why the hell bother, then?"


(Of course, it is highly noticeable, unless one deliberately focuses on finding the few ways in which it isn't and ignores everything else.)

[2D8HP]

If their argument for why a flatworld isn't a dissonance generator is that it's barely distinguishable from a spherical world... if it's a distinction without a difference... then why bother having a flat world in the first place? Just to say it's different, or for the "wow" factor of having nonspherical world?...


http://www.thegamesplace.co.uk/acatalog/TORGaysle.jpg

Well in the multi-genre weird setting of Torg (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torg), one of the "Cosm's" was Aysle (https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://onyr.free.fr/Torg/Aysle.pdf&ved=0ahUKEwikifDa79rNAhXDbiYKHYm4A1oQFggbMAA&usg=AFQjCNGRRFxpGuKiaAGGpQTjVpp4Lk4jzw)
an Earth-sized discworld with life on both sides and a hole in the center through which a small sun rises and sets, which would just be a gimmick with just the one side was a standard Fantasyland (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tough_Guide_To_Fantasyland), with underground Dwarf mines, except the otherside "of the world" past the underground, was a "land of giants". That matters to players. A new world to explore! :biggrin:
Otherwise a "donut shaped" world would have no purpose besides "different".
:wink:

[pwykersotz]

If their argument for why a flatworld isn't a dissonance generator is that it's barely distinguishable from a spherical world... if it's a distinction without a difference... then why bother having a flat world in the first place?

Flat world: So that you can sail the seas with your sextant, navigating by the stars, and find the edge of the world as an adventure location.

Gravity: So that you can have floating islands and continents that occur "naturally" without needing a PHD in math.

Others: Similar reasons, so that you CAN have some differences, but in the day to day living of the world and for the purpose of GM and player extrapolation, things work as expected except for the things the GM is prepared to run. And also to prevent snarky players from insisting they can construct a fusion bomb.

[The-0-Endless]

Okay, so, I'm going to pick up two metal spheres and set up a cavendish balance. Please describe to me the readings. Now, I'm going to take two metal sheets and hang them from the balance, fixed in orientation. Now I'm going to rotate them, and measure the readings.
Okay, we've proven now that either gravity works normally or that I can create a planet cracking weapon in my backyard by abusing the new laws of gravity and magnetism you've written.
When GM's tell me "it doesn't work the way it does in our world", I will start performing experiments to discover the form of the laws that govern the world of our D&D. Screw killing monsters, it's way more fun be be a scientist! Oh, and hey, GM, I'm expecting to see your math.
I will massacre the catgirls.

Please tell me how a simple Cavendish balance is a planet cracking weapon?

[LordCdrMilitant]

Please tell me how a simple Cavendish balance is a planet cracking weapon?

A cavendish balance isn't a planet destroying weapon. Gravity is.

Though, it's not really a worthwhile mention, since, planet cracking is actually fairly easy in D&D.

[Milo v3]

And yet in response to "how do you account for all the immediate and interwoven differences that come with a flat world", many of the responses were either "it's just a flat world for the sake of being fantastic, none of that other stuff changes" or "actually the difference is hardly noticeable".
I think it was more "To fit the aesthetic and automatically teach players that it is a fantastic world and will not match the real world", and the "hardly noticeable" comes from the fact that people were saying "Actually that probably wouldn't actually come up from a flat-world to the extent you imagine there to be".


Does that actually somehow tie into it being a flat world or otherwise oddly shaped?
I was using that as another example of detail into the physics behind a world which is just fluff despite not being very noticeable and not changing anything on the surface.


Um, I said 'for fluff's sake' and no other reason. Fluff reasons encompass all possible aesthetics and atmosphere functions, but does not include mechanical effects of any kind.
..... You realise that flat-world is a fluff change not a mechanical one right......


So basically, if you are going to change fundamental physics in your game world, it should have a mechanical effect of some kind.
I disagree with this. Just because the gravity in my setting is created from negative energy rather than mass doesn't mean gravity suddenly has to change mechanically.


Anyway, with regard to aesthetics and atmosphere I have mentioned several times in this thread that no such world-building limitations apply if you are being surrealist or operating on rule of cool = winner or any other setup that has disregarded simulationist aspects in total and does not care about internal consistency.
I actually do these sort of changes to make it More simulationist, since TTRPG's like D&D & Pathfinder rarely are internally consistent with their cosmology so I alter them to become more consistent.

[Mechalich]

I'd like to introduce magic. That by itself renders most standard physics models mere special cases of the new world's physics. (When magic use is zero.)

That's backwards. Most magic systems hold that when magic use is zero, physics operates completely as normal. Magic is a special case wherein active magical effects alter or suspend the laws of physics locally or temporarily. Even when those laws of physics are crazy fantasy madness, like when you're on Acheron or the Ethereal Plane or Discworld, magic represents an alteration to standard conditions. That's also why spells and magical items behave differently from one plane to the next, because they are interacting with different baselines.



..... You realise that flat-world is a fluff change not a mechanical one right......

A flat world absolutely mandates mechanical change. It does this in the same way that having an ocean planet, or a world with an ammonia-dominant atmosphere does, only on a much more dramatic scale. If the world has an edge, that means things can fall off the edge or you can throw people off of it and you have to provide mechanics for this. If the world simply has a fuzzy edge that fades into infinite chaos then you have to provide mechanics for that (Exalted had a whole book full of them).


I disagree with this. Just because the gravity in my setting is created from negative energy rather than mass doesn't mean gravity suddenly has to change mechanically.

Then your alternative explanation is pointless. Saying X physical law in my fantasy is functionally identical to X physical law in the real world but is called something else or has some alternative in-universe explanation that does nothing is wasteful. You can take gravity in your setting and call it 'Garglebargle' but have it behave the same way, and that's stupid. It adds nothing but being needlessly obtuse. I've seen professional writers do this - most recently in Ken Liu's Dandelion Dynasty novels, which refers to electrostatic energy as the 'Silkmotic Force' - and it's barely tolerable within the context of a wholly in-universe narrative. For world-building purposes call things what they actually are. After all, you have to be able to relate to anyone potentially using the world what is actually going on in terms they can understand.

Now, people living in your setting can believe whatever they want. They can be wildly, crazily wrong about things just as most humans were for most of their history (and as humans no doubt are still wrong about a great many things in our understanding of the cosmos), but in terms of what actually exists in your fantasy universe creating non-functional changes for the sake of change is wasteful and unnecessarily confusing.

[Milo v3]

A flat world absolutely mandates mechanical change. It does this in the same way that having an ocean planet, or a world with an ammonia-dominant atmosphere does, only on a much more dramatic scale. If the world has an edge, that means things can fall off the edge or you can throw people off of it and you have to provide mechanics for this. If the world simply has a fuzzy edge that fades into infinite chaos then you have to provide mechanics for that (Exalted had a whole book full of them).
Most games already have rules for falling and grappling so.... Yeah, no additional mechanics required. No mechanics are needed that aren't already needed by ledges.


Then your alternative explanation is pointless. Saying X physical law in my fantasy is functionally identical to X physical law in the real world but is called something else or has some alternative in-universe explanation that does nothing is wasteful.
Only wasteful IMO if that fluff is isolated and doesn't interact with other fluff. To me, it'd be weird if things like mass do exist in things like D&D settings considering how shapeshifting is a pretty regular thing, so why not tie gravity to things that you know exist in the setting?

[gkathellar]

That's backwards. Most magic systems hold that when magic use is zero, physics operates completely as normal. Magic is a special case wherein active magical effects alter or suspend the laws of physics locally or temporarily. Even when those laws of physics are crazy fantasy madness, like when you're on Acheron or the Ethereal Plane or Discworld, magic represents an alteration to standard conditions.

See, to me, this is bizarre and verisimilitude-busting, for two reasons:

First, does magic embody some sort of super-reality, which acts upon but is not acted upon? Can it only be acted upon according to its own conceptual rules? In either case, doesn't that bring us right back to requiring an alternate or modified physics to explain its behavior (we don't call dark matter magical because the only known force it interacts with is gravity, after all)? "We don't know," is a perfectly valid answer here, but so is, "yes, here's a rough outline."

Second, this is totally out of step with mythology and folklore, and with huge amounts of fantasy and horror literature, in which the world is invested with magical and symbolic qualities on a fundamental level. There are cultures where a house's architecture can invite or repel evil spirits, and others where it's seen as important to have a sub-basement for negative psychic energy to settle harmlessly in. "The Devil and Daniel Webster," describes a lawyer basically performing an exorcism with the power of patriotism. In the Ramayana, a man unhappy with his caste nearly destroys the universe by concentrating too hard. Ju-on (the original version of the Grudge) has the perpetrator and victims of a particularly violent murder-suicide linger past death, sucking the nearby living into an endless, atemporal repetition of their tragic ends. In the Bas-Lag stories, golemancy becomes so pedestrian that one golemancer *pretends to be a puppeteer* to get money busking. A favorite of mine, Natsume Yuujinchou, involves its spiritually-aware protagonist asking the town's new Buddhist monk to stop blessing everything, because it's hurting the local kami despite the monk's total ignorance of the spiritual world. Similar examples appear from every place, culture, and time. Saying "the world is intrinsically magical," in one's fantastical stories isn't unusual - it's the norm.

(My own urban fantasy setting treats the spiritual world as something not unlike dark matter, drawn to emulate the mass and configurations of the physical in ways that are uniquely spiritual and may, in turn, effect the physical world. Powerful sorcerers are rare, but a lot of magic is as simple as following architectural rules that induce the spirit world to respond in desirable ways.)


That's also why spells and magical items behave differently from one plane to the next, because they are interacting with different baselines.

If you're talking about D&D, this is accurate, but it also undermines your point, since the Prime Material is physically formed out of the four elements, life and death are driven by the Positive and Negative planes, and totally non-magical things on the Prime have huge magical consequences. D&D's baseline is very different from our own.


A flat world absolutely mandates mechanical change. It does this in the same way that having an ocean planet, or a world with an ammonia-dominant atmosphere does, only on a much more dramatic scale. If the world has an edge, that means things can fall off the edge or you can throw people off of it and you have to provide mechanics for this. If the world simply has a fuzzy edge that fades into infinite chaos then you have to provide mechanics for that (Exalted had a whole book full of them).

Well, no, for one's own table game, one doesn't have to do that unless it comes up - and it may or may not. I've certainly met players who'd want to jump off of the world's edge because it's there. I've also met plenty of players who'd be happy to say, "oh, the world is flat and its edge is a giant waterfall? Very cool," and then basically only have it matter when they reference it in character.

But sure, providing those answers can absolutely be a fun or useful thing to do, and it's probably a good idea if you're putting together something for publication. So?

(Also Graceful Wicked Masques and CCD The Wyld are by no means mandatory book.)


Then your alternative explanation is pointless. Saying X physical law in my fantasy is functionally identical to X physical law in the real world but is called something else or has some alternative in-universe explanation that does nothing is wasteful. You can take gravity in your setting and call it 'Garglebargle' but have it behave the same way, and that's stupid. It adds nothing but being needlessly obtuse.

Ah, but the critical thing is describing laws of the universe that are superficially identical, but are different in ways that have particular consequences of interest. Exalted's Charms, for instance, work because they're huge, calculated essence expenditures in a world made from and described by Essence, and because those expenditures toss out much of Fate's influence - and these are only a few such consequences.


I've seen professional writers do this - most recently in Ken Liu's Dandelion Dynasty novels, which refers to electrostatic energy as the 'Silkmotic Force' - and it's barely tolerable within the context of a wholly in-universe narrative.

That does sound pretty irritating, yeah.


For world-building purposes call things what they actually are. After all, you have to be able to relate to anyone potentially using the world what is actually going on in terms they can understand.

So ... shoddy writing is shoddy? I mean yeah, duh. But if you have something that is meaningfully different, explaining it may come up, and if you do it, you should do it well.

(Or it may not come up. You don't have to understand essence physics to play Exalted, or faux-Platonic philosophy to play MtAw, or the inner workings of contracts to play CtL. Those things are available for those who are interested, though, and they're pretty cool!)


Now, people living in your setting can believe whatever they want. They can be wildly, crazily wrong about things just as most humans were for most of their history (and as humans no doubt are still wrong about a great many things in our understanding of the cosmos), but in terms of what actually exists in your fantasy universe creating non-functional changes for the sake of change is wasteful and unnecessarily confusing.

Who says they're non-functional?

[5a Violista]

If their argument for why a flatworld isn't a dissonance generator is that it's barely distinguishable from a spherical world... if it's a distinction without a difference... then why bother having a flat world in the first place?

Flat world: So that you can sail the seas with your sextant, navigating by the stars, and find the edge of the world as an adventure location.[/COLOR]

(Psst! pwykersotz! While that edge of the world and floating-rocks ideas sound like fun settings, it seems like you missed the key phrase of that paragraph, the one that relates Max_Killjoy's response to the discussion that came before. "If their argument for why a flatworld isn't a dissonance generator is that it's barely distinguishable from a spherical world". If you can find the edge of the world as a location, then the world isn't "barely distinguishable from a spherical world" because spherical worlds generally don't have edges. I think the only exception to the "spherical worlds don't have edges" would be Pirates of the Caribbean, and they only arrived there through some mystic getting-lost mechanics.)
(In fact, I remember a book series that had both the edge of the world and floating rocks as distinguishing features. I think somewhere in the third book, it was actually a huge plot point that the magic in the rocks started to run out and the rocks started to fall to the ground, which had huge effects on the people living on one of them. However, if the author had just decided on saying "it's magic, so it flies independent of the physics of the world" then the story wouldn't have been nearly as interesting. Now I have to remember what series that was, because I want to reread it. Also, now that I think about it, it probably wasn't a flat world, either. More likely just a continent suspended above the ground (due to the shape), and nobody was able to explore enough to really define what exactly their world was like, but that didn't matter because it was a book and not a game.)




an Earth-sized discworld with life on both sides and a hole in the center through which a small sun rises and sets, which would just be a gimmick with just the one side was a standard Fantasyland (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tough_Guide_To_Fantasyland), with underground Dwarf mines, except the otherside "of the world" past the underground, was a "land of giants". That matters to players. A new world to explore! :biggrin:
Otherwise a "donut shaped" world would have no purpose besides "different".
:wink:
(Like, this world is also not "barely distinguishable" because the sun stays in a fixed azimuth angle all day long which affects things like wilderness exploration and travel, and characters have the ability to travel to a new world by traveling underground. Those two facts alone would make playing on a flat world more interesting, because it wouldn't be "functionally identical" to a round world.)



Okay! Sentence in not-parentheses: After a bit of thought, I decided to add one more reason why I like it when the setting is well-defined: because then, as a player, I can understand what my character is seeing and what my character knows. It makes it easier to define how my character would react and think if I already knew that she knew (and has always known) that the world is flat/donut/reversible/etc and that it has such-and-such cosmological implications. If I don't know how it's different as a player, then it makes it extremely difficult to get in-character without having to later told out-of-character that my character would obviously know that my creative idea wouldn't work because "gravity isn't actually a thing" or whatever reason.

[pwykersotz]

(Psst! pwykersotz! While that edge of the world and floating-rocks ideas sound like fun settings, it seems like you missed the key phrase of that paragraph, the one that relates Max_Killjoy's response to the discussion that came before. "If their argument for why a flatworld isn't a dissonance generator is that it's barely distinguishable from a spherical world". If you can find the edge of the world as a location, then the world isn't "barely distinguishable from a spherical world" because spherical worlds generally don't have edges. I think the only exception to the "spherical worlds don't have edges" would be Pirates of the Caribbean, and they only arrived there through some mystic getting-lost mechanics.)
(In fact, I remember a book series that had both the edge of the world and floating rocks as distinguishing features. I think somewhere in the third book, it was actually a huge plot point that the magic in the rocks started to run out and the rocks started to fall to the ground, which had huge effects on the people living on one of them. However, if the author had just decided on saying "it's magic, so it flies independent of the physics of the world" then the story wouldn't have been nearly as interesting. Now I have to remember what series that was, because I want to reread it. Also, now that I think about it, it probably wasn't a flat world, either. More likely just a continent suspended above the ground (due to the shape), and nobody was able to explore enough to really define what exactly their world was like, but that didn't matter because it was a book and not a game.)

Narnia is also a well known and widely beloved flat world.

And given your response, it's possible I've missed something. I am under the impression that the "barely distinguishable" clause is referring to the laws of physics as they operate for normal people in normal use, not for the adventure locations which they are designed to provide. Hence why the problem people seem to have with a flatworld is the horizon and the sextant, not the actual edge. If having the edge as an adventure location is enough to overcome the objections to the physics, I have no beef with that.

[Jay R]

Okay, so, I'm going to pick up two metal spheres and set up a cavendish balance...

Roll on Knowledge (advanced physics), please. Oh, your PC doesn't have that skill, because nobody in the world has it or can teach it? Then your entire plan requires an approach to science that is impossible in this world, just as no medieval person could build a working jet airplane.

Your PC does not know what a Cavendish balance is. There is nobody in the world who knows what a Cavendish balance is.

In any case, you can't do 1,000 years of research in a few game years.


Now I'm going to rotate them, and measure the readings.

Assuming I let you do this, you would discover that the readings aren't constant. Assuming years of measurements, you'd eventually learn that gravity is not universal, only pulls downward, has subtle changes whenever a levitation, flight, or feather fall spell is used in the fairly near vicinity, and has irreproducible changes with causes you are never able to identify. Scientific experimentation requires you to be able to control every other contributing variable, and you can't.

Over the course of many generations of experiments, one might eventually learn that magic flows through and controls everything, and what we think of as an anti-magic field merely eliminates certain levels of magic. The destructive force you're looking for is the elimination of all magic, which would eliminate all matter, energy, souls, and forces of any kind. Fortunately, this is impossible.

This is part of why you cannot find any underlying non-magical physics to study.


Okay, we've proven now that either gravity works normally ...

Gravity does not work normally. Levitation spells work, so there is no such thing as universal gravity.


...or that I can create a planet cracking weapon in my backyard by abusing the new laws of gravity and magnetism you've written.

You have asserted this with no proof. There is no logical path from "Gravity isn't constant" to "The world can be destroyed by somebody with medieval-level knowledge."

And assuming that there were such universal laws that made this possible, the gods would not allow it. The universe isn't run by modern physics. It really isn't.

Besides, you'd have the same chance of doing this as a medieval alchemist would of creating an atomic bomb.

And even if you could, why would you? Why do you want to destroy all the fun the other players want to have?

This is a serious question. Your proposed action has no purpose except to hurt people. Why?


When GM's tell me "it doesn't work the way it does in our world", I will start performing experiments to discover the form of the laws that govern the world of our D&D...

Roll a Knowledge (Modern scientific methods) check. You don't have that skill? OK, your PC cannot do it.

And if I let you do it, and after you spent several decades of gametime (or more likely, several lifetimes) preventing the party from having fun and adventures, you would learn that gravity is not universal, that energy and mass are not preserved, and that a great many results are not reproducible.


Screw killing monsters, it's way more fun be be a scientist!

Being a scientist in that world would be no more fun than being a Fighter with no weapons and no wars, or being a wizard with no spellbooks and no way to learn spells.


Oh, and hey, GM, I'm expecting to see your math.

First, make a Knowledge (tensor calculus) check. Your PC can't handle the math.

Second, D&D math is at best erratic. Growth due to xps is discrete; somebody with 2,999 xps is the same as somebody with 1,000, but very different from somebody with 3,000. somebody with an INT of 17 has the same abilities as one with 16, but not 18. How much experience it takes to develop from a Fighter 1 to a Fighter 2 depends on how many levels of wizard she has. Math in a D&D world is maddeningly hard to pin down.

Third, I would no more show you my math than I would give your PC control over the gods. You want to know what PCs don't know and do what PCs can't do, for the express purpose of destroying the game for everybody else. Why would I give you tools to destroy my game and hurt my other players with?

Besides, it isn't a world of modern physics, and it isn't run by math.


I will massacre the catgirls.

No - just the game.

And why? Why would you want to destroy people's fun?

[Segev]

If their argument for why a flatworld isn't a dissonance generator is that it's barely distinguishable from a spherical world... if it's a distinction without a difference... then why bother having a flat world in the first place?Why bother specifying at all? I mean, if there's not going to be a noticeable difference...


On the flip side, if the difference is noticeable to those living there, including to those individuals who are actually the PCs, then the fundamental underlying "rules and mechanisms" by which the world operates from the smallest to largest scale, and there are countless interconnected changes to the world that would be blatantly obvious were we to "visit".Not inherently true. Unless you're dropped near the edge of the world, or you deliberately get out your stick and notebook and wrack your brains to remember the trigonometry to figure out if the world is flat or round, or you somehow need to interact with the sun in a way that cares whether it's moving through the sky or you're rotating on a ball, or you're plopped in the middle of a perfectly flat plain or ocean...many people won't notice the details that would give it away.


The PCs are interacting with a world where every last thing is alien to us, and all those differences need to be apparent in the crunch and fluff of the game, and in very interaction the characters have with the world they inhabit.Not really. The differences can be detected if one looks for them, but you exaggerate their impact on day-to-day life. The fact that you have to dismiss "hills" and "trees" and "buildings" as if they were corner cases illustrates the problem you face.

Do you live in the Salt Flats, or something? Surrounded by nothing but miles and miles of empty, flat terrain?


If you aren't going to do that, then you've created a dissonance generator... you're telling the players one thing, and showing them something entirely different. Again, no, you're not. The differences you actually have to account for are relatively minor outside of the ones you were going to highlight anyway.


On the flip flip side, one might suggest that the different rules and mechanisms could be contrived in just such a way that everything appears the same as our world, other than, you know, that other world is flat. And that takes us right back to the start, with "why the hell bother, then?"Again: why specify either way?


(Of course, it is highly noticeable, unless one deliberately focuses on finding the few ways in which it isn't and ignores everything else.)Sorry, Max, this discussion has revealed that you're the one trying to focus on rare corner cases and dismiss everyday, typical life experiences and terrains as "few ways in which it isn't" obvious.

You've yet to provide examples that don't rely on practically white-room (white plane?) situations, other than the few which are part of the "wow" factor to begin with (e.g. "Sailing to the edge of the world.")

[Max_Killjoy]

I live in a place full of hills and trees.

And yet even here it would be obvious within minutes that the world was flat instead of spherical.

Those repeatedly bringing up "well there's a tree in a way in this one spot" and "you can't see 200 miles because of scattering" and "you can't see one person at 10 miles away anyway" are focusing on cherry-picked edge cases.

[Segev]

I live in a place full of hills and trees.

And yet even here it would be obvious within minutes that the world was flat instead of spherical. How?


Those repeatedly bringing up "well there's a tree in a way in this one spot" and "you can't see 200 miles because of scattering" and "you can't see one person at 10 miles away anyway" are focusing on cherry-picked edge cases.

Er, no.

1) There are MANY TREES that form a complete visual barrier to the horizon from where you're standing. Not "there's a tree in the way in this one spot."

2) The hills are also in the way; unless you climb to a point above all the visible hills, you can't see the horizon behind them, round world or not.

3) "Scattering in the atmosphere" is not a cherry-picked, edge case. It's literally inescapable unless you change the physical properties of light and air. This makes it nigh-universal to the kinds of settings being discussed.

4) "Things 10 miles away are often so small that you can't see them anyway" is hardly an edge case, either. You've yet to provide counter-examples of "non-edge" cases which are not "cherry-picked" which make this 10 mile distance so instantly noticeable compared to whatever you claim a horizon would provide.



(4) is an important one, Max. You've dismissed as cherry-picked edge cases YOUR OWN EXAMPLES when people have examined them and refuted them. Give us examples as to why this matters and how it would be "instantly" noticeable in day-to-day life, or even month-to-month life. Because frankly, you've yet to actually support your claim other than by assertion, and have undermined it by repeatedly rejecting YOUR OWN EXAMPLES as cherry-picked edge cases when people have refuted them.

[Lord Torath]

I live in a place full of hills and trees.

And yet even here it would be obvious within minutes that the world was flat instead of spherical.

Those repeatedly bringing up "well there's a tree in a way in this one spot" and "you can't see 200 miles because of scattering" and "you can't see one person at 10 miles away anyway" are focusing on cherry-picked edge cases.Really? We've discussed up close (no discernible difference), mid range (3-10 miles - almost no discernible difference) and long range (out to 200 miles - the mountain you're journeying toward emerges from the blue haze as thin smudge on a flat world when you're seven-and-a-half days away*, and would only peek above the horizon on a round world when you're five days away).

If you're a surveyor, yes it's obvious. Wait, you're a surveyor? Okay. So it's obvious. So what? Are you criticizing an imaginary DM for not describing things just so? When was the last time you got an accurate description of everything your character can see poking up above the horizon, and how it changed every time you moved? Did you rage-quit the last time that didn't happen?

What it really comes down to, is what premise are you willing to accept in order to have a fun game. Can you accept someone converting ambient energy into a ball of fire to toss at an opponent dozens of yards away? Great, wizards are in your game! Can you accept that gods are real, powerful, and can grant some of that power to their followers? Sweet, you've got clerics. Can you accept that some creatures can fly when our physics says it's impossible? Dragons, Gargoyles, and Rocs are now viable. Can you accept that Relativity (either Special or General) doesn't hold true? Fly spells, floating continents, and Flat Worlds all become possible.

A different set of premises and you have the Warhammer 40k universe. Relativity mostly holds, but we've figured out how to create artificial gravity without constant acceleration, so obviously something's allowed us to break it. And interesting things regarding the square-cube law and strength of materials is going on, permitting Titans and Bio-titans. Plus there's the Warp and its denizens and energies.

Change the premise slightly, and you get Starwars. We're still doing funky things with artificial gravity, but we also have planet-wide force fields. The Warp has changed substantially, but we still have "magic" monks, ginormous space ships that somehow don't buckle under the stress of their acceleration (more strength of materials stuff), and relatively small reactors pumping out more energy in a few seconds than the sun does in a week.

Change the premise again, and you've got Firefly/Serenity. Still doing funky things with gravity (closing the airlock re-instates gravity in the cargo bay, but the cockpit and engine room both enjoyed full gravity the whole time). Or maybe you've got Mechwarrior. Or Rifts. Or Mekton Zeta. Or heck, even Zombie Apocalypse. Every one of these settings violates basic fundamental laws of physics in some fashion.

So it really comes down to what premise you are willing to accept for a game. If you can't accept it, that's fine. Don't play. But don't knock those who can accept the premise of a flat world with gravity that still provides a useful attractive force, but doesn't obey General Relativity.

* Assuming an un-encumbered human traveling at a normal (non-forced-march) rate over clear terrain, with no woods/buildings/etc obscuring the view of the horizon). 2E AD&D that's 24 miles per day.

[Max_Killjoy]

No, I've given examples, and then they've been misrepresented or skewed to make them into "refutations". Repeatedly.

There are multiple places on my drive to and from work every day where I'd be able to see miles and miles of the road if the world were flat, but instead the road disappears over the horizon in the distance. There are places where I know there are hills or forests just over the horizon, that would be visible on a flat world. I drive about an hour away most weekends, and there are places on the interstate highway where the view would be markedly different were it not for the curvature horizon.

You can tell me "oh no you'd probably barely notice" all you want, but I'm looking at those places every day and I know what's right there stretching out in front of me into the distance.

The issue of scattering IS a meaningless edge case, it only applies at distances an order of magnitude farther than what's necessary for the curve vs flat difference to be blatant. But if you can't see 200 miles due to scattering, then supposedly that's a "refutation" of any visible difference at 20 miles? Really?

If I can see easily make out an airplane 6 miles up as an airplane, then 10 miles shouldn't be an issue for all sorts of objects, natural or artificial. "Oh no no, you can't see a person at 10 miles, so you'd never be able to notice the difference no matter what you're looking at."

[BlacKnight]

Not inherently true. Unless you're dropped near the edge of the world, or you deliberately get out your stick and notebook and wrack your brains to remember the trigonometry to figure out if the world is flat or round, or you somehow need to interact with the sun in a way that cares whether it's moving through the sky or you're rotating on a ball, or you're plopped in the middle of a perfectly flat plain or ocean...many people won't notice the details that would give it away.

A good chunk of human population lives (and has always lived) near the sea. So they literally have a flat plain near home that extend to the horizon... if there is an horizon. They can see that ship masts appear before the hull when a ship approach the coast.
Not to say that in the Age of Sail where did the scout stay to see further ? Yeah, on the mast. But in a flat world being higher doesn't make you see further.
Not so many people live in the mountains and can enjoy the eyesight, but a lot more live near mountains. They can easily notice how mountains aren't visible from a far distance. And mountains are a little too big to hide behind trees.
I notice this everyday, just like dozens (hundreds ?) of millions of people that live near the Alps.

To be clear: you can change the rules of phisics. You can have a world based on aristotelian physics.
But you can't change math. And geometry is part of math. A flat world would appear different, because geometry says so and nobody can do a thing about it.



If you're a surveyor, yes it's obvious. Wait, you're a surveyor? Okay. So it's obvious. So what? Are you criticizing an imaginary DM for not describing things just so? When was the last time you got an accurate description of everything your character can see poking up above the horizon, and how it changed every time you moved? Did you rage-quit the last time that didn't happen?

I didn't follow the entire discussion, but I tought that the problem was something like: nobody says anything about the shape of the world, then at some point during the campaign it is revelead to be flat. But flat world would have been noticeable from the start. So there's a break of immersion.
If the world is flat it should be clear from the beginning, and it would be nice if the GM says something about the difference from our own. Just like if there are multiple moons. You don't have to study astronomy, but but you can't even arrive at session 45 and saying: "Ah, I forgot: there are two moons"

[ImNotTrevor]

How?



Er, no.

1) There are MANY TREES that form a complete visual barrier to the horizon from where you're standing. Not "there's a tree in the way in this one spot."

2) The hills are also in the way; unless you climb to a point above all the visible hills, you can't see the horizon behind them, round world or not.

3) "Scattering in the atmosphere" is not a cherry-picked, edge case. It's literally inescapable unless you change the physical properties of light and air. This makes it nigh-universal to the kinds of settings being discussed.

4) "Things 10 miles away are often so small that you can't see them anyway" is hardly an edge case, either. You've yet to provide counter-examples of "non-edge" cases which are not "cherry-picked" which make this 10 mile distance so instantly noticeable compared to whatever you claim a horizon would provide.



(4) is an important one, Max. You've dismissed as cherry-picked edge cases YOUR OWN EXAMPLES when people have examined them and refuted them. Give us examples as to why this matters and how it would be "instantly" noticeable in day-to-day life, or even month-to-month life. Because frankly, you've yet to actually support your claim other than by assertion, and have undermined it by repeatedly rejecting YOUR OWN EXAMPLES as cherry-picked edge cases when people have refuted them.

That's what we in the business call a Slam Dunk.

[Insert Space Jam theme here.]

Though I keep my assertion that the actual problem is that Max has a preconceived notion of what a Flatworld would be like, and any explanation that differs from that will break his personal immersion.

From piecing it all together, that's my theory of the real problem.

[2D8HP]

...I keep my assertion that the actual problem is that Max has...


From previous threads I've gathered that Max_K. is very big on verisimili-whatsit, so he doesn't much like D&D (I think he means the 3.x version if that makes a difference), because it lacks it, and I'm guessing that his dislike of Flat World's is part of that.

Different strokes, etc.

In many ways this thread seems to be a SF versus Fantasy argument.

To each their own.

[Jay R]

Max is right. The difference would be clear to anybody who ever climbs a tree, rides over a gentle rise, scales a mountain, sees an eclipse, lives near the shore, or sails the ocean. And the proof of this is that people on our world knew that the world was round on exactly that evidence.


1) There are MANY TREES that form a complete visual barrier to the horizon from where you're standing. Not "there's a tree in the way in this one spot."

But for you to be correct, you would need there to be trees taller than whatever you're standing on, or however high you fly or levitate, in all directions and at all times, even if you live on the shore.


2) The hills are also in the way; unless you climb to a point above all the visible hills, you can't see the horizon behind them, round world or not.

All the visible hills? don't be silly. You only need to be above any hills within 5-10 miles in a single direction. Unless you live in a bowl and never leave it, then sometimes you are above the hills in one direction. I've stood on fairly low ridges where all I could see to the north, west, or south was higher mountains. But I could see to the eastward horizon.


3) "Scattering in the atmosphere" is not a cherry-picked, edge case. It's literally inescapable unless you change the physical properties of light and air. This makes it nigh-universal to the kinds of settings being discussed.

Frankly, I think Segev is correct here. You'd need a much higher level of science to understand this difference than the standard D&D game assumes, as is shown by the fact that scattering in the atmosphere was never used to prove that our world is round.


4) "Things 10 miles away are often so small that you can't see them anyway" is hardly an edge case, either. You've yet to provide counter-examples of "non-edge" cases which are not "cherry-picked" which make this 10 mile distance so instantly noticeable compared to whatever you claim a horizon would provide.
On a round world:

When you watch a ship sail away, the waterline disappears first, then the rest of the hull, then the lower sails, then the upper sails. Anybody who has lived on a shore knows this.
When you sail to a mountainous island, you see the tip of the mountain first, then more mountain, and finally the shore when you get much closer.
If you sail towards two mountaintops in the distance, you can't initially see if they are on one island or two, and you can't tell if you can sail between them.
Looking across a large enough lake, you cannot see the other shore.
If you travel a plain towards the mountains, first you just see snowcaps barely peeking over the horizon. You have to travel much closer to see the foothills, even though they are closer to you.



(4) is an important one, Max. You've dismissed as cherry-picked edge cases YOUR OWN EXAMPLES when people have examined them and refuted them. Give us examples as to why this matters and how it would be "instantly" noticeable in day-to-day life, or even month-to-month life. Because frankly, you've yet to actually support your claim other than by assertion, and have undermined it by repeatedly rejecting YOUR OWN EXAMPLES as cherry-picked edge cases when people have refuted them.

The examples are listed above.

I think Max is a little too emotional about it, if it would ruin a game for him for a GM to not focus on physics. But he is certainly right that you could tell the difference. We know that people on our world could tell the difference, and thereby knew that our world was round.

[gkathellar]

I dunno why so many of you assume that vision on Flatworld isn't a psychic sense with a maximum range, amplified by proximity to heaven. Haven't you ever read the Flatworld Yoga Sutras?

Incidentally, invisibility is lots easier on Flatworld, since it just consists of warding off other people's vision, not manipulating a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.

[Segev]

Oh, certainly, if you're on the sea, you won't see the masts first as ships draw near. You'll see little dots on the horizon, and your telescope is going to be FAR more important than your crow's nest to see things at a distance. You'll still want the crow's nest, unless you only sail flat, calm waters, because ocean waves can wibble hundreds of feet up and down, from my understanding, and that's WITHOUT cresting. A crow's nest will help you see over them better than just standing on your deck.

I didn't say there are NO cases. I said that it wouldn't be so noticeable that it would come up in every-day description.

Max's big example right now that I can parse is that there are places on his drive to/from work where the horizon provides the limit as to how far down the road he can see. That's fine.

My point is that a GM describing what the players on such a road are seeing probably wouldn't reflect a "round world" any more than it would a "flat world" in casual description.

"You see a wagon approaching you on the road in the distance" is about all I might expect. Heck, "You eventually encounter a drover atop a colorful gypsy-style wagon," even, which would assume that the encounter wasn't important enough to mention until long, long after the wagon would have been visible, regardless of whether it's a round or flat world.

I can understand his verisimilitude-breaking frustration if the GM describes the top of the wagon becoming visible first, but I don't know about anybody else, but I haven't had GMs who get so into description that they try to paint pictures that graphically. Not that far off.

So where I think the communication break-down lies must be in this: what is the GM, in Max's experience, describing or doing that is breaking his verisimilitude?

Okay, fine, sure, everybody in the setting is aware it's a flat world, not a round world. So? It being common knowledge just means the players need to be told, so they don't make bad assumptions and talk about going "around the world" or something.

Max speaks of these myriad differences as if they impact even the smallest aspects of daily life as presented to the players by the GM. So far, his examples don't really demonstrate this. At best, they demonstrate that somebody looking for it can detect it. There's a huge gap between the examples he's giving and the consequences he's claiming and I'm not seeing how he's bridging it. Especially when you take into account how the GM is going to describe things in a round world, too.

The closest thing to a legitimate complaint I've been able to parse is a question of whether somebody can see a potential threat or point of interest from a certain distance away. The rules for D&D don't give a horizon-line limit for how far you can see. They give a perception penalty for distance. If anything, a DM running D&D by the RAW would have to stop and think of a horizon-as-barrier before it would come up that this puts a hard limit on how far you can see.

Even "height helps you see further" is true in a flat world, provided it's a flat world with topography and trees and such: the higher you are, the fewer things are tall enough to obstruct your view of other things. And if you can see over them, you can see "shorter" things in the distance that are behind those taller things.

So the advantage of watch towers is still real.

Heck, if you've ever played a miniatures game or even most board games, you know that you have a better view of the game board from above than if you get down so that you're looking at it edge-on, and I will mail you a crisp $20 bill if you give me proof that you've played a board game large enough that the difference between a flat game board and a game board that curves like the Earth was notable. (You will, of course, have to provide me a mailing address in this event, or I cannot follow through in this promise.)

[2D8HP]

Max is right. The difference would be clear to anybody who...


Is it just me, or does anyone else think that Jay R's list of how one would notice that they're on a flat world (or maybe just one with a much bigger circumference?), make a flat world seem even cooler?

[Marcloure]

About the discussion of the horizon being infinite in a flat world, couldn't the world just be a section of sphere? That would solve the problem. Or, the DM could say that a spectral haze blurs the horizon as it gets too far.

But now about the preference of a round or flatish world. Well, lets put some features of which them.

1) Flat world: It has more mythical and magical appeal. As for gravity and why doesn't it round over time, the DM can bake a pretty and cool story behind it. "The World-forger God smashed his creation against the Anvil of Worlds with his powerful hammer. He did it to gift his loving goddess with the piece. And that is way currency is made with flat coins. And lastly, gravity is universal, there is an universal "up" and "down". Gravity is also not bounded to emanate from mass.

2) Realistic round world: This one is simple. Gravity pulls things together, so it becomes round. It has less high fantasy flavor, but there is also nothing wrong with it. Basic, no need to explain anything. Overall, I have the feeling that round worlds are bigger.

3) Fantastic round world: To trap a creature of pure chaos and madness, the gods weaved a fabric to cage that god-like beast. This version has nothing to do with gravity or real-world physics. With an explanation like this one, you can make your round world feels mythical too.

So, what can we conclude of all this? If you don't have a reason to make a flat world, don't even bother doing so. The reason for doing it can be as simple as building atmosphere, but most worlds don't need it. Heck, most of them don't even bother if the world is flat, round, the inside face of a sphere or an amorphous goo. Also, as long as you can create a cool story, anything can be great. But my favorite type? Flat. I tend to prefer mythical worlds, with astrology, floating cities, events that makes rain rains upward, falls that leads to the void beyond and the Mountain of Gods that is high enough to see the entire world. But in the end, it is a matter of preference.

[Xuc Xac]

There are multiple places on my drive to and from work every day where I'd be able to see miles and miles of the road if the world were flat, but instead the road disappears over the horizon in the distance. There are places where I know there are hills or forests just over the horizon, that would be visible on a flat world. I drive about an hour away most weekends, and there are places on the interstate highway where the view would be markedly different were it not for the curvature horizon.


Name one or stop saying this. Pick one place and tell us what you can't see from there but should be able to see on a flat world.

I never "cherry picked" any examples. You keep picking cherries and saying "It's the size of an apple! How could anyone fit the whole thing in their mouth?" and I measure it to show that it's a couple millimeters bigger than normal. When I picked my own examples, like Kansas and the Rocky Mountains, I picked them to skew the results in your favor. You say the differences would be huge, so I tried to find examples where the differences would be as great as possible. It still wasn't that big a deal. So, go ahead. Name one place you see every day that would look noticeably different without looking at it through a telescope or theodolite.

[Max_Killjoy]

Name one or stop saying this. Pick one place and tell us what you can't see from there but should be able to see on a flat world.


They don't have names, they're just random places along roads. They're not landmarks for you to go lookup online, tweak the view until it shows what you want from a very particular angle, and then come back and use that to prop up another strawman.

And I'll keep saying whatever I want to say, you have ZERO authority to restrict what I post.

[Max_Killjoy]

I think Max is a little too emotional about it, if it would ruin a game for him for a GM to not focus on physics. But he is certainly right that you could tell the difference. We know that people on our world could tell the difference, and thereby knew that our world was round.


The emotional part of my reaction is more due to that having all the differences (such as you listed) dismissed as "minor" and "subtle", having my own experience of the world dismissed out of hand and certain posters about half a step from outright calling me a liar, and being told that any dissonance is the fault of those experiencing the dissonance and their own supposed failures of imagination and inability to "do fantasy"... and totally having nothing at all to do with the worldbuilding or presentation.

And frustration at the notion that anyone who can't turn their suspension of disbelief up to 11 shouldn't be bothering with "fantasy", and assertions that "fantasy" is defined by "sensawunda" and randomly inserted "isn't that cool!" world features and nonfunctional beliefs being the actual mechanisms of the world -- and that if someone is bothered by those features being tack-ons that don't affect the world at all beyond being there to look upon with wonder, and the implications not being followed through on, then that's their problem, and totally not a fault in the worldbuilding.


E: I'm not going to let some random... person online (not you, Jay) tell me that what I can plainly see in the world every day isn't the case and that I shouldn't trust my own damn eyes, and I'm not going to let anyone tell me that having a high threshold for internal consistency and coherence in fictional worlds is bad-wrong-unfun.

And anyone who really enjoys fictional worlds built of myth and legend and just-so stories and wondrous features that exist simply for the sake of being wondrous shouldn't let me throw dirt on their campfire.

They're not changing my mind, and I'm not changing their mind.

I'm done. Please enjoy the discussion, I will stop darkening the thread.

[jayem]

Max is right. The difference would be clear to anybody who ever climbs a tree, rides over a gentle rise, scales a mountain, sees an eclipse, lives near the shore, or sails the ocean. And the proof of this is that people on our world knew that the world was round on exactly that evidence.

On a round world:

When you watch a ship sail away, the waterline disappears first, then the rest of the hull, then the lower sails, then the upper sails. Anybody who has lived on a shore knows this.
When you sail to a mountainous island, you see the tip of the mountain first, then more mountain, and finally the shore when you get much closer.
If you sail towards two mountaintops in the distance, you can't initially see if they are on one island or two, and you can't tell if you can sail between them.
Looking across a large enough lake, you cannot see the other shore.
If you travel a plain towards the mountains, first you just see snowcaps barely peeking over the horizon. You have to travel much closer to see the foothills, even though they are closer to you.




The examples are listed above.

I think Max is a little too emotional about it, if it would ruin a game for him for a GM to not focus on physics. But he is certainly right that you could tell the difference. We know that people on our world could tell the difference, and thereby knew that our world was round.

It's noteworthy that the early observation of the radius and roundness was based on angles of sunlight and stars for the most part. The sea approach to mountains and heights was noted by Ptolemy (although note that the relative projections will also produce a weaker variant of the effect anyway).

For most of the others I think they are dominated out, until telescopes are around.

Ignoring the observers height, at about 5000m, a 2m object is behind the horizon.
At this point lines separated by 1.5m are just about resolvable by someone with 20/20 vision. So an army might be visible on flat world but not on round world, but not a person.

Moving closer at 2500m, 0.5m is below the horizon while Visual acuity is about 0.75m. So you might be able to do an experiment to notice that you can't see their legs on roundworld, but probably not (in any case even on flatworld you expect local bumps). In terms of a camera image one person will be about 4 pixels high, one will be 3.

From 2 meters up. At a kilometer, a hundred meter flat beach subtends 0.01 degrees. So again is basically invisible in flat world. Perspective is dominating here.

I'm not sure how the 2 island thing demonstrates anything.

Todays wave heights are around 1m, the top of the Santa Maria's sail was 16m. So looking at 15km(Rnd)/45km(Flt). So there would be mechanical differences. Although you can resolve the horizon issue by standing up or climbing the rigging, which would be less useful on flat world (to check??). And if you knew what you looking for you could probably see the difference by eye, but the sail hull waterline effect would more or less occur in either world (which might make an interesting diversion, have roundworlders arguing this on flatworld).

With the mountains my personal experience is that at mid distances you can only see the foothills.
Mount Blanc ought to be hidden in round world (despite perfect vision) at 200k, which gets you to Lyon or just outside the foothills. The at least quarter height hill at the half way point would obscure the lower half quite adequately. On flat world it ought to be technically visible at 12,000k (I.E from the edge), provided of course that there isn't a 100m hill in the first 300km (or course you could climb that, but that would give the seeing the top effect). So potentially a quite noticeable difference, but one requiring a decent amount of traveling to actually confirm on land.

A specially located mountain inland, or across the sea would be noticeably different. You do see the horizon effect in a round world, and not really in flatland. Mount Blanc would be about the same size as an outstretched thumbnail at 400km, which might mean you could go directly across small seas earlier.

Before that of actual material consequence not a lot.
A few minor twinges that you might notice if you were transported. With a telescope, all of that changes, and there are casually observable effects.
But of course your characters should be used to living in a flat world and take that for granted, so actually commenting on them would be less realistic.

[gkathellar]

About the discussion of the horizon being infinite in a flat world, couldn't the world just be a section of sphere? That would solve the problem. Or, the DM could say that a spectral haze blurs the horizon as it gets too far.

But now about the preference of a round or flatish world. Well, lets put some features of which them.

1) Flat world: It has more mythical and magical appeal. As for gravity and why doesn't it round over time, the DM can bake a pretty and cool story behind it. "The World-forger God smashed his creation against the Anvil of Worlds with his powerful hammer. He did it to gift his loving goddess with the piece. And that is way currency is made with flat coins. And lastly, gravity is universal, there is an universal "up" and "down". Gravity is also not bounded to emanate from mass.

2) Realistic round world: This one is simple. Gravity pulls things together, so it becomes round. It has less high fantasy flavor, but there is also nothing wrong with it. Basic, no need to explain anything. Overall, I have the feeling that round worlds are bigger.

3) Fantastic round world: To trap a creature of pure chaos and madness, the gods weaved a fabric to cage that god-like beast. This version has nothing to do with gravity or real-world physics. With an explanation like this one, you can make your round world feels mythical too.

So, what can we conclude of all this? If you don't have a reason to make a flat world, don't even bother doing so. The reason for doing it can be as simple as building atmosphere, but most worlds don't need it. Heck, most of them don't even bother if the world is flat, round, the inside face of a sphere or an amorphous goo. Also, as long as you can create a cool story, anything can be great. But my favorite type? Flat. I tend to prefer mythical worlds, with astrology, floating cities, events that make rain rains upward, falls that leads to the void beyond and the Mountain of Gods that is high enough to see the entire world. But in the end, it is a matter of preference.

Well said, sir, well said!

[Cluedrew]

The difference would be clear to anybody who ever climbs a tree, rides over a gentle rise, scales a mountain, sees an eclipse, lives near the shore, or sails the ocean. And the proof of this is that people on our world knew that the world was round on exactly that evidence.But do any of these changes make the setting unusable, or impossible to resolve with constancy? That is what I have been arguing against, I think it is doable.

[Mutazoia]

The range of human eyesight is a lot further than most people realize...not infinite, but with an unobstructed view, you can see the curvature of the earth (such as at sea).

Now, there are a lot of post assuming that our hypothetical flat world would be obviously so...but these posts miss a few points that may or may not be true with said flat world:


The flat world is also topographically flat, being completely devoid of any hills, valleys, Mountains, etc.
The size of the flat world. On Earth, we can see the curve, as I said before. On a planet the size of Jupiter, we wouldn't.
Atmospheric composition. What's to say that the type of atmosphere necessary for a flat world would allow for nearly unobstructed vision over long distances.
It's a fantasy world. Nothing has to make sense.

[Bohandas]

How about an antisphere, or maybe a klein bottle?

[Bohandas]

About the discussion of the horizon being infinite in a flat world, couldn't the world just be a section of sphere? That would solve the problem. Or, the DM could say that a spectral haze blurs the horizon as it gets too far.

But now about the preference of a round or flatish world. Well, lets put some features of which them.

1) Flat world: It has more mythical and magical appeal. As for gravity and why doesn't it round over time, the DM can bake a pretty and cool story behind it. "The World-forger God smashed his creation against the Anvil of Worlds with his powerful hammer. He did it to gift his loving goddess with the piece. And that is way currency is made with flat coins. And lastly, gravity is universal, there is an universal "up" and "down". Gravity is also not bounded to emanate from mass.

2) Realistic round world: This one is simple. Gravity pulls things together, so it becomes round. It has less high fantasy flavor, but there is also nothing wrong with it. Basic, no need to explain anything. Overall, I have the feeling that round worlds are bigger.

3) Fantastic round world: To trap a creature of pure chaos and madness, the gods weaved a fabric to cage that god-like beast. This version has nothing to do with gravity or real-world physics. With an explanation like this one, you can make your round world feels mythical too.

You could also add a "realistic" flat world, which would seem to it's inhabitants to be bowl shaped since to reach the edges one would have to move away from the center of mass; effectively "up" as it were, at a greater effective slope the further one got from the center

[Jay R]

How about an antisphere, or maybe a klein bottle?

Somebody else might enjoy this. But for my purposes, the reason for a world that violates modern physics is to move away from modern ideas into fantasy. Klein bottles and Lobachevsky's non-Euclidean mathematics forces me more towards modern ideas.

[Bohandas]

Somebody else might enjoy this. But for my purposes, the reason for a world that violates modern physics is to move away from modern ideas into fantasy. Klein bottles and Lobachevsky's non-Euclidean mathematics forces me more towards modern ideas.

To be fair, a spherical world involves Riemannian geometry

[BeerMug Paladin]

Somebody else might enjoy this. But for my purposes, the reason for a world that violates modern physics is to move away from modern ideas into fantasy. Klein bottles and Lobachevsky's non-Euclidean mathematics forces me more towards modern ideas.

Meanwhile, I was considering suggesting using Hyperbolic space in order to solve the "see too far" dilemma for a flat world. Yes, let's make things even more difficult for ourselves to solve that problem.

[Bohandas]

How about a semi-realistic cube world, which is just a sphere world with eight really enormously huge mountains

[Jay R]

How about a semi-realistic cube world, which is just a sphere world with eight really enormously huge mountains

If I did this, it would be in a superhero universe, and it would be the Bizarro World.

http://www.repmanblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/planeta-bizarro.png

[Bohandas]

If I did this, it would be in a superhero universe, and it would be the Bizarro World.

http://www.repmanblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/planeta-bizarro.png

No, that's a fantasy-style cube world. A realistic cube world could only have ocean in the center of its faces as the areas around the vertices would effectively be very large mountains

[Segev]

Max, the trouble is that you are yelling at us rather than answering our questions.

I still don't know how the differences you say are so major manifest in an actual game as described by a GM to his players. You've yet to give any examples of these painfully obvious differences that you could pick up on from day to day descriptions of the world from the GM's mouth.

I can't begin to appreciate your position when I can't wrap my head around how these differences should manifest but the GM's descriptions jarringly fail to display them.

[Erth16]

(In fact, I remember a book series that had both the edge of the world and floating rocks as distinguishing features. I think somewhere in the third book, it was actually a huge plot point that the magic in the rocks started to run out and the rocks started to fall to the ground, which had huge effects on the people living on one of them. However, if the author had just decided on saying "it's magic, so it flies independent of the physics of the world" then the story wouldn't have been nearly as interesting. Now I have to remember what series that was, because I want to reread it. Also, now that I think about it, it probably wasn't a flat world, either. More likely just a continent suspended above the ground (due to the shape), and nobody was able to explore enough to really define what exactly their world was like, but that didn't matter because it was a book and not a game.)


I haven't finished reading the thread yet, but I'm fairly certain you are remembering The Edge Chronicles. As far as I remember, it was a pretty flat world, with on one side the edge, and at the other side of the known world an endless forest.

[Cluedrew]

Max, the trouble is that you are yelling at us rather than answering our questions.Second this, Max_Killjoy tends to get the point across the first time or not at all. Some exceptions of course.

Another issue I have realized that has covered this whole thread is that we have, or I did for a bit and a lot of other people's arguments seem to reflect this same mistake, grouped everything into "pro" and "anti" flat world, without really noting the differences in those groups. I for instance do not actually agree with some parts of the "it wouldn't make a difference" argument. Mostly around sea travel (assuming you don't fog it up for simplicity) and towers. Still that isn't much of a problem, and I hold that you can play in a flat world with those changes and the changes to the underlying system that lets the world be flat. Others think you don't need all those changes, and maybe you don't, but I would put them there.

On The Edge: Yes, as I recall the edge was sort of a triangle, two narrowing cliffs towards a point and the Deep Woods at the base of the triangle. And a single river winding its way down from Riverrise to the tip.

[Mechalich]

Max, the trouble is that you are yelling at us rather than answering our questions.

I still don't know how the differences you say are so major manifest in an actual game as described by a GM to his players. You've yet to give any examples of these painfully obvious differences that you could pick up on from day to day descriptions of the world from the GM's mouth.

I can't begin to appreciate your position when I can't wrap my head around how these differences should manifest but the GM's descriptions jarringly fail to display them.

I suspect you are not thinking about a flat world in at all the same way that Max_Killjoy is.

Here's the thing, there's two ways to have your fantasy on a flat earth. One, you can start from first principles and build a system of fantastical physics that produces a structure that somehow resembles a medieval world on a flat surface. Two, you can cheat and just decree the world is flat and ignore the implications and carry on as if things are normal and dare you players to find an issue.

The problem with the first approach is that it is really, really hard. Good world building is hard enough when you keep all initial conditions the same. When you start changing fundamental physics in order to modify gravity or replace it with something else you are likely to end up with something awful. So the most common result of trying to create a flat world is that it will be awful or stupid or some mixture of both (like Creation in Exalted).

The problem with the second approach is that if you world building is based on the principle of 'because I said so' you are likely to run into the problem where you say two explicitly contradictory things or absent-mindedly allow a significant issue that allows for infinite scaling. The Tippyverse, notably, is based on a particular feature of the magical trap rules. It's by no means the only way to break 3.X D&D, but it sure does.

Most people who are saying 'I'll make a flat world for my campaign' seem to be leaning onto approach two, simply because there's nothing in the responses that suggests they put anything like the work necessary for approach one into the process. And I'll admit, for a campaign or two, with a group of friends who already understand the house rules you play by and the implicit gentleman's agreement of 'no breaking the world' that is necessary for a wide variety of TTRPGs to take place at all, you can get away with it. You can also do this in narrative, if you're good at it, by simply channeling the story away from any complications with your flat world or simply working to make you story good enough that if/when readers call you on your mistakes it isn't a big deal (see Martin, G.R.R.).

My sense of Max_Killjoy's argument is that he has flatly rejected approach two from the very beginning as generally unsuitable, which, if your standard is 'material that rises to the level of publishable' happens to be absolutely true. You can't just piece a world together ad hoc and expect it to be useable by other people for game purposes. This was the cardinal sin of the oWoD, which only really functioned if you played according to certain implicit assumptions and WW got very angry at people who kept asking for rules that would allow for the game to be played even slightly differently even though it was there fault for not making the implicit internal guidelines they used around the office part of the actual rules. Ultimately there is just a big difference from what is viable in the context of 'things you share around the table with your buddies' versus 'things you present to the general public.'

So when Max or others (including myself) go forth and say 'no, you actually have to deal with X, Y, and Z' and others respond 'no we don't' both can be right, but they are talking about different things.

[Milo v3]

So when Max or others (including myself) go forth and say 'no, you actually have to deal with X, Y, and Z' and others respond 'no we don't' both can be right, but they are talking about different things.
Except the only X, Y, and Z things which have been discussed are things we either have gone "Okay... people can see further in rare cases... how does that being truth break anything or prevent the world from being consistent?" or "That is easy to resolve with the mythic nature of the world with an element like E". So to me it sounds more like 1 is the thing which is being discussed, not 2.

It's just that whenever we discuss the elements which can resolve the issues with a flat-world to make it consistent, Max acts as though it's an automatic fail because at some stage the explanation will conflict with something if you go deep enough because it'd be insane to make a whole universe worth of physics which are consistent, despite the fact that after some stage, yes we have to go to "It's magic" after a few layers of explaination... but that's true of all fantastic elements. We can explain a few layers down why the physics works differently, but we're not being inconsistent and just saying "it's all arbitrary" any more than another game which has fantasy in it because if you look deep enough into those.... the same thing is going to happen because it's ridiculous to expect people to make whole universe-worths of physics.

[raygun goth]

Except the only X, Y, and Z things which have been discussed are things we either have gone "Okay... people can see further in rare cases... how does that being truth break anything or prevent the world from being consistent?" or "That is easy to resolve with the mythic nature of the world with an element like E". So to me it sounds more like 1 is the thing which is being discussed, not 2.

It's just that whenever we discuss the elements which can resolve the issues with a flat-world to make it consistent, Max acts as though it's an automatic fail because at some stage the explanation will conflict with something if you go deep enough because it'd be insane to make a whole universe worth of physics which are consistent, despite the fact that after some stage, yes we have to go to "It's magic" after a few layers of explaination... but that's true of all fantastic elements. We can explain a few layers down why the physics works differently, but we're not being inconsistent and just saying "it's all arbitrary" any more than another game which has fantasy in it because if you look deep enough into those.... the same thing is going to happen because it's ridiculous to expect people to make whole universe-worths of physics.

Wow, I never expected to see the Oberoni fallacy in a fluff argument, but there it is.

[Milo v3]

Wow, I never expected to see the Oberoni fallacy in a fluff argument, but there it is.

... What? You realize we are talking about the flavour of a setting... That is 100% stuff decided by GMs.

If I'm adding an element to my setting, resolving the issues X, Y, and Z that would be caused by that element is going to be "houserules" because the whole setting is houserules. It's a homebrew setting for my homegames.

I'm not saying flat-world doesn't change anything. I'm saying you can add it as an element to your games while remaining consistent. Whenever you add Any element to our setting, you should be consistent. It's simply not as difficult for it to be consistent as some people seem to imagine it to be.

[pwykersotz]

... What? You realize we are talking about the flavour of a setting... That is 100% stuff decided by GMs.

If I'm adding an element to my setting, resolving the issues X, Y, and Z that would be caused by that element is going to be "houserules" because the whole setting is houserules. It's a homebrew setting for my homegames.

I'm not saying flat-world doesn't change anything. I'm saying you can add it as an element to your games while remaining consistent. Whenever you add Any element to our setting, you should be consistent. It's simply not as difficult for it to be consistent as some people seem to imagine it to be.

Ignore it. Fallacies like Oberoni and Stormwind are often used to obfuscate a point or bully an idea out of somebody. The fallacies are technically true in their points, but very seldom is the person accused of commiting the fallacy actually making that point. It's great when someone cites them, because then you know that the post can be safely ignored. Most of the time the thread is dead after the third fallacy citation.

[The Extinguisher]

Ignore it. Fallacies like Oberoni and Stormwind are often used to obfuscate a point or bully an idea out of somebody. The fallacies are technically true in their points, but very seldom is the person accused of commiting the fallacy actually making that point. It's great when someone cites them, because then you know that the post can be safely ignored. Most of the time the thread is dead after the third fallacy citation.

At the risk of completely undermining my own point, the Fallacy fallacy is a real problem in debates specifically arguments on the internet.

[Mechalich]

... What? You realize we are talking about the flavour of a setting... That is 100% stuff decided by GMs.


Again, this is only true if you are talking about a type two flat world situation.

In a type one flat world situation the world being flat is a fundamental fact and you have to have a whole bunch of stuff in place to justify it existing and how things necessary for life - like a sun - exist.

If you make a giant flat plate with a surface area equivalent to one hemisphere of the Earth and it happens to be 100 km thick or something, then unless you change gravity that disk immediately undergoes catastrophic collapse into a sphere! Surface area of the half the Earth is 250 million square kilometers, as a thin cylinder 100 km thick, so 25 billion cubic kilometers. The volume of Ceres (which is absolutely a sphere) is a mere 421 million cubic kilometers. It is even possible that if you disk is only a single kilometer thick the 250 million cubic kilometers would undergo gravitational collapse (though depending on the composition that probably wouldn't get all the way to hydrostatic equilibrium). And a world that was only 1 kilometer thick would have all sorts of other problems with geology, hydrology, and other processes.

So for your flat world to exist you have to either 1. change how gravity works, which induces a catastrophic cascade of impacts throughout your setting because gravity effects everything. Spelljammer changed gravity, and as a result had some really, really, bizarre rules about missile weapons and what happened when gravity planes interacted and a bunch of other stuff that never. worked. properly. or 2. pretend you have ultra-strong supermaterials that allow your flat world to exist in defiance of what gravity demands, which has its own consequence of allowing super-strong things to at least theoretically exist in the setting and someone can get it into their head to build towers to space or something and being consistent then means saying, 'yeah that's cool.'

This isn't drilling levels down at all. It is quite apparent at the surface. And openly fantastical flat world settings can have those problems too. Exalted postulated that Mount Meru in the center of Creation was 600 miles tall and could be seen from almost anywhere, and people had all sorts of arguments about what impact that mountain's shadow would have on the Blessed Isle as a result, because it turned out that yeah, a 600-mile tall mountain might well blanket a huge chunk of the island in lightless shadow for large portions of the day everyday and that was kind of an issue for sustaining life there. And it was never clear if day length varied with the seasons at all, or if the seasons just kind of happened because the gods decreed them - which kind of matters in arctic areas because there's a big difference between 30 days of night and it just getting a lot colder for a while.

World-building failure is common. Everyone screws up. G.R.R. Martin made the Wall too big and agriculture impossible in the North. Ed Greenwood packed the Forgotten Realms with entirely too many high level wizards and realized that the minute any of them got serious they'd crack the world like an egg (especially when 3e made them all like 10X more powerful, which wasn't his fault). Dark Sun made the Thri-Kreen way too awesome so that the Kreen Empire was invincible and was going to eat the Tablelands for breakfast, so they wrote that out of the 4e version. JJ Abrams let the Millennium Falcon come out of hyperspace inside a planetary shield in The Force Awakens and by doing so destroyed all warfare in Star Wars forever (okay, he probably didn't make that decision personally, but I'll blame him anyway). People are bad at this, and they are really bad at it when they start assigning actual numbers to things, since numbers aren't like qualitative labels and cannot easily be fudged around with later. Games, however, demand numbers, making things much more difficult. If I write a novel and say 'Merlin was a mighty wizard' I can freely define mighty to meet the needs of the narrative. If I design a game and say 'Merlin was a 14th level wizard' suddenly I have a lot less room to maneuver.

World-building is hard. The more moving parts you have, and the more deviations from the baseline of lived experience you introduce, the harder it becomes. If your world were a car, a deviation like, 'there are four moons' is small, like having extension mirrors instead of regular ones. Having a flat earth is ripping out the internal combustion engine and replacing it with the power of moonbeams and fairy dust. Good luck with that.

[Xuc Xac]

Here's the thing, there's two ways to have your fantasy on a flat earth. One, you can start from first principles and build a system of fantastical physics that produces a structure that somehow resembles a medieval world on a flat surface. Two, you can cheat and just decree the world is flat and ignore the implications and carry on as if things are normal and dare you players to find an issue.


Or the excluded middle. You can make some changes to the laws of physics to allow what you want without worrying about how those changes will play out when carried to extremes. Complaints like "Oh, no! If the rules worked like that, then the world would break when you scaled it up!" can be answered with "It doesn't actually work like that when you scale it up. These are the way the rules appear to work at the scale where the rules are actually used. There's no point in figuring out the extreme edge cases that nobody will use anyway."

Just like in the real world. If you are trying to calculate the trajectory of an arrow being shot from a bow by an archer who just took a 5 foot step, you're talking about an object moving hundreds of feet in a few seconds. At the velocity and distance involved, it's just a lot easier to use Newtonian physics instead of dealing with relativity. It's technically not exactly correct, but it's close enough to make no real difference. Using Newtonian physics to calculate the trajectory of an arrow used to shoot the planet Mars doesn't work because you need to take relativity into account at those distances, but it doesn't matter because no archer is shooting an arrow at Mars anyway. Newtonian physics also breaks down if you look at the subatomic scale, but no archer is going to be using a bow made of a Helium-3 nucleus to shoot individual electrons at teeny tiny orcs after taking his free 5 Planck unit step.

[Milo v3]

Again, this is only true if you are talking about a type two flat world situation.
Nope.


In a type one flat world situation the world being flat is a fundamental fact and you have to have a whole bunch of stuff in place to justify it existing and how things necessary for life - like a sun - exist.
Yep. But those justifications and facts are still made by the GM when he makes the setting....


World-building is hard. The more moving parts you have, and the more deviations from the baseline of lived experience you introduce, the harder it becomes. If your world were a car, a deviation like, 'there are four moons' is small, like having extension mirrors instead of regular ones. Having a flat earth is ripping out the internal combustion engine and replacing it with the power of moonbeams and fairy dust. Good luck with that.
Again. I'm not saying there wouldn't be changes necessary to the world if it's a flat world. If you're doing 1, then your need a very large number of justifications and changes for it to be consistent. I'm just suggest it's not as hard to provide those justifications as you present it to be.

My setting (where one of the planes is a flat-world) did need to change a lot of things to make the setting internally consistent. Gravity did have to be changed. How day/night/seasons/atmosphere/etc work all had to be changed. How nutrients work had to be changed in my setting. I had to change a lot of stuff, and I admit there is probably things I forgot about when I made it, but it should cover it in "enough depth"*. The end result still resembles a world the mechanics of the game (in some ways more than the default settings like how I handled how positive energy works) outside of some houserules with some classes.

* How much depth is enough, is of course highly subjective though.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Here's the thing, there's two ways to have your fantasy on a flat earth. One, you can start from first principles and build a system of fantastical physics that produces a structure that somehow resembles a medieval world on a flat surface. Two, you can cheat and just decree the world is flat and ignore the implications and carry on as if things are normal and dare you players to find an issue.



Why must there be a system of physics at all? Not that I mind physics (having a PhD in such and all), but why can't you have a world where things work on more allegorical lines? Where plate tectonics aren't a thing? Where things are the way they are because the Creator was a bit of a madman?

Speaking from a physical stand point, the laws of physics are pretty fragile. Any change that would allow magic would also destroy the conservation laws. Laws of physics aren't like legal laws that can be broken/ignored/etc. They're statements about observed reality. If you have even a single counter example, then what you thought were laws really weren't. Much better to just go whole hog and not require an impossible standard to begin with.

[ImNotTrevor]

Wow, I never expected to see the Oberoni fallacy in a fluff argument, but there it is.

The Oberoni fallacy is stating that a Mechanical Rule Error is not an Error because you can houserule it.

The argument here is that demanding 100% consistency is ridiculous and that with all things fantasy, eventually it will break down under close enough scrutiny.

The fundamental difference lies in how much scrutiny you're going to put in before you say "good enough."

Some argue for just a little. Some argue for a lot. But when it comes down to it, it's an argument purely about how much scrutiny any given fantasy world must stand up to in order to be deemed "acceptable." And that will vary wildly from person to person.

[BeerMug Paladin]

I feel it's worthwhile to note that in real-world physics, models that are useful have working tolerances. That is, they work within constraints and not outside them. Inside those constraints the models can do something useful. That's why the models exist at all; they appear to match what happens within well-defined parameters. What physicists don't have is a perfectly consistent physics.

In a fantasy-land, maybe some people have models of their reality. But if so, it seems more reasonable to me that those models would have constraints as well. Outside those limits, maybe nobody has adequate models because they're still deeply mired in the "need more data" phase of their no-science intellectualism.

Of course, coming up with things like the aforementioned giga-super-mountain and neglecting to consider what effects its shadow would have on the world are still a fail in so far as world-building goes, but that's a completely different kind of setting building than writing a bunch of fantasy-physics equations.

[Cluedrew]

Ignore it. Fallacies like Oberoni and Stormwind are often used to obfuscate a point or bully an idea out of somebody.Sometimes they are used correctly, but here I agree that I don't think they have. Oberoni Fallacy paraphrased is: Just because something can be fixed doesn't mean it isn't broken. Milo v3 seems to be arguing more that it is at worst broken (not internally consistent) in ways that don't matter. Because they happen at such a low level that people don't interact with it. Which is a very different and not invalid argument.

To Mechalich: I kind of stopped following your argument when you reduced things to two ways. Everything is more complex than that. For instance I work back all the way to first principles some times, but I don't start there. I start at what I want the results to be and create an internal set of justifications that extends as far down the stack of turtles as I can make it. And when people ask those complicated questions, my response is generally "you want the short answer or the long answer?"

[2D8HP]

....Having a flat earth is ripping out the internal combustion engine and replacing it with the power of moonbeams and fairy dust. Good luck with that.


Besides having an Edge, I thought that having a flat world is a broad signal that the setting is run on the "power of moonbeams and fairy dust" i.e. that the setting is "beyond the fields we know"/"not in Kansas anymore", and the impossibility is the point.

I thought that having the impossible was a definition of fantasy.

What am I not getting?

[PhoenixPhyre]

Besides having an Edge, I thought that having a flat world is a broad signal that the setting is run on the "power of moonbeams and fairy dust" i.e. that the setting is "beyond the fields we know"/"not in Kansas anymore", and the impossibility is the point.

I thought that having the impossible was a definition of fantasy.

What am I not getting?

Exactly. I find that attempts at "first-principles" fantasy worlds are harder for me to get into than ones that signal "this ain't your normal world." This goes for movies, books, etc. Just like how those knowledgeable about law find shows like CSI hard to watch, I find verisimilitude lacking in "fully-justified" worlds that deviate from our real one. Call it the uncanny valley of world-building.

Pro-tip: if your setting allows for any significant magic beyond pure telepathy (including FTL travel, teleportation, powerful energy weapons and all the other staples of science fiction), it can't be justified by real physics. As in, it violates conservation laws. That means that all physical law and theory has to be completely reworked from the ground up. I doubt the result will do what you want it to. So what's the point of trying? It won't work and it just leads to visible flaws.

[Bohandas]

Why must there be a system of physics at all? Not that I mind physics (having a PhD in such and all), but why can't you have a world where things work on more allegorical lines?

You could, but from a rules perspective I believe you'd be required to give the location the "divinely morphic" trait

[Bohandas]

Pro-tip: if your setting allows for any significant magic beyond pure telepathy (including FTL travel, teleportation, powerful energy weapons and all the other staples of science fiction), it can't be justified by real physics.

That depends on how you define "faster than light". The alcubierre metric doesn't contradict known physics and a ship based on it would get you to a destination faster than a beam of light through space. Admittedly though it technically wouldn't move at all, much like a heighliner or the Planet Express ship


So for your flat world to exist you have to either 1. change how gravity works, which induces a catastrophic cascade of impacts throughout your setting because gravity effects everything. Spelljammer changed gravity, and as a result had some really, really, bizarre rules about missile weapons and what happened when gravity planes interacted and a bunch of other stuff that never. worked. properly. or 2. pretend you have ultra-strong supermaterials that allow your flat world to exist in defiance of what gravity demands, which has its own consequence of allowing super-strong things to at least theoretically exist in the setting and someone can get it into their head to build towers to space or something and being consistent then means saying, 'yeah that's cool.'

To be fair, a lot of settings already have ultra strong supermaterials, like adamantine

EDIT:
Also, now that I think of it, it might not even need that. if we have any physicists or geologists or materials scientists (or possibly jewelers) here, could someone run the numbers (or at least give an estimate) on what would happen realistically if the base of a disc planet was a single gigantic flawlwss sapphire?

[Segev]

I suspect you are not thinking about a flat world in at all the same way that Max_Killjoy is.

Here's the thing, there's two ways to have your fantasy on a flat earth. One, you can start from first principles and build a system of fantastical physics that produces a structure that somehow resembles a medieval world on a flat surface. Two, you can cheat and just decree the world is flat and ignore the implications and carry on as if things are normal and dare you players to find an issue. "The world is flat. Gravity points down, at the strength it does on average for the Earth's surface."

Now, you can get into deeper questions as to whether this is a magical universal field effect, and you can start to conduct experiments to see if we're in Aristotelian gravity (heavier things fall faster) or not, and you can even discuss the possibility that the flat world is "really" a giant space ship thrusting through space at 9.8 m/s2 to produce the "Gravity" effect.

But from a day-to-day, what-the-GM-is-describing-to-the-players-as-they-travel-through-the-vast-swath-of-the-world-that-isn't-near-the-edge perspective, most of this isn't going to be relevant unless people LOOK for it. Conduct and construct experiments to call out and discover these differences.

I'm trying to appreciate your (and Max's, whether it's really the same as yours or not) perspective, but you're still not answering my fundamental question: What sorts of things in normal game play would you expect a GM to stumble over in his "round world expectations" influencing his descriptions in thoughtless ways?

Max, at the very least - and maybe you, though I don't recall you being so vehement about it - has acted as if GMs will inevitably stumble across them within the first session in ways that make it painfully obvious the GM is not thinking through the implications of a flat world.

When pressed for examples, those examples have been examined and found less than convincing, and he's accused those examining them of "cherry-picking" or "ignoring" his scenarios (where the scenarios being "ignored" are actually the real cherry-picked corner cases, at BEST...like "don't you dare bring up haze effects").

I'm asking you, now, Mechalich, for some examples that reasonably would show up that a GM would likely unthinkingly use his real-world experience to describe which should be different in a flat world and would thus be jarring to any player who was trying to cotton on to the flatness of the world from the GM's descriptions.



So when Max or others (including myself) go forth and say 'no, you actually have to deal with X, Y, and Z' and others respond 'no we don't' both can be right, but they are talking about different things.The thing is, it's not that people are saying "no, we don't," it's that people are saying, "Even if we deal with X, Y, and Z, they mostly won't be noticeably different in typical runnings of the game."

They will come up...but generally only in situations where the flatness of the world would actually be at the top of the GM's mind. Even the "resolve out of the haze" vs. "appear mast-first over the horizon" difference is less than likely to come up, as most GMs would be more likely to say, "You eventually spot a ship in the distance."

So please, give examples of what the blatant problems you expect to come up are, and why they'll immediately throw the "flat world" out the window. I cannot picture situations that could possibly arise in normal play that would pose the scale of problem that's being asserted to exist. It shouldn't be hard to give these examples! Just tell me what you're picturing as a bad-case scenario in a typical session of play!

[GungHo]

If their argument for why a flatworld isn't a dissonance generator is that it's barely distinguishable from a spherical world... if it's a distinction without a difference... then why bother having a flat world in the first place?
Because we want to have a fight with an immortal on the edge of the world and push him off of it to be rid of him forever.

[Jay R]

Considering that they provided very reasonable explanations why it would be hardly noticeable in many situations, I think that might be the correct response. Maybe not quite, it depends on other details of the setting. As I see it, it is an entirely workable change. Yet you act like it is not and I still don't get why.
If their argument for why a flatworld isn't a dissonance generator is that it's barely distinguishable from a spherical world... if it's a distinction without a difference... then why bother having a flat world in the first place?

You changed his argument to make yours work. He didn't say that "it's barely distinguishable from a spherical world". He said that it's "hardly noticeable in many situations" (emphasis added).

This cannot be accurately characterized as "a distinction without a difference". It's a distinction without a difference in many situations.

People are arguing that you can ignore the distinction except in those situations in which it makes a difference. You are maintaining that you can't, because it virtually always makes a difference.


A finite flat world would have an edge. This only matters if you are near the edge.
A flat world would have a much longer area of view when you are higher than nearby obstructions. This only matters when you are higher than nearby obstructions. (Of course, this includes when you send up a lookout with levitation, which I assume every lord does regularly, to see approaching armies much earlier.)
A flat world on four elephants standing on the back of a turtle has four giant elephants and a turtle to explore. This only matters if you go over the edge.


The basic argument appears to be (you) there is virtually always an obvious difference, and if the DM doesn't focus on this most of the time you'd be annoyed, vs. (them) the difference only matters occasionally, when the DM would be dealing with it.

[I apologize if I'm mischaracterizing your argument, but I'm pretty sure it's pretty close.]

In any event, nobody means to say that there are no differences. They just believe that the differences don't come up as often as you think they do.

[Max_Killjoy]

From my last post previous:



And anyone who really enjoys fictional worlds built of myth and legend and just-so stories and wondrous features that exist simply for the sake of being wondrous shouldn't let me throw dirt on their campfire.

They're not changing my mind, and I'm not changing their mind.

I'm done. Please enjoy the discussion, I will stop darkening the thread.


I very much wanted to leave the thread and stop throwing dirt on other people's campfires.

I've little use for worlds made of faerie dust, rainbows, and unicorn farts woven of fiat, held up by deific will(s) alone, made up of nothing but legend and myth and unrelated just-so statements -- but I also don't think that any of those things define "fantasy" worlds in the least.

E: When I look at a world and see those sorts of explanations, or see things that don't add up (that are incoherent when looked at side-by-side), that immediately signals to me that there's something to figure out, that there's an underlying objective truth/reality being hidden by chance or design. Incongruences are a signal to investigate, not a source of wondrous awe. This comes from the same part of my brain that finds disconnects between system and setting jarring -- don't tell me one thing and show me another.

Other people really enjoy worlds where the world is flat "because it's flat" and the phases of the moon are the blinking of the night-god's one good eye and people are literally the tears of the mother goddess mixed with the clay of the crafting god and fired in the fumes of the dragon god and given breath by the east wind...

There's very little common ground for us to meet on, so I thought instead of dragging the discussion down any further, I'd just leave it to those who enjoy it.

[Zale]

From my last post previous:



I very much wanted to leave the thread and stop throwing dirt on other people's campfires.

I've little use for worlds made of faerie dust, rainbows, and unicorn farts woven of fiat, held up by deific will(s) alone, made up of nothing but legend and myth and unrelated just-so statements -- but I also don't think that any of those things define "fantasy" worlds in the least.

Other people really enjoy worlds where the world is flat "because it's flat" and the phases of the moon are the blinking of the night-god's one good eye and people are literally the tears of the mother goddess mixed with the clay of the crafting god and fired in the fumes of the dragon god and given breath by the east wind...

There's very little common ground for us to meet on, so I thought instead of dragging the discussion down any further, I'd just leave it to those who enjoy it.

That's a perfectly valid position.

I think it's possible there's been confusion in people thinking that you were holding your position to be paramount over all others, rather than as a personal preference.

I personally dislike settings that act as if they are derived from exactly the same physical laws as our own, despite having several incredible deviations that are crudely hand-waved away. Improperly applied physics harms my verisimilitude far more than something that's whole-cloth myth or legend. I'd rather play in a setting where the sun and moon are literally just two people chasing each other around a flat world than one that tries to write an entire textbook justifying itself as something that sticks to the Rules(tm).

Different tastes!

[2D8HP]

...Other people really enjoy worlds where the world is flat "because it's flat" and the phases of the moon are the blinking of the night-god's one good eye and people are literally the tears of the mother goddess mixed with the clay of the crafting god and fired in the fumes of the dragon god and given breath by the east wind...

There's very little common ground for us to meet on, so I thought instead of dragging the discussion down any further, I'd just leave it to those who enjoy it.


Sorry M K, I don't remember the previous post, but I've got to say, you really write well a neat mythic setting (even if it's one you don't like).

You're kinda of like a famed meat chef who's a vegetarian.

I'm a bit reminded of how easily I can write up "back-stories" for "Edgelord" PC's...
...that I don't want to play.

[Lord Torath]

Sorry M K, I don't remember the previous post, but I've got to say, you really write well a neat mythic setting (even if it's one you don't like).

You're kinda of like a famed meat chef who's a vegetarian.

I'm a bit reminded of how easily I can write up "back-stories" for "Edgelord" PC's...
...that I don't want to play.Now I have the urge to create a character named Edgelord, whose family owns a small keep at the edge of the forest. Hence the family name. Friendly, cheerful, team player who's never even heard the word "katana", and has eyes that are both the same, ordinary, color. "Edgelord" would, of course, be his family name. Maybe his first name could be Martin?

[Max_Killjoy]

Now I have the urge to create a character named Edgelord, whose family owns a small keep at the edge of the forest. Hence the family name. Friendly, cheerful, team player who's never even heard the word "katana", and has eyes that are both the same, ordinary, color. "Edgelord" would, of course, be his family name. Maybe his first name could be Martin?

He goes by his middle name, "Steve".

He is utterly embarrassed by his actual given name... which may be "Darke", or "Sharpe", but he's not telling.

[Lord Torath]

He goes by his middle name, "Steve".

He is utterly embarrassed by his actual given name... which may be "Darke", or "Sharpe", but he's not telling.Much better than Martin, which I was only leaning toward due to Marty Stu. Also, no capes trenchcoats or long hair styles. Obviously, his parents have a cruel sense of humor.

So what's his sister's name?

[Jay R]

Now I have the urge to create a character named Edgelord, whose family owns a small keep at the edge of the forest. Hence the family name. Friendly, cheerful, team player who's never even heard the word "katana", and has eyes that are both the same, ordinary, color. "Edgelord" would, of course, be his family name. Maybe his first name could be Martin?

Edge of the forest? No, no, no, no, no. We're talking about flat worlds here.

Put him on the edge of the earth.

[Lord Torath]

Edge of the forest? No, no, no, no, no. We're talking about flat worlds here.

Put him on the edge of the earth.Gets us back on topic, but it does depend on the campaign I'm trying to insert him in. If the DM's doing a flat world, great. If not, certainly the edge of something. Lake, Canyon, Jungle, what have you.

[Max_Killjoy]

Much better than Martin, which I was only leaning toward due to Marty Stu. Also, no capes trenchcoats or long hair styles. Obviously, his parents have a cruel sense of humor.

So what's his sister's name?

She also goes by her middle name, shortened to "Jenny" from "Jennifer".

She is also embarrassed by her given name... which is either "Darke" or "Sharpe", whichever the parents didn't give to "Steve".

[Cluedrew]

I personally dislike settings that act as if they are derived from exactly the same physical laws as our own, despite having several incredible deviations that are crudely hand-waved away.Oh, that's one of the ones that gets me. When magic (or similar) just seems strapped onto the world any interacts with it at a few convenient points... well I already said it just feels strapped on. We have magic because we created the setting and adding magic, without setting it seep into the cracks, doesn't feel as good.

Also Steve and Jenny Edgelord, I love it. I'm sure they get along quite well, probably get along with their parents pretty well too (as much as they think they think their parents are overly dramatic).

[Xuc Xac]

Now I have the urge to create a character named Edgelord, whose family owns a small keep at the edge of the forest. Hence the family name. Friendly, cheerful, team player who's never even heard the word "katana", and has eyes that are both the same, ordinary, color. "Edgelord" would, of course, be his family name. Maybe his first name could be Martin?

There is already a formal noble title for a medieval edge lord. "Marquis", "marquess", or "margrave" are literally "lord of a boundary territory". The Marquis de Sade was both a literal and figurative "edge lord".

[Max_Killjoy]

Oh, that's one of the ones that gets me. When magic (or similar) just seems strapped onto the world any interacts with it at a few convenient points... well I already said it just feels strapped on. We have magic because we created the setting and adding magic, without setting it seep into the cracks, doesn't feel as good.

Also Steve and Jenny Edgelord, I love it. I'm sure they get along quite well, probably get along with their parents pretty well too (as much as they think they think their parents are overly dramatic).

Imagine their embarrassment when the party has to take refuge in the family manor, and sees the paintings with their actual first names under them.

"Wait, your names are Sharpe Steven Edgelord and Darke Jennifer Edgelord?" :smallbiggrin:

[Xuc Xac]

"Wait, your names are Sharpe Steven Edgelord and Darke Jennifer Edgelord?" :smallbiggrin:

"I was originally named Dirk Stephano Darkraven-Steele after my maternal grandfather, but I had it changed."

[Lord Torath]

Imagine their embarrassment when the party has to take refuge in the family manor, and sees the paintings with their actual first names under them.

"Wait, your names are Sharpe Steven Edgelord and Darke Jennifer Edgelord?" :smallbiggrin:<grrrr!> "They're family names from way back on our mother's side, okay? It's tradition! It's a dumb tradition, but it's tradition." <grrr!>

[Jay R]

The Marquis de Sade was both a literal and figurative "edge lord".

Oh, well done. Very well done indeed.

[Segev]

I'm kind-of amused by the notion of a setting that takes place on a flat-except-for-topology landmass that is the size of Australia or so, with a sea or small ocean along at least one edge over which a massive waterfall flows. The edge of this world is obvious to anybody, and one can perform experiments to determine the relative flatness of the overall average terrain and achieve "it's flat" results...

...but it's actually just a really huge plateau with an oddly flat top on an otherwise round world.

Though I'd have to do some math to see how big I could make this (Australia might be too big) before "gravity towards center of planet" vectors would make the edges feel like rising hills.

[Jay R]

I'm kind-of amused by the notion of a setting that takes place on a flat-except-for-topology landmass that is the size of Australia or so, with a sea or small ocean along at least one edge over which a massive waterfall flows. The edge of this world is obvious to anybody, and one can perform experiments to determine the relative flatness of the overall average terrain and achieve "it's flat" results...

...but it's actually just a really huge plateau with an oddly flat top on an otherwise round world.

Though I'd have to do some math to see how big I could make this (Australia might be too big) before "gravity towards center of planet" vectors would make the edges feel like rising hills.

The math isn't that hard. It's just the Pythagorean theorem (a2 + b2 = c2), where a is the radius of earth, and b is the radius of the continent. Then c is the radius of earth plus the extra elevation on the edge.

You also need simple trig to get the slope.

Assuming the radius of the planet is the same as earth (about 4,000 miles), and the continent is about the same as Australia (about 2,500 miles east-to west, and 2,300 north-to-south), then the east and west coasts would be about 190 miles higher than the center of the continent, and the north and south coasts would be about 160 miles higher. By contrast, Mount Everest is about 6 miles above sea level. Near the edge, you'd be walking uphil at about 17-18 degrees.

To have a flat circular continent whose edges are no higher than Mt. Everest, the continent should be no more than 220 miles radius (440 miles diameter). Near the edge, the slope would be about 3.3 degrees.

To have the edges be no taller than than tallest mountain in Australia (Mt. Kosciuszko), the continent should be 106 miles in radius (212 miles diameter). You'd walk uphill at 1.6 degrees - quite obvious.

But to make the edges less than 500 feet above the center? The "continent" should be 27 miles in radius or less. And approaching the edge, you be walking uphill at a slope of about 0.4 degrees - which any bicyclist will recognize as uphill, and I expect many walkers would, too.

[Max_Killjoy is correct; it really does make a difference. He just reacts to that difference more than I do.]

[Segev]

The math isn't that hard. It's just the Pythagorean theorem (a2 + b2 = c2), where a is the radius of earth, and b is the radius of the continent. Then c is the radius of earth plus the extra elevation on the edge.

You also need simple trig to get the slope.

Assuming the radius of the planet is the same as earth (about 4,000 miles), and the continent is about the same as Australia (about 2,500 miles east-to west, and 2,300 north-to-south), then the east and west coasts would be about 190 miles higher than the center of the continent, and the north and south coasts would be about 160 miles higher. By contrast, Mount Everest is about 6 miles above sea level. Near the edge, you'd be walking uphil at about 17-18 degrees.

To have a flat circular continent whose edges are no higher than Mt. Everest, the continent should be no more than 220 miles radius (440 miles diameter). Near the edge, the slope would be about 3.3 degrees.

To have the edges be no taller than than tallest mountain in Australia (Mt. Kosciuszko), the continent should be 106 miles in radius (212 miles diameter). You'd walk uphill at 1.6 degrees - quite obvious.

But to make the edges less than 500 feet above the center? The "continent" should be 27 miles in radius or less. And approaching the edge, you be walking uphill at a slope of about 0.4 degrees - which any bicyclist will recognize as uphill, and I expect many walkers would, too.Thanks for doing the math for me! For it to be less-than-obvious by observation that there is a "center" where gravity points orthogonal to the ground, then, it'd be more a smallish island than anything resembling a "world."


[Max_Killjoy is correct; it really does make a difference. He just reacts to that difference more than I do.]Depending on assumptions, yes. In this example, the assumption was a round world with ordinary gravitational attraction with an oddly tall and flat plateau.

In most "flat world" settings, gravity is more a universal constant with the whole universe having a "down." There is often no more explanation for this than we have for why time moves forward. Regardless, under that relatively reasonable assumption for a flat world setting, you wouldn't have the oddly-sloped gravity problem as a tell-tale.

[Lord Torath]

I'm kind-of amused by the notion of a setting that takes place on a flat-except-for-topology landmass that is the size of Australia or so, with a sea or small ocean along at least one edge over which a massive waterfall flows. The edge of this world is obvious to anybody, and one can perform experiments to determine the relative flatness of the overall average terrain and achieve "it's flat" results...

...but it's actually just a really huge plateau with an oddly flat top on an otherwise round world.

Though I'd have to do some math to see how big I could make this (Australia might be too big) before "gravity towards center of planet" vectors would make the edges feel like rising hills.Also, what's to prevent someone standing at "the edge" from looking over and seeing the rest of the world? I think we've determined that Rayleigh scattering will blur out everything at sea level after about 184 miles, which makes for a pretty high plateau if you want the rest of the world to fade into the blue haze. I'm pretty sure on Earth that counts as "in space". Make the plateau lower, and keep the edges permanently surrounded by thick clouds, preventing a view of the rest of the world? You would need a substantial amount of rain to keep up with the ginormous* waterfall, so perpetual clouds around the edge might not to too terribly unplausible.

On a planet like Earth, someone from "the world below" would find this place, and climb up, for no other reason than "because it is there."

* Huh. Apparently "ginormous" is now a word. Spell-check's not throwing up a red flag underline at any rate.

Edit: You could put this "floating continent" on a much larger-but-less-dense world, resulting in a more gradual "gravity slope" toward the edges, while still maintaining 1-G environment.

[2D8HP]

...but it's actually just a really huge plateau with an oddly flat top on an otherwise round world....


I'm a little bit reminded of Mount Lookitthat on the planet

Plateau (http://larryniven.wikia.com/wiki/Plateau)

from the novel:
A Gift from Earth (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gift_from_Earth)

[Max_Killjoy]

I'm a little bit reminded of Mount Lookitthat on the planet

Plateau (http://larryniven.wikia.com/wiki/Plateau)

from the novel:
A Gift from Earth (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gift_from_Earth)

I was just looking that up to reference it. It was the first thing I thought of too.

[Xuc Xac]

Also, what's to prevent someone standing at "the edge" from looking over and seeing the rest of the world? I think we've determined that Rayleigh scattering will blur out everything at sea level after about 184 miles, which makes for a pretty high plateau if you want the rest of the world to fade into the blue haze.

Because the edge is where the ocean pours over an enormous waterfall. They can see where the edge is but getting close enough to look over it is suicide.

[Lord Torath]

Because the edge is where the ocean pours over an enormous waterfall. They can see where the edge is but getting close enough to look over it is suicide.I suppose that's one solution. The original description was a waterfall over "at least one edge", of which "all the edges" is certainly a valid subset.

[Xuc Xac]

I suppose that's one solution. The original description was a waterfall over "at least one edge", of which "all the edges" is certainly a valid subset.

The original description also said "a landmass the size of Australia". To me, that implies that it's surrounded by water and not just a really big plateau next to a coast "like China but a few miles higher than its neighbors".

[Segev]

A combination of mist off the ginormous waterfall and potentially being surrounded by ocean might be enough to have at least the ocean/sky horizon lost to mist/scattering. Not sure about that, though.

As for "at least one person climbs it," well, maybe, but how long was it before Sir Edmund Hillary climbed Mount Everest after Mount Everest was known to his culture? It might have technological limitations to human ability to do so, making it ultra-rare if not impossible prior to a certain point in development.

[Jay R]

Also, what's to prevent someone standing at "the edge" from looking over and seeing the rest of the world?
Because the edge is where the ocean pours over an enormous waterfall. They can see where the edge is but getting close enough to look over it is suicide.

No it's not. The edge is higher than the middle. That water would pour back downhill to the center.

[2D8HP]

No it's not. The edge is higher than the middle. That water would pour back downhill to the center.


Isn't it the assumption that constant rain makes it like an overflowing bowl?

[Cluedrew]

What if it was a bent world? That is to say curved like part of a sphere but you still have edges.

That might also be a fix it you are worried about the horizon line but want edges of the world.

[Jay R]

What if it was a bent world? That is to say curved like part of a sphere but you still have edges.

That might also be a fix it you are worried about the horizon line but want edges of the world.

He's trying to produce what appears to be a flat world that turns out to be a mere extension of a round world. Making it appear to be a round world defeats the purpose, I suspect.


Isn't it the assumption that constant rain makes it like an overflowing bowl?

If so, it's an assumption I can't remember seeing. And under this assumption, the sea level would be curved, not flat, and therefore doesn't simulate a flat world, like the example above.

[Beelzebubba]

The trouble with a flat world is that you have to make all sorts of other changes to the known laws of physics, astronomy, thermodynamics etc. to allow it to exist. And unless you're very well versed in these things, there's a good chance that sooner or later one of your players is going to start asking questions you can't answer.

We live in a world with quantum physics. There's tons of questions we can't answer today. Just be like Calvin's dad and make stuff up on the fly. It doesn't have to make sense. When did any pre-scientific cosmology ever?

Non-standard worlds are amazing. They can really add a cool feel to a game. They open up possibilities of all sorts of creative, weird, and compelling events, since our scientific models don't necessarily apply.

Heard of Reign? That world is literally on the bodies of God. Two human-shaped worlds, reclined, facing each other, joined by their arms reaching across the chasm. At the bottom of a U-shaped ocean. The sun hovers over the outstretched arms. It's bonkers.

Also, there's always the 'it wraps around' option. There's a brilliant short story by Ted Chiang called "Tower of Babylon" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babylon_(story)) that uses the geo-centric model to describe what happens when the Tower of Babel is literally built tall enough to touch heaven. Engineers find an expanse overhead of pure marble; they dig through it, only to find themselves drowning in water. The narrator barely survives, swims up to the surface, only to find himself on the beach, in a place he knows, a few month's travel from where the Tower stands.

It would be cool for characters to get into a crazy Tinker Gnome DaVinci flying contraption and fly so high they have to duck and weave between all the 3-meter diameter stars that are whizzing over the land like flocks of birds.

Hell, this is fantasy. Make it fantastic!

[Beelzebubba]

If gravity and magnetism don't work the way they do in our world, at least nominally/superficially... that has a host of knock-on effects that will radically alter the reality of the setting.

...

And yet in those "fantastic" worlds, the worldbuilders (authors, GMs, crackpot flat-earth wingnuts, whoever) always seem to cherry-pick which implications they want to actually follow through on, and leave everything else just like it is in our world, which doesn't actually work by those rules at all. Or rather, they're rarely considering the implications of what they're saying, and it's just a mashup of "just so stories (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ad_hoc)".

You can 'let yourself go' enough to imagine dragons that breathe chlorine gas, levitating toothy heads that fire anti-magic beams, and an entire plane of existence run by Satan.

But you choose this that you 'can't possibly let go'.

Do you role-play your character sitting inside a room running Newtonian experiments? Maybe you should be outside, I dunno, killing Dragons and casting magic spells at Demons?

[Max_Killjoy]

You can 'let yourself go' enough to imagine dragons that breathe chlorine gas, levitating toothy heads that fire anti-magic beams, and an entire plane of existence run by Satan.

But you choose this that you 'can't possibly let go'.



1) Non-sequitur and strawman much?

2) Then there's the Playgrounder Fallacy of assuming that all discussions are about and only about bog-standard D&D rules and settings.

3) Never mind that you're going way back in the thread and resurrecting dead discussions.

4) Also, far more recent and relevant:





And anyone who really enjoys fictional worlds built of myth and legend and just-so stories and wondrous features that exist simply for the sake of being wondrous shouldn't let me throw dirt on their campfire.

They're not changing my mind, and I'm not changing their mind.

I'm done. Please enjoy the discussion, I will stop darkening the thread.



I very much wanted to leave the thread and stop throwing dirt on other people's campfires.

I've little use for worlds made of faerie dust, rainbows, and unicorn farts woven of fiat, held up by deific will(s) alone, made up of nothing but legend and myth and unrelated just-so statements -- but I also don't think that any of those things define "fantasy" worlds in the least.

E: When I look at a world and see those sorts of explanations, or see things that don't add up (that are incoherent when looked at side-by-side), that immediately signals to me that there's something to figure out, that there's an underlying objective truth/reality being hidden by chance or design. Incongruences are a signal to investigate, not a source of wondrous awe. This comes from the same part of my brain that finds disconnects between system and setting jarring -- don't tell me one thing and show me another.

Other people really enjoy worlds where the world is flat "because it's flat" and the phases of the moon are the blinking of the night-god's one good eye and people are literally the tears of the mother goddess mixed with the clay of the crafting god and fired in the fumes of the dragon god and given breath by the east wind...

There's very little common ground for us to meet on, so I thought instead of dragging the discussion down any further, I'd just leave it to those who enjoy it

[Cluedrew]

Non-sequitur and strawman much?Not really, or not entirely. We all have the things we are used to and are willing to except. As a trivial example, allowing almost any form of magic requires a rewrite of the rules of the world on a scale similar to a flat world, but I have yet to see anyone level arguments against magic like the ones levelled against flat worlds in this thread.

Some arguments against flat worlds came from different places, but a few could be cut and pasted straight into an argument against using magic in settings and be roughly as valid. So in a sense there is a double standard about what people will accept in a story and things they will not.

In another sense, it is a work of fiction and the most important (non-double) standard is how much you enjoy the work. Whether or not that is for entirely logic reasons or not doesn't matter (in this context, others where it does matter probably exist). Of course we can debate the little details around and around as we do on Giant in the Playground.

Also I am keeping the quote there because it was Max_Killjoy's post when I started writing.

[Max_Killjoy]

Not really, or not entirely. We all have the things we are used to and are willing to except. As a trivial example, allowing almost any form of magic requires a rewrite of the rules of the world on a scale similar to a flat world, but I have yet to see anyone level arguments against magic like the ones levelled against flat worlds in this thread.

Some arguments against flat worlds came from different places, but a few could be cut and pasted straight into an argument against using magic in settings and be roughly as valid. So in a sense there is a double standard about what people will accept in a story and things they will not.


None of the arguments I've seen in this thread are "equally valid" as blanket arguments against all fictional constructs of "magic", only some constructs and only to some degree.

First and foremost, there are ways of arranging for a setting to have magic that don't immediately require the reader / player to accept (or characters therein) to not notice the existence of at least half a dozen totally incompatible things before breakfast.

( And yes, in fact, it was non sequitur and a strawman, given that nothing he said was related to anything I'd actually be arguing or any of my actual statements. )




Also I am keeping the quote there because it was Max_Killjoy's post when I started writing.


Good for you. Whatever.

[Milo v3]

First and foremost, there are ways of arranging for a setting to have magic that don't immediately require the reader / player to accept (or characters therein to not notice the existence of) at least half a dozen totally incompatible things before breakfast.
Could you give an example? Since physics relies on all the laws interacting with each other, if you modify even one bit so that you can have magic, it realistically would lead to a cascading effect throughout the rest of physics and make the world immensely different to the real world.

[Max_Killjoy]

Could you give an example? Since physics relies on all the laws interacting with each other, if you modify even one bit so that you can have magic, it realistically would lead to a cascading effect throughout the rest of physics and make the world immensely different to the real world.

Who said anything about tinkering with the physics? Unlike what's needed just to keep a flatworld of any appreciable size from collapsing in on itself, fictional allowances for magic don't by necessity require tinkering with important physics.

[Milo v3]

Who said anything about tinkering with the physics?

.... You indirectly? You're talking about magic.... Unless your magic is a unique thing which doesn't match anyone else's description of magic, then there are going to be physics involved.

[Max_Killjoy]

.... You indirectly? You're talking about magic.... Unless your magic is a unique thing which doesn't match anyone else's description of magic, then there are going to be physics involved.

I think you're flat wrong there.

But you think whatever you want, I'm not interested in another argument.

[Milo v3]

I think you're flat wrong there.

But you think whatever you want, I'm not interested in another argument.

You could just give a single example of a setting with magic that wouldn't interact with physics to show your point...?

[Max_Killjoy]

You could just give a single example of a setting with magic that wouldn't interact with physics to show your point...?

"Interact with physics" != "change the laws of physics".

And having something very much like reality, doesn't immediately mean that it has exactly the same physics to the core, and allowing for any sort of magic at all doesn't immediately mean it all falls apart -- but that was never my argument about flatworlds and the like, and at this point you're (deliberately or not) trying to get me into an argument about something I didn't say.

[Milo v3]

"Interact with physics" != "change the laws of physics".
Magic = Supernatural thing which does things that would normally considered impossible.
If magic exists, then the physics of the setting must have it exist otherwise it wouldn't exist. This means the physics of any world with magic need to be changed to handle the addition those things which would normally considered impossible, otherwise they would be impossible in the setting as well.


at this point you're (deliberately or not) trying to get me into an argument about something I didn't say.
Actually I'm just trying to understand this statement:

First and foremost, there are ways of arranging for a setting to have magic that don't immediately require the reader / player to accept (or characters therein to not notice the existence of) at least half a dozen totally incompatible things before breakfast.

[Cluedrew]

None of the arguments I've seen in this thread are "equally valid" as blanket arguments against all fictional constructs of "magic", only some constructs and only to some degree.Right, the word is cogent, not valid. Nothing in this thread has been truly valid as far as I can remember.

Also the note about the quote is because I saw the update, but hadn't revaluated my post to see if it still fit with you new post. I think it would be but I wasn't when I wrote that.


Who said anything about tinkering with the physics? Unlike what's needed just to keep a flatworld of any appreciable size from collapsing in on itself, fictional allowances for magic don't by necessity require tinkering with important physics.Could you elaborate on this one? I really don't get it. Is physics a shorthand for "how the world works on a low level"? That is what is usually seems to mean in these topics. Actually while I am listing terms, what is a fictional allowance?

There are how many new posts!?

[Max_Killjoy]

No, I can't elaborate. I'm not getting sucked into this nonsense again. Do whatever you want with your fictional worlds, they don't have to make any damn sense at all for some people to have loads of fun.

I shouldn't have let myself get trolled by someone digging up month-old posts just to restart crap, but I was pissed off about something else at just that moment.

[Cluedrew]

I'm serious Max_Killjoy, I don't understand what you just said and if you would take the time to elaborate I would like to read it and try to understand. You don't have to so you have my permission (not that you need it) to bow out if you want.

[ImNotTrevor]

And having something very much like reality, doesn't immediately mean that it has exactly the same physics to the core, and allowing for any sort of magic at all doesn't immediately mean it all falls apart --

I am now laughing because this is almost verbatim a summary of many of the pro-flatworld arguments.

And as I said before, it seems to be a matter of matching expectation and scope moreso than actual accuracy to reality.

That you wouldn't be able to see an army 200 miles away while standing in a field on a flatworld is pretty much accurate (though for different reasons than why you wouldn't see it on Earth), but for some, declaring such to be the case messes with one's internal model and thus one's immersion. For others, we don't encounter that situation often enough to care, so our expectations are not fiddled with.

Some expect magic and physics to get along just fine. Others know that magic's mere existence would break physics so hard that the universe would barely hold together. Others don't care so long as they can yell "PEW PEW" when they cast Magic Missile.

If it meets your expectations, and extrapolates to at least the scope you imagine it to, then it won't bother you. If it does neither, no dice. Simple. (This is the royal, general "you" not anyone in particular.)

[90sMusic]

Has to be round. Not only is that true to life, but it also prevents weird circumstances like being able to see near infinite distances without the curvature of the earth. If the world was flat, you could climb to the highest mountain, throw up a powerful telescope, and be able to see literally anywhere on the planet.

I could see certain settings being a flat world, kinda like a massive landmass kind of floating in the ethereal sea, riding the back of a giant turtle or something like that. It works for some settings. I think most settings default to reality though, and that means a round world.

[Cluedrew]

If the world was flat, you could climb to the highest mountain, throw up a powerful telescope, and be able to see literally anywhere on the planet.This is a feature not a bug. I mean drastically altering how a setting works on a high level (as opposed to the low level seen in scientific measurement) is hard but it can be really rewarding.

If it is a feature you don't want, put a very thin fog in the air (or set the whatyamacallit of air) so that air is effectively opaque at a high enough distances.

[jayem]

Has to be round. Not only is that true to life, but it also prevents weird circumstances like being able to see near infinite distances without the curvature of the earth. If the world was flat, you could climb to the highest mountain, throw up a powerful telescope, and be able to see literally anywhere on the planet.

I could see certain settings being a flat world, kinda like a massive landmass kind of floating in the ethereal sea, riding the back of a giant turtle or something like that. It works for some settings. I think most settings default to reality though, and that means a round world.

Practically you couldn't even then. At non-trivial distances each mountain in the way would 'throw a shadow' equal to it's distance*it's height/your height. So if can assume there is a mountain near the half way point that is half your height in each direction^ then you can't see the rim and anything on the ground in three quarters of the planet.
On the assumption that your not on a totally isolated convex mountain, you'll get near shadows too.

What you might be able to do is see a specific range of points that could be anywhere on the planet [in particular from peak to peak is almost certain]. Or build sufficiently high towers.

^I'd imagine there to be some power law that means that this is more or less true. (0.5% of the earth is at half everest height). Or at least a chain of smaller peaks.

[Jay R]

Has to be round. Not only is that true to life, but it also prevents weird circumstances like being able to see near infinite distances without the curvature of the earth. If the world was flat, you could climb to the highest mountain, throw up a powerful telescope, and be able to see literally anywhere on the planet.

This assumes a telescope better than any previous to the 20th century, and far better than any hand-held telescope today.

It also assumes that you can hand-hold a telescope, or build a platform for it, that is far more steady than anything done before. [Remember that it's on a swivel of some sort, or it only points in one direction. No perfectly steady swivel could be built before the 20th century.]

Finally, it assumes that you can point something with a level of accuracy far beyond anything but a computer and high-tech machinery today. To point at a spot 100 miles away and be within ten feet of your aiming point requires accuracy to within 1/1,000 of a degree.

[Lord Torath]

Has to be round. Not only is that true to life, but it also prevents weird circumstances like being able to see near infinite distances without the curvature of the earth. If the world was flat, you could climb to the highest mountain, throw up a powerful telescope, and be able to see literally anywhere on the planet.We've actually had this discussion in this very thread. Several times, in fact. In Earth's atmosphere, Rayleigh scattering (the reason the sky looks blue) turns everything beyond about 180 miles into a featureless blue haze.

[Bohandas]

I'm serious Max_Killjoy, I don't understand what you just said and if you would take the time to elaborate I would like to read it and try to understand.

Yeah, I don't quite understand either. Or I'm not sure if I understand at any rate. I think it might mean like changing the constants and/or the world's starting conditions vs changing the actual laws, or possibly that like relativity and quantum mechanics it generally reduces to regular physics at the human scale, but those are both just shots in the dark

[Xuc Xac]

Some expect magic and physics to get along just fine. Others know that magic's mere existence would break physics so hard that the universe would barely hold together. Others don't care so long as they can yell "PEW PEW" when they cast Magic Missile.

If it meets your expectations, and extrapolates to at least the scope you imagine it to, then it won't bother you. If it does neither, no dice. Simple. (This is the royal, general "you" not anyone in particular.)

I don't know if there's a name for it, but I've seen this same phenomenon before. Some things just inspire greater scrutiny and people are less willing to suspend their disbelief even for two things that are equivalently unreal.

"Sorry, guys. The klingon just transported away without a trace and you can't find out where he went because of subspace interference."
"That's bull! You don't know how transporters work! There must be some kind of particle trail we can detect!"

"Sorry, guys. There was some subspace interference and some tachyons were... fluxing the... emitter array, so now there are two Rikers, ok?"
"Ok. Neat!"

The party gets hit by a fireball. Do we bother to check if the oil flasks and scrolls are ignited or check to see if the archer snaps a bowstring? No, don't worry about it. Just make your save and keep on going. Oh, wait, one guy has a gunpowder weapon? Well, then let's dig into the nitty gritty details about how flammable gunpowder is or isn't!

The party just teleported halfway around the globe but the GM says it's still the same time of day and forgets to take time zones into account? Pfft. So what? I check for traps and move on. Oh, the party is just walking down the road on a flat world and the GM says we spot someone 3 miles away? Well, let's stop and argue about whether we should have been warned when they were still 3.25 miles away because details matter!

[Cluedrew]

To Xuc Xac: I want to say Acceptance Bias, but at the same time I don't think that is it. Any yes I have seen it before as well.

[Max_Killjoy]

Well, at least I'm getting a chuckle out of watching some of you compete to build the biggest strawman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man) caricature (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caricature) possible.

"It would be quickly obvious that the world is flat instead of a sphere, for the same reasons that some people from ancient times onward knew our world was a sphere -- they looked out at the horizon, climbed mountains, watched ships disappear in the distance but that distance was farther if they were on a cliff or tower, they looked at the stars and observed eclipses, watched the angles of shadows and the angles to celestial bodies, etc. There are enough places where one could stand and see 10 or 20 times farther, and large things that are over the horizon on our world would be plainly visible on a flatworld."

And somehow the response that comes back is 'Well you can't see forever because light scatters too much in the air as you get near to 200 miles, and of you're going to quibble over a quarter mile then why wouldn't you upset about this other thing" (and never mind it's never been about a quarter of a mile no matter how much distortion you apply, and that you have no way of knowing what my position might be on that other thing, since that other thing has never come up on this thread... you're just making a bald-faced presumptions for the sake of establishing the most belittling, demeaning, insulting strawman you can come up with.).

[Bohandas]

"Sorry, guys. The klingon just transported away without a trace and you can't find out where he went because of subspace interference."
"That's bull! You don't know how transporters work! There must be some kind of particle trail we can detect!"

To be fair IIRC The Gamesters of Triskelion established that transporters, or at least Triskelion's long range transporters, do indeed leave a traceable trail

[Cluedrew]

To Max_Killjoy: I wasn't talking about your argument, so I seem to be talking about something else that is because I actually am. (Of course I don't know if I was in "some" either... but just as a point of clarification.)

[Max_Killjoy]

To Max_Killjoy: I wasn't talking about your argument, so I seem to be talking about something else that is because I actually am. (Of course I don't know if I was in "some" either... but just as a point of clarification.)

You were not part of the "some".

But the whole "well if you accept this one thing why do you object to all those other things"... thing... does strike me as a rather flimsy justification for committing the "but dragons!" fallacy (treating all breaks from reality as equivalent, and one break from reality as total justification for all breaks from reality).

[Milo v3]

You were not part of the "some".

But the whole "well if you accept this one thing why do you object to all those other things"... thing... does strike me as a rather flimsy justification for committing the "but dragons!" fallacy (treating all breaks from reality as equivalent, and one break from reality as total justification for all breaks from reality).

In this case it was more "Why aren't you applying the same level of scrutiny to the other things in your game?" (though I admitt there were some instances of just "but dragons!" in the discussion).

[pwykersotz]

Well, at least I'm getting a chuckle out of watching some of you compete to build the biggest strawman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man) caricature (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caricature) possible.

"It would be quickly obvious that the world is flat instead of a sphere, for the same reasons that some people from ancient times onward knew our world was a sphere -- they looked out at the horizon, climbed mountains, watched ships disappear in the distance but that distance was farther if they were on a cliff or tower, they looked at the stars and observed eclipses, watched the angles of shadows and the angles to celestial bodies, etc. There are enough places where one could stand and see 10 or 20 times farther, and large things that are over the horizon on our world would be plainly visible on a flatworld."

And somehow the response that comes back is 'Well you can't see forever because light scatters too much in the air as you get near to 200 miles, and of you're going to quibble over a quarter mile then why wouldn't you upset about this other thing" (and never mind it's never been about a quarter of a mile no matter how much distortion you apply, and that you have no way of knowing what my position might be on that other thing, since that other thing has never come up on this thread... you're just making a bald-faced presumptions for the sake of establishing the most belittling, demeaning, insulting strawman you can come up with.).

This is actually more in support of your point than anything because it necessitates the curvature of the earth, but I think I heard somewhere (I know, my sources are amazing) that some very ancient cultures believed the world was a dome atop a disc of freshwater (because when you dig down you reach freshwater) atop a disc of saltwater (the sea). Sadly, I don't remember which culture.

[ImNotTrevor]

"It would be quickly obvious that the world is flat instead of a sphere, for the same reasons that some people from ancient times onward knew our world was a sphere -- they looked out at the horizon, climbed mountains, watched ships disappear in the distance but that distance was farther if they were on a cliff or tower, they looked at the stars and observed eclipses, watched the angles of shadows and the angles to celestial bodies, etc. There are enough places where one could stand and see 10 or 20 times farther, and large things that are over the horizon on our world would be plainly visible on a flatworld."


To be fair, the objection was never "there is no observable difference and nobody would know the world is flat."
The objection was "in most situations the difference won't be so stark as to invalidate common, casual descriptions of things approaching." Only noticing that one specific growing speck in the distance was a gypsy caravan when it got within about 10 miles is not unreasonable for most human eyes. Suspend a car 10 miles in the air straight above the ground and most people won't be able to spot it because it's now tiny. Yes, a massive object will be visible, but the GM probably isn't going to want or need to explain each and every large mountain you can see every time you're outside. Assuming you can see them is probably not going to ruffle any feathers.



And somehow the response that comes back is 'Well you can't see forever because light scatters too much in the air as you get near to 200 miles, and of you're going to quibble over a quarter mile then why wouldn't you upset about this other thing" (and never mind it's never been about a quarter of a mile no matter how much distortion you apply, and that you have no way of knowing what my position might be on that other thing, since that other thing has never come up on this thread... you're just making a bald-faced presumptions for the sake of establishing the most belittling, demeaning, insulting strawman you can come up with.).
No one was talking about you at that point. Take a chill pill.
Unlike you, most of us feel no need to toss vague accusations about "some people" throwing personal attacks our way. If we're referring to you specifically, we'll be sure that you know.

Geeze.

[Mutazoia]

To be fair, the objection was never "there is no observable difference and nobody would know the world is flat."
The objection was "in most situations the difference won't be so stark as to invalidate common, casual descriptions of things approaching." Only noticing that one specific growing speck in the distance was a gypsy caravan when it got within about 10 miles is not unreasonable for most human eyes. Suspend a car 10 miles in the air straight above the ground and most people won't be able to spot it because it's now tiny. Yes, a massive object will be visible, but the GM probably isn't going to want or need to explain each and every large mountain you can see every time you're outside. Assuming you can see them is probably not going to ruffle any feathers..

Pretty much. After all, you would have to assume that the flat world was also topographically flat for this to be much of an issue. If you use the Bonneville Salt Flats un Utah as an example: The Flats are about 30,000 acres, or nearly 47 miles. You can stand at one end, and see the mountains are the other end. Could you make out a person at the base of said mountains? Nope. Can you see the curve of the Earth? Nope....mountains are in the way.

If you took the Earth, and spread it out flat, like a wall map, nobody that wasn't damned close to the edge would be able to tell that the world was flat...there's just too much stuff in the way.

Oh...and most people didn't realize that the earth was round by watching a ship sail over the horizion. Most people (except the sailors) were afraind to sail that far, because they were afraid of falling off the edge of the world (they assumed the horizion WAS the edge). It wasn't until much later, when stellar navagation became well known (amongst the sea-faring members of society) that ships ever traveled out of sight of land...even crossing a relatively small body of water, such as the Mediterranean Sea was a big no no. Everybody took the long way around, keeping land firmly in sight. Why do you think it took so long for Odysseus so long to make the short trip from Troy to Greese? (Yes, Homer wrote it that way....but he wrote it that way because the prevailing logic of the time was that once you got out of sight of land, you would be hoplessly lost...but I digress).

P.S. As a side note: People lived on this planet for quite a long time, believing it was flat. They didn't really care one way or another.

[BlacKnight]

P.S. As a side note: People lived on this planet for quite a long time, believing it was flat. They didn't really care one way or another.

I get interested about the argument and a made some research. None of the sources I found in Homer and the Bible says specifically that the Earth is flat. They says various things that can be interpreted as they thought the world was flat... but they could just as well mean other things.

For example the famous Homer citation about the shield of Achilles doesn't say that Earth was flat. Somebody says that "Homer believed Earth was a flat surface like the shield" that makes sense as saying that we believe Earth is flat because maps are flat...

About the Bible https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/earth/does-bible-teach-earth-flat/

So does anybody have sources that proves people believed Earth was flat ?

[Mutazoia]

I get interested about the argument and a made some research. None of the sources I found in Homer and the Bible says specifically that the Earth is flat. They says various things that can be interpreted as they thought the world was flat... but they could just as well mean other things.

For example the famous Homer citation about the shield of Achilles doesn't say that Earth was flat. Somebody says that "Homer believed Earth was a flat surface like the shield" that makes sense as saying that we believe Earth is flat because maps are flat...

About the Bible https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/earth/does-bible-teach-earth-flat/

So does anybody have sources that proves people believed Earth was flat ?

You mean besides the whole "Holy Roman Church jailing people for saying the Earth is round" thing?

[BlacKnight]

You mean besides the whole "Holy Roman Church jailing people for saying the Earth is round" thing?

I mean besides miths, lies and propaganda. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth

No, people in the Middle Ages didn't believe Earth was flat. I was talking about people that lived before Eratosthenes.

[Cluedrew]

To Mutazoia: There was the incident with Galileo and the Sun vs. Earth Centered world. But that was not a flat world, people had that figured out before the Middle Ages. Science & study goes way back.

[Max_Killjoy]

In this case it was more "Why aren't you applying the same level of scrutiny to the other things in your game?" (though I admitt there were some instances of just "but dragons!" in the discussion).

Problem is, the person asking the question has no idea what level of scrutiny gets applied to other things in my games, and was just jumping to presumption for the sake of diverting the discussion into a red herring argument.

(For the record, it has actually come up in my various musings, how you'd tell if you'd been moved to some other part of the world instantly, and the time of day, location of major celestial bodies, and the seasonal weather all come to mind. So yes, actually, it would stand out if in-game we teleported halfway around the world, and none of those things were different.)

[Max_Killjoy]

Pretty much. After all, you would have to assume that the flat world was also topographically flat for this to be much of an issue. If you use the Bonneville Salt Flats un Utah as an example: The Flats are about 30,000 acres, or nearly 47 miles. You can stand at one end, and see the mountains are the other end. Could you make out a person at the base of said mountains? Nope. Can you see the curve of the Earth? Nope....mountains are in the way.

If you took the Earth, and spread it out flat, like a wall map, nobody that wasn't damned close to the edge would be able to tell that the world was flat...there's just too much stuff in the way.


Great.

But from 47 miles on the curved Earth, starting at about 3 miles away, there are things you won't see, that you would see on a flatworld, depending on how tall they are, that are located between you and those mountains.

No one ever said "you can see the curvature of the earth" (which would mean something like what's visible from a high-altitude fight).




Oh...and most people didn't realize that the earth was round by watching a ship sail over the horizion. Most people (except the sailors) were afraind to sail that far, because they were afraid of falling off the edge of the world (they assumed the horizion WAS the edge). It wasn't until much later, when stellar navagation became well known (amongst the sea-faring members of society) that ships ever traveled out of sight of land...even crossing a relatively small body of water, such as the Mediterranean Sea was a big no no. Everybody took the long way around, keeping land firmly in sight. Why do you think it took so long for Odysseus so long to make the short trip from Troy to Greese? (Yes, Homer wrote it that way....but he wrote it that way because the prevailing logic of the time was that once you got out of sight of land, you would be hoplessly lost...but I digress).

P.S. As a side note: People lived on this planet for quite a long time, believing it was flat. They didn't really care one way or another.


The "people used to believe the earth was flat" thing is largely a myth. Blame Washington Irving, Antoinne-Jean Letronne, and some others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/busting-a-myth-about-columbus-and-a-flat-earth/2011/10/10/gIQAXszQaL_blog.html
http://www.livescience.com/16468-christopher-columbus-myths-flat-earth-discovered-americas.html

(http://www.livescience.com/16468-christopher-columbus-myths-flat-earth-discovered-americas.html)Mediterranean cultures as far back as the Minoans and Phoenicians routinely sailed out of sight of land, across open water, to their trading destinations and distant colonies. And you can watch a ship sail over the horizon from land, from the shore or from a watchtower or whatever, without setting foot on a boat, and people can actually spread word of what they've seen to others who were not there... so the "most people didn't sail" thing is irrelevant.


EDIT -- and we also come right back to the elephant in the room... if the goal of having a flat world is to be wondrous and different and awesome... doesn't claiming that the difference is hardly noticeable also assert that said goal isn't being achieved?

[Jay R]

You mean besides the whole "Holy Roman Church jailing people for saying the Earth is round" thing?

Nope. They knew it was round. Rome is near the Tyrrhenian Sea. Everybody who lives near a sea (or sees a lunar eclipse) can see that the earth is round.

They were initially upset with Galileo for say that the round earth moved, and wasn't the unmoving center of the universe.

His response to a court verdict was, "Eppur si muove," which means, ""And yet, it moves." It had nothing to do with flat vs. round.

[Lord Torath]

The "people used to believe the earth was flat" thing is largely a myth. Blame Washington Irving, Antoinne-Jean Letronne, and some others. Sadly, some people still believe the Earth is flat. According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_flat_Earth_societies), the groups mostly date from the mid-20th century (one from the 1800s), and while some of them appear to be joking, the others appear to genuinely believe it. :smallsigh:

[Max_Killjoy]

Sadly, some people still believe the Earth is flat. According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_flat_Earth_societies), the groups mostly date from the mid-20th century (one from the 1800s), and while some of them appear to be joking, the others appear to genuinely believe it. :smallsigh:

OK, to be fair, aside from some delusional nitwits, people have long known the world was a sphere.

[Lord Torath]

OK, to be fair, aside from some delusional nitwits, people have long known the world was a sphere.Oh, sure. Eratosthenes of Ancient Greece calculated the radius to within 30% around 200 BC. And you (generic "you", also generic "Flat-Earther you") can re-do his calculations (http://www.juliantrubin.com/bigten/eratosthenes.html). These Flat Earthers are a modern group only 2200 years out of step with the rest of the world. :smallyuk:

[2D8HP]

...you (generic "you", also generic "Flat-Earther you") can re-do his calculations (http://www.juliantrubin.com/bigten/eratosthenes.html)....:


That there ciphering looks suspiciously close to science!

No good can come from that!

:tongue:

[Bohandas]

OK, to be fair, aside from some delusional nitwits, people have long known the world was a sphere.

Educated people have long known the world is a sphere. There weren't exact a lot of those until sometime after the renaissance

[Segev]

"It would be quickly obvious that the world is flat instead of a sphere, for the same reasons that some people from ancient times onward knew our world was a sphere -- they looked out at the horizon, climbed mountains, watched ships disappear in the distance but that distance was farther if they were on a cliff or tower, they looked at the stars and observed eclipses, watched the angles of shadows and the angles to celestial bodies, etc. There are enough places where one could stand and see 10 or 20 times farther, and large things that are over the horizon on our world would be plainly visible on a flatworld."

Alright. So the denizens of the flat world, having lived there and had people do these things (or done these things, themselves), are well aware they live on a flat world.

Max, the problem I'm having is that I am not seeing what it is you are actually complaining about. What, that the GM does in a game, will give away that his subconscious round-world expectations are belying his claim of a flat world?

You've not given any examples, or, where you seem to have, you've complained that people are "distorting" them into "red herrings."

(Apologies for yelling here, but I can't seem to get this answered, so I assume it's being missed:)
SHOW ME WHAT IT IS THAT YOU WOULD SEE IN AN ACTUAL GAME THAT WOULD CALL ATTENTION TO THE FACT THAT THE GM IS NOT THINKING ABOUT HIS FLAT WORLD'S FLATNESS AT ALL TIMES!

I get it: you don't want to have the GM describe something that makes you go, "wait, that only applies on round worlds!" when he's established a flat world.

The problem I'm having is that the only examples you've given are of things people have to go out of their way to deliberately do to test for it (in which case the GM probably is going to give the results appropriate to his flat world), or are things that I can't see coming up in the description of the setting as the GM gives it.

Give me examples of something that, if I were running a game that you were in on a flat world setting, I could do in normal running of the game that would ruin the flat world for you because it relies on me forgetting the differences between a round and a flat world, please.

[Max_Killjoy]

I'm serious Max_Killjoy, I don't understand what you just said and if you would take the time to elaborate I would like to read it and try to understand. You don't have to so you have my permission (not that you need it) to bow out if you want.


Yeah, I don't quite understand either. Or I'm not sure if I understand at any rate. I think it might mean like changing the constants and/or the world's starting conditions vs changing the actual laws, or possibly that like relativity and quantum mechanics it generally reduces to regular physics at the human scale, but those are both just shots in the dark

A civil request deserves better than the blow-off response I gave.

For "fantasy", I'm not really talking about trying to maintain the deepest-lying quantum equations and constants, the exact laws of relativity, etc. I'm more concerned with end results at the scale from cells to solar systems. As long as the end result is recognizable, the existence of the Higgs boson or the exact decay rate of unstable isotopes aren't really what matters.

However, if you tell me that a world is a flat disk, AND that gravity still appears to behave exactly as I'm familiar with in our world (mass attracts mass, denser stuff tends to settle under less-dense stuff, etc), I'm going to wonder why the flat disk isn't collapsing in on itself. If you tell me that gunpowder doesn't work in this world, AND fire still burns and people still breath air, I'm going to wonder how that is. If you tell me that electricity doesn't work in this world, AND that there's lightning and so on, I'm going to wonder what the heck is going on. If you tell me things are different, but show me them behavior exactly the same, that's just going to bug me. Incongruities stand out like a sore thumb, at least for me.

Making the world really different just for the sake of making it really different (ie, to make it wondrous and strange and awesome) and then not exploring the differences just seems like a pointless expenditure of the limited currency of suspended disbelief. If you make the world really different, then that seems like it's the point of the story... not just set-dressing and backdrop scenery and empty flavor. When reading the Ringworld novels, the ways in which the Ringworld is different from a spherical planet constantly come to the fore and affect how the story progresses and how the characters interact with the setting.

And it makes it harder to get inside the characters' heads if you're constantly having to think about how their world is different and if those differences (or lack of differences, or how the differences interact) make sense. So unless the differences have an actual point and effect beyond "oh wow cool" sensawonda... then I don't get it.

[Segev]

For a flat world, I would typically assume "gravity points down." Likely a universal field effect. That's the simplest explanation. (And it works surprisingly well for most people's mental image of how things work "in space," too: how often have you seen a spaceship "sinking" because it got fatally wounded, despite how little sense that makes in reality?)

[BlacKnight]

However, if you tell me that a world is a flat disk, AND that gravity still appears to behave exactly as I'm familiar with in our world (mass attracts mass, denser stuff tends to settle under less-dense stuff, etc), I'm going to wonder why the flat disk isn't collapsing in on itself. If you tell me that gunpowder doesn't work in this world, AND fire still burns and people still breath air, I'm going to wonder how that is. If you tell me that electricity doesn't work in this world, AND that there's lightning and so on, I'm going to wonder what the heck is going on. If you tell me things are different, but show me them behavior exactly the same, that's just going to bug me. Incongruities stand out like a sore thumb, at least for me.

Those listed are incongruities only if you assume that mass attracts mass, matter is composed by the elements or the periodic table and that lighting is an effect of electromagnetism.
But in a fantasy world stuff could be attracted by the Hell (that is flat too), air and fire could be 2 of the 4 elements of the Aristotelian physics and lighting could be totally unrelated to electromagnetism.


Making the world really different just for the sake of making it really different (ie, to make it wondrous and strange and awesome) and then not exploring the differences just seems like a pointless expenditure of the limited currency of suspended disbelief. If you make the world really different, then that seems like it's the point of the story... not just set-dressing and backdrop scenery and empty flavor. When reading the Ringworld novels, the ways in which the Ringworld is different from a spherical planet constantly come to the fore and affect how the story progresses and how the characters interact with the setting.

And it makes it harder to get inside the characters' heads if you're constantly having to think about how their world is different and if those differences (or lack of differences, or how the differences interact) make sense. So unless the differences have an actual point and effect beyond "oh wow cool" sensawonda... then I don't get it.

Not having firearms or all the stuff related to electromagnetism seems like merely flavour to you ?
And notice that a lot of fantasy worlds are full of stuff that is there just because it's cool. For example did ASOIAF really need dragons ? Can't they be removed with some minor change ?

[Max_Killjoy]

For a flat world, I would typically assume "gravity points down." Likely a universal field effect. That's the simplest explanation. (And it works surprisingly well for most people's mental image of how things work "in space," too: how often have you seen a spaceship "sinking" because it got fatally wounded, despite how little sense that makes in reality?)

Too often, and it's like the mental equivalent of grating teeth, or "nails on a chalkboard".... like, demonic nails on the chalkboard of the damned, accompanied by crying babies and wailing animals.

[Segev]

Too often, and it's like the mental equivalent of grating teeth, or "nails on a chalkboard".... like, demonic nails on the chalkboard of the damned, accompanied by crying babies and wailing animals.

Wouldn't it be nice if the flying ships were doing this because gravity really did just point in a single uniform direction in this setting, so breaking the flying ships actually results in whatever technology or magic keeps them in the air failing, and the "sinking" is thus absolutely what SHOULD happen? :smallbiggrin:

[Max_Killjoy]

Those listed are incongruities only if you assume that mass attracts mass, matter is composed by the elements or the periodic table and that lighting is an effect of electromagnetism.
But in a fantasy world stuff could be attracted by the Hell (that is flat too), air and fire could be 2 of the 4 elements of the Aristotelian physics and lighting could be totally unrelated to electromagnetism.


And if you want that sort of world, fine, but follow through. If a world is made up of 4 elements blending, and living things are comprised of Elements and Humors, and "gravity is the pull of Hell", and lightning isn't giant sparks, and so on... then you're looking at a world where the everyday observable behavior of all things would be noticeably different.

Not "the rules aren't identical but the results are close enough to the same that it acts like the world we know".

Those same ideas are things that people in our world believed at certain points, and those ideas lost out because they didn't do a good job of explaining the observable world -- a world operating by those rules would look and act differently from our world.

So to be clear, if you want your world to be based on those ideas, then great, you should explore ideas that intrigue you and set your games (or fiction) in worlds that you find enjoyable to "visit". But follow through. Don't just treat those changes like the old 2-dimensional storefronts in a quick-built wild-west movie set.




Not having firearms or all the stuff related to electromagnetism seems like merely flavour to you ?


Note that it's not "there are no firearms on this world" -- it's "gunpowder doesn't work on this world".

And if gunpowder just doesn't work, but combustion is otherwise effectively the same as in our world, then yes, it's just fluff and flavor... a "just so" element that's the way it is because it's the way it is, no cause and no effect.




And notice that a lot of fantasy worlds are full of stuff that is there just because it's cool.


More's the pity.




For example did ASOIAF really need dragons ? Can't they be removed with some minor change ?


I don't know, I haven't read it. Based on reviews and summaries it's not for me... "everyone is a bastard and/or dies" is just an overreaction to "black and white morality, everyone is good or evil, good triumphs".

[Max_Killjoy]

Wouldn't it be nice if the flying ships were doing this because gravity really did just point in a single uniform direction in this setting, so breaking the flying ships actually results in whatever technology or magic keeps them in the air failing, and the "sinking" is thus absolutely what SHOULD happen? :smallbiggrin:

It would be nice if the people making science fiction films did their damn homework, actually. :smallbiggrin:

[Segev]

It would be nice if the people making science fiction films did their damn homework, actually. :smallbiggrin:

Well, that too, but honestly some of the time they DID, and got back audience reactions that were sub-par because reality was too counterintuitive. "Reality is unrealistic" and all that.

Things like audible sharpness and the sound we associate with guns serve both to signal things we couldn't otherwise easily be aware of in the medium to the audience, and to suit audience expectations so that the real-but-jarring behavior doesn't actually shake them out of their suspension of disbelief. We might prefer to teach people how it "really" should go, but not all fiction is meant to teach all concepts.

That said, I still think you're overvaluing the things that would be observable, because by and large they either aren't notable without deliberately experimenting to detect them, or they're too fine a resolution for what the GM is describing.

Viewing distance is the best one I've got since I can't get more examples from you: most GMs aren't going to bother stating the distance at which you first notice the approaching wagon on the road. And, if asked, they're more likely to turn to game mechanics to calculate spot distances or distance penalties to perception and have you roll to spot it to see how far out it's visible, rather than thinking "well, you can't see over the horizon past 3 miles." If anything, I would expect them to err closer to flat world reality than round world reality just by virtue of not thinking about the horizon at all.

[Max_Killjoy]

Well, that too, but honestly some of the time they DID, and got back audience reactions that were sub-par because reality was too counterintuitive. "Reality is unrealistic" and all that.

Things like audible sharpness and the sound we associate with guns serve both to signal things we couldn't otherwise easily be aware of in the medium to the audience, and to suit audience expectations so that the real-but-jarring behavior doesn't actually shake them out of their suspension of disbelief. We might prefer to teach people how it "really" should go, but not all fiction is meant to teach all concepts.


I'd love to see someone do their movie effects based on real sounds, real explosions, etc. Reviews and interviews would mention it enough that the audience wouldn't be blindsided, and maybe we'd get a break from "bombs" that look like a gallon jug of fuel oil, a capsule of thermite, and a blasting cap. While we're at it, maybe we could get some hand-to-hand combat that's not edited into 2+ jump cuts per second, and the death of shaky-cam.




Viewing distance is the best one I've got since I can't get more examples from you:


Jay R and I have both listed other examples a few times now. Shadows, the movement of celestial bodies, the nature of eclipses, objects at sea "fading" and/or "shrinking" to the disappearing point instead of dropping below the horizon, etc, etc, etc.

[Jay R]

That said, I still think you're overvaluing the things that would be observable, because by and large they either aren't notable without deliberately experimenting to detect them, or they're too fine a resolution for what the GM is describing.

I don't think he's "overvaluing" them, because we each set our own values. That's why we like different games.

His emotions about this are much stronger than mine. But I assume that he is valuing his own emotional reaction correctly. I don't share it at that level, but that doesn't make it "overvalued"; it just means our tastes and reactions differ.

[Max_Killjoy]

I don't think he's "overvaluing" them, because we each set our own values. That's why we like different games.

His emotions about this are much stronger than mine. But I assume that he is valuing his own emotional reaction correctly. I don't share it at that level, but that doesn't make it "overvalued"; it just means our tastes and reactions differ.

To be honest, the fervor of reaction would probably be lower if the concerns about tell/show dissonance in the settings wasn't being treated as silly, and a failure of imagination, and a presumed double-standard, by certain parties.

[Segev]

I'd love to see someone do their movie effects based on real sounds, real explosions, etc. Reviews and interviews would mention it enough that the audience wouldn't be blindsided, and maybe we'd get a break from "bombs" that look like a gallon jug of fuel oil, a capsule of thermite, and a blasting cap. While we're at it, maybe we could get some hand-to-hand combat that's not edited into 2+ jump cuts per second, and the death of shaky-cam. I am very glad that shaky-cam seems to be dying out, at least. Seriously, how can you watch Transformers (the first Micheal Bay movie) and see the fight scenes where shaky-cam plus all 'bots being dull gray means you can't even tell where one robot ends and the other begins, let alone what's happening in the fight, and think that makes good cinema?!

I think space battles with silence would be good for some works, but not all, just because without sound it FEELS less intense. Might be cool to stylize it, though: write the orchestral score to be timed as if it were sound effects, but still very obviously orchestral. I would love to see a choreographed space battle set to Mars: Bringer of War. I've seen some, but none were choreographed to it well. I want to see weapons-fire timed with the dramatic chords, darn it.


Jay R and I have both listed other examples a few times now. Shadows, the movement of celestial bodies, the nature of eclipses, objects at sea "fading" and/or "shrinking" to the disappearing point instead of dropping below the horizon, etc, etc, etc.Shadows...aren't going to be noticeably different on a day-to-day basis, without deliberately trying for experiments. Objects at sea, yes, could be a thing. Though again, most GMs I know would default to something like "and the ship sails away into the distance" rather than "...disappears over the horizon" or "...sinks until only the masts are visible." If they expressly had a flat world, they'd be looking out for things like that, too, as a chance to show it off.

Movement of celestial bodies is going to also be one that takes some thought, yes, but defaulting to "sun rises, sun sets; moon rises, moon sets; stars are visible at night," isn't going to give away the game very much. They're the sort of thing you'd probably either already have deliberately different for your setting (and thus gleefully show off in your description), or which you're planning a contrivance to make it "close enough" to Earth's behavior.

Unless you're tracking stars for sidereal motion, it's unlikely that the geocentric nature of your flat world is going to be detectable. This thus falls under "deliberate experiment" territory.


So far, then, the only place I'm really seeing something that is likely to come up by accident due to a GM forgetting to think of consequences is the "things at sea" phenomenon, and even that's only if he does something like "disappears over the horizon." I just can't see a GM knowing enough about how ships show up or vanish to say "masts first" or the like without also having already thought of that for his flat world.

And if you're not at sea...even less likely, since "things showing up in the distance" tend to be phrased in those terms rather than as horizon-effects.

Heck, just look to Westerns: they discuss or show the cowboy riding into the sunset, with a shimmery haze obscuring him to nothing long before he'd "vanish over the horizon." And that's on a round Earth!

[Zale]

And if you want that sort of world, fine, but follow through. If a world is made up of 4 elements blending, and living things are comprised of Elements and Humors, and "gravity is the pull of Hell", and lightning isn't giant sparks, and so on... then you're looking at a world where the everyday observable behavior of all things would be noticeably different.

Not "the rules aren't identical but the results are close enough to the same that it acts like the world we know".

Those same ideas are things that people in our world believed at certain points, and those ideas lost out because they didn't do a good job of explaining the observable world -- a world operating by those rules would look and act differently from our world.

So to be clear, if you want your world to be based on those ideas, then great, you should explore ideas that intrigue you and set your games (or fiction) in worlds that you find enjoyable to "visit". But follow through. Don't just treat those changes like the old 2-dimensional storefronts in a quick-built wild-west movie set.


I personally don't bother with it because I know my players, and I know such a level of detail would bore them to tears.

I think the part of the reason people are reacting so strongly is because it appears that you're phrasing a subjective matter of taste as if it were an objective necessity.

I've made a world where the base laws of physics were different; and, did my best to account for how that would change things. However, I'm not going to invest a huge amount of time into calculating how horizons differ because the world is flat. That's not a good return on my time investment, since neither I, nor anyone I play with, will care.

It would take a majority of my players putting forth a stance of caring for me to actually go for that level of detail.

[Max_Killjoy]

I personally don't bother with it because I know my players, and I know such a level of detail would bore them to tears.

I think the part of the reason people are reacting so strongly is because it appears that you're phrasing a subjective matter of taste as if it were an objective necessity.

I've made a world where the base laws of physics were different; and, did my best to account for how that would change things. However, I'm not going to invest a huge amount of time into calculating how horizons differ because the world is flat. That's not a good return on my time investment, since neither I, nor anyone I play with, will care.

It would take a majority of my players putting forth a stance of caring for me to actually go for that level of detail.

I can't do it.

I have to put the effort in to have at least a good approximation, I can't just wing it and make up potentially contradictory details. Even if the players never notice (and many of my players over the years WOULD have noticed), I'll still know that I was just making it up as I went along with no foundation to work from, and it will bother me even if no one else every notices.

[BlacKnight]

And if you want that sort of world, fine, but follow through. If a world is made up of 4 elements blending, and living things are comprised of Elements and Humors, and "gravity is the pull of Hell", and lightning isn't giant sparks, and so on... then you're looking at a world where the everyday observable behavior of all things would be noticeably different.

Wait, why should it be different ? I can make a set of rules that produces results identical to the real world, except in the few areas where I want it to be different.
For example I can make a world that is just like medieval Europe, but where dragons and magic exists. I make rules that explains how dragons and magic work and why the other stuff is still medieval Europe. Simply applying real phisics to the "other stuff" conflicts with the rules for dragons and magic, so I end making new phisics for everything, even if you notice it only about the fantasy stuff.


So to be clear, if you want your world to be based on those ideas, then great, you should explore ideas that intrigue you and set your games (or fiction) in worlds that you find enjoyable to "visit". But follow through. Don't just treat those changes like the old 2-dimensional storefronts in a quick-built wild-west movie set.

So you are saying: "Do good world building" ? Well, I agree.


Note that it's not "there are no firearms on this world" -- it's "gunpowder doesn't work on this world".

And if gunpowder just doesn't work, but combustion is otherwise effectively the same as in our world, then yes, it's just fluff and flavor... a "just so" element that's the way it is because it's the way it is, no cause and no effect.

Generally writers decide the end result before thinking how to reach it, not the other way around.
I think nobody ever said: "I don't want gunpowder just because". I think they say: "I have to get rid of firearms because I want melee fighting".
How to remove firearms ? Let's remove gunpowder. Obviously that has cascade effects that has to be considered.
But not having firearms has a tangible effect on the world. Really who has ever removed gunpowder but left firearms in a setting ?


I don't know, I haven't read it. Based on reviews and summaries it's not for me... "everyone is a bastard and/or dies" is just an overreaction to "black and white morality, everyone is good or evil, good triumphs".

Ok let's try with something more famous: Star Wars. Did the first movie need FTL travel and multiple planets ? No, it didn't. Did it need lightsabers ? Aliens ?

[Max_Killjoy]

Really who has ever removed gunpowder but left firearms in a setting ?


Col Buchanan's Farlander series of novels.

[Segev]

In the Amber novels by Zelazney, gunpowder didn't work in certain planes (most notably those closest to the Pattern from which the main character's family drew their power), but the main character discovered that certain cosmetic chemicals used for face-painting on Earth's plane became very gunpowder-like in behavior as you got into the plane he cared about, and he built an army around that.

[Bohandas]

Those listed are incongruities only if you assume that mass attracts mass, matter is composed by the elements or the periodic table and that lighting is an effect of electromagnetism.
But in a fantasy world stuff could be attracted by the Hell (that is flat too), air and fire could be 2 of the 4 elements of the Aristotelian physics and lighting could be totally unrelated to electromagnetism.

If you want human characters or even just non-alien biology though the elemental system has to reduce to something close to standard chemistry at a pretty low level.

[BlacKnight]

Col Buchanan's Farlander series of novels.

A rapid search tell me that gunpowder is present. Is maybe different from the real one ?


If you want human characters or even just non-alien biology though the elemental system has to reduce to something close to standard chemistry at a pretty low level.

???
Can you make some example ?

[Max_Killjoy]

A rapid search tell me that gunpowder is present. Is maybe different from the real one ?


It's not really gunpowder... it's something superficially similar in appearance to black powder, that's hypergolic (http://www.dictionary.com/browse/hypergolic) with water IIRC.

That's right, you set it off by adding water.

o.0

[Bohandas]

Can you make some example ?

For the liver, kidneys, and intestines to do what they do the way they do there must be some kind of biochemistry where microscopic nutrients are filtered out of digested food and actively transported into the bloodstream and waste products and toxins in the bloodstream are broken down into managable forms that can be removed from the blood and excreted, these are all dependent on chemical reactions that occur at the molecular level. The chemistry has to work mostly the same to have non-alien physiology; though there could still be organs with analogous functions allowing for non-alien anatomy, provided that the chemistry allowed for analogous processes (or if the physics of the world functioned in a top-down manner, which seems to be the case with the outer planes. This is however, also largely the distinguishing feature of the outer planes and thus questionabke at best on the material, transitive, and inner planes)

EDIT:
As for human characters, the physiological differences alone would likely be sufficient for them to not even be classified as the same cladistic kingdom as humans, unless they were somehow descended partly for normal humans and acquired the alien physiology through hybridization

[Cluedrew]

A civil requestAlways glad to keep things civil.

Anyways, having read your longer response it seem (let me know accurate this is) to come down two things, neither of which is flat worlds. First is inconsistency in world building: things changing in one place but not in another. I don't think there will be disagreement there. Second is gimmicks: large superficial changes that do not effect the setting in tangible ways. I think gimmicks real use in setting tone for a setting, but other than that I agree.

How is that for a two line summery? Plus two lines of response.

[PhoenixPhyre]

For the liver, kidneys, and intestines to do what they do the way they do there must be some kind of biochemistry where microscopic nutrients are filtered out of digested food and actively transported into the bloodstream and waste products and toxins in the bloodstream are broken down into managable forms that can be removed from the blood and excreted, these are all dependent on chemical reactions that occur at the molecular level. The chemistry has to work mostly the same to have non-alien physiology; though there could still be organs with analogous functions allowing for non-alien anatomy, provided that the chemistry allowed for analogous processes (or if the physics of the world functioned in a top-down manner, which seems to be the case with the outer planes. This is however, also largely the distinguishing feature of the outer planes and thus questionabke at best on the material, transitive, and inner planes)

But all this assumes that all the processes are the same, just with different laws. As I understand it, the laws of nature are optimized for the "real" processes. That is, you can't really change the laws (constants, interactions, etc) and still get the same outcomes as we have here. If you want any significant changes, you have to completely change the model and discard some element of consistency. That is, any significant deviations from "real-world" physics (including chemistry, etc) are incompatible with any first-principles system other than the real-world ones.

Since we're only imagining the worlds anyway, that's not a big problem. Once you accept that any fantastic elements will require abandoning more than a passing resemblance to the real world, life is easier and more fun (in my opinion anyway). Consistency is overrated--a fantastic world with active gods (for example) will have to accept inconsistencies because "a god did it" is a true explanation. It's not lazy storytelling in that world, it's the in-world reality. Organs may work on sympathetic principles or some other way entirely. Aristotelian humor theory may be the operational law of reality. Germ theory may not be real. Anything is possible.

I find worlds more engaging and easier to suspend disbelief if they explicitly accept that they're not real. The ones that try too hard to have an "explanation" for everything inevitably fail hard and break the illusion. Humans are simply incapable of thinking through the consequences of fundamental changes. For that matter, we're really bad with our current reality. I teach physics and the number of deep misconceptions is enormous. "There's no gravity on the moon" (actually said by a student) and all that. Accept it and take it where it goes.


I won't say that my setting is anything special, but it avoids all this by being dreamed out of the psychoreactive primordial chaos and actively maintained by metaphysical machinery. There are no elements--nuclear fusion isn't a thing. The sun is a portal to the plane of fire; the stars are thin sections in the Cosmic Barrier that forms the border between this pocket universe and the Dreaming Dark Beyond. Everything is created out of soul-stuff created by living creatures; this energy is explicitly not conserved. The excess is pumped up by the Great Mechanism and used to replenish the matter and energy of the various moving pieces of reality. The Gods get their power from this Mechanism in return for handling aspects of reality. Yes, that does make soul-sacrifices and other such effects a major part of the setting. That's by design.

The laws of physics are more a shared delusion reinforced by the Great Mechanism and ontological inertia. Why do things fall they way they do? Because we expect them to. Why do we expect them to? Because they always have. Yes, it's circular. No, that's not a problem. In other parts of the Dreaming Dark there may be flat worlds where ships go "over the horizon" as they would on a round world. Why? Because the Dreamer for that world decided they would. Nothing more, nothing less.


Please, I beg you--don't force your so-called realism into my fantasy. Realism is a fake god that brings nothing but heartache and boredom. In fact, reality is unrealistic. Things that would be "immersion breaking" for a level 20 fighter happen regularly in this world, achieved by normal humans. I play TTRPGs in part to escape. I can solve parts of the equations for reality--that's my day job. Let fantasy by fantastic.

[Mutazoia]

... then you're looking at a world where the everyday observable behavior of all things would be noticeably different.

Would you notices a difference? Or more to the point, would your character notice the difference, having never lived in a world where the everyday observable behaviour of all things, behaved in the same way all his life, having never seen the way things behave on a round world? No...no they wouldn't. YOU would notice a difference. But insisting everything be changed in a fantasy game, simply because YOU want to see physics work they way they do IRL, is just silly.....and a whole lot of extra work for the GM. Things are assumed to function they way they do IRL, unless specifically noted, so the GM doesn't have to write an entire physics textbook, and teach a PhD level course in said special physics, just to run a damned fantasy Role Playing GAME.

Again, who cares if gravity is the pull of hell, or mass attracting mass...if it functions the same, does the difference really matter?


In the Amber novels by Zelazney, gunpowder didn't work in certain planes (most notably those closest to the Pattern from which the main character's family drew their power), but the main character discovered that certain cosmetic chemicals used for face-painting on Earth's plane became very gunpowder-like in behavior as you got into the plane he cared about, and he built an army around that.

It was jewel polish, from a different shadow, that he discovered by accident one day after tossing the cloth he was using to polish some gem or other, into the fireplace in his room in Castle Amber. He walked to a shadow where the stuff was laying around naturally, gathered a few tons of it, and then brought it to Earth to have packed into bullets. But you were close ;)

[Bohandas]

Going back to the original topic for a second, it just occured to me that you could have a flat planet irl if it was rotating ridiculously fast

[LordCdrMilitant]

Going back to the original topic for a second, it just occured to me that you could have a flat planet irl if it was rotating ridiculously fast

You could also have a space station, and it could be a flat world if it was earth-independent. It would be a pretty cool flat world. It would also be a lot more hypothetically survivable than a planet that spun so fast as to turn into a pancake.

[Squiddish]

You could also have a space station, and it could be a flat world if it was earth-independent. It would be a pretty cool flat world. It would also be a lot more hypothetically survivable than a planet that spun so fast as to turn into a pancake.

Extension: Gobsmackingly vast space station, or better yet, generation ship, which is so old that its inhabitants have forgotten that it isn't natural. Loads of long forgotten subsystems tick away beneath the surface, ensuring that everything remains alright and maintaining themselves. Every so often, though, something goes wrong.

[Bohandas]

But all this assumes that all the processes are the same, just with different laws. As I understand it, the laws of nature are optimized for the "real" processes. That is, you can't really change the laws (constants, interactions, etc) and still get the same outcomes as we have here. If you want any significant changes, you have to completely change the model and discard some element of consistency. That is, any significant deviations from "real-world" physics (including chemistry, etc) are incompatible with any first-principles system other than the real-world ones.

Likely the anatomy in such a world would be significantly different as well; I just said that you could have analogs of the familiar organs, at least in some possible regimes

In any case there's often more than one way a given task can be achieved. To give an example within real world chemistry, if there was too little iron on a world for animals to reliably produce hemoglobin, that wouldn't preclude the evolution of large creatures requiring circulatory systems for oxygen transport, copper based hemocyanin might simply be yhe most common oxygen transporting chemical instead

[S@tanicoaldo]

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT5LsrbGOafAcshKpFsEFkuc-ujnLJYXw3D-R5dZc1PUIeYvO8j

Looks good enough to me.

[Milo v3]

What effects on the world do you think there would be from the day swapping which way it travels each day (since once it's on one side, it needs to turn around and go back to the first side the next day)?

[ImNotTrevor]

It's not really gunpowder... it's something superficially similar in appearance to black powder, that's hypergolic (http://www.dictionary.com/browse/hypergolic) with water IIRC.

That's right, you set it off by adding water.

o.0

So it's basically Sodium powder, since sodium explodes in water. But probably more concentrated/reactive.

Sounds fine to me.

[Mutazoia]

Extension: Gobsmackingly vast space station, or better yet, generation ship, which is so old that its inhabitants have forgotten that it isn't natural. Loads of long forgotten subsystems tick away beneath the surface, ensuring that everything remains alright and maintaining themselves. Every so often, though, something goes wrong.

So...the plot/premis of Phantasy Star 3 (or was it 4...)

[Mechalich]

You could also have a space station, and it could be a flat world if it was earth-independent. It would be a pretty cool flat world. It would also be a lot more hypothetically survivable than a planet that spun so fast as to turn into a pancake.

The trick is that, unless you change gravity, any object (https://what-if.xkcd.com/4/) above a certain mass collapses into a sphere in short order due to it's own gravitational forces. The total mass required for this to happen varies somewhat based on the strength of the materials involved. The real world example is that 'icy' (in the astronomical sense) objects collapse into hydrostatic equilibrium at smaller sizes that 'rocky' objects. The asteroid Pallas is not in hydrostatic equilibrium despite being larger than some objects such as Mimas that probably are. However, the larger an object that you postulate, the more effort you have to put into halting gravitational collapse. The traditional remedies are super-strong materials and some kind of energy fields to hold things together. Note that even relatively conservative megastructure designs - such as a Banks' Orbital (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_(The_Culture)) must rely on such handwavium technologies to function. The smaller the megastructure, the less handwavium required. A Banks' Orbital is much more viable than the Ringworld due to its smaller size.

A Banks' Orbital is actually a very interesting idea for a mythic world, as it solves many of the tricky problems with things like the day/night cycle and gravity, but would feel like living in a giant flat ribbon. And it would be huge - depending on how wide the ribbon is you have anywhere for 20 to 120 times the surface area of the Earth.

[BlacKnight]

It's not really gunpowder... it's something superficially similar in appearance to black powder, that's hypergolic (http://www.dictionary.com/browse/hypergolic) with water IIRC.

That's right, you set it off by adding water.

o.0

That sounds like an important difference, especially for naval warfare. Sure it isn't a change without consequences.

[Segev]

It was jewel polish, from a different shadow, that he discovered by accident one day after tossing the cloth he was using to polish some gem or other, into the fireplace in his room in Castle Amber. He walked to a shadow where the stuff was laying around naturally, gathered a few tons of it, and then brought it to Earth to have packed into bullets. But you were close ;)

Ah, thanks for the correction. It's been...probably 2 decades or more since I read them through that one time. ^^; (I got a one-book collection of the whole series, both protagonists, when I was a young-to-mid-teen.)

[Max_Killjoy]

That sounds like an important difference, especially for naval warfare. Sure it isn't a change without consequences.

The question wasn't whether it was an important difference or plausible -- the question was whether "gunpowder functions" and "firearms are workable" are matched overlapping sets.