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TheManicMonocle
2017-05-03, 03:42 PM
So, as a tabletop player, which do you prefer? A flat world, with an edge (like Pirates of the carribean) or a round world? And why?

Freed
2017-05-03, 03:44 PM
Round, in case my players attempt to dig to the center if the Earth. It's a more common occurrence than you would think.

Anonymouswizard
2017-05-03, 03:53 PM
Spherical world, I tend to prefer science fiction which means a spherical world is assumed. It also means that even in a fantasy setting I can assume that you can hide from 'infinite range' effects by just being far enough away (as most magical effects work with a direct line they can be assumed not to curve with the planet, although few fantasy games happen at the scales where this would be noticeable).

Honest Tiefling
2017-05-03, 04:00 PM
Round, because making a flat world would probably be more work then is worth it. A flat world might be interesting, but if it is basically people saying that the world is flat with no changes it didn't exactly add to the setting, did it?

AtlasSniperman
2017-05-03, 04:37 PM
My setting is a flat-world. And the number of changes I had to make to make it work makes new players(new the the setting) brain melt. e.g. the sun moves in a circle in the sky and just pops in and out instead of rising/setting.

veti
2017-05-03, 04:53 PM
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.

Just go with round. It's much easier.

Xuc Xac
2017-05-03, 05:04 PM
We've been working on making a relatively flat world (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?521199-Let-s-build-another-setting!-(Diskos)) in the World Building sub-forum if anyone is interested.

Tanarii
2017-05-03, 05:20 PM
Round, in case my players attempt to dig to the center if the Earth. It's a more common occurrence than you would think.
Just tell them it's turtles all the way down.

JAL_1138
2017-05-03, 05:46 PM
Just tell them it's turtles all the way down.

Technically there are a lot of turtles, but each of them carries a different world on it as it swims through space. On the backs of the turtles, there are elephants; four is the usual number of pachyderms, but there can be more or fewer depending on the size. The elephants hold up the world, which is a flat-ish disc. Sometimes a turtle sized for four elephants will have a fifth, which often slips off the turtle's back and orbits 'round to impact as a gigantic meteor, leaving deposits of fats and BCBs (burnt crunchy bits) deep underground.

Occasionally on one of these "disc-worlds" you'll get Wizards, who may end up creating round worlds through magical experiments.

Jormengand
2017-05-03, 06:06 PM
Toroidal worlds are the best. :smalltongue:

Jay R
2017-05-03, 09:39 PM
Round, of course. Even when I ran a game in which the earth was the center of the universe, and the seven planets (including the sun and the moon) revolved around the earth, it was round. Otherwise I'd have to work out a whole new approach to eclipses, and it's not worth it. [Eclipses are one of the reasons that all educated people knew that the world was round, very early in history - because we've seen its shadow.]

TheManicMonocle
2017-05-03, 09:48 PM
Very good scientific points for the round world, but I don't see it as needful for your world to have a scientific basis. Surely it helps, but with a round world you don't have Pirates of the Carribean, at worlds end!

Or Terry Pratchett's discworld! Which some here have referenced.

Dr_Dinosaur
2017-05-03, 10:04 PM
We couldn't decide, so my group's setting is technically both. From a terrestrial perspective, it's a sphere and floats through space with other planets same as ours. From a planar/conceptual one it's a giant disc encased within an impossibly huge magic dyson sphere

Knaight
2017-05-03, 10:40 PM
I might have done a flat world setting at some point, but they're ridiculously outnumbered by round world settings - there's the various sci-fi and space opera games alone (where flat worlds don't fit), and then there's how I tend not to find alternative world shapes that interesting*. With that said, I also have a fondness for small archipelagos where it doesn't really matter, outside of implications a flat world has on horizon distance.

*Flat worlds, worlds on the bodies of two titans that aren't either flat or round, toroids and spindles, hollow worlds where people are on the inside face, whatever.

Lvl 2 Expert
2017-05-04, 12:19 AM
but with a round world you don't have Pirates of the Carribean, at worlds end!

Make sure nobody asks you how you navigate, because our latitude longitude system and the ways we use to determine those only work because the world is round. For a pirate campaign I would generally go with round.

That, or come up with a new system that would work there. A close enough sun could help.

For most non primarily ocean going games it's not really important. Maybe make the world a donut? Or a cube?

Edit: Oh, one other thing. The round earth is the reason we have a horizon. Either be prepared for that question, or use it to weird your players out and try to give them a world without one. (So stuff becomes invisible by being too small to be seen, eventually, not by being behind the earth. Binoculars are pretty cool on a flat world.)

Grizl' Bjorn
2017-05-04, 12:26 AM
Flat to avoid projection issues.

And so constant reminders that it curves around aren't necessary, and things really as far from each other as they look

Deliverance
2017-05-04, 03:32 AM
So, as a tabletop player, which do you prefer? A flat world, with an edge (like Pirates of the carribean) or a round world? And why?
Round. Anything else is giving Washington Irving and his poisoning of the American mind, which later poisoned global popular culture with the flat world myth, too much credit. :smallbiggrin:

Form a pure game-technical perspective, there are way too many details that are counterintuitive to our own experiences to keep in mind in a flat world campaign, so I don't see much point in it unless going for deliberate silliness where all the mistakes made by the GM and players regarding how the world they are playing in works can easily be handwaved away, such as a Discworld setting.

EDIT: Of course, if players are stuck in dungeons most of the time it doesn't matter much. Unless they get really caught up in delving deeper.

Dappershire
2017-05-04, 03:47 AM
Just tell them it's turtles all the way down.

While I totes adorb your reference, I can't help but feel this is self-defeating.

The moment you explain to a party that the world is flat, they'll crawl around it, make mounts of the elephants*, and start murdering their way down through an infinite amount of turtles.


Edit: *Which might just be the best use of Handle Animal ever.

Edit 2: Can you just imagine a Space Jammer's response to this? "This better be good Navigator. I wanted to be landed and unloading our gear an hour ago. Let me just see what the hol-ly Tymora! Ef this. Set sail for Krynn. Even Kender are less crazy then that thing."

weckar
2017-05-04, 06:00 AM
I'll throw my hat in with the toroidal or spirallic (Or rather helicoid, or maybe a proper helix, I suppose) crowds. Best world types and easier to make sense of than flat.

Anonymouswizard
2017-05-04, 06:24 AM
Surely it helps, but with a round world you don't have Pirates of the Carribean, at worlds end!

Good, couldn't wrap my head around that film anyway.

Although in that the 'falling off the edge of the world' thing seemed to be magical rather than physical, and this is a world where the world was circumnavigated (it's supposed to be 'our world, but with a touch of magic'). Really the shape of the world didn't matter to the writers as much as telling a good confusing story.


Or Terry Pratchett's discworld! Which some here have referenced.

Really, if I wanted to run a Discworld inspired campaign I'd either use the Disc itself, or more likely set it in an Ankh-Morpork style city on a roundworld. As far as I'm concerned the flat works is only there to serve the joke, and while I love Discworld the hands I'd run in the setting don't need a flat planet.

gkathellar
2017-05-04, 06:43 AM
Depends on tone. Flat, or even just "assumed-to-be-flat" worlds can feel persuasively mythic. There's something about the ocean falling off of the edge of the world into the shining void that captures the imagination. When the world itself is unreal and magical, we can believe that everything else should be.

Round worlds, on the other hand, feel more real, require less handwavium, and often feel ... bigger, I guess? There's a vastness and believability to seeing the curve of the world on a map and knowing there are people and cultures and lands and wonders unseen, that will never be seen, a feeling of grandiosity and strangeness far grander and stranger than just "here be dragons."


Spherical world, I tend to prefer science fiction which means a spherical world is assumed. It also means that even in a fantasy setting I can assume that you can hide from 'infinite range' effects by just being far enough away (as most magical effects work with a direct line they can be assumed not to curve with the planet, although few fantasy games happen at the scales where this would be noticeable).

What, you mean you don't simulate the effects of the planet's gravity and rotation on line effects? For shame.


but with a round world you don't have Pirates of the Carribean, at worlds end!

So what you're really saying is, "avoid flat worlds, or you might accidentally end up with PoC: At World's End."

JAL_1138
2017-05-04, 06:55 AM
There's also some weirder ones in Planescape.

Giant geometric shapes crashing together and drifting apart, mountains rising from an infinite sea, a toroidal city floating at the top(?!) of an infinitely(?!)-tall pillar of stone, two flat worlds (of infinite size) floating atop one another so that if you look straight up you're looking straight down at the ground of the other world, concentric hollow prison-worlds, a world made of tunnels in stone through which strange maddening winds howl constantly, a world of infinite sky in all directions with the occasional floating island, a world where instead of air and sky there is only the stuff of magic and cities can be built on the corpses of dead gods or broken pieces of other worlds that have drifted in, a world made of raw primordial chaos that constantly shifts and changes (the few bits of it that are even remotely stable to start with, anyway), a world made of endless gigantic clockwork gears and coils and mechanisms...

weckar
2017-05-04, 07:10 AM
There's also some weirder ones in Planescape.

Giant geometric shapes crashing together and drifting apart, mountains rising from an infinite sea, a toroidal city floating at the top(?!) of an infinitely(?!)-tall pillar of stone, two flat worlds (of infinite size) floating atop one another so that if you look straight up you're looking straight down at the ground of the other world, concentric hollow prison-worlds, a world made of tunnels in stone through which strange maddening winds howl constantly, a world of infinite sky in all directions with the occasional floating island, a world where instead of air and sky there is only the stuff of magic and cities can be built on the corpses of dead gods or broken pieces of other worlds that have drifted in, a world made of raw primordial chaos that constantly shifts and changes (the few bits of it that are even remotely stable to start with, anyway), a world made of endless gigantic clockwork gears and coils and mechanisms...
And those are just the touristy ones!

Dappershire
2017-05-04, 07:48 AM
There's also some weirder ones in Planescape.

Giant geometric shapes crashing together and drifting apart, mountains rising from an infinite sea, a toroidal city floating at the top(?!) of an infinitely(?!)-tall pillar of stone, two flat worlds (of infinite size) floating atop one another so that if you look straight up you're looking straight down at the ground of the other world, concentric hollow prison-worlds, a world made of tunnels in stone through which strange maddening winds howl constantly, a world of infinite sky in all directions with the occasional floating island, a world where instead of air and sky there is only the stuff of magic and cities can be built on the corpses of dead gods or broken pieces of other worlds that have drifted in, a world made of raw primordial chaos that constantly shifts and changes (the few bits of it that are even remotely stable to start with, anyway), a world made of endless gigantic clockwork gears and coils and mechanisms...


And those are just the touristy ones!

Been there, done that, all I got was this tunic.

Lord Torath
2017-05-04, 08:08 AM
While I totes adorb your reference, I can't help but feel this is self-defeating.

The moment you explain to a party that the world is flat, they'll crawl around it, make mounts of the elephants*, and start murdering their way down through an infinite amount of turtles.

Edit: *Which might just be the best use of Handle Animal ever.

Edit 2: Can you just imagine a Space Jammer's response to this? "This better be good Navigator. I wanted to be landed and unloading our gear an hour ago. Let me just see what the hol-ly Tymora! Ef this. Set sail for Krynn. Even Kender are less crazy then that thing."Did you mean Spelljammer? The elephants and turtles (and similar creatures) are called "Star Beasts", and are an exception to the normal (for Spelljammer) rules of gravity and air envelopes. And they're just so huge and old that they pay no attention to the dust motes (ie PCs) that may happen to float by them. No need to worry about the PCs taming them.

Anonymouswizard
2017-05-04, 10:00 AM
What, you mean you don't simulate the effects of the planet's gravity and rotation on line effects? For shame.

To take this as if it was black text for a moment, I tend to assume 'pure magic' travels as a radio signal, removing the need to take gravity into account, although with stuff summoned with magic you have to account for gravity as if it was nonmagical. I don't know the maths for correcting for the earth's soon, but at some point I'm going to research it and include it.

The main things including curvature do is allow you to add some importance to height at long ranges and shields which bounce magic off of the ionosphere to achieve greater ranges.

Martin Greywolf
2017-05-04, 10:26 AM
As in all things DM, you need to ask yourself a question of "Does this help with my game in any way?"

If not, avoid flat worlds - they require you to do additional work during worldbuilding, work that is best spent elsewhere, on things that will matter to the players. Go with the default that we're all accustomed to, which is an Earth-like planet with a single moon. Side note: adding more moons creates a massive amount of complications, and can, on occasion, create a problem when your planet should be ripped apart by tidal forces.

If you want a flat world, then it should impact the game in some way or form, otherwise it may as well not be flat and save you all the work. In some cases, the impact is to go for maximum wackyness a la Discworld, and that is perfectly fine, in other cases it creates unique effects that you couldn't have on other worlds. I'd say that one of the obligatory elephants reaching into the oceans with his trunk to have a drink is pretty cool thing to see every now and then.

Least likely option is that you want to tell a story that explicitly requires and oddly-shaped world - The Last Hero from Discworld is an example, as are some sci-fi stories (these usually aren't flat, but the work required to set games in them is comparable). In cases like these, well, definitely pick oddly shaped world, because otherwise you don't have a story.

GungHo
2017-05-04, 10:41 AM
Usually round, but also have done hollow worlds, ring worlds (Niven rings and sometimes something more complex), Dyson spheres (both swarms/bubbles and shells), O'Neill cylinders. I haven't tried Alderson disks yet. I'm a fan of mixing tech with fantasy (think Endless Space/Legend) or simply having "wizard/deity did it" mega-structures, usually with enough regression/time for people to have forgotten that they don't really know they're in an artificial environment.

Knaight
2017-05-04, 12:43 PM
If not, avoid flat worlds - they require you to do additional work during worldbuilding, work that is best spent elsewhere, on things that will matter to the players. Go with the default that we're all accustomed to, which is an Earth-like planet with a single moon. Side note: adding more moons creates a massive amount of complications, and can, on occasion, create a problem when your planet should be ripped apart by tidal forces.

They only require additional work if the group is going to get really nitpicky about real world geology - which is much the same case with having multiple moons. The baseline is more along the lines of remembering that there isn't a proper horizon anymore.

Gravitron5000
2017-05-04, 01:33 PM
As in all things DM, you need to ask yourself a question of "Does this help with my game in any way?"

If not, avoid flat worlds - they require you to do additional work during worldbuilding, work that is best spent elsewhere, on things that will matter to the players. Go with the default that we're all accustomed to, which is an Earth-like planet with a single moon. Side note: adding more moons creates a massive amount of complications, and can, on occasion, create a problem when your planet should be ripped apart by tidal forces.


By the same logic, avoid spherical worlds (also oblong spheroid worlds). If it's not going to come up in play, who cares whether the world is flat or spherical or conical or some undefinable amorphous bloby sort of shape?

So, I guess my answer is that for most settings that I have created, I prefer not to define the shape of the world, unless I expect the players to interact with said shape in some way. Some settings/genres make this more likely (Sci Fi), where in many, it really doesn't matter.

golentan
2017-05-04, 02:04 PM
For fantasy, flat. If you exhaust the fun of your starting location, you can fill in additional map if you like. And if anyone questions it and tries to make it a thing, like the people saying you have to rewrite laws of physics and what have you, I just say "It's magic, it works off the laws of magic, real world physics don't apply, stop hurting the catgirls."

Saves a whole lot of questions about the production of nerve gas or the summoning of anti-osmium.

For a more realistic or sci-fi/science fantasy game, of course round.

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-04, 02:10 PM
Spheroid, in a heliocentric system.

Deliverance
2017-05-04, 02:16 PM
For fantasy, flat. If you exhaust the fun of your starting location, you can fill in additional map if you like. And if anyone questions it and tries to make it a thing, like the people saying you have to rewrite laws of physics and what have you, I just say "It's magic, it works off the laws of magic, real world physics don't apply, stop hurting the catgirls."

Saves a whole lot of questions about the production of nerve gas or the summoning of anti-osmium.

For a more realistic or sci-fi/science fantasy game, of course round.
Your main argument here doesn't seem to have anything to do with whether round or flat is chosen and everything to do with whether players have access to a world map.

If they don't, you have the freedom to fill in additional areas as you like in both cases without anybody noticing, and if they do, and you start messing things up by filling in additional map, your "magic world, laws of magic etc" approach works equally well and equally poorly with flat and round and depends mostly on your ability to sell a change for the good of the game/campaign to your players. (That is, if you don't fall back on the old "Continent X mysteriously disappeared/blew up/sank/melted, and look what's there now!" routine.)

golentan
2017-05-04, 02:28 PM
Your main argument here doesn't seem to have anything to do with whether round or flat is chosen and everything to do with whether players have access to a world map.

If they don't, you have the freedom to fill in additional areas as you like in both cases without anybody noticing, and if they do, and you start messing things up by filling in additional map, your "magic world, laws of magic etc" approach works equally well and equally poorly with flat and round and depends mostly on your ability to sell a change for the good of the game/campaign to your players. (That is, if you don't fall back on the old "Continent X mysteriously disappeared/blew up/sank/melted, and look what's there now!" routine.)

With a round world, anyone with a pair of sticks, a signal flag, and a good measuring tool knows how big the world is. Once that globe is filled in, that's it: you can do exploration, but only to a point. A flat world, if you give a partial map who knows how big things are beyond the known world, without need for retcon or continents moving around on people? Plus, a world being literally flat is an immediate, big, bold neon sign that Things Work Differently Here, and plays into a lot of myths you can borrow on.

As for the moving the campaign around, it's less "change of setting for the campaign" and more... it may be more my group but usually if a map isn't filled in... they wanna go peek over the edge.

It's far from the only way to do it, but it's a way I like, it's simple, it makes its point pretty clearly and unambiguously.

Deliverance
2017-05-04, 02:50 PM
I understand your thinking better now, golentan. Thanks. :smallsmile:

It isn't as if an Earth sized planet is all that small and easily explored in a lifetime, but that said, if your players really, really, love to fill in the map and you feel constrained with a round world, have you considered a large one? You probably have, but I mean really large. Given your group of players as I envision them based on your description, I can't help thinking that they'd take to a round world the size of Robert Silverberg's Majipoor like ducks to water. (A world that really deserves its own RPG system. Did anybody build one on that IP? I don't recall hearing of it.)

golentan
2017-05-04, 02:54 PM
I understand your thinking better now, golentan. Thanks. :smallsmile:

It isn't as if an Earth sized planet is all that small and easily explored in a lifetime, but that said, if your players really, really, love to fill in the map and you feel constrained with a round world, have you considered a large one? You probably have, but I mean really large. Given your group of players as I envision them based on your description, I can't help thinking that they'd take to a round world the size of Robert Silverberg's Majipoor like ducks to water. (A world that really deserves its own RPG system. Did anybody build one on that IP? I don't recall hearing of it.)

I loved "Lord Valentine's Castle."

Anonymouswizard
2017-05-04, 03:29 PM
By the same logic, avoid spherical worlds (also oblong spheroid worlds). If it's not going to come up in play, who cares whether the world is flat or spherical or conical or some undefinable amorphous bloby sort of shape?

So, I guess my answer is that for most settings that I have created, I prefer not to define the shape of the world, unless I expect the players to interact with said shape in some way. Some settings/genres make this more likely (Sci Fi), where in many, it really doesn't matter.

Honestly, I work on the idea of 'default to real world'. Unless I have a compelling reason for something not to work as it does in the real world (or extrapolation requires some weird change in the laws of physics for the world to work as-is) then the physics defaults to what it is (or seems to be, for some fields we can't be 100% certain) in the real world.

Whether or not the world has curvature (and potentially momentum, although relative to what) is important in long ranged situations, especially if you're dealing with stuff that acts like light (although it's important even if we're dealing with stuff like cannon shells that move fast enough, but less so). Heck, if we're dealing with magical lasers of the right wavelength (and we're measuring the range in miles/kilometres) it becomes important to know if we can bounce them off of the upper layers of the atmosphere. While it's uncommon to get to the ranges where 'does the world have curvature' matters in fantasy settings it does happen, especially when dealing with things like high level D&D.

Also, most players I've met will default to assuming a roughly spherical planet that weighs about one earth and has one g of gravity (as well as an atmosphere almost identical to earth and one natural satellite of about the size and relative distance as the moon). There's nothing inherently wrong with a different world shape, but most players won't assume the game world's flat.

(Of course, if you're using a world with multiple layers/realities there's nothing stopping different realities from having different shapes.)

Of course, I also like to throw in the occasionally hollow world for pulpy fun, even though that goes against the laws of physics. It's just that you can assume most of my worlds work like Earth until proven otherwise.

(Now I am considering a fantasy world on a superearth which is a few times earth's mass, but there'll be no real reason for it unless the campaign eventually goes to another planet.)

Milo v3
2017-05-04, 05:45 PM
Lets see.... My setting has Spherical, Flat, Cylindrical Shell World, a world that is the interior face(?) of a torus, Cubical, Waterwheel worlds, and one which is a giant body.

BeerMug Paladin
2017-05-05, 03:11 PM
I once used an infinite flat plane world for a more or less gonzo fantasy setting. The place of the setting/rising sun was a popular tourist spot with a protective shield so you can watch it sink or rise through a massive hole in the ground. Garbage was thrown into a bottomless pit in one area. There was only one megacity comprising historically disparate cities permanently linked via gates and the wilderness, which was everything outside and generally not a place that 'normal' people ventured far from.

There was a guild that maintained and redrew maps, and a few regions in the megacity did not have known locations. Very few people ventured out into the world, but those who did so usually went via airship.

Obviously, the issues the party faces can't be solved by others because all the mega-powerful people who set this up and never die got bored and went outside. They got lost.

Generally, the shape of the world only matters for flavor reasons. If you want things to stay more or less grounded, go with a round planet. Or don't bother, because people will naturally assume spherical to be the case and will probably never be in a situation where their characters will discover anything like that for certain. If you want them to understand the world is wacky and abnormal, give a simpler primer on whatever wacko world geometry you like.

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-05, 03:55 PM
For those who chose "flat"... do you ever mention to your players that there's no horizon as such, just the world stretching off into the horizon until it disappears into the haze or is blocked by something taller than the height of the viewer's eyes? Has anyone come back from the literal brink of the world, with strange or terrible tales?

Beneath
2017-05-05, 04:18 PM
Round is usually the easiest to do. I've done flat though on occasion.

What I really want is negative curvature. probably no horizon, unless it has less negative curvature than the space that it's in, infinitely expanding and exploding space in all directions. I've only seen that done once, though.

(actually, by embedding a flat world in a space with negative curvature; i.e. a world on the surface of a horosphere, a sphere of infinite radius in a negatively-curved space, I think you should be able to get a horizon on it. You have a surface with zero gaussian curvature (equivalent to a flat world), where lines drawn from eye level to points on the surface will eventually have to go through it)

Afgncaap5
2017-05-05, 07:12 PM
My world has, frustratingly, both features. There is a definitive, mapped rim that sailors know to look out for, and yet aeronauts have seen the curvature of the Earth and have a well-informed map of the global geography.

There *is* a reason for that, but I won't get into the whys and hows here just in case any players swing by.

And you're all wrong about flat worlds, of course. The world is on the shoulders of a giant brogmoid.

Piedmon_Sama
2017-05-05, 07:13 PM
Round, because that way I can just use an online distance to horizon calculator and not have to do the math myself > _ >

SirBellias
2017-05-05, 08:40 PM
They don't get to know until they hit the edge :smallamused:

Milo v3
2017-05-05, 10:14 PM
For those who chose "flat"... do you ever mention to your players that there's no horizon as such, just the world stretching off into the horizon until it disappears into the haze or is blocked by something taller than the height of the viewer's eyes?
Generally it's something taller or a massive storm which blocks view unless the players are in one of massive towers/mountain ranges, or if they are right next to the edge.


Has anyone come back from the literal brink of the world, with strange or terrible tales?
The flat-world I made was inhabited primarily by Azata (godly narrative fae), so I had a faction called the Untold who who walked past the edge world and eventually came back, changing from being "made of stories" to "Made of stories that were never told". They became odd, full of deception and boredom, but not so eldritch that players couldn't potentially play them.

raygun goth
2017-05-06, 01:29 AM
Round. Anything else is giving Washington Irving and his poisoning of the American mind, which later poisoned global popular culture with the flat world myth, too much credit. :smallbiggrin:

I'm on board with this.

It is important to keep in mind, though, that a small group of tribal cultures in west Asia believed that not only was the world flat, it was under a large dome (called the firmament) that was ultimately underwater, and "night" was a shawl or cloak draped over the dome. They ended up spreading this idea very far, even into Europe. It didn't last long among anyone who could, you know, do math, but it still persists in a lot of mythology and literature from the day.

If I was gonna do a flat setting, that's how I'd do it.

weckar
2017-05-08, 02:02 AM
Isn't that how the Elder Scrolls universe does it?

JAL_1138
2017-05-08, 04:21 AM
Isn't that how the Elder Scrolls universe does it?

Nirn is a spherical planet, but it's not quite so simple. The Elder Scrolls cosmology (http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Cosmology) is self-contradictory and just plain weird.

LordCdrMilitant
2017-05-08, 11:07 AM
What?

Mostly-round.


I dislike Spelljammer for having Phlogiston and Crystal Spheres be a thing, even though it's mechanically identical to having J-Drives or The Warp, because its so damn stupid thematically.

So in the same veing, planets are round. They orbit a yellow star in an ellipse with a fairly low eccentricity and low inclination. Even the Greeks knew the world was round. And if your world isn't round, it invites all kinds of problems with its stability and gravity and atmosphere and just breaks down mathematically, so no, no flat worlds.



With a round world, anyone with a pair of sticks, a signal flag, and a good measuring tool knows how big the world is. Once that globe is filled in, that's it: you can do exploration, but only to a point. A flat world, if you give a partial map who knows how big things are beyond the known world, without need for retcon or continents moving around on people? Plus, a world being literally flat is an immediate, big, bold neon sign that Things Work Differently Here, and plays into a lot of myths you can borrow on.

As for the moving the campaign around, it's less "change of setting for the campaign" and more... it may be more my group but usually if a map isn't filled in... they wanna go peek over the edge.

It's far from the only way to do it, but it's a way I like, it's simple, it makes its point pretty clearly and unambiguously.

If the world was a plane with an finite thickness << than it's horizontal dimensions, gravity will change direction as you walk around the world.

And, you can know how big the world is, since you can measure and know the fluctuations in the direction and magnitude of the gravitational force to determine where the edge is.

Anonymouswizard
2017-05-08, 11:36 AM
On the entire 'on a round world you can only do so much exploring' front that's true for any world of finite size, flat or round. Of course a flat world can in theory go on forever, but even if your have infinite pizzas you can't eat all of them.

Of course, if you really want to explore forever, build a spaceship on a round world and head out into the universe. There's more than enough planets to scour.

Joe the Rat
2017-05-08, 11:42 AM
I am intrigued by platter worlds in fantasy, as it can make for some fun cosmology-building. Is gravity drawn towards the "center plane" of bodies as in Spelljammer, or a Great Attractor, or is there a Universal Down in the material plane?

I am treating my current game as a flat world, as the players do not have lore or evidence to suggest otherwise*. Of course, I tend to cook up all sorts of pre-Aristotelian cockamamie for how things work when the smart characters ask or experiment... or have them come up with explanations. The sun and moon are the holes through which the cyclopean creator-god watches the world. Eclipses and moon phases are when he blinks (or gets really drowsy at night). Or they are orbiting gates to a radiant energy source (sun), and the enriched demiplane that sits "between" radiance and material planes (moon), for those godless academics.

* The one group of major fliers can reach altitudes to where "edges" or "curvature" should be visible... and they ain't sharing.

LordCdrMilitant
2017-05-08, 12:39 PM
I am intrigued by platter worlds in fantasy, as it can make for some fun cosmology-building. Is gravity drawn towards the "center plane" of bodies as in Spelljammer, or a Great Attractor, or is there a Universal Down in the material plane?

I am treating my current game as a flat world, as the players do not have lore or evidence to suggest otherwise*. Of course, I tend to cook up all sorts of pre-Aristotelian cockamamie for how things work when the smart characters ask or experiment... or have them come up with explanations. The sun and moon are the holes through which the cyclopean creator-god watches the world. Eclipses and moon phases are when he blinks (or gets really drowsy at night). Or they are orbiting gates to a radiant energy source (sun), and the enriched demiplane that sits "between" radiance and material planes (moon), for those godless academics.

* The one group of major fliers can reach altitudes to where "edges" or "curvature" should be visible... and they ain't sharing.

Spelljammer is silly and stupid, and I absolutely detest "pre-Aristotelian cockamamie".

Planets orbit stars. There are laws governing how how both form and behave, and those laws say that both should be approximately spherical.

Gravity acts between individual points. The reason we treat it as originating at the center of mass is because when we integrate the gravity contributions of all the individual points, there is equivalence. We can perform this integration for infinite and finite planes of mass, and demonstrate mathematically how and why your flat world breaks down!

Lord Torath
2017-05-08, 12:56 PM
Round, because that way I can just use an online distance to horizon calculator and not have to do the math myself > _ >I've got a spreadsheet that does it for me. It's a pretty simple calculation, really, but not one I want to re-do every time I need to know how far away the tower needs to be to be under the horizon.


I am intrigued by platter worlds in fantasy, as it can make for some fun cosmology-building. Is gravity drawn towards the "center plane" of bodies as in Spelljammer, or a Great Attractor, or is there a Universal Down in the material plane?Gravity exerts a force roughly equal to 1 G that is "in the direction that is most convenient*". Spherical bodies have spherical gravity fields. Discworlds and similar generally have a gravity plane though the middle of the disc, attractive on both faces.

As far as the starbeasts that carry the planets/suns, gravity for them is in the direction that makes sense for them, and only applies to them, and the planet they carry (and only insofar as it lets them carry the planet. Pieces of the planet that break loose will fall to the planet, not to the starbeast). Starbeast gravity does not interact with anything else.

Strength of Spelljammer gravity is reflected in the size of the field, not the intensity of the field. All objects of at least 1 Spelljammer ton (100 cubic yards) or larger generate a gravity field of 9.807 m/s2. Larger bodies exert this field over a larger area, reflecting in larger air envelopes for ships, and longer "escape" times for celestial bodies.

* For a particular definition of "convenient"

** In general. DM-specified exceptions almost certainly exist.

golentan
2017-05-08, 02:01 PM
If the world was a plane with an finite thickness << than it's horizontal dimensions, gravity will change direction as you walk around the world.

And, you can know how big the world is, since you can measure and know the fluctuations in the direction and magnitude of the gravitational force to determine where the edge is.

If gravity or magnetism worked the way it does in our world. But they don't, stop being silly, and stop hurting the catgirls.

See how easy that was?

Anonymouswizard
2017-05-08, 02:05 PM
But maths is for people who have no imagination.

Is what everybody says when I break out m my calculator and show that yes, I can accelerate a slug to a fast enough velocity to blow up the moon out whatever. Likely by using my battle moon. Which I have parked in orbit because this is a round planet, no really the maths says it should be.

EDIT: yes, I know catgirls live on the moon, that's why I'm blowing it up.

LordCdrMilitant
2017-05-08, 02:13 PM
If gravity or magnetism worked the way it does in our world. But they don't, stop being silly, and stop hurting the catgirls.

See how easy that was?

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.

golentan
2017-05-08, 02:14 PM
But maths is for people who have no imagination.

Is what everybody says when I break out m my calculator and show that yes, I can accelerate a slug to a fast enough velocity to blow up the moon out whatever. Likely by using my battle moon. Which I have parked in orbit because this is a round planet, no really the maths says it should be.

EDIT: yes, I know catgirls live on the moon, that's why I'm blowing it up.

Math is fine. I enjoy math, and I enjoy people using the rules of the world in the game to their advantage. Build some tech which makes life better for generations to come and positions you well to become a world spanning empire.

But people talking about gravity being a function of mass are the in game world equivalent of people in the real world talking about phlogiston. Which, conveniently, might be a real thing in my game world and THEN WOULDN'T YOU FEEL SILLY talking about how electromagnetism works in the real world.

It's a fantasy world. It has license to be fantastic. It doesn't have to play by our rules.

Edit: Oh, great, a rules lawyer who loves to metagame and is rules lawyering based not on the book, but on real world physics?

Get out of my hypothetical game and never come back.

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-08, 02:15 PM
If gravity or magnetism worked the way it does in our world. But they don't, stop being silly, and stop hurting the catgirls.

See how easy that was?

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.

There are science fiction series that starts with premises like "what if electronics all stopped working tomorrow?" or "what if the rate of oxygenation changed tomorrow so that fire-based tech didn't work?" Well, the big effect that the authors always seem to miss, is that they have no story at all from that point...

...because the human characters, and every other living thing in the world, all die tomorrow. Poof. End. The behavior of electrons, the reactivity of oxygen, etc, are vital the basic chemistry of life. Hell, change those sorts of basic things enough, and matter doesn't even hold together.


Change the rules, and you change the world. Phlogiston theory fails because it doesn't explain the observed phenomena. Same with vital humors, and so on. If those theories are correct in a fictional world, then the observed phenomena would be different, in keeping with the differing underlying mechanisms.

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)".

golentan
2017-05-08, 02:18 PM
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.

There are science fiction series that starts with premises like "what if electronics all stopped working tomorrow?" or "what if the rate of oxygenation changed tomorrow so that fire-based tech didn't work?" Well, the big effect that the authors always seem to miss, is that they have no story at all from that point...

...because the human characters, and every other living thing in the world, all die tomorrow. Poof. End. The behavior of electrons, the reactivity of oxygen, etc, are vital the basic chemistry of life. Hell, change those sorts of basic things enough, and matter doesn't even hold together.

Again, you're assuming that the world has any relationship with real world physics. It's fantasy, it has license to be fantastic. We don't need atoms, or molecules. Hell, we don't need cells. We don't have electronics, we already have magic...

LordCdrMilitant
2017-05-08, 02:26 PM
Math is fine. I enjoy math, and I enjoy people using the rules of the world in the game to their advantage. Build some tech which makes life better for generations to come and positions you well to become a world spanning empire.

But people talking about gravity being a function of mass are the in game world equivalent of people in the real world talking about phlogiston. Which, conveniently, might be a real thing in my game world and THEN WOULDN'T YOU FEEL SILLY talking about how electromagnetism works in the real world.

It's a fantasy world. It has license to be fantastic. It doesn't have to play by our rules.

Edit: Oh, great, a rules lawyer who loves to metagame and is rules lawyering based not on the book, but on real world physics?

Get out of my hypothetical game and never come back.

No. Because now, I have an opportunity to make you suffer. I'm going to study this phlogiston, and I'm going to make you work out the new governing laws of your world.

I expect to have those equations in my hand next session. And then, the session after that, I'm going to blow the world up because there are direct responses and difference, as Killjoy said, as repercussions to your changes.

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-08, 02:27 PM
Again, you're assuming that the world has any relationship with real world physics. It's fantasy, it has license to be fantastic. We don't need atoms, or molecules. Hell, we don't need cells. We don't have electronics, we already have magic...

See edit above -- copied here for convenience:


Change the rules, and you change the world. Phlogiston theory fails because it doesn't explain the observed phenomena. Same with vital humors, and so on. If those theories are correct in a fictional world, then the observed phenomena would be different, in keeping with the differing underlying mechanisms.

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)".


If your world doesn't have atoms, molecules, or cells, or electrons, your world will look NOTHING LIKE the real world. It won't be "like our world, but with magic instead"... it will be something else entirely.

"But it's fantasy!" is just another version of the "but dragons! (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?445781-The-quot-BUT-DRAGONS!-quot-Fallacy)" fallacy.

Anonymouswizard
2017-05-08, 02:36 PM
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.

There are science fiction series that starts with premises like "what if electronics all stopped working tomorrow?" or "what if the rate of oxygenation changed tomorrow so that fire-based tech didn't work?" Well, the big effect that the authors always seem to miss, is that they have no story at all from that point...

...because the human characters, and every other living thing in the world, all die tomorrow. Poof. End. The behavior of electrons, the reactivity of oxygen, etc, are vital the basic chemistry of life. Hell, change those sorts of basic things enough, and matter doesn't even hold together.


Change the rules, and you change the world. Phlogiston theory fails because it doesn't explain the observed phenomena. Same with vital humors, and so on. If those theories are correct in a fictional world, then the observed phenomena would be different, in keeping with the differing underlying mechanisms.

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".

Isn't there a science fiction trilogy which begins with what seems like a miniscule change (a minus sign in one equation bring a plus sign or something like that), and then the author works out the exact consequences for this universe, including the speed of light not being constant and that some times people just explode on death, and wires a story based on those?

Now I have no problem with the fantastical, but I'm going to abuse it until it shuts up, sits down, and allows me to run repeatable experiments on it. I mean I could kill the dragon, but I'm too busy working out of I can abuse mana flow to create a computer (sorry, in my works this is possible as mana behaves similarly to electrons, including energy levels and some materials bring better conductors*).

* Stone in this case, to justify city sized ancient stone computers. It's not physically plausible, none of this mana as electrons stuff is, but it's an add on to physics meant to be exploited.

LordCdrMilitant
2017-05-08, 02:40 PM
Again, you're assuming that the world has any relationship with real world physics. It's fantasy, it has license to be fantastic. We don't need atoms, or molecules. Hell, we don't need cells. We don't have electronics, we already have magic...

So then, I expect explanations.

You better have majored in theoretical physics in college and be able to give me the math when I ask. We found out what we have about the world through controlled and methodical experimentation. I'm going to start with proving simple things, then make it worse and worse for you as I proceed to work through it governing equation by governing equation. Expect spreadsheets.

Let's start. I'm going to weigh a rock, and drop it from a variety of heights and measure the time it takes to hit the ground. Let's go for from the table, from the second story, and from the castle wall.

Science is more fun than adventuring.

golentan
2017-05-08, 02:47 PM
See edit above -- copied here for convenience:


Change the rules, and you change the world. Phlogiston theory fails because it doesn't explain the observed phenomena. Same with vital humors, and so on. If those theories are correct in a fictional world, then the observed phenomena would be different, in keeping with the differing underlying mechanisms.

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".


If your world doesn't have atoms, molecules, or cells, or electrons, your world will look NOTHING LIKE the real world. It won't be "like our world, but with magic instead"... it will be something else entirely.

"But it's fantasy!" is just another version of the "but dragons! (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?445781-The-quot-BUT-DRAGONS!-quot-Fallacy)" fallacy.

Just because it looks superficially like the real world doesn't mean it works like it on a fundamental level, that's something I agree with.

As an example, I play a lot of exalted. The world is flat, and bordered by chaos. The sky is a solid dome, the sun and moon are airships commanded by their respective god. All things are made of magic (essence) and most have their own Least God, a tiny, unconscious spirit which handles physical state changes (such as chemistry, motion, what have you) by singing a little magical song which changes the object they are charged with overseeing. Least gods answer to other gods, and on up the chain. People look like people because... they are shaped like people (made of flesh and bone and blood), and they are able to think and feel not because of their brains, but because they have two souls which handle their mind and body (and if they die the souls are detached and become ghosts). Sometimes, one or more gods make a mistake or something from outside the world (also made of essence) messes with something... and something goes wrong in the world, for which purpose the loom of fate exists to predict and model the universe and, through sympathetic resonance and occasional use of field agents, fix errors before they grow too large.

I like thinking about a lot of those "what ifs" like that. I like considering how phlogiston might work, and if you could use it as rocket fuel for a magical space program (spelljammer is pretty damn cool, apropos of nothing). I like thinking about how much magic changes things. As a huge biology nerd, I like considering "what if flesh were just its own sort of substance, and humans did not evolve from a single celled organism, but were made from flesh by a god who might have as easily chosen to make them out of wood... is that where dryads come from? Do these substances have any indivisible unit, or is it just infinitely divisible" If I'm going fantasy, I want a genuine fantasy, and I'm not afraid of having conversations on what that implies for the people living in this or that setting.

But I have no patience for the sort of... special, special soul who has no interest in the actual game and just thinks he can prove himself the cleverest, or the sort of person who tries to rules lawyer the game to a halt until they get their way.

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-08, 02:50 PM
So then, I expect explanations.

You better have majored in theoretical physics in college and be able to give me the math when I ask. We found out what we have about the world through controlled and methodical experimentation. I'm going to start with proving simple things, then make it worse and worse for you as I proceed to work through it governing equation by governing equation. Expect spreadsheets.

Science is more fun that adventuring.

Indeed.

Now, to be clear, I don't actually spend my fantasy worldbuilding efforts on changing the mass of the electron. My actual approach when building a fantasy world is to make the world superficially/nominally like ours, and save the fantasy/mysterious elements for where they matter, like including magic and spirits and whatnot as necessary.

See the first line of my signature.

Segev
2017-05-08, 03:00 PM
To be fair, the "horizon" being "a haze" rather than "a line" isn't a huge shift, and you still get, ultimately, a dividing line between "sky" and "ground" in the distance. And, in an infinite flat plane, there would always be SOMETHING taller than what's behind it, eventually. Your desert is absolutely surrounded by hills. Your mountain, unless it's the tallest mountain in the infinite world, still has more mountains bigger still out there somewhere.

The fun thing about an infinite flat world is that you can't ever get to wherever the sun goes when it sets.

Or, maybe you can. Maybe the sun only illuminates a finite portion of this infinite flat world, and beyond that ring-path it follows, the world gets colder and colder with increasingly long nights, until you're so far away that the sun isn't even visible.



Or, perhaps the world is mostly oceans, and each continent has its own sun. It's a feeding ground pulled together by the great Sun-Fish whose leap across the sky is the day, and whose swim beneath the floating land mass is the night. Sail from one land mass to another, and you find a new sun as well as a new land.

LordCdrMilitant
2017-05-08, 03:32 PM
Indeed.

Now, to be clear, I don't actually spend my fantasy worldbuilding efforts on changing the mass of the electron. My actual approach when building a fantasy world is to make the world superficially/nominally like ours, and save the fantasy/mysterious elements for where they matter, like including magic and spirits and whatnot as necessary.

See the first line of my signature.

Me neither.

But I also don't have worlds that are flat, or stars that aren't stars, or something stupid like phlogiston.


Just because it looks superficially like the real world doesn't mean it works like it on a fundamental level, that's something I agree with.

I like thinking about a lot of those "what ifs" like that. I like considering how phlogiston might work, and if you could use it as rocket fuel for a magical space program (spelljammer is pretty damn cool, apropos of nothing). I like thinking about how much magic changes things.

But I have no patience for the sort of... special, special soul who has no interest in the actual game and just thinks he can prove himself the cleverest, or the sort of person who tries to rules lawyer the game to a halt until they get their way.

As I said before, I hate Spelljammer. I'm sorry, I wanted to be playing Sci-Fi, not whatever this crap is.

I can be that special sort of soul, but only when the GM pisses me off. And discarding the established conventions of the world's function for the sake of the fantastic is one of those things.

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-08, 03:42 PM
Me neither.
But I also don't have worlds that are flat, or stars that aren't stars, or something stupid like phlogiston.


Indeed.

It's not really turtles all the way down, we just tell that to the tourists. :smallwink:

Segev
2017-05-08, 03:43 PM
Indeed.

It's not really turtles all the way down, we just tell that to the tourists. :smallwink:

Yep. There's actually a fair mix of iguanas and platypi in there.

Anonymouswizard
2017-05-08, 03:53 PM
Honestly you can have your flat worlds if you agree to play over there. I'll be here, in the room I've already set up in, and I'll be running a spherical world game. We can all be happy.

Of course, if anybody can work out a way to make a world shaped like a tesseract, let me know.

Segev
2017-05-08, 04:40 PM
Of course, if anybody can work out a way to make a world shaped like a tesseract, let me know.

That's easy! Start with a cube-shaped world, and unfold it until it's flat!

gkathellar
2017-05-08, 05:45 PM
The thing about demanding that stories and games comply with the physical laws of the real world is that stories are of and have their value in the world of appearances, the world of symbol and idea and emotion and poetry and thought. And of course the laws of the known physical world can be used to tell a good story, but the critical word is "use," because it is not the laws themselves that do the telling. The novel A Mote In God's Eye has largely accurate physics and a believable, consistent FTL drive that is central to the plot. But it is the world of appearances conveyed by that consistency that gives the book meaning and power, not its adherence to real-world mathematics. What matters is not that the world of the story has electrons and quarks and gravitational waves, but rather that it superficially resembles the one we live in ways that provide meaningful emotional reference points for the human being experiencing it.

Physics and mathematics fill the world with a vastness and strangeness and beauty. To paraphrase Feynman, they add to and expand the world, make it greater and more wonderful and more interesting. But vastness and strangeness and beauty themselves are subjective things, immaterial except in the much-abstracted, neurochemical sense. As things we experience, they too belong to the world of appearances. Stories and games - art, really - appeal to that world, to imminent experience, and to the internal process of being human, which doesn't necessarily demand rigor or facticity so much as it demands validation and recognition and a measure of emotional truth.

The value of a flat world, or of a cosmos made of crystal spheres floating in latent magical energy, or of a universe built on the inner surface of an imposssibly vast dodecahedron, then, is not in our ability to map it to knowable physical laws. Its value is in the emotional power of its imagery and the enrichment we draw from that idea.


So then, I expect explanations.

You better have majored in theoretical physics in college and be able to give me the math when I ask. We found out what we have about the world through controlled and methodical experimentation. I'm going to start with proving simple things, then make it worse and worse for you as I proceed to work through it governing equation by governing equation. Expect spreadsheets.

This honestly sounds like really toxic table behavior, and unless it were appropriate for the game that was being played (say, Ars Magicka), it could get you banned from a lot of games if you were obnoxious about it. If you, personally, don't like anything that doesn't conform exactly to consistent physical laws, that's fine, but ruining other people's game experience is a really icky thing to do.

Of course, if a player were nice or at least tolerable and in-character about it, a good GM might play along. I know that personally, I wouldn't mind having a scientifically-minded character in a game I was running, so long as they didn't make a nuisance of themselves (and if said character ever tried to use Major Creation to synthesize anti-osmium in a game I was running, the vast extraplanar serpent from which all magic emanates would give them a tub of dead voles and a slip of paper reading, "IOU: 1 Anti-Osmium"). But just because you want to bust the GM's balls does not mean you should expect them to oblige you.


Let's start. I'm going to weigh a rock, and drop it from a variety of heights and measure the time it takes to hit the ground. Let's go for from the table, from the second story, and from the castle wall.

And in, say, Ars Magicka or Exalted, the results of this experiment wouldn't surprise you much. It's just that the reasons for those results would differ a great deal, and also lead to wizards and god-punching superhumans. In the right type of game, you could even get into those reasons - that's the cool thing about stories.


Science is more fun than adventuring.

Just so long as you're not ruining someone else's table experience.

8BitNinja
2017-05-08, 06:06 PM
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.

Just go with round. It's much easier.

It's a fantasy world with giant fire breathing lizards and talking animals. I'm pretty sure science can be thrown out the window if needed.

Anonymouswizard
2017-05-08, 06:23 PM
It's a fantasy world with giant fire breathing lizards and talking animals. I'm pretty sure science can be thrown out the window if needed.

Man, what sort of fantasy world do you play in? Mine only has the magical cat people and 50,000,000 golems.

5a Violista
2017-05-08, 06:51 PM
The fun thing about an infinite flat world is that you can't ever get to wherever the sun goes when it sets.

Or, maybe you can. Maybe the sun only illuminates a finite portion of this infinite flat world, and beyond that ring-path it follows, the world gets colder and colder with increasingly long nights, until you're so far away that the sun isn't even visible.

Or, perhaps the world is mostly oceans, and each continent has its own sun. It's a feeding ground pulled together by the great Sun-Fish whose leap across the sky is the day, and whose swim beneath the floating land mass is the night. Sail from one land mass to another, and you find a new sun as well as a new land.

These particular ideas sound like they could be really fun and exciting flat worlds.

I'd enjoy playing a flat (or whatever) world so long as it's thought through and internally consistent. If someone wants to run a "Exactly like the real world, except flat", I'm not interested. If it's flat, I want some actual consequences of it being flat, rather than just being flat for the novelty and the "it's magic and has dragons" aspect. For example: the ability for particularly daring explorers to climb off the edge and around the bottom, and there's a city hanging beneath the flat disk, or a way to hang-glide down to the abyss, or sailing off the edge will lead you to a mythic land of cruel gods, or an infinite number of suns passing eternally eastward (spaced a day apart), or the above ideas, or some mystical/mythological reason why the world is flat...and so on.
If a world is flat, I want it to be more than just flat for the sake of being flat.

As an aside, whenever someone says "Science doesn't apply to this world" I take it to understand the speaker doesn't know what science means, because science means studying how the world works through cause-effect situations. "This world's physics has some differences than real-world physics" would be much better, because it demonstrates the world-builder at least put some thought into the cause-effect relationships of their world, and that starts the conversation into something more interesting. It also means I, as the player, would be able to naturally intuit how the world works without needing pages and pages of exposition just to describe why my particular idea wouldn't work (when my character would know it wouldn't work automatically based on life experiences).

So: if you want to explore the effects of a particular flat-world, that sounds fun. However, flat-world for the sake of flat-world doesn't sound very exciting. If you're just going to do "flat world, but with no interesting consequences compared to a round world" just stick with what you know.

Mechalich
2017-05-08, 07:29 PM
The value of a flat world, or of a cosmos made of crystal spheres floating in latent magical energy, or of a universe built on the inner surface of an imposssibly vast dodecahedron, then, is not in our ability to map it to knowable physical laws. Its value is in the emotional power of its imagery and the enrichment we draw from that idea.


While this is true, the value of such dynamic imagery is constrained by the amount of handwavium necessary to make it happen.

TTRPGs are inherently collaborative, they are not functioning in the same dynamic as a narrative delivered in direction from storyteller to audience. In the narrative I'm just trying to offer a good time and sometimes making sense is irrelevant because the focus is on a purely emotional or purely sensory appeal. The anime studio GAINAX has seemingly (post-Eva) made this a professional philosophy - Gurren Lagann and Kill la Kill and so forth are utterly ridiculous. They took verisimilitude out back and beat it over the head with a crowbar, but no one cares because a technicolor wonderland where galaxies explode from being thrown at each other awaits and the goal is to leave the viewer slack-jawed. By investing into such a universe you have implicitly agreed to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. In terms of a flat earth the obvious example is Discworld, and I believe that taking Discworld's mechanics seriously is an offense punishable by lengthy lectures about zoning laws from stern British schoolmasters.

Such a buy-in is impossible when designing an RPG scenario (or at least, when designing an RPG scenario to be played beyond a circle of close friends who have implicitly agreed to certain conceits - in fact the failings of VtM have a lot to do with the game being dependent upon implicit agreements that WW authors apparently shared but that the general gaming populace didn't agree with at all). In fact, you have to worry specifically that not only will the players fail to buy in, but that they will deliberately and willfully seek to find cracks in the setup of the world and break them open. Narratives don't have that problem: the fact that the Potterverse can be shattered by a logical incision in about twenty different ways in under two minutes has limited impact on its success, because the majority of readers continue to buy in Rowlings conceits and the worst I do is write angry reviews. However, if you made a Harry Potter RPG, I could build a character who Apparates into nuclear storage and makes off with WMDs and then uses them and that'd end any ongoing game real quick now wouldn't it?

Now, it is impossible to make a game that is ironclad, the power of players to subvert, troll, and otherwise wreck fictional universes is unsurpassed - exploits find their way into even actively managed Co-opt games, multiplayer games, and MMOs that face economic demands to prevent them from proliferating. In tabletop the game is going to be actively managed by the GM, and you want to build your world such that the design minimizes the number of times a GM is to have to turn to a player and say 'yeah no, you can't do that, it'll ruin the game' compared to 'yeah no, that's not actually possible because X.' It's a balance between awesomeness and annoyance.

A flat earth, in all honesty, contributes far more annoyance than it will ever make up for in awesomeness.

Exalted's Creation is a telltale example here. It's not flat because the design team thought about awesome stuff they could do when designing a flat world floating in formless chaos - it's flat because the world in Tales from the Flat Earth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_the_Flat_Earth) by Tanith Lee is a flat world floating in formless chaos and Creation was blatantly ripping it off (and White Wolf admits as much in the inspiration section). All of the tens of thousands of words spilled trying to justify Creation as flat were produced post hoc in an attempt to make that choice viable.

Knaight
2017-05-08, 08:19 PM
No. Because now, I have an opportunity to make you suffer. I'm going to study this phlogiston, and I'm going to make you work out the new governing laws of your world.

I expect to have those equations in my hand next session. And then, the session after that, I'm going to blow the world up because there are direct responses and difference, as Killjoy said, as repercussions to your changes.

Why should the equations just be given to you? Your character doesn't know them, likely doesn't have the apparatus needed to get the data for a lot of them, and even if we ignore the metagaming implicit in a research program which never has dead ends discovery is still difficult. I'm running a game right now centered around the discovery of magic and invention of magitech by the PCs, and the underlying rules of magic are hidden. They're present, and there have been successful bits of experimentation, but there's plenty the players haven't figured out. There's plenty more the characters haven't figured out (e.g. the reason the Excite Light spell makes the target light bluer), and that's with a certain level of metagaming going on for what is basically a research program which is really light on dead ends.

Consider what it took to discover equations for the real world.

LordCdrMilitant
2017-05-14, 06:16 PM
Why should the equations just be given to you? Your character doesn't know them, likely doesn't have the apparatus needed to get the data for a lot of them, and even if we ignore the metagaming implicit in a research program which never has dead ends discovery is still difficult. I'm running a game right now centered around the discovery of magic and invention of magitech by the PCs, and the underlying rules of magic are hidden. They're present, and there have been successful bits of experimentation, but there's plenty the players haven't figured out. There's plenty more the characters haven't figured out (e.g. the reason the Excite Light spell makes the target light bluer), and that's with a certain level of metagaming going on for what is basically a research program which is really light on dead ends.

Consider what it took to discover equations for the real world.

Of course. But, I expect to find them, and I expect him to have them and be able to apply it consistently.

It's more a point that the GM probably didn't think about the ramifications and prepare the equations, and I'll be taking notes and making and testing hypotheses.

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-14, 07:37 PM
Why should the equations just be given to you? Your character doesn't know them, likely doesn't have the apparatus needed to get the data for a lot of them, and even if we ignore the metagaming implicit in a research program which never has dead ends discovery is still difficult. I'm running a game right now centered around the discovery of magic and invention of magitech by the PCs, and the underlying rules of magic are hidden. They're present, and there have been successful bits of experimentation, but there's plenty the players haven't figured out. There's plenty more the characters haven't figured out (e.g. the reason the Excite Light spell makes the target light bluer), and that's with a certain level of metagaming going on for what is basically a research program which is really light on dead ends.

Consider what it took to discover equations for the real world.


Of course. But, I expect to find them, and I expect him to have them and be able to apply it consistently.

It's more a point that the GM probably didn't think about the ramifications and prepare the equations, and I'll be taking notes and making and testing hypotheses.


I don't think it's a matter of them being "just given" to the character. But they should be there, at least in abstract terms, for the character to discover.

Xuc Xac
2017-05-14, 07:58 PM
I don't think it's a matter of them being "just given" to the character. But they should be there, at least in abstract terms, for the character to discover.

They were there to discover in the real world too. It still took a very long time to figure out even the stuff you learn on your first day of high school physics class. Humans had several thousand years of experience in throwing and shooting things when Aristotle claimed that heavy things fell faster than light ones. It was nearly 2000 years later when Galileo figured out that mass had no effect on falling speed.

You can claim that your character is researching all you want, but that doesn't mean your character gets to be immediately correct. In fact, looking at history, the odds are very good that your character will end up as one of the nameless horde of scientists who spent their whole lives researching a dead end that is proven wrong later.

Anonymouswizard
2017-05-14, 09:29 PM
Ah, the old 'I don't like it so I'll railroad' trick. Works every time the PCs are doing something you don't want then to do.

The thing is, of your players don't like flat worlds (never saw the appeal myself, seems impractical compared to a sphere) then you shouldn't be running one. The same for spherical, hollow, torus, pear, cat, or raptor-shaped worlds. It's as simple as that.

I really can't understand how a flat world is meant to feel mythic. Maybe it's because the example I'm most familiar with by far is comedic, but my first instinct is to bungee jump off the edge (my second is to throw my enemies of the edge, my third is to drill through the world, and my fourth is to pay attention to what the GM is saying).

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-14, 09:56 PM
They were there to discover in the real world too. It still took a very long time to figure out even the stuff you learn on your first day of high school physics class. Humans had several thousand years of experience in throwing and shooting things when Aristotle claimed that heavy things fell faster than light ones. It was nearly 2000 years later when Galileo figured out that mass had no effect on falling speed.

You can claim that your character is researching all you want, but that doesn't mean your character gets to be immediately correct. In fact, looking at history, the odds are very good that your character will end up as one of the nameless horde of scientists who spent their whole lives researching a dead end that is proven wrong later.

This is getting off the actual point, however.

Again, it's not that the rules are spelled out in complicated mathematical formulas, or that some PC is going to learn them all through research.

It's that the GM, having changed the rules of how the world works, needs to understand that at least in abstract, and needs to understand how those changes affect the world functions and how the resulting world is not the same as the world that we live in with its rules.


(And never mind that every water wheel, every weapon, every siege engine, every arch and dome and so on, ever built and used, was an expression of understanding the world's rules function on some level... going all the way back to "sharp stone cuts, fire makes food better". In a world with different underlying rules, those things work differently, or not at all.)

Xuc Xac
2017-05-14, 10:52 PM
Ah, the old 'I don't like it so I'll railroad' trick. Works every time the PCs are doing something you don't want then to do.


If PCs bite off more than they can chew, it's not railroading to say they choke on it. If they are living in a world where one guy has said "maybe atoms are a thing" and everyone else says "no, it's four infinitesimally divisible elements" or "it's spirits and demons all the way down", it's pure metagaming to try building a Large Hadron Collider to look for the Higgs Boson.

Research takes a lot of time and resources. If you're trying to invent the field of physics from scratch, you get to be Aristotle at best. You don't get to skip straight to Einstein or Feynman.

Jay R
2017-05-14, 10:58 PM
It's that the GM, having changed the rules of how the world works, needs to understand that at least in abstract, and needs to understand how those changes affect the world functions and how the resulting world is not the same as the world that we live in with its rules.

Exactly backwards. The DM does not have to understand it in abstract, only in the concrete effects - as you said, "how those changes affect the world functions and how the resulting world is not the same as the world that we live in with its rules"

Here's the description from one of my games.
A warning about meta-knowledge. In a game in which stone gargoyles can fly and people can cast magic spells, modern rules of physics and chemistry simply don’t apply. There aren’t 92 natural elements, lightning is not caused by an imbalance of electrical potential, and stars are not gigantic gaseous bodies undergoing nuclear fusion. Cute stunts involving clever use of the laws of thermodynamics simply won’t work. Note that cute stunts involving the gross effects thereof very likely will work. Roll a stone down a mountain, and you could cause an avalanche. But in a world with teleportation, levitation, and fireball spells, Newton’s three laws of motion do not apply, and energy and momentum are not conserved. Accordingly, modern scientific meta-knowledge will do you more harm than good. On the other hand, knowledge of Aristotle, Ptolemy, medieval alchemy, or medieval and classical legends might be useful occasionally.

The major concrete effect was that there really were seven planets - "wandering stars" - and their magic was a crucial plot point in the first story arc.

Also, the players were expected to play the fantasy game, not try to use their personal scientific knowledge to try to make gunpowder or some such.


(And never mind that every water wheel, every weapon, every siege engine, every arch and dome and so on, ever built and used, was an expression of understanding the world's rules function on some level... going all the way back to "sharp stone cuts, fire makes food better". In a world with different underlying rules, those things work differently, or not at all.)

That what I meant with "Note that cute stunts involving the gross effects thereof very likely will work. Roll a stone down a mountain, and you could cause an avalanche."

For centuries, people lived in a world in which they believed that everything was composed of the four elements (with the fifth one in the heavens), that illnesses were an imbalance of the four humors, and that the sun and moon, like the other five planets, orbited the earth. In my world, I assumed that all of this was true. It caused no more cognitive dissonance for the players than it did for the people 1,000-2,000 years ago who lived in a world in which they believed that it was all true.


So then, I expect explanations.

You can "expect" anything you like, but you can only get it through role-playing.


You better have majored in theoretical physics in college and be able to give me the math when I ask.

"Who is your character asking for these equations - the smith, the greengrocer, the beggar, or the mule? Those are the only NPCs currently in sight."


We found out what we have about the world through controlled and methodical experimentation. I'm going to start with proving simple things, then make it worse and worse for you as I proceed to work through it governing equation by governing equation. Expect spreadsheets.

"Your character does not know the value of controlled and methodical experimentation, and does not know anybody who could teach him the basics of modern science. Also, he has no spreadsheet knowledge."


Let's start. I'm going to weigh a rock, and drop it from a variety of heights and measure the time it takes to hit the ground. Let's go for from the table, from the second story, and from the castle wall.

"What instrument is your character using for measurement? It's already well known that time measurements are not constant. An hour, which is defined as one twelfth of the daylight time or the night time, is longer during summer days and winter nights than it is in summer nights or winter days."


Science is more fun than adventuring.

I agree, but your character has no science skills, no ability to take precise measurements of time, distance, or weight, and it's known that magic spells can affect these quantities anyway.

Even if I allowed him to try, and even if the other players agreed with your desire to forgo all the fantasy adventures they cam here for to watch you, you would get no further in a lifetime than any one medieval or classical scientist did, and you're talking about trying to duplicate several hundred years of research.

And by the way, what's your actual motivation? Why do you want to prevent the adventures the other players are here to play out? For what reason to you want to destroy the game?

gkathellar
2017-05-15, 04:01 AM
In a world with different underlying rules, those things work differently, or not at all.)

Alternately, their workings are superficially the same, but for different reasons.

BeerMug Paladin
2017-05-15, 05:13 AM
Some of the chatter here is making me think of a few things.

1) Matter is story given shape. Matter is not divisible into atoms. It exists to be observed, or interacted with by entities. It exists because it has a narrative purpose. No matter the type of matter it is, that is why it is there. Attempting subdivision of matter in order to examine it will yield inconsistent results because after a certain point the observations made about the matter will be a reflection of the examiner's expectations or desires rather than any fundamental trait about the matter itself.

2) Physical laws are governed by expectations, not equations. A dropped rock falls because that is what people expect it to do. Certainly, there are some broad trends that have been observed over time, but those trends exist in the way they do because they were initially set up to be that way by the creator pantheon. It hasn't changed in that time due to cultural inertia. IE, the gods agreed that, "A dropped rock will fall." In the early days that event played out. People noticed it and picked up the belief, thus reinforcing the trend long after the creator pantheon ceded from much direct intervention in the world.

3) Repeatability is a harsh mistress. It can pay off to do the same sort of experiment over and over again. Drop a rock. Drop it again. Do it another time. If you have the means to time it you'll also notice certain things about how fast it drops that generally hold. Everyone's expectations for basic physics are the same, so it allows basic technology to function. But press too far into uncommon knowledge and you'll begin to encounter anomalies. These will be little details that are true physical laws that operate near yourself, in your own experimentations, but not necessarily operate when other observers are around. Like subdivision of matter yielding results that only reflect the observer, careful scrutiny of physical laws will yield formulae and equations that only work for one experimenter. These principles likely cannot be used widely or very effectively when they interact with the expectations of those around them or perhaps only have temporary or short-range effects.

4) Magic is the manipulation of expectation. Wizards goof the expectations for physics in a controlled, very deliberate way. Sorcerers "expect" a rock to float really hard, and so against all odds, it does. Clerics ask a god to "expect" something really hard on their behalf. Higher level magical power is researched by rare individuals via a scientific process. Experiment, find a newer, more powerful anomaly and figure out how to use that to goof physics in a way you want.

Beyond all this, I would imagine that in a world with literal trickster gods, a determined scientist trying to break the universe would have an obvious foil.

I almost want to see someone accommodating a player who wanted to just run experiments for the sole purpose of trying to prove the game world was dumb. I imagine someone devious enough to keep hinting at some obvious breaking point in the future, but being clever enough with every new equation and principle to keep it just out of reach.

Jormengand
2017-05-15, 06:43 AM
Honestly you can have your flat worlds if you agree to play over there. I'll be here, in the room I've already set up in, and I'll be running a spherical world game. We can all be happy.

Of course, if anybody can work out a way to make a world shaped like a tesseract, let me know.

My setting contains a plane which is set inside the hypernet of a tesseract (or on the "Surface" of a tesseract). It employs a weird form of subjective directional gravity which causes the individual person's gravity to pull them towards the last face they just entered that hyperface from.

Tesseracts are weird.

Anonymouswizard
2017-05-15, 07:08 AM
If PCs bite off more than they can chew, it's not railroading to say they choke on it. If they are living in a world where one guy has said "maybe atoms are a thing" and everyone else says "no, it's four infinitesimally divisible elements" or "it's spirits and demons all the way down", it's pure metagaming to try building a Large Hadron Collider to look for the Higgs Boson.

Research takes a lot of time and resources. If you're trying to invent the field of physics from scratch, you get to be Aristotle at best. You don't get to skip straight to Einstein or Feynman.

Maybe I wasn't to play Academia: the RPG (I do own Ars Magical). I'll start by doing apples and work my way up to particle accelerators with immortality potions.


Some of the chatter here is making me think of a few things.

1) Matter is story given shape. Matter is not divisible into atoms. It exists to be observed, or interacted with by entities. It exists because it has a narrative purpose. No matter the type of matter it is, that is why it is there. Attempting subdivision of matter in order to examine it will yield inconsistent results because after a certain point the observations made about the matter will be a reflection of the examiner's expectations or desires rather than any fundamental trait about the matter itself.

2) Physical laws are governed by expectations, not equations. A dropped rock falls because that is what people expect it to do. Certainly, there are some broad trends that have been observed over time, but those trends exist in the way they do because they were initially set up to be that way by the creator pantheon. It hasn't changed in that time due to cultural inertia. IE, the gods agreed that, "A dropped rock will fall." In the early days that event played out. People noticed it and picked up the belief, thus reinforcing the trend long after the creator pantheon ceded from much direct intervention in the world.

3) Repeatability is a harsh mistress. It can pay off to do the same sort of experiment over and over again. Drop a rock. Drop it again. Do it another time. If you have the means to time it you'll also notice certain things about how fast it drops that generally hold. Everyone's expectations for basic physics are the same, so it allows basic technology to function. But press too far into uncommon knowledge and you'll begin to encounter anomalies. These will be little details that are true physical laws that operate near yourself, in your own experimentations, but not necessarily operate when other observers are around. Like subdivision of matter yielding results that only reflect the observer, careful scrutiny of physical laws will yield formulae and equations that only work for one experimenter. These principles likely cannot be used widely or very effectively when they interact with the expectations of those around them or perhaps only have temporary or short-range effects.

4) Magic is the manipulation of expectation. Wizards goof the expectations for physics in a controlled, very deliberate way. Sorcerers "expect" a rock to float really hard, and so against all odds, it does. Clerics ask a god to "expect" something really hard on their behalf. Higher level magical power is researched by rare individuals via a scientific process. Experiment, find a newer, more powerful anomaly and figure out how to use that to goof physics in a way you want.

Beyond all this, I would imagine that in a world with literal trickster gods, a determined scientist trying to break the universe would have an obvious foil.

I almost want to see someone accommodating a player who wanted to just run experiments for the sole purpose of trying to prove the game world was dumb. I imagine someone devious enough to keep hinting at some obvious breaking point in the future, but being clever enough with every new equation and principle to keep it just out of reach.

Something something Mage the Ascension. There reality is literally defined by belief.

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-15, 07:57 AM
That what I meant with "Note that cute stunts involving the gross effects thereof very likely will work. Roll a stone down a mountain, and you could cause an avalanche."

For centuries, people lived in a world in which they believed that everything was composed of the four elements (with the fifth one in the heavens), that illnesses were an imbalance of the four humors, and that the sun and moon, like the other five planets, orbited the earth. In my world, I assumed that all of this was true. It caused no more cognitive dissonance for the players than it did for the people 1,000-2,000 years ago who lived in a world in which they believed that it was all true.


And the failures of all those theories lead people to search for other ideas.

(There's a lot of Victorian-era just-so-story garbage about what "people used to believe" that's become accepted "fact".)

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-15, 07:59 AM
Something something Mage the Ascension. There reality is literally defined by belief.


Eventually, you have to get down (or up) to a level at which there's objective fact, or there is no reality.

In Mage, the "reality" that's shaped by belief, isn't reality, it's illusion. The mutability of that illusion is part of the underlying objective reality.

gkathellar
2017-05-15, 08:33 AM
Eventually, you have to get down (or up) to a level at which there's objective fact, or there is no reality.

In Mage, the "reality" that's shaped by belief, isn't reality, it's illusion. The mutability of that illusion is part of the underlying objective reality.

Well, that depends on whether you take "reality" to mean the approximate world that we directly experience, or to mean the underlying world-machinery of which that approximation is derived. If you want to get technical, said issue is just as relevant to our real universe (in which actions and objects are useful approximations for the results of probability wobbles and energy states) as it is to they imaginary world of mage Mage (in which actions and objects are useful approximations for the results of belief wobbles and ideology states).

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-15, 08:52 AM
Well, that depends on whether you take "reality" to mean the approximate world that we directly experience, or to mean the underlying world-machinery of which that approximation is derived. If you want to get technical, said issue is just as relevant to our real universe (in which actions and objects are useful approximations for the results of probability wobbles and energy states) as it is to they imaginary world of mage Mage (in which actions and objects are useful approximations for the results of belief wobbles and ideology states).

Probability is still objective.

Don't take the whole "quantum mystery" thing as played up for the wow-factor by pop-"science" television documentaries and trash-"science" books too seriously. There's a lot of amateur-hour confusion there based on terms of art like "observed" (it's not the say most people use observation, which has lead people to the incorrect conclusion that the world responds to being observed -- a better term would have been "interact" or "encounter" or something, because two particles interacting is "observation" as the term is used in the field).

As said in other threads -- if the chair wasn't real, your butt would be on the floor.

gkathellar
2017-05-15, 09:02 AM
Right, I'm not saying the approximate world doesn't exist, just that it's an approximation derived of preconditions that have little immediate effect on most narratives - and that this is just as viable an explanation going forward from "everything is made of elves" as it is from "everything is made of infotidbits wobbling at different frequencies." The difference is irrelevant for the purpose of most stories.

My point being that it's safe, in Ascension and similar settings, to say "reality is defined by thought," because the level of reality that's being talked about is the approximate one, not the more basic subbasement where all of the defining by thought actually happens (which may itself be intractable to research - I dunno, I know and like Awakening better than Ascension).

Jay R
2017-05-15, 09:17 AM
And the failures of all those theories lead people to search for other ideas.

Agreed. But that's because those ideas failed in this world. Once the world got the the Renaissance level of measurement precision tools and the frame of mind that could believe in the scientific method, careful measurements showed their limitations.

Galileo saw the phases of Venus, proving that Venus circles the sun, and he saw the 4 biggest moons of Jupiter. This proved that not everything orbited the earth.

Tycho Brahe made extremely careful measurements at Uraniborg and proved conclusively that the planets weren't traveling in perfect circles of epicycles in circular orbits. Kepler was able to take those measurements and eventually demonstrate that the motions could be described better as ellipses.

Newton went further and used calculus to work out the laws of universal gravitation, proving conclusively that (for example) levitation cannot work. He also worked out the laws of motion, showing (among other things) that flight is not possible without wings or pushing air backwards behind you (with propellors or jets). Bleeding was a 'cure" intended to balance the humors, and it didn't work.

But in my D&D world, Venus has no phases (or nearly none), Jupiter has no moons, the planets (including the sun) travel in perfect circles of epicycles in circular orbits, and levitation and flight are possible. Healing is a skill that involves re-balancing humors, and it works.


(There's a lot of Victorian-era just-so-story garbage about what "people used to believe" that's become accepted "fact".)

True. For instance, the size and shape of the world were in fact well known. Anybody who contemplated the shape of the earth's shadow on the moon in a lunar eclipse, or who lived on a coast and watched ships sailing away, knew that the world was round. Its circumference was accurately measured by Eratosthenes, using a shadow and a book.

But also, many alternate ideas really were believed in earlier times. The best astronomical work was Ptolemy's Almagest, which had the earth at the center of the universe. The theory of humorism was believed, alchemists tried to turn base metals into gold, etc.

Lord Torath
2017-05-15, 09:46 AM
No. Because now, I have an opportunity to make you suffer. And this is exactly the kind of player every DM wants in their game.

But I also don't have worlds that are flat, or stars that aren't stars, or something stupid like phlogiston. As I said before, I hate Spelljammer. I'm sorry, I wanted to be playing Sci-Fi, not whatever this crap is.
If you don't want to play Pirates of the Caribbean in Space, that's just fine. You can go play in the universe where you enter the realm of daemons to go from planet to planet in a useful amount of time and 100-foot tall human-shaped mecha wrapped in Void Shields are the most effective ground combat unit (not that I have anything against the Warhammer 40,000 universe - I actually really enjoy it - but it's just as silly as the Spelljammer universe).

If you're in my game, you've agreed to the premise, and I'll not thank you to try to tear down my setting just because you think a universe of crystal spheres floating in the phlogiston is dumb. You've already agreed to them. If you want to play scientist and spend your time working out the laws of the universe, that's fine. Your character retires from adventuring to become a sage. Please make a character that actually wants to adventure in this campaign.


Honestly you can have your flat worlds if you agree to play over there. I'll be here, in the room I've already set up in, and I'll be running a spherical world game. We can all be happy.This. Very much this.

Jay R
2017-05-15, 12:20 PM
As said in other threads -- if the chair wasn't real, your butt would be on the floor.

This is only true if the butt and the floor are real, and the chair is not.

Your PC is imaginary, He's not real. Neither is his butt. The chair in the DM's invented tavern is not real either. But your PC can sit in the chair just fine.

Similarly, the chair I'm currently siting in is mostly empty space around electrons (which are themselves waves as much as they are particles). My butt is similarly constructed. Nonetheless, there are physical rules for how mostly-empty spaces interact, which have been shown to work. Specifically, the mostly-empty-space that is my butt is currently comfortably sitting on the mostly-empty-space that is the chair.

Conclusion: The word "real" has a very complex meaning, which can't be reduced to the level you're trying to use.

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-15, 12:34 PM
This is only true if the butt and the floor are real, and the chair is not.

Your PC is imaginary, He's not real. Neither is his butt. The chair in the DM's invented tavern is not real either. But your PC can sit in the chair just fine.

Similarly, the chair I'm currently siting in is mostly empty space around electrons (which are themselves waves as much as they are particles). My butt is similarly constructed. Nonetheless, there are physical rules for how mostly-empty spaces interact, which have been shown to work. Specifically, the mostly-empty-space that is my butt is currently comfortably sitting on the mostly-empty-space that is the chair.

Conclusion: The word "real" has a very complex meaning, which can't be reduced to the level you're trying to use.


Real, or reality, is the stuff that's extant independent of perception or opinion. The objective world.

"Mostly empty space" is one of those cute "wonderisms" that gets pushed far beyond any reasonable point in order to gin up "wow-factor". It's true, but it's not the eye-popping worldview-bending revelation that's it's been made out to be in every other science program and documentary for decades now. It's firmly in the "big freaking deal" category at this point.

LordCdrMilitant
2017-05-15, 12:45 PM
And this is exactly the kind of player every DM wants in their game.

If you don't want to play Pirates of the Caribbean in Space, that's just fine. You can go play in the universe where you enter the realm of daemons to go from planet to planet in a useful amount of time and 100-foot tall human-shaped mecha wrapped in Void Shields are the most effective ground combat unit (not that I have anything against the Warhammer 40,000 universe - I actually really enjoy it - but it's just as silly as the Spelljammer universe).

If you're in my game, you've agreed to the premise, and I'll not thank you to try to tear down my setting just because you think a universe of crystal spheres floating in the phlogiston is dumb. You've already agreed to them. If you want to play scientist and spend your time working out the laws of the universe, that's fine. Your character retires from adventuring to become a sage. Please make a character that actually wants to adventure in this campaign.

This. Very much this.

I observed elsewhere, I like 40k, I hate Spelljammer, and mechanically, there is no difference between crystal spheres and a 100xdiameter no-jump radius and jumpspace or the Warp or Hyperspace.

I can tolerate it when its silly. But, what I hate is specifically the theme phlogiston and crystal spheres creates. It's not science fiction. 40k, despite having daemons and literal gods, has laser guns and tanks and airlocks to throw people out of. Space is still fundamentally space, and 40k abides by all expectations of science fiction. I know that I can't expect to play or read actual, realistic sci-fi, but I do want to play a game that doesn't have the universe built the way the ancient greeks or whatnot thought it was built by. It's worth mention that even the greeks knew the world was round.

And as a side note, they didn't even use the theory of phlogiston correctly.


I play just fine when I'm having fun. But I do want to see that math, OOC. If you could work out what makes the flat world work and run the universe consistently with the equations, that's beyond cool and I'm happy to play. But if you're just going "the world is flat because the world is flat, but everything else is normal", then I'm getting frustrated, because it serves no purpose but to break suspension of disbelief.


Also, for the record, and infinite sheet of charge has an electric field strength equal to the charge density divided by 2e0. We can start there for our infinite sheet of mass.

Lord Torath
2017-05-15, 01:56 PM
I observed elsewhere, I like 40k, I hate Spelljammer, and mechanically, there is no difference between crystal spheres and a 100xdiameter no-jump radius and jumpspace or the Warp or Hyperspace.

I can tolerate it when its silly. But, what I hate is specifically the theme phlogiston and crystal spheres creates. It's not science fiction. 40k, despite having daemons and literal gods, has laser guns and tanks and airlocks to throw people out of. Space is still fundamentally space, and 40k abides by all expectations of science fiction. I know that I can't expect to play or read actual, realistic sci-fi, but I do want to play a game that doesn't have the universe built the way the ancient greeks or whatnot thought it was built by. It's worth mention that even the greeks knew the world was round.And this perception is part of the problem. Spelljammer is not science fiction. It's fantasy pirates in SPAAACE! It's also worth noting that the major campaign worlds are all round (Except for Eberron. I mean, it might be round, and probably is, but I don't know enough about it to say one way or the other. Mystara is round, but also has a Hollow World. And don't get me started on Ravenloft).


And as a side note, they didn't even use the theory of phlogiston correctly.Very true. But then, they didn't use Crystal Spheres "correctly" either (each celestial body was embedded on its own sphere with Earth at the center of all of them in the ancient model of the universe, while Spelljammer puts one giant sphere around each solar system). They didn't intend to. There is a whole host of things D&D gets wrong, from rate of fire to weapon effectiveness to mythological pantheons. But it can still make a fun game.


I play just fine when I'm having fun. But I do want to see that math, OOC. If you could work out what makes the flat world work and run the universe consistently with the equations, that's beyond cool and I'm happy to play. But if you're just going "the world is flat because the world is flat, but everything else is normal", then I'm getting frustrated. It's a thematic thing.If you really want the math on Spelljammer physics, I could give it to you. They dedicated an entire book (96 pages) to the physics. But it mostly boils down to "It's magic, and it knows it's magic." If you can accept radically different astrophysics than you're used to, you can have a lot of fun in Spelljammer. The physical laws of the universe were written around allowing a certain type of adventure. The Anthropic Principle in extremis.

Vrock_Summoner
2017-05-15, 02:11 PM
One time I went for a cube world, just to screw with my players.

Otherwise, generally round - if you keep going one way far enough, you'll end up back where you started. I find it convenient, but I do admit it's not as cool as how Exalted does it.

Jay R
2017-05-15, 02:41 PM
I play just fine when I'm having fun. But I do want to see that math, OOC. If you could work out what makes the flat world work and run the universe consistently with the equations, that's beyond cool and I'm happy to play. But if you're just going "the world is flat because the world is flat, but everything else is normal", then I'm getting frustrated, because it serves no purpose but to break suspension of disbelief.

Well, in my case, it served a very specific purpose, that the players could not know at the start of play without breaking the game. The earth was the center of the universe, surrounded by the seven planets, because the first major set of adventures dealt with seven artifacts with powers from the planets. Figuring that out was a large part of the first several adventures.

If anybody had asked these questions at the start, then my answers would have followed this progression.
"Your PC does not know anything about cosmology."
"It would take generations of the kind of measurements you're talking about to get to the level of knowledge you're looking for, just like it did on our earth."
"The ogres are attacking. Do you stop experimenting and fight back?"
"You're looking for information that the PCs don't know, and that will break the game for the players to know. I will not answer."
And eventually, "Well, I'm sorry my game doesn't work for you. See you later, and I hope you can find a game to play somewhere else. Now excuse me, I have a game to run for the players who do want to play."

I never had complete equations. I knew that gravity wasn't universal, as it can't be in any D&D world, because levitation and flight spells work. I knew that energy doesn't work the same way as in our world, as in every D&D world, because cold is something real, not just the absence of heat. I assumed that what pulled you down to earth wasn't the same thing that made planets travel in perfect circles. But there was no reason to create equations.

Mechalich
2017-05-15, 03:05 PM
Well, in my case, it served a very specific purpose, that the players could not know at the start of play without breaking the game. The earth was the center of the universe, surrounded by the seven planets, because the first major set of adventures dealt with seven artifacts with powers from the planets. Figuring that out was a large part of the first several adventures.

First of all, having an Earth-centered solar system model is much less ridiculous than having a Flat Earth, which is why most ancient cultures were fully aware that the Earth was round but that finding the math to conclusively prove the Earth orbited the sun rather than some Ptolemaic epicycles system existing was much more complicated and actually required telescopes.

Making the Earth flat is a huge change. It impacts day/night cycles, seasonality, the laws of optics, the horizon, weather patterns, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

Fantastical elements in fantasy settings, in the same way as handwavium technologies in science fiction settings, represent a trade off. Those elements net you some expanded storytelling possibility at the expense of so disruption to the workings of your reality that have to be rationalized and otherwise compensated for. A simple example is FTL travel - such drives may be utilized as impossibly powerful weapons in many scenarios and of course they have the disturbing property of violating causality, but their existence opens up the universe. As such, they are generally regarded as worth it.

What does a flat earth add? What stories can you tell on a flat world that you can't tell on a round one? There's hardly anything. A Flat Earth has huge verisimilitude costs and hardly any benefits. It's not worth it.

Anonymouswizard
2017-05-15, 03:17 PM
there is no difference between crystal spheres and a 100xdiameter no-jump radius and jumpspace or the Warp or Hyperspace.

I want to not that, while I personally hate this setting element, I do know why it's generally there and removing it makes some stories very difficult, especially interstellar warfare.

The next setting I'm planning to run uses FTL where ships can create a wormhole to any point within a light year to within about 1% accuracy (the wormhole has to be built around a physical object, takes time to power on, and acts like a jump drive in practice). While wormholes are almost never used in atmosphere ships abuse the heck out of the fact that there's no other limitations, generally jumping to within a few light seconds of their destination or less for in-system travel, or jumping to the edge of the solar system and then just flitting along a preplotted course with occasional changes for deviations, with most ships hitting 1LY/hour (the fastest can hit 1LY/minute). The end result is that there's no such thing as a space fleet and practically no space piracy, planets just have highly sophisticated defence satellites. The only reason the entire galaxy isn't explored is that even at those speeds there's still a lot of it (it takes the average ship 11 years to cross the galaxy).

Although that setting also drops the idea of shields, blaster (particle beam) shots and missiles are instead absorbed by armour plating. It's as much a gameplay as genre concern here though.

Cluedrew
2017-05-15, 05:44 PM
Keep things like real life unless you have a particular reason to change them. I would generally advise that the reason be stronger than "its cool/different" and that you spend a bit of time on the fallout of that change. But ultimately it is your setting, make it the way you and the people that will be playing in it will enjoy.

I can do shallow "it works like this" changes or massive projects that replace all of physics. Last time one of the latter came up I got "you haven't really world built until you have gotten into protein folding". So I have done a lot. Mind you having done it, if I wasn't enjoying myself so much, I would probably have to call it a waste of time. Is the most scientifically sound setting ever any more fun than say Exalted or Harry Potter's world? Probably not.

Milo v3
2017-05-15, 07:39 PM
What does a flat earth add? What stories can you tell on a flat world that you can't tell on a round one? There's hardly anything. A Flat Earth has huge verisimilitude costs and hardly any benefits. It's not worth it.
Well one thing is lets me do is have plots where characters kidnap seasons (because they're caused by a powerful entity rather than distance to the sun) or have the sun crash into the country side because a heroically skilled archer killed his chariot's horses with adamantine arrows. I have antagonists who went off the edge and returned changed. I get to have water pour in from the dark-sections of moon phases as the moon tries to refill the world's water (which keeps falling off the edge).

Jay R
2017-05-15, 07:50 PM
J.R.R. Tolkien never explained how trees could grow like the two great Trees, or how a Ring could make photons pass through somebody. George R.R. Martin never provided equations for the variable-length, years-long winter. C.S. Lewis never explained the time dilation between earth and Narnia. The writers of D&D don’t explain how a dragon can breathe fire, or why the cube-square law doesn’t apply to giants and gargoyles.

Yet somehow, despite all this, a lot of people have managed to enjoy their works anyway.

Cluedrew
2017-05-15, 08:42 PM
Narnia was also a flat world, or believed to be a flat world by those who lived there. Stars were also a kind of human like creature that were carried aloft by birds. The critical difference that has been argued is that books, as a non-interactive medium, don't have the same standards as a game setting.

This is true to a degree because games, especially role-playing games, have to account not only for what could happen instead of just what does happen. But the difference is actually small, readers can still do what-ifs in their head and arrive at strange and nonsensical answers. Violation of expectation can still snap people out of a narrative, when something breaks the established rules, implicit or explicate, that have been used up to this point.

At least that is my experience. More logically consistent settings tend to be more fun than the ones that don't quite mesh. Of course there are a hundred other factors, in the setting and other aspects of the story or game, that decide how good it is, but that still is one.

And that is to say logically consistent with itself, not our world. And not detailed to the point of modern science. In your average fantasy settings the tools to make some of these measurements don't exist anyways, nor do the ideas you would be testing. If you want to play a scientist (or wizard who uses experimentation) still play one that makes sense in the setting.

Now if you want to tear setting logic apart, talk to me after the game. I can probably give you a head start.

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-15, 08:55 PM
I was going to note that JRR Tolkein didn't have players with PCs roaming around in his world. He had total control over the course of events, character reactions, etc.

Despite what some might try to assert, an RPG campaign is not a work of fiction in the way that a book, movie, or myth is.

Aotrs Commander
2017-05-15, 09:09 PM
My worlds - and this includes any worlds I include in my universe from D&D fluff - are planets, in space, orbiting suns.

I also LOATHE the very concept of Spelljammer. As a starship obessive fanatic, sailing ships in space are about as much an anethema as the can possibly get.




With regard to the laws of physics debate? The fastest way to lose me as a player (or a reader or anything else) is to say "it's magic, I don't have to explain it."

Yes, DM/author/script-writer. Yes, yes, you DO. The explanation does not have to detailed and in depth, especially when dealing with magic or scifi... But you damn well better have at least gave passing thought about the ramifications and at least made a passing stab at it. I will take someone who has tried and maybe not got it quite right or someone how goes "MST3K mantra" anyday.

(I am, if not my trade, but mentality and training, and engineer (as the a fair propotion of my group or other in similar fields).)

But I put my money where my mouth is. One of my long term projects in an entirely alien campaign world which is tide-locked. I spent literal months on and off, reading up astrophysics, talking to people on physics forums and getting advie on the maths. Sure, I might still make a mistake somewhere (and, for example, cannot satisfactoirly explian resistance with solar wind with more than a handwave), but, by frag, I did my absolute damndest.



And, unfortunately, someone invoked the "if you bring up physics in [x], [y] kills catgirls" thing, so per standing regulations, I am required to throw a sackful of kittens, puppies and catgirls into my giant adamantine blender.

*mrow* *woof* *waaah* *thackthackthackthackthackthackthackthack*

Kane0
2017-05-15, 09:55 PM
Round world.
It makes travel easier and allows me to keep suspension of disbelief in my players when i tell them that said world wiggles between the sun and 'moon', which is a magic reverse-sun giving off bluish light and cold.

Psikerlord
2017-05-15, 10:10 PM
How would a flat world affect climate zones?

What about an oval world?

I am in the middle of making a setting, and have ended up using different climate zones within relatively close proximity to each other, that would not form naturally on earth (or at least I dont think so, with my limited internet research, I suppose there are always exceptions). In the fluff I have indicated the world is smaller than earth, with a smaller sun, with more intense and narrower climate zones.

I have no clue if this is really possible scientifically, but perhaps it doesnt really matter.

I didnt think about flat worlds or other shaped worlds. Interesting thread!

Psikerlord
2017-05-15, 10:12 PM
Depends on tone. Flat, or even just "assumed-to-be-flat" worlds can feel persuasively mythic. There's something about the ocean falling off of the edge of the world into the shining void that captures the imagination. When the world itself is unreal and magical, we can believe that everything else should be.

Round worlds, on the other hand, feel more real, require less handwavium, and often feel ... bigger, I guess? There's a vastness and believability to seeing the curve of the world on a map and knowing there are people and cultures and lands and wonders unseen, that will never be seen, a feeling of grandiosity and strangeness far grander and stranger than just "here be dragons."


Yeah good point. I think non-round worlds feel more magical

Psikerlord
2017-05-15, 10:25 PM
Probability is still objective.

Don't take the whole "quantum mystery" thing as played up for the wow-factor by pop-"science" television documentaries and trash-"science" books too seriously. There's a lot of amateur-hour confusion there based on terms of art like "observed" (it's not the say most people use observation, which has lead people to the incorrect conclusion that the world responds to being observed -- a better term would have been "interact" or "encounter" or something, because two particles interacting is "observation" as the term is used in the field).

As said in other threads -- if the chair wasn't real, your butt would be on the floor.

Unless of course your brain is in a jar, connected to a supercomputer that is simulating reality for you, and tells you your butt does not hit the floor, ala the matrix.

2D8HP
2017-05-15, 11:31 PM
What does a flat earth add? What stories can you tell on a flat world that you can't tell on a round one?...


The Well at the World's End (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well_at_the_World%27s_End)


J.R.R. Tolkien never explained how....

I'm reminded of:

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/images/0/09/columbus.png



I was going to note that JRR Tolkein didn't have players with PCs roaming around...


And again I'm reminded:

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/images/0/04/stingray_nebula.png


Back in the 1980's (I should just make that part of my Sig), I gamemastered a RPG that had a setting that was both flat and round:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/67/RWRPG.jpg

http://www.dennisantinori.com/RingworldRPG/mediac/400_0/media/RWbits.jpg

Speaking of Sigs, this thread has delivered two fine out-of-context quotes:


...unfortunately, someone invoked the "if you bring up physics in [x], [y] kills catgirls" thing, so per standing regulations, I am required to throw a sackful of kittens, puppies and catgirls into my giant adamantine blender.

*mrow* *woof* *waaah* *thackthackthackthackthackthackthackthack*



....Your PC is imaginary, He's not real. Neither is his butt....

Mechalich
2017-05-16, 12:27 AM
The Well at the World's End (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well_at_the_World%27s_End)


There's nothing in that plot summary that requires a flat world. It's just a standard fantasy adventure to find a magical McGuffin that happens to be called the Well at World's End.

For a flat earth to be necessary, it has to be impossible for you to swap the flat earth out with a spherical world and just change a bunch of names. For that to be the case that means the story has to integrate the mechanical impacts of a flat earth into the story somehow. If your weird physics don't do anything, then there's no reason to have them, they're just window dressing.

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-16, 05:45 AM
Unless of course your brain is in a jar, connected to a supercomputer that is simulating reality for you, and tells you your butt does not hit the floor, ala the matrix.

It's only a matter of time in these before someone drags that unfalsifiable claim out of the hole it's rightfully buried in and props it up as if it's meaningful.

"You might be a brain in a jar!" And there might be 1 million infinitely small pixies in the room you're in, too. Or an invisible intangible unicorn. So what. Untestable hypotheses are meaningless.

Oh well.

Uncle Pine
2017-05-16, 05:56 AM
My current campaign has a thoroidal world, because I wanted to explore the consequences of a central source of light.

Anonymouswizard
2017-05-16, 06:26 AM
Yeah good point. I think non-round worlds feel more magical

Because of the massive amount of the element Handwavium needed for most of them to function.

Milo v3
2017-05-16, 07:29 AM
Because of the massive amount of the element Handwavium needed for most of them to function.
Doesn't need to be handwaved though...

gkathellar
2017-05-16, 08:51 AM
Making the Earth flat is a huge change. It impacts day/night cycles, seasonality, the laws of optics, the horizon, weather patterns, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

I mean it can, assuming all of those things run on the same rules they do in our world - but of course, they don't, since the world is flat. That means they can be as intuitive or unintuitive as you can imagine, just so long as they feel fitting, in the end.


What does a flat earth add? What stories can you tell on a flat world that you can't tell on a round one? There's hardly anything. A Flat Earth has huge verisimilitude costs and hardly any benefits. It's not worth it.

See, that depends entirely on the tone and imagery you're going for.


This is true to a degree because games, especially role-playing games, have to account not only for what could happen instead of just what does happen. But the difference is actually small, readers can still do what-ifs in their head and arrive at strange and nonsensical answers. Violation of expectation can still snap people out of a narrative, when something breaks the established rules, implicit or explicate, that have been used up to this point.

Danke for pointing this out, you put this well. I'd add that games always run on a social contract, and players can always find excuses to violate said contract. If a person's problem with flat worlds is, "but my players will sail beyond the edge," well, that's a property of said group and they way they interact with games. It's not a bad thing, it's just the fact that said group is unwilling to accept the social contract required for certain games.


At least that is my experience. More logically consistent settings tend to be more fun than the ones that don't quite mesh. Of course there are a hundred other factors, in the setting and other aspects of the story or game, that decide how good it is, but that still is one.

And that is to say logically consistent with itself, not our world. And not detailed to the point of modern science. In your average fantasy settings the tools to make some of these measurements don't exist anyways, nor do the ideas you would be testing. If you want to play a scientist (or wizard who uses experimentation) still play one that makes sense in the setting.

Indeed. Perceived internal consistency - the feeling of a thing making sense within its own context - is far more important than physical justification.


I was going to note that JRR Tolkein didn't have players with PCs roaming around in his world. He had total control over the course of events, character reactions, etc.

Despite what some might try to assert, an RPG campaign is not a work of fiction in the way that a book, movie, or myth is.

Sure, but the parts of Tolkein that translate poorly to an RPG are generally agreed to be railroading, use of prophecy, character inequality and the general elements of "I'm-writing-a-book-not-running-a-game." Hobbits and invisibility rings and talking trees, on the other hand, translate to the game table just fine.


Because of the massive amount of the element Handwavium needed for most of them to function.

Well, sure, that's my point. If I say, "the world is flat," one immediate implication is that the rules are different.

Exalted remains a decent example, here. The core book says, "the world is flat, beyond it is Chaos." This raises a lot of questions, some of which are answered immediately, and some of which are explored in later books. All of these questions and answers try to produce a general sense of weirdness and wonder (with greater and lesser degrees of success). Disposing of the world-as-we-know-it opens up the possibility of weirdness where the seasons are tied to elemental cycles and the sun is a giant robot that learned kung fu this one time. More importantly, it creates the feeling of weirdness.

Jay R
2017-05-16, 10:28 AM
I was going to note that JRR Tolkein didn't have players with PCs roaming around in his world. He had total control over the course of events, character reactions, etc.

I have PCs roaming around in my world, and they cause no problems with this at all. PCs are not a problem for cosmology, on any shape or location of earth.

Fortunately, I don't have players demanding equations, looking for flaws, and otherwise trying to de-mystify the mysterious, rationalize the marvellous, ken the uncanny, modernize the medieval, and otherwise try to mess up the game. That's what kills fantasy.


Despite what some might try to assert, an RPG campaign is not a work of fiction in the way that a book, movie, or myth is.

I don't remember anybody trying to assert that they are alike. They do, however, share many properties, and that allows a great many analogies to work just fine.

When I brought up J.R.R. Tolkien in this thread, along with George R.R. Martin and C.S. Lewis, I specifically included the D&D rules writers as well, specifically to show that the analogy was valid.

Ratguard
2017-05-16, 11:08 AM
I just don't understand the hostility towards a DM that wants to run a flat world game. To me it harkens back to the days of campy retro sci-fi/fantasy settings and stories, and whenever I think of a flat world I think about that kind of high fantasy/ science fantasy adventure where the goal is just to sit down and have a romp around. A flat world can help you capture a specific setting, or make the world seem more bizarre.

To the people saying it takes too much handwavium and that you would demand equations. Dragons technically are incapable of flight if we use real life rules with them. Enlarge person/ giants are subject to the square cube law.

It just feels like asking for mathematical equations and hard facts about how a flat world works from your dm, serves no purpose, it obviously isn't a game that cares much about hard math and staying true to our laws and physics, for you it may take you out of your suspension of belief, but I always just get into character and think about the world in one of two ways, my character if a native sees nothing bizarre about it, this is how life has always been.

Or if I really want to stick to my logical guns, my character is an outsider, or you guys could go with them being a scientist, and the entire shape of the world makes no sense, and it drives them crazy. But no one will listen to the.

It just seems like if you are playing a game with a flat world asking for equations and mathematical formula is being a passive aggressive toxic player, if you do it specifically just to teach the DM a lesson about thinking about the shape of his world. He just wants to sit down and have fun, and he thought a flat world would do that. And truth be told you aren't being inconvenienced about it besides not being able to circumnavigate the globe, or if the horizon would play an important part in your character build or battle plans.

I would say a DM needs to think about the bare minimum needed to keep the world ticking, mainly just horizon, and decide a path for the heavenly bodies, whether that is the sun popping out of this system during the night and doing double duty for two planets, while the moon is doing the same, or if it's the planet drifting away from the sun a little on it's path (if it has one) and then pulling back closer.

But in the end it is all just a preference thing, and the slamming of other people for liking a certain kind of campaign world is insensitive and childish. akin to saying in a playground, "No my transformer toy is cooler than your magical monster toy because he is all mechanical, and your magical monster just shoots lights, and mine is the coolest, and I hate your toy."

Squiddish
2017-05-16, 11:35 AM
I tend to prefer round worlds. They make space travel easier, and let me create dungeons in the core of the planet.

If you're going for a strong fantasy feel, of course, the only logical world shape is dragon shaped. It just makes sense.

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-16, 11:44 AM
I have PCs roaming around in my world, and they cause no problems with this at all. PCs are not a problem for cosmology, on any shape or location of earth.

Fortunately, I don't have players demanding equations, looking for flaws, and otherwise trying to de-mystify the mysterious, rationalize the marvellous, ken the uncanny, modernize the medieval, and otherwise try to mess up the game. That's what kills fantasy.


Who has to look?

If a GM or author tells me the world is flat, and then tells me that something is "over the horizon", that's going to stand out like a sore thumb... no looking or trying involved. If the world is flat and I'm standing at the top of a mountain on a clear day, I should be able to see the land stretching out for 100s of miles.

Jay R
2017-05-16, 01:32 PM
Who has to look?

If a GM or author tells me the world is flat, and then tells me that something is "over the horizon", that's going to stand out like a sore thumb... no looking or trying involved. If the world is flat and I'm standing at the top of a mountain on a clear day, I should be able to see the land stretching out for 100s of miles.

You just looked for one. In the first place, you had to invent the GM telling you something to generate the problem. She could just as easily have said, "You can't see it", without using the offending word.

In the second place, it's not a problem. There would still be a distance beyond which you cannot see any details, and another distance beyond which you cannot see the ground at all. In our world, "horizon" is a shorter form of "horizon kuklos" (limiting circle. But in the fantasy world, it could just as easily be a shorter form of "limiting distance". The concept would be the distance past which everything appears to be a featureless line to you, or behind something else, and therefore beyond your ability to perceive. Most often the limit would be a mountain, hill, range, or even a slight rise one cm higher than your eyes.

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-16, 02:00 PM
You just looked for one. In the first place, you had to invent the GM telling you something to generate the problem. She could just as easily have said, "You can't see it", without using the offending word.

In the second place, it's not a problem. There would still be a distance beyond which you cannot see any details, and another distance beyond which you cannot see the ground at all. In our world, "horizon" is a shorter form of "horizon kuklos" (limiting circle. But in the fantasy world, it could just as easily be a shorter form of "limiting distance". The concept would be the distance past which everything appears to be a featureless line to you, or behind something else, and therefore beyond your ability to perceive. Most often the limit would be a mountain, hill, range, or even a slight rise one cm higher than your eyes.

What I did is hardly looking. It's just an example of something that can happen on its own in a game.

Asking players to not notice blatant contradictions like that example isn't just telling them to not actively look behind the curtain -- it's asking them to turn their brains off completely.

Celestia
2017-05-16, 02:03 PM
It depends on the focus of the world in question. If I'm making a world where the basis is on something more grounded, like the political and cultural relations between nations, then I go with a round world because doing otherwise would be an unnecessary distraction. If the focus is on something more grand and fantastical, then I prefer flat worlds because they add more mystique and charm.

Milo v3
2017-05-16, 03:52 PM
Who has to look?

If a GM or author tells me the world is flat, and then tells me that something is "over the horizon", that's going to stand out like a sore thumb... no looking or trying involved. If the world is flat and I'm standing at the top of a mountain on a clear day, I should be able to see the land stretching out for 100s of miles.

So... what your saying is "Who has to look... if the DM forgets major aspects of the world?". That's not a trait of flat-worlds, that's applicable to every single trait a campaign setting could have.

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-16, 03:55 PM
So... what your saying is "Who has to look... if the DM forgets major aspects of the world?". That's not a trait of flat-worlds, that's applicable to every single trait a campaign setting could have.


Yes, flat worlds are but a single example. Is that supposed to serve as a refutation?

Jay R
2017-05-16, 04:13 PM
What I did is hardly looking. It's just an example of something that can happen on its own in a game.

Asking players to not notice blatant contradictions like that example isn't just telling them to not actively look behind the curtain -- it's asking them to turn their brains off completely.

No, I'm asking you to turn your brain back on again. There is still a limit to how far you can see, and that limit can be called the horizon. I recognize that the limit is caused by other things than curvature on a flat world.

But the fact that the limit is caused by rises in a mostly flat surface, or by the increasingly bad angle for viewing, or by the limits of vision, is not a problem, unless you actively prefer to complain than to play.

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-16, 04:29 PM
No, I'm asking you to turn your brain back on again. There is still a limit to how far you can see, and that limit can be called the horizon. I recognize that the limit is caused by other things than curvature on a flat world.

But the fact that the limit is caused by rises in a mostly flat surface, or by the increasingly bad angle for viewing, or by the limits of vision, is not a problem, unless you actively prefer to complain than to play.

Yes, yes, there's a "limit to how far you can see"... with a different cause and a different appearance, but hey let's shove that under the rug and come up with a way to call that "the horizon".

And never mind that calling it "the horizon" when you're not referring to the same physical/optical phenomenon that English speakers all over the world are referring to when they use the terms "the horizon", is dodging the original point completely.

A flat world will be different in appearance and behavior, in ways that are clear, obvious, and unmistakable. Leaving that out is telling the players or audience one thing, and then showing them something entirely incongruous with that claim. The evidence doesn't support the hypothesis.

Cluedrew
2017-05-16, 05:18 PM
But why not just take those things into account? Have a mountainous world so you can't see much more than the tops of mountains past the first mountain range. Or maybe light bends or there is a haze that blocks light enough distance. Or maybe with a powerful telescope and a high stand you can see almost anywhere in the world.

What's wrong with that?

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-16, 05:29 PM
But why not just take those things into account? Have a mountainous world so you can't see much more than the tops of mountains past the first mountain range. Or maybe light bends or there is a haze that blocks light enough distance. Or maybe with a powerful telescope and a high stand you can see almost anywhere in the world.

What's wrong with that?

Nothing is wrong with that -- if the differences are taken into account and the changes are evidence, that's fine.

The problem is that all too often, we get "the world is flat" and that's it, everything else looks and functions exactly as if the world were spheroid, and when someone says "but wait", they get scolded for "ruining fantasy" and/or the incongruous setting is excused with the some version of the "But Dragons!" fallacy.

Cluedrew
2017-05-16, 05:49 PM
OK, I just think it should be "make sure you would build properly if you to a flat world" and not "flat worlds are bad because they have been done badly". You may mean the former, but I am getting a vibe like the latter.

Of course sometimes people just don't care. Discworld for instance has more than a few setting elements that probably couldn't be resolved even if you tried to. But why would you try to? That's the joke.

Xuc Xac
2017-05-16, 05:57 PM
But why not just take those things into account? Have a mountainous world so you can't see much more than the tops of mountains past the first mountain range. Or maybe light bends or there is a haze that blocks light enough distance. Or maybe with a powerful telescope and a high stand you can see almost anywhere in the world.

What's wrong with that?

Exactly. In a perfectly flat world with nothing to obstruct your view and perfectly clear atmosphere (assuming that light undergoes Rayleigh scattering like in the real world), you could see a maximum of 296 km before the air itself gets in your way. It's also highly unlikely that you will have a clear 296 km line of sight to anything. There will be hills and fog banks (or even just slightly humid areas over swamps or ponds) that will cut down the visibility.

If you were on an extremely calm sea, you won't have anything to block your view, but the air will be more humid and the limit of visibility will be much closer.

If you were on a big flat area like Kansas (and you're taller than the tallest grass), you'd be limited by all the water vapor being released by all that grass. In the mornings, you'll have fog. When the fog clears, you can see further but still not as far as the theoretical limit because of all the humidity released from evaporating dew, respiring vegetation, and sun-warmed sod (and if it's not a sunny day, you won't be seeing that far anyway).

In a desert, you'll have dry air but you'll have to deal with sand dunes and windblown sand. In an arctic environment, you'll have dry air but drifting snow. I haven't done any math on it, but I suspect that glare from ice and snow would probably greatly amplify the effect of light scattering and drastically reduce the maximum "ideal clear atmosphere" visibility.

If you're near forests, hills, or mountains, the horizon will be the tops of those. In a city, you can see the sky if you look up and every other direction is blocked by buildings.

There are very few places where you would be able to see significantly further than on a large sphere AND have something interesting to see. If you can see much further, it's because there's nothing between you and what you're looking at. You might see further on a calm sea, but so what? Sailing ships don't exactly sneak up on each other, especially if the sea is calm and there's no wind. If anything, it just makes engagement distances much greater and slows everything down because the ships have more distance to cover to escape or engage each other but they don't move any faster.

If you ever find yourself in a situation where your vision is limited by the atmosphere instead of something that would also block the horizon on a round planet, you're in a really boring place: the figurative "middle of nowhere".

ImNotTrevor
2017-05-16, 06:07 PM
Apparently GMs in unique settings must strictly police every single word they say and never use conveniently approximate words for what they're talking about, and must instead ensure that they are always describing in full the exact phenomena to which they refer.

A flat-world GM apparently must not use Horizon as a convenient shortening of "the point beyond which things are too small to differentiate" and must use that entire phrase every time because players are morons who will believe the world has suddenly become round due to using a word we use to describe a phenomena of our round world, instead of assuming that it means basically the same thing as it does on our world but there's no convenient word at the ready in English to describe this thing as occuring in the fantasy world and using the entire phrase every time would clearly be a massive hassle.

If someone decided to have that big of a cow because I used the term Horizon, me and most of my players would probably say something to the effect of "Oh shut up you know what I(he) mean(s)."
Why get your panties in a wad about the little things? We know what the GM means. If you demand your GM to have a comprehensive understanding of the physics of a flatworld and never miss any minor inconsistent detail, then you need to take several chill pills. We play to have fun, not create the next watertight fantasy epic with no logical inconsistencies. It's a GAME.

And also, quick poll:

How many people here would feel the need to point out the illogicalness of using the term Horizon to their GM in such a context instead of just knowing what they mean and carrying on?
I'm genuinely interested to see if there's more than 1.

Amaril
2017-05-16, 06:10 PM
I think the bigger issue here is whether a flat world, without great effort expended to detail how it works differently from a round one, necessarily breaks suspension of disbelief. The argument I keep seeing is "flat worlds are impossible to take seriously in a game because they don't make any sense". And if you feel that way, that's totally fair. But I don't think you can use that as an argument that people should never build flat worlds for RPGs unless there's a very specific reason it's essential. Just because it breaks your suspension of disbelief doesn't mean it does the same for everyone. For me personally, flat worlds do give things a certain mythic flair, and I find it easy to not think too much about how nonsensical they are while playing in them. Again, they may not have that effect for you, but there are legitimate reasons why some people enjoy them. As long as everyone in the group shares that same taste, and can have fun playing mythic adventures on a flat world, I don't see the problem--and I know such groups exist, because I'm in one right now (our Torchbearer game takes place on a flat world). It requires a mutual agreement to buy in, but so does every game.

Edit: To respond to the swordsage who most certainly is not Trevor, I wouldn't even think to question something like that (though, to be perfectly honest, it didn't occur to me until I started reading this thread that the horizon is produced by the curvature of the Earth--I never really thought about it).

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-16, 06:22 PM
On Earth, the distance to the horizon on "flat" ground is roughly 3 miles, depending on how tall the person is. Just 3 miles.

From a second-story window, the horizon is over 5 miles away. From a 100-foot tower, the horizon is about 12 miles away.

In contrast, on a flat planet, the mountain chain over there 100 miles away isn't below the horizon, it is the "horizon".


And please, no appeals to "humidity" or whatever. Clear air visibility is usually indicated as "over 10 miles" -- so the difference on a clear day is immediately apparent. And even on a very humid night, as long as there is no fog or cloud, one can see completely out of the atmosphere, looking through over 100 miles of air if you're looking straight up (getting thinner, but that's beside the point), and see through far more than that looking near the horizon. Go find somewhere your vision isn't obscured by light pollution, and look at the horizon or tree line, and consider how much air you're looking through to see those stars.


How much is it going to take to make it clear that the differences between a sphereoid planet and a flat planet will be immediately and incontrovertibly obvious to any observer?


E: and it's not that I care if the far distant edge of the visible surface on a flat world is called "the horizon" -- it's that the use of the same word for two different things was being used to "fig leaf" over that very real difference and how obviously noticeable it would be.

ImNotTrevor
2017-05-16, 06:30 PM
So.... the Horizon is further away. Ok. I don't know how far the horizon is on Earth (at least not off the top of my head) except that on the ocean it's apparently around 10-ish miles or something so I've always just said that it's not unreasonable for a character to be able to see for about 10 miles with some accuracy, because nobody in my group, including me, gives a single floppy flip about details that insignificant while we're having a story about dragons and kingdoms and demons rising to claim the souls of men. How far away the horizon is sits very, very, very low on the priority list. And once a player says "wouldn't the horizon on a flat planet be like way further?" I can shrug and say "Ok. How does like... 50 miles in clearish conditions sound?" And if we're all good with that quick non-math we carry on. And if we forget next time, eh. Apparently it didn't really matter.

LordCdrMilitant
2017-05-16, 07:13 PM
And this perception is part of the problem. Spelljammer is not science fiction. It's fantasy pirates in SPAAACE! It's also worth noting that the major campaign worlds are all round (Except for Eberron. I mean, it might be round, and probably is, but I don't know enough about it to say one way or the other. Mystara is round, but also has a Hollow World. And don't get me started on Ravenloft).

It's not IN SPACE! That's the problem. Pirates IN SPACE! are plenty cool, but Spelljammer isn't IN SPACE!


I have PCs roaming around in my world, and they cause no problems with this at all. PCs are not a problem for cosmology, on any shape or location of earth.

Fortunately, I don't have players demanding equations, looking for flaws, and otherwise trying to de-mystify the mysterious, rationalize the marvellous, ken the uncanny, modernize the medieval, and otherwise try to mess up the game. That's what kills fantasy.


Rationalizing the marvelous is what makes the marvelous marvelous. It's a challenge, unexplained today, but to be explained tomorrow. I think the most exciting thing in the world is how far we've come, and how far we have to go. How we've gone from "it was an act of God" to modern particle physics. Our understanding of the world has come so far.

Anonymouswizard
2017-05-16, 07:55 PM
Am I the only one who tends towards the giant firebreathing flying lizards not being a thing in my settings? I mean I know there's magic and everything, but it's not like you can just find a wizard on a street corner (due to the reagents needed for every spell in my setting), so why should there be massive flame throwers flying around.

Squiddish
2017-05-16, 08:45 PM
Am I the only one who tends towards the giant firebreathing flying lizards not being a thing in my settings? I mean I know there's magic and everything, but it's not like you can just find a wizard on a street corner (due to the reagents needed for every spell in my setting), so why should there be massive flame throwers flying around.

Well, because if you don't let them into your setting, they come into our settings and destroy things in fits of rage.

Also, as to the topic at hand, if you make a flat world and change gravity to justify that, I will figure out how to use that to break the setting, and so, I think, would most PCs. It's not ruining the fun so much as it is ruining everything else about the setting.

Could I have fun in an infinite flat world? Yes, especially if it came with some accompanying wacky physics. But could I stay focused on the campaign? Almost certainly not. I've dealt with flat worlds in the form of demiplanes, but an infinite flat world is something else entirely. I'd be more concerned with the infinite part than the flat part.

Lord Torath
2017-05-16, 08:52 PM
It's not IN SPACE! That's the problem. Pirates IN SPACE! are plenty cool, but Spelljammer isn't IN SPACE!(You didn't get enough 'A's in your "SPACE!". There needs to be at least three.) Wildspace (where most of Spelljammer takes place) is not Outer Space. It doesn't pretend to be. The introduction to the game literally starts with "Everything you know about space is wrong." The cover art and text clearly let you know what you're getting into. Spelljammer is, indeed, Pirates of the Caribbean in space, right down to the cannons and cutlasses (they both even have magic, although they don't have the same kind).

Again, swashbuckling in space is either something that appeals to you, or it doesn't. Do you think it's cool to stand on the deck of your ship and swing across the gap to board another vessel? Or would you prefer to be fulling enclosed in a bullet-proof space suit in your boarding torpedo and burst out after it penetrates the other ship's hull? Both settings involve gravity planes, but in one they are literally a natural law, and in the other they are generated artificially. One of them purports to be our universe in the far future, and the other claims nothing of the sort.

If you can let yourself accept the premise, you can have a blast (regardless of setting). If you can't, you'll never be able to enjoy the setting, or any games set there. And that's what it really comes down to.

Milo v3
2017-05-16, 09:07 PM
Yes, flat worlds are but a single example. Is that supposed to serve as a refutation?
Your saying "X is bad because of Y", but it's pretty pointless to say that in my opinion when Y applies to everything you could ever have in your setting. Y is not a bad trait of X, if it's impossible for things to not have Y as a trait.


The problem is that all too often, we get "the world is flat" and that's it, everything else looks and functions exactly as if the world were spheroid, and when someone says "but wait", they get scolded for "ruining fantasy" and/or the incongruous setting is excused with the some version of the "But Dragons!" fallacy.
Yeah, but mine isn't a case of "the world is flat and that's it", so why is it bad? If we do have it act logically based on the differences to real-world expectation, then there shouldn't be a problem right? I mean it won't have a 145 page description of the metaphysics, but as long as it is consistent what is the problem?

Also, I think some people are misunderstanding the "but dragons" thing. It's not "Everything is allowed because it's a fantasy setting" (which is true but rarely ever relevant), it should be "yes, we know that this doesn't work because of physics, this world acts differently to real world physics, instead the following is true x, y, z".

Anonymouswizard
2017-05-16, 09:11 PM
On the entire 'most PCs will try to use weird gravity to break the setting', the best games I've been in have been in a group where we'd try to poke the world with a stick just to find out how it worked (thankfully the GM loved this, unfortunately it meant we were competing against the NPCs who were poking the world with a stick). It got to the point where we abused the fact a world ran on comic book conventions. The more we understand the setting the more we can try, and the more we can try the more fun it is.

It's like how a M&M GM who complains at you for exploring the interesting extradimensional city instead of going straight to the ominous tower (made sense to me, looked like a 'locate the key' puzzle) compared to one who'll include a high speed chase* that stops in six seconds (I don't think he had clocked exactly how much I'd upgraded my speed). While with one it might just be easier to go along with what the GM wants, the other story is the one I'll remember far longer (and not only because I had enough speed to hopscotch to the speeding van in a round).

raygun goth
2017-05-16, 09:12 PM
looking for flaws, and otherwise trying to de-mystify the mysterious, rationalize the marvelous, ken the uncanny

I would argue that this is the PCs' job, and that it makes for the best damn fantasy.

Fairy tales don't tell us monsters exist, they tell us that monsters can be defeated.

LordCdrMilitant
2017-05-16, 10:05 PM
Am I the only one who tends towards the giant firebreathing flying lizards not being a thing in my settings? I mean I know there's magic and everything, but it's not like you can just find a wizard on a street corner (due to the reagents needed for every spell in my setting), so why should there be massive flame throwers flying around.

You are not. I don't like dragons either. But there are flamethrowers and flying sky battleships.

I tend to have the "magic is a surrogate for technology" approach to magic in setting I build. I prefer laser guns to magic missiles.


(You didn't get enough 'A's in your "SPACE!". There needs to be at least three.) Wildspace (where most of Spelljammer takes place) is not Outer Space. It doesn't pretend to be. The introduction to the game literally starts with "Everything you know about space is wrong." The cover art and text clearly let you know what you're getting into. Spelljammer is, indeed, Pirates of the Caribbean in space, right down to the cannons and cutlasses (they both even have magic, although they don't have the same kind).

Again, swashbuckling in space is either something that appeals to you, or it doesn't. Do you think it's cool to stand on the deck of your ship and swing across the gap to board another vessel? Or would you prefer to be fulling enclosed in a bullet-proof space suit in your boarding torpedo and burst out after it penetrates the other ship's hull? Both settings involve gravity planes, but in one they are literally a natural law, and in the other they are generated artificially. One of them purports to be our universe in the far future, and the other claims nothing of the sort.

If you can let yourself accept the premise, you can have a blast (regardless of setting). If you can't, you'll never be able to enjoy the setting, or any games set there. And that's what it really comes down to.

I think that it's cool to swing from the rigging of a sailing vessel on the high seas above the thundering broadsides of of sailing ships, hacking through the enemy crew with a saber and flintlock.

But, if the premise of the game is that it's going to be "Pirates, but IN SPACE!", I expect to be crossing the vacuum with a thruster pack and voidsuit and lascutter through brilliant laser cannon fire and railcannon slugs, blasting my way through the enemy crew with a rail-shotgun and pseudoscience energy sword.

Anonymouswizard
2017-05-16, 10:16 PM
You are not. I don't like dragons either. But there are flamethrowers and flying sky battleships.

I tend to have the "magic is a surrogate for technology" approach to magic in setting I build.

I used to do that, but I've tended towards science fiction more and more and just had technology act as technology (and also act as a very rough surrogate for magic in some cases). So I do have massive kilometre or more long ships (when I want space vessels), massive bursts of flame, and extremely fast healing, it's just all powered by a fission reactor (sometimes fusion, depending on whether or not it turns out to be difficult in-universe) rather than mystical mysticism used by mystics.

These days I only run fantasy if I want to do a 'knights and thieves' game, pretty much anything else will find people carrying lasers over swords and riding bikes instead of horses.

ImNotTrevor
2017-05-16, 10:17 PM
I would argue that this is the PCs' job, and that it makes for the best damn fantasy.

Fairy tales don't tell us monsters exist, they tell us that monsters can be defeated.

I don't see how paragraph 2 connects to paragraph 1. Those are two entirely unrelated facets of fantasy.

The thing is that you're mixing up "explain how things work to an acceptable degree" and "explain the physics of each detail." Those are two different levels of information. I believe he's talking about the latter.

The first allows the mystical to be explained while remaining mystical. "The Walking Palace of Iirnatha is powered by the tooth of Vagra, God of the Forge, who designed its unfathomable clockworks" explains sufficiently how The Walking Palace of Iirnatha manages to move around without making it less mystical and cool.

"The Walking Palace of Iirnatha functions on from the energy held within a large calcium deposit harvested from a highly intelligent creature, who also designed the mechanisms responsible for the Palace's movement. The palace is capable of seemingly violating the Square-Cube law due to clever use of...." is an exaggerated but illustrative position of the "Umm, Ackshually" thing that is super annoying. When the GM says the world is flat and you can see for about 50 miles in any direction and have it be meaningful/processable information, it's just being crappy to pull out your physics textbook and start a debate. Just play the dang game! It's such a tiny, tiny detail that does not need expounding upon. Just move on. It is inconsequential.

LordCdrMilitant
2017-05-16, 10:28 PM
I used to do that, but I've tended towards science fiction more and more and just had technology act as technology (and also act as a very rough surrogate for magic in some cases). So I do have massive kilometre or more long ships (when I want space vessels), massive bursts of flame, and extremely fast healing, it's just all powered by a fission reactor (sometimes fusion, depending on whether or not it turns out to be difficult in-universe) rather than mystical mysticism used by mystics.

These days I only run fantasy if I want to do a 'knights and thieves' game, pretty much anything else will find people carrying lasers over swords and riding bikes instead of horses.

Yeah. I run Dark Heresy and Traveler now. And nobody complains about there being tanks and laser guns and spaceships, because there's supposed to be tanks and laser guns and spaceships. And swords are chainsaw swords.

Anonymouswizard
2017-05-16, 11:34 PM
"The Walking Palace of Iirnatha functions on from the energy held within a large calcium deposit harvested from a highly intelligent creature, who also designed the mechanisms responsible for the Palace's movement. The palace is capable of seemingly violating the Square-Cube law due to clever use of...."

Sounds significantly more awesome and miraculous than that other version. Mind if I poke or with a stick?


Yeah. I run Dark Heresy and Traveler now. And nobody complains about there being tanks and laser guns and spaceships, because there's supposed to be tanks and laser guns and spaceships. And swords are chainsaw swords.

I should get a copy of Traveller, I'll see if I can convince any family members that I deserve birthday presents.

I mean, I know I'll get a copy of Rocket Age, which works when I want to focus on 'what of the rest of the solar system did have life' (although I'm thinking of just saying Einstein succeeded in making a transrelativistic shop and the aliens are from different systems), and d6 Space was free, so there's no rush to pick it up.

LordCdrMilitant
2017-05-16, 11:43 PM
Sounds significantly more awesome and miraculous than that other version. Mind if I poke or with a stick?



I should get a copy of Traveller, I'll see if I can convince any family members that I deserve birthday presents.

I mean, I know I'll get a copy of Rocket Age, which works when I want to focus on 'what of the rest of the solar system did have life' (although I'm thinking of just saying Einstein succeeded in making a transrelativistic shop and the aliens are from different systems), and d6 Space was free, so there's no rush to pick it up.

With regards to the first point, I agree. I'd rather have a pseudo magi-scientific explanation [and most importantly, consistently applied] that I can poke than "it's magic, accept it."

Traveler is really good, IMO. We do prefer DH in my groups somewhat, because we're Warhammer 40k players first and D&D players second, but Traveler is a lot of fun. Almost any space campaign can really be run with it, though we mostly play a sort of "do what you have to to get paid and keep flying" game, in contrast to the way we play Dark Heresy. Though approaching Traveler as a group of Space Marines is definitely viable.

Xuc Xac
2017-05-16, 11:44 PM
And please, no appeals to "humidity" or whatever. Clear air visibility is usually indicated as "over 10 miles" -- so the difference on a clear day is immediately apparent. And even on a very humid night, as long as there is no fog or cloud, one can see completely out of the atmosphere, looking through over 100 miles of air if you're looking straight up (getting thinner, but that's beside the point), and see through far more than that looking near the horizon. Go find somewhere your vision isn't obscured by light pollution, and look at the horizon or tree line, and consider how much air you're looking through to see those stars.

100 miles is 160.9 km. You can see through a maximum of 296 km (about 184 miles) of perfectly clear atmosphere. It's highly unlikely that you would ever have that much perfectly clear atmosphere in one place, especially without an airplane to get you far from ground effects like fog and haze. Clear air visibility may be "over 10 miles" but "fog" is defined as "visibility <1 km", which is a little over half a mile. "Haze" (from dust) or "mist" (from humidity) is "visibility < 5km" which is about 3 miles. That means that haze and mist don't really look like much where you're standing but they are noticeable if you try to look very far away. Most of the time, visibility less than 5 km only matters if you're in a plane or on the side of a mountain with no other nearby mountains blocking your view. Also, "visibility" isn't defined as "being able to see something" but it's specifically something with a high contrast like a spotlight on an unlit background or a black object on a white background (there are obviously other definitions, but this is the one used by the meteorologists who set that "10 miles" standard for clear visibility you quoted). On Earth, haze and mist aren't usually an issue for most people. For an observer on the ground, fog is noticeable, but haze and mist don't matter much because we can't often see over 3 miles even in clear air. On a flat world, it matters a lot more.

Even if you had an unobstructed view, what do you expect to see? Have you ever watched a person walk over the horizon on earth? I've seen ships sail over the horizon, but I've never seen a sailor standing on the deck of one. Things get smaller as they get farther away. Even mountains start to turn into a smudge of blurred colors.

This is the Google streetview from Ala Wai Boulevard in Waikiki where I'm currently sitting.
http://i1243.photobucket.com/albums/gg552/picarys/Screenshot%20from%202017-05-16%2014-27-05_zpsdq6betco.png
The arrow that I've drawn on the screenshot is pointing at a speckled blob on the mountainside. That's a neighborhood of houses between Manoa and Palolo. My eyes have better resolution than this photo but I can just barely tell that it's many small objects instead of one big blob. It's about two miles away in a straight line. The light colored rectangle on the right side of the blob behind the two little palm trees is a 15-story-tall apartment building about a mile away. The two little palm trees are planted right behind the row of shorter trees along the canal. They're about 250 feet away. That canal is at sea level. The peak of Wa'ahila ridge above the indicated neighborhood is 1323 feet (just over a quarter mile) above sea level and it's 3 miles away. Mt. Everest is 6,937 miles away and just under 5 miles above sea level. It wouldn't even be visible behind those short trees along the canal. In order for it to be (just barely) visible over the top of Wa'ahila Ridge, Mt. Everest would have to be 578.1 miles above sea level. The International Space Station is only 205 miles up.

On Earth, the curvature of the planet sets an upper limit to what you can see on the surface. Without that limit, things still blur and shrink in the distance. Air eventually turns into an opaque blue smudge at 296 km due to Rayleigh scattering. A human eye with excellent vision has an angular resolution of 0.02 degrees (think of it as the "pixel size" of your eyeball's "camera"). At that maximum distance under ideal conditions, an object would have to be big enough to fill a 103 meter pixel in order to register as a speck on your vision. That means if you had a clear unobstructed view, the smallest object you could see 296 km away would be about the size of a sports stadium. However, 296 km is the point at which air becomes too thick to see through: light scatters too much and all you can see is a blue smudge no matter how big something. (If it gives off its own very bright light, the redder part of the spectrum would be visible for a greater distance, but it would have to be a truly huge light to be visible as anything other than a red spark.) You probably wouldn't be able to pick out something that was only one "eye pixel" across through the blurred light. If human vision in atmosphere were rendered in a video game, things would be smaller and smaller as they got further away until they shrank to smaller than one pixel. Anything that shrinks smaller than one pixel isn't rendered, but nothing is rendered beyond 296 km regardless of its size.

It's actually a really weird effect. For example, the Death Star from Star Wars was supposed to be 100 km in diameter. If it flew toward you through breathable atmosphere, it would appear twice the size of your fist at arm's length (about 20 degrees of arc) when it resolved out of the blue background blur. For reference, Earth's moon fills about half a degree of arc in the sky (you could fit two of them behind your little finger). I did all this math already while working out another unusual setting with long lines of sight. Even if Mt. Everest were 578.1 miles above sea level as I mentioned above, it still wouldn't be visible because it's too far away. It's deep inside the blue background blur of atmospheric light scattering. If it were only 296 km away (close enough to be visible through the air), it would appear to be as tall as a 473-foot hill at three miles away. Wa'ahila ridge is 1323 feet tall and three miles away so it would easily block your view of Everest. In order to appear over the top of Wa'ahila, Everest would have to be within 60 miles.

Stars are a bit of a red herring here. We see the ones that appear brightest as points of light because enough photons from them reach our eyes to generate a response, but we can't recognize them as objects. We know they're round because physicists did the math, but at this distance, they don't have a large enough angular diameter to register as a circle to our eyes because we can't track things that finely. We also only see the ones that are much brighter than their background. The Milky Way is a lot of stars but it just looks like a white blur to the naked eye. We wouldn't see them at all if they had to go through 300 km of air to reach us because the light would be scattered into the blue blur of a daytime sky just like the sun's light is. In a flat world, the brightest stars with red wavelengths might still show up as reddish points of light when low in the sky, but most stars would only be visible through the thinner sections of atmosphere higher up in the sky. The lower a star is in the sky, the redder and brighter its light needs to be to get through the thicker section of air.

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-17, 12:15 AM
And yet on many days, one can look up and make out that an airplane at cruising altitude is in fact an airplane, with clearly discernible wings and body. That's about 5 miles away. I'm not sure tropical island air is a great yardstick for you here -- you're probably getting a lot more haze than many places do for large parts of the year.

But anything about "fine detail" or making out individual people is entirely missing the point.


On earth, one can't see that sports stadium you mentioned from more than about 20 miles away (with no obstructions) because it disappears behind the horizon.

On a "flatworld", even by your numbers, the same stadium is visible from over 180 miles away (with no obstructions) because it NEVER disappears behind the horizon. 9 times farther away.


On earth, the horizon is 3 miles away from typical human eye level.

On a "flatworld", by your numbers, the "horizon" is over 180 miles away with the naked human eye. 60 times farther away.


If I'm playing a character on a "flatworld", and I'm looking out across flat open ground, and yet I don't see that army of 10000 coming until they're just a few miles away, my GM had better have a better answer than "sorry, haze" or "sorry, dust" for why all of a sudden things are "over a horizon" that doesn't exist in that setting.

ImNotTrevor
2017-05-17, 01:28 AM
And yet on many days, one can look up and make out that an airplane at cruising altitude is in fact an airplane, with clearly discernible wings and body. That's about 5 miles away. I'm not sure tropical island air is a great yardstick for you here -- you're probably getting a lot more haze than many places do for large parts of the year.

But anything about "fine detail" or making out individual people is entirely missing the point.


On earth, one can't see that sports stadium you mentioned from more than about 20 miles away (with no obstructions) because it disappears behind the horizon.

On a "flatworld", even by your numbers, the same stadium is visible from over 180 miles away (with no obstructions) because it NEVER disappears behind the horizon. 9 times farther away.


On earth, the horizon is 3 miles away from typical human eye level.

On a "flatworld", by your numbers, the "horizon" is over 180 miles away with the naked human eye. 60 times farther away.


If I'm playing a character on a "flatworld", and I'm looking out across flat open ground, and yet I don't see that army of 10000 coming until they're just a few miles away, my GM had better have a better answer than "sorry, haze" or "sorry, dust" for why all of a sudden things are "over a horizon" that doesn't exist in that setting.

Doesn't this miss the point he just made of things looking tinier and tinier as you get further away to the point where the difference is pretty moot, and most things are going to be too small at distance to give meaningful information?

>.>

ImNotTrevor
2017-05-17, 01:45 AM
Sounds significantly more awesome and miraculous than that other version. Mind if I poke or with a stick?

That's not the point, but it is literally the same thing worded with needless vagueries and no proper nouns.

I'm sure you caught that and the intent is not to acknowledge the annoying behavior I'm talking about, but you also prefer Sci-fi over Fantasy.

What would likely annoy you would be someone pointing out that calcium deposits do not generate spare energy to use for fuel, clockwork is a wildly inefficient method of movement, and quite frankly having a moving palace is a wildly illogical decision for anyone to make and presents far more problems than it presents solutions, or other ways of basically pissing in your wheaties because of their issues with minor details instead of just getting on with it.

Xuc Xac
2017-05-17, 02:44 AM
I'm not sure tropical island air is a great yardstick for you here -- you're probably getting a lot more haze than many places do for large parts of the year.


I tried that argument, but then...



And please, no appeals to "humidity" or whatever.

BeerMug Paladin
2017-05-17, 05:45 AM
Yeah. I run Dark Heresy and Traveler now. And nobody complains about there being tanks and laser guns and spaceships, because there's supposed to be tanks and laser guns and spaceships. And swords are chainsaw swords.

I find chainsaw swords and the topic of verisimilitude rather amusing. Lots of staple "sci-fi" things break verisimilitude for me.


If I'm playing a character on a "flatworld", and I'm looking out across flat open ground, and yet I don't see that army of 10000 coming until they're just a few miles away, my GM had better have a better answer than "sorry, haze" or "sorry, dust" for why all of a sudden things are "over a horizon" that doesn't exist in that setting.

May I suggest, some kind of wizardry? Perhaps an illusion spell: Horizon, which shields large objects/groups from view unless the observer is within a distance of 3 miles.

Snarkiness aside, I'm not really sure what it is you want. The real world is messy, chaotic and often produces singular, non-repeatable anomalous results. Presumably, a good GM will try to avoid producing these kinds of situations in the game world, but it will still happen because a GM isn't going to be perfect. As a player, I find it's typically better to not demand the focus on the game be on that one little thing that you don't think should have gone that way. It's a bit too antagonistic.

But if it's your preference to do things that way, it's fine. It's a different play style. But I don't think you're going to convince people on the other side of things to come around to your way.

More on the topic of armies, I would naturally expect visibility in such a setting to vary widely, and the natural response for (non-magical) military technology would be camouflaging armor. Anything to bring that range of visual resolution down would be a boon.

gkathellar
2017-05-17, 06:47 AM
Either way, thank you Xuc Xac, that was very informative.

So, if I follow correctly, there are two basic limits to vision above and beyond the horizon: (a) the laws of perspective, which mean even very large objects rapidly become invisible at distance, and (b) permeability of air to light. Under optimal conditions, (b) would be approximately 296km, but might be considerably less otherwise - although it'd still probably be more than the 10km we can see up to the horizon. In either case, (a) would have a far greater immediate effect, with objects rapidly diminishing at distance until, horizon or no horizon, they'd be indistinguishable. If I were to stand on a mountain in a flat world, in optimal atmospheric conditions, I could see out to 296km from my position - but most of that would be broad patches of green and brown, not unlike looking down from an airplane, with individual geographic features simply lacking the resolution necessary to make out. Is this accurate?

Also, I'd think that even before things reach maximum visual range, they start to blur blue and distort due to partial Rayleigh scattering. Y/N?

(And of course all of this assumes that we're not in a cosmology inspired by the yoga sutras, where vision has nothing to do with passively interpreting light, and is described as something closer to psychic echolocation. That makes our flat world a fair bit easier, since the average human simply lacks the psychic faculties to see most things past 10km. Hence also why Eagle Eyed Stan can see 30km.)


I find chainsaw swords and the topic of verisimilitude rather amusing.

I know, right? It betrays a really terrible misunderstanding of how both swords and chainsaws work. It is to the combat nerd as flat worlds apparently are to some physics nerds.

2D8HP
2017-05-17, 07:35 AM
There's nothing in that plot summary that requires a flat world. It's just a standard fantasy adventure to find a magical McGuffin that happens to be called the Well at World's End.....


Look at the date the "standard fantasy adventure" novel was published, I believe you'll find it to be what's called a "trope starter.


..... If your weird physics don't do anything, then there's no reason to have them, they're just window dressing.


I think fantasy is mostly "window dressing", in this particular case having something at "World's Edge" is to indicate that the story takes place "Beyond the fields we know", but largely in a game you're correct, the purpose of a flat world is so that the PC's find it's edge, and the purpose of a round world is for the PC's to circumnavigate it, otherwise the shape just doesn't come up.

TripleD
2017-05-17, 08:49 AM
I like flat worlds; a neat little break from the mundane.

Don't really find them immersion breaking since I assume most fantasy worlds are designed by gods. As such the laws are not the extrapolation of simpler laws but rather like a massive collaborative software project with no version control or task planning. Something held together with a million "if" statements and dirty hacks to make it "work the way it's 'supposed to' work".

Segev
2017-05-17, 10:54 AM
If I'm playing a character on a "flatworld", and I'm looking out across flat open ground, and yet I don't see that army of 10000 coming until they're just a few miles away, my GM had better have a better answer than "sorry, haze" or "sorry, dust" for why all of a sudden things are "over a horizon" that doesn't exist in that setting.

Having grown up in Missouri (specifically St. Louis County), I can say that the horizon is rarely the limit of visible range in hilly environs. That army of 10,000 might not be visible until "a few miles" away simply because the hills, trees, and other such obstructions make it difficult to spot.

But you probably have lookouts and scouts and even random travelers who are friendly to your kingdom who'd bring word of an army of 10,000 marching from MANY miles away, regardless of whether there's a round-world horizon or not.

If that army of 10,000 is really trying a sneak-march, then they'll do things that will obscure them from known means of detection, to the best of their ability. Possibly up to and including employing wizards with illusion magic to create panels of "clear ground" that look convincing enough from far away, under which the armies march.

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-17, 11:13 AM
Having grown up in Missouri (specifically St. Louis County), I can say that the horizon is rarely the limit of visible range in hilly environs. That army of 10,000 might not be visible until "a few miles" away simply because the hills, trees, and other such obstructions make it difficult to spot.


Which is why I specified flat open ground.




But you probably have lookouts and scouts and even random travelers who are friendly to your kingdom who'd bring word of an army of 10,000 marching from MANY miles away, regardless of whether there's a round-world horizon or not.

If that army of 10,000 is really trying a sneak-march, then they'll do things that will obscure them from known means of detection, to the best of their ability. Possibly up to and including employing wizards with illusion magic to create panels of "clear ground" that look convincing enough from far away, under which the armies march.


All things being equal, setting aside all these distractions, a large force crossing flat open ground on a "flatworld" will be visible from much farther away than the same force crossing flat open ground on a sphereoid world.

Segev
2017-05-17, 11:28 AM
All things being equal, setting aside all these distractions, a large force crossing flat open ground on a "flatworld" will be visible from much farther away than the same force crossing flat open ground on a sphereoid world.

Sure, but that almost requires more contrivance to achieve than the opposite, wherein the flatness of the world is not the salient factor in how far away the army is visible.

"Flat world importance to story" will rarely be such small-scale things. It will be things dealing with cosmology, or with exploration to the edge of the world. On the ocean, it might come up. You might mention that ships "materialize" out of the "haze" rather than describing their masts appearing first. (Though even that is partially due to mirage-effects on the water.)

Perhaps I misread your source of gripe, here, but it seemed to me that you were complaining that a DM who wanted to "surprise" the players with an army of 10,000 was having it appear "only" 10 miles away on that flat ground, when the players should have had much more warning. I just don't see the problem arising under most real-terrain circumstances.

Lord Torath
2017-05-17, 11:32 AM
But, if the premise of the game is that it's going to be "Pirates, but IN SPACE!", I expect to be crossing the vacuum with a thruster pack and voidsuit and lascutter through brilliant laser cannon fire and railcannon slugs, blasting my way through the enemy crew with a rail-shotgun and pseudoscience energy sword.There's a big difference between Space Pirates and "Magic Age of Sail in Space". You seem to be criticizing it for not being the former when it clearly bills itself as the latter.

Edit: On the army of 10,000 bit, a person at 10 miles away has an apparent height of 0.003 inches at arms length (28 inches). The dust they kick up will be much more visible than the army itself.

ImNotTrevor
2017-05-17, 11:40 AM
How often are you expecting for the situation of a massive army traveling across several hundred miles of wide open, featureless terrain is going to be coming up in these flatworld campaigns to begin with, and what number of them are you expecting to simply show up without warning?

Because while it might not be your core point, it's the only demonstration of your problem I've really seen, and it's an extreme edge case. So what exactly is the thing we're trying to get at, here?

You dislike flatworlds because some GMs don't do all the math and figure out all of the unique behaviors of a flatland on top of all the other crap they already have to do to give their players a good time and that really rustles your jimmies?

I'm just wondering where the specific problem begins and ends.

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-17, 12:10 PM
Sure, but that almost requires more contrivance to achieve than the opposite, wherein the flatness of the world is not the salient factor in how far away the army is visible.

"Flat world importance to story" will rarely be such small-scale things. It will be things dealing with cosmology, or with exploration to the edge of the world. On the ocean, it might come up. You might mention that ships "materialize" out of the "haze" rather than describing their masts appearing first. (Though even that is partially due to mirage-effects on the water.)

Perhaps I misread your source of gripe, here, but it seemed to me that you were complaining that a DM who wanted to "surprise" the players with an army of 10,000 was having it appear "only" 10 miles away on that flat ground, when the players should have had much more warning. I just don't see the problem arising under most real-terrain circumstances.

More like having it appear 3 miles away, as if the flatworld had a horizon identical to Earth's -- as just one example of the sort of stunning visual differences that should result from a differently-shaped world, but would often by ignored because consideration of the world being flat stopped at "ooooo, fantasy world!"




Edit: On the army of 10,000 bit, a person at 10 miles away has an apparent height of 0.003 inches at arms length (28 inches). The dust they kick up will be much more visible than the army itself.


10 miles? The horizon from typical eye-level on earth, assuming no obstruction, is 3 miles away.

Segev
2017-05-17, 12:46 PM
Actually, one of the more interesting effects of a flat world would be the diminished impact of high vantage points. Sure, they're great for seeing over other obstacles (like hills or trees), but they won't actually give you a better chance of seeing that army of 10,000 on a flat plain any sooner. You're not seeing more of the horizon. It would let you see more of its depth relative to your position, as you could look down on it and over the top of the oncoming horde, though.

Lord Torath
2017-05-17, 01:07 PM
10 miles? The horizon from typical eye-level on earth, assuming no obstruction, is 3 miles away.And a person's head pops over the horizon at about 6 miles away, assuming a perfectly spherical Earth. Still too far away to discern that it's a person and not a tree stump.

Segev
2017-05-17, 01:31 PM
And a person's head pops over the horizon at about 6 miles away, assuming a perfectly spherical Earth. Still too far away to discern that it's a person and not a tree stump.

"Say, Bob?"
"Yes, Alice?"
"Were those 10,000 tree stumps there a minute ago?"
"No, Alice."

Lord Torath
2017-05-17, 01:36 PM
"Say, Bob?"
"Yes, Alice?"
"Were those 10,000 tree stumps there a minute ago?"
"No, Alice."It could be Paul Bunyan. You don't know, man! You don't know! :smallwink:

Anonymouswizard
2017-05-17, 01:59 PM
That's not the point, but it is literally the same thing worded with needless vagueries and no proper nouns.

I'm sure you caught that and the intent is not to acknowledge the annoying behavior I'm talking about, but you also prefer Sci-fi over Fantasy.

Sorry, my point was that the way it was worded made it sound like something that can be interacted with, understood, and utilised, which always feels more awesome and miraculous to me. If I can do nothing other than go 'wow' then I'll be bored, it's not like it'll interact with me in any way beyond plot. If it's phrased in a way that says 'you can poke this' I'll be excited even if I don't have the tools to poke it with. The phrasing matters in creating a tone.

Maybe it's because I prefer science fiction to fantasy (not that there's anything wrong with fantasy, I just prefer sci-fi), but what I love the most about roleplaying is the ability to deconstruct another universe and abuse the implications.


What would likely annoy you would be someone pointing out that calcium deposits do not generate spare energy to use for fuel, clockwork is a wildly inefficient method of movement, and quite frankly having a moving palace is a wildly illogical decision for anyone to make and presents far more problems than it presents solutions, or other ways of basically pissing in your wheaties because of their issues with minor details instead of just getting on with it.

Now this are things to investigate. While I'd personally have had something other than calcium powering it (maybe potassium, maybe just a strangely efficient reactor of some sort) the fact is that there's still something to poke at and disassemble. Why did the makers use clockwork? Was that the best they had? Was it to prove a point?


There's a big difference between Space Pirates and "Magic Age of Sail in Space". You seem to be criticizing it for not being the former when it clearly bills itself as the latter.

If I wanted to play 'magic age of sail' I'd get a sailing ship, some magic, and start going 'yaaaar me'hearties'. I see no reason to go into space if I'm not going into space, thankyouverymuch.

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-17, 02:18 PM
Sorry, my point was that the way it was worded made it sound like something that can be interacted with, understood, and utilised, which always feels more awesome and miraculous to me. If I can do nothing other than go 'wow' then I'll be bored, it's not like it'll interact with me in any way beyond plot. If it's phrased in a way that says 'you can poke this' I'll be excited even if I don't have the tools to poke it with. The phrasing matters in creating a tone.


Maybe for some, that's the point -- you're supposed to revel passively in the wonder and mystery, and most certainly not go all empirical on it and start figuring it out.

But that's like asking me to not breathe.

Segev
2017-05-17, 02:29 PM
But that's like asking me to not breathe.

You're just determined to pollute the atmosphere with your disgusting human breathing, aren't you.

You need to get over that atrocious oxygen addiction. The withdrawal is harsh, but if you wean off of it, surely you'd be healthier!

Jay R
2017-05-17, 02:46 PM
Rationalizing the marvelous is what makes the marvelous marvelous. It's a challenge, unexplained today, but to be explained tomorrow. I think the most exciting thing in the world is how far we've come, and how far we have to go. How we've gone from "it was an act of God" to modern particle physics. Our understanding of the world has come so far.

That's a great description of the science and science-fiction approach that I play fantasy games to escape from.

I also play SF games occasionally, and I can be quite interested in the physics of the setting -- when it is a setting in which characters getting involved in the physics fits in.


But that's like asking me to not breathe.

No; it's asking you to approach a medieval fantasy world with a medieval or fantasy approach instead of a modern or science-fiction approach.

Or, if you can't do that, to play in the games that you enjoy and let other people enjoy the games that they enjoy.

raygun goth
2017-05-17, 02:47 PM
I don't see how paragraph 2 connects to paragraph 1. Those are two entirely unrelated facets of fantasy.

The thing is that you're mixing up "explain how things work to an acceptable degree" and "explain the physics of each detail." Those are two different levels of information. I believe he's talking about the latter.

The first allows the mystical to be explained while remaining mystical. "The Walking Palace of Iirnatha is powered by the tooth of Vagra, God of the Forge, who designed its unfathomable clockworks" explains sufficiently how The Walking Palace of Iirnatha manages to move around without making it less mystical and cool.

Wait, when do things ever stop being mystical and cool? Where is the magical barrier between "mystical" and "not mystical?" Why give an Int based magic user class then expect nobody to ever experiment with anything?


"The Walking Palace of Iirnatha functions on from the energy held within a large calcium deposit harvested from a highly intelligent creature, who also designed the mechanisms responsible for the Palace's movement. The palace is capable of seemingly violating the Square-Cube law due to clever use of...." is an exaggerated but illustrative position of the "Umm, Ackshually" thing that is super annoying. When the GM says the world is flat and you can see for about 50 miles in any direction and have it be meaningful/processable information,

I run a game for two engineers (one of them specializes in optics, the other in stresses), an evolutionary biologist, and a physicist who specializes in string equations. They are all perfectly capable of setting aside their knowledge of the real world while also not setting aside the tools they use to determine the likelihood of a given statement being true, and I assure you they are all capable of awe and wonder, and they can spend marvelous, fun-filled sessions experimenting with a world's physics.


it's just being crappy to pull out your physics textbook and start a debate. Just play the dang game! It's such a tiny, tiny detail that does not need expounding upon. Just move on. It is inconsequential.

I think you are misunderstanding what I am saying. I am sorry for not being more clear. No one is advocating pulling out a damn physics textbook, that is silly. I swear to you that none of my players have ever said "that's impossible, because Real World X!" (there may have been "That's impossible, spirits can't invent new things" or "that's impossible, fire spirits can only circumvent X behavior if a human is involved" or "that's impossible, only Chaweeya-type curses can jump species like that" (all of which led to interesting plots) ... because they have bought in, suspended disbelief, and their world functions around them in predictable ways)

I am saying that [I believe] it is the job of adventures to plumb the unknowable and come to know it, to reach beyond and grasp it, to look into the trap, Ray, to see the invisible, break the unbreakable, do the impossible. In short, to fight the powah.

Regardless of all these things - even a tiny detail can have big consequences, and discovering those consequences and changing the world can be FUN. My home setting has experienced an industrial revolution due to PC actions in exploring and experimenting with a tiny fragment of how certain spells work, and it has made the setting better and more interesting. What seemed to be a small detail to make magic function better in the narrative led to organic growth of the setting into something far more rich and interesting.

If mysteries aren't solvable, then why have them in the first place? All that does is frustrate both players and GM - the GM because they're constantly changing details of their world to prevent the players from ever figuring things out, and the players because their world isn't consistent and the buy-in to the fantasy is that much harder.

Also, it's important to remember that everyone has fun differently.

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-17, 02:57 PM
No; it's asking you to approach a medieval fantasy world with a medieval or fantasy approach instead of a modern or science-fiction approach.


I reject in total the assertion that "passive awe" is inherent to or a critical part of a "medieval or fantasy approach".

Show me a world, and I will attempt to understand it. We are a tool-using, problem-solving, curiosity-driven species -- not just our species but all the hominids to some degree, back into the depths of prehistory.

Anonymouswizard
2017-05-17, 03:06 PM
That's a great description of the science and science-fiction approach that I play fantasy games to escape from.

I also play SF games occasionally, and I can be quite interested in the physics of the setting -- when it is a setting in which characters getting involved in the physics fits in.

Each to their own, play your games your way.


No; it's asking you to approach a medieval fantasy world with a medieval or fantasy approach instead of a modern or science-fiction approach.

Or, if you can't do that, to play in the games that you enjoy and let other people enjoy the games that they enjoy.

I want to bring up a single game I love in theory but not quite in practice (their magic system is in that place where it's really awesome once it clicks), Ars Magica.

Ars Magica starts at the point of 'it's medieval Europe, and everything works roughly as people in medieval Europe believed it did'. Then it tells you to roll up a magus/maga, take the tools it gives you to poke the universe, and roleplay a bunch of academics performing experiments, reading books, and publishing papers. Sure you can go out and slay mythical beasts, but in a very real sense that's not what the game's for. If you wanted to slay beasts in a medieval fantasy setting you'd be playing D&D, you pick up Ars Magica because you want to play a bunch of mages arguing over who has access to some paper everyone needs (and then the fire mage gets banned from the library).

As my friend said to me once 'of course you'd be a bloody Verditus, little gnome wizard'. Then again, this is the same person who spent an entire campaign roleplaying her character researching how to make a certain virtue teachable.

It's a beautiful blending of a fantasy setting and giving the players sticks to poke it with.

Squiddish
2017-05-17, 03:38 PM
I have to agree with raygun goth. I can suspend disbelief just fine, but when I have to pretend skeptical inquiry doesn't exist or doesn't work that's beyond reason. If someone's going to reject real physical rules, I'm okay with that, because it's a game. When someone is going to constantly create and ignore rules, destroying internal consistency as they go, it's too far.

I don't want to pull out a physics textbook and perfectly apply it; I want to be able to find out the rules of this new, magical world and then apply them.

As for the example earlier, I'm fine with you giving the first explanation, but you better have the second one ready because I will be poking that thing. I don't care what element that tooth is made of, if it can power a moving castle I'll be leaving with a sample, provided it won't kill me and maybe even if it will! That's what magic is for, after all, not only does it let you poke things better it also lets you recover from lab accidents quite easily.

Xuc Xac
2017-05-17, 05:46 PM
Either way, thank you Xuc Xac, that was very informative.

Thanks. I actually did all this math last year for another setting for reasons of art, not science. I wanted to know how big things would look given the sizes and distances involved.


So, if I follow correctly, there are two basic limits to vision above and beyond the horizon: (a) the laws of perspective, which mean even very large objects rapidly become invisible at distance, and (b) permeability of air to light. Under optimal conditions, (b) would be approximately 296km, but might be considerably less otherwise - although it'd still probably be more than the 10km we can see up to the horizon. In either case, (a) would have a far greater immediate effect, with objects rapidly diminishing at distance until, horizon or no horizon, they'd be indistinguishable. If I were to stand on a mountain in a flat world, in optimal atmospheric conditions, I could see out to 296km from my position - but most of that would be broad patches of green and brown, not unlike looking down from an airplane, with individual geographic features simply lacking the resolution necessary to make out. Is this accurate?

Also, I'd think that even before things reach maximum visual range, they start to blur blue and distort due to partial Rayleigh scattering. Y/N?


Beyond 296 km, the only things that would be visible through air would be extremely bright light sources with a significant component in the red wavelengths. Everything else is lost in the blue. (Red scatters too, but it can travel farther before being totally diffused by air.)

This is a view from the top of Mt. Everest. The horizon from here is 208 miles away. Almost everything in the picture is closer than that because Mt. Everest is surrounded by other tall mountains that block the view of the horizon, but there are few spots where you can see the sky and the ground blur together in a fuzzy blue haze. This is beyond the 296 km limit I've been talking about, but it's also through a significant portion of much thinner atmosphere. This is what you could see on a flat world if you were high enough to see the over things instead of just seeing everything from the edge.

http://i1243.photobucket.com/albums/gg552/picarys/everest_zpsma4ps3hw.jpg

If you want to know what you could see in other parts of the world, look out the window of an airplane flying at 30,000 feet. If you only focus on the horizon distance, you kind of miss a major problem. This is what the world looks like from the top of a tall mountain. On a flat world, getting closer to the ground doesn't make the horizon any closer, but it does compress your field of view. Everything gets flatter and squished into each other. The further away something is, the more that gets compressed into the same section of your field of view. If you look down on a square in front of your feet, it looks like a square. As your eyes get lower, the closer edge looks bigger than the farther edge. It starts to turn into a trapezoid. As you get lower, the trapezoid looks shorter and shorter until finally you only see the closest edge.


Which is why I specified flat open ground.

All things being equal, setting aside all these distractions, a large force crossing flat open ground on a "flatworld" will be visible from much farther away than the same force crossing flat open ground on a sphereoid world.

Not if you're on that flat open ground with them. Assuming one soldier is 6 feet tall, an army of 10,000 soldiers is--let me check my math here--also 6 feet tall because they don't stack. A 6 foot tall soldier would first appear as a barely visible speck at 3.25 miles. An army of 10,000 would appear as a barely visible line one "speck" thick at the same distance. If you stand up in a tower or on a mountainside, you can see them sooner because you have a view of more than just the front rank. The line gets thicker and visible at a greater distance, but it's still not much of an improvement over a curved Earth. If your eyes are 6 feet above the perfectly flat ground, the first three miles of ground will fill the bottom 89.98 degrees of your field of vision. Everything between 3 and 184 miles is compressed into that last 0.02 degrees (the upper 90 degrees are all sky and tall things that stick up into the sky and block your view). That is also the minimum angle your eyes can track, so when that thin line of army appears, they will just fill that little slice of land before the blue sky touches the ground. When the army is 1 mile away, that line will triple in thickness. If you hold out your hand at arms length, you little finger is about 1 degree thick. If you put the upper edge of your little finger at the bottom edge of the sky, you would cover everything over 344 feet away from you.

If you really want to benefit from the lack of curvature, you'll still have to climb up a tower or a mountain just like on the curved Earth. Especially if you're not standing on a smooth featureless plain and you have hills, valley, trees, or anything else blocking your view. Climbing higher compresses your view of things near you and decompresses the view at the far end. For example, if you climbed up to the top of Wa'ahila ridge, you could fit 14 miles into that 89 degree arc of vision, which would let you spot things as small as 26 feet in size. In the real world, the horizon is 44.6 miles from the top of Wa'ahila. At that distance, you can see something about 82 feet in size. Things smaller than that shrink to nothing. Things bigger than that disappear over the horizon. On a flat world, they would continue to shrink at the edge of the sky. Things 339 feet or bigger would fade into the blue haze of the sky before they shrank to nothing. Keep in mind that these sizes are based on the minimum angle that your eyes can distinguish. You might be able to see a one foot diameter ball from half a mile away, but you aren't going to see a human hair at that distance even if it's ten feet long. If an object isn't 339 feet tall and wide, it won't fill enough of your field of vision to be visible at the maximum range.


More like having it appear 3 miles away, as if the flatworld had a horizon identical to Earth's

The horizon on Earth is 3 miles away for a person on smooth ground. At that point, things reach the edge of the sky and disappear over the edge (assuming they are big enough to be visible at that distance). On a flat world, things 3 miles away would still appear to be at the edge of the sky but they would continue to shrink instead of vanishing over the edge. Unless you're at sea (or in Kansas), large objects are likely to disappear behind a hill, ridge, tree, or garden gnome before they get much beyond 3 miles. A lot like on Earth, actually. This will make a big difference at sea, though. Ships traveling on shipping lanes are unlikely to pass each other unnoticed because they can see each other at a much greater distance. That might not change anything though, because the ships won't be able to travel any faster so ships that want to engage (pirates, pirate hunters, ships from warring nations, etc.) might decide its not worth trying to catch up to a far off ship. Most things smaller than tall mountains would be obscured by smaller and closer things on land, but at sea, islands and coasts would be visible at the maximum range of vision (which is probably less than the 296 km of perfect conditions, because conditions at sea will never be perfect due to humidity, but still pretty far). "Coasters" that stay within sight of land would have a much greater territory than on Earth. A nation's territorial waters probably wouldn't extend further, though, since those distances were based on how far a shore-based cannon could shoot and not how far they could see.


And a person's head pops over the horizon at about 6 miles away, assuming a perfectly spherical Earth. Still too far away to discern that it's a person and not a tree stump.

If you want to see an approaching army from more than 3 miles away even on a flat world, you'll have to be far enough above them to see several ranks of marching soldiers. If not, the whole army will be crammed by foreshortening into that narrow hairline of land just below the sky along with 181 miles of landscape.

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-17, 06:16 PM
Somehow, I keep using the qualifier "on flat open ground"... and people keep saying "hills!" and "stuff!"

Somehow, I keep referencing large features or masses of smaller objects... and people keep saying "small stuff is hard to see that far away!"

Somehow, people keep trying to avoid the damn point of how radically different a flat world would look, by cherry-picking the specific things that might not be that different.


Oh well.

Milo v3
2017-05-17, 06:21 PM
I still don't understand how "You can see further away under some circumstances" = "Flatworld's are bad".

Cluedrew
2017-05-17, 06:35 PM
To Max_Killjoy: Yes, the argument has gotten caught up in a small point. And there are also some very significant differences, like the fact you could build a pair of sufficiently high towers and use light signals to communicate between them. Range only limited by the power and focus of the light. Not to mention minor details like: what happens at the edges.

But how does this make flat world settings bad? Put aside any argument that assumes bad world building. That is already bad without flat worlds and people have really messed it up on round worlds as well.

Xuc Xac
2017-05-17, 06:44 PM
Somehow, I keep using the qualifier "on flat open ground"... and people keep saying "hills!" and "stuff!"

Somehow, I keep referencing large features or masses of smaller objects... and people keep saying "small stuff is hard to see that far away!"

Somehow, people keep trying to avoid the damn point of how radically different a flat world would look, by cherry-picking the specific things that might not be that different.


Oh well.

On flat open ground on a curved Earth, the horizon is 3 miles away. On a flat world, the horizon is 184 miles away, but the first 3 miles look the same and the last 181 miles are crammed into a hairline along the horizon. You can see very large (and high) things from a greater distance. It doesn't look that radically different. On a flat world, mountains on the horizon are farther than they are on Earth. Land is visible from a much greater distance at sea. Other than that, it really isn't radically different.

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-17, 07:01 PM
I still don't understand how "You can see further away under some circumstances" = "Flatworld's are bad".

It doesn't.

"Most authors and GMs consistently forget that you can often see farther away, and all sorts of other effects, because they just wanted the kewl factor of a different world shape" = "most flatworlds are bad".

This is why I wish more forums had the old-style nested quotes, so that context remained obvious and plain. Of course, even then, deliberate digression, cherry-picking, etc, would still happen.


The problem is that flatworlds are usually internally inconsistent and incoherent, and therefore a strain on disbelief, because the author/GM/worldbuilder usually doesn't follow through with all the differences.

Someone asserted that you'd have to be an anti-fun, anti-fantasy, anti-social nitpicking jerk-face, deliberately looking for things to complain about, to ever actually notice that sort of thing.

So I pointed out that the differences would be blatant, obvious, and immediately noticeable, and that it takes willful ignorance to pretend they're not there.

And then there were some counter-arguments made against that based on cherry-picking situations where it's less noticeable -- I guess to avoid the facts and try to go back to the utterly false assertion that it would take someone really trying to pick a setting apart to notice that details given are inconsistent with the claim of a flatworld, in many of these "flatworld" settings.



On flat open ground on a curved Earth, the horizon is 3 miles away. On a flat world, the horizon is 184 miles away, but the first 3 miles look the same and the last 181 miles are crammed into a hairline along the horizon. You can see very large (and high) things from a greater distance. It doesn't look that radically different. On a flat world, mountains on the horizon are farther than they are on Earth. Land is visible from a much greater distance at sea. Other than that, it really isn't radically different.

And there's the perfect example of the last bit -- concentrating on cherry-picked details that avoid the big picture and the entire point.

I keep giving examples of large objects and details, and you keep coming back with things that conveniently ignore that. Buildings, tall trees, distant hills, all sorts of things that are still plainly visible at well past 3 miles, but would be vanishing behind the horizon on a sphereoid world... would still be plain to see on a flatworld. And don't even try to assert otherwise, I've been places where details of that size are EASILY discernible from well over 3 miles away given a tall enough position to extend the apparent horizon a few extra miles.

(Of course, we can skip all this distraction about how much detail the naked eye can pick out at what range, if we just give our hypothetical observer any sort of telescope or binoculars...)

Milo v3
2017-05-17, 07:45 PM
It doesn't.

"Most authors and GMs consistently forget that you can often see farther away, and all sorts of other effects, because they just wanted the kewl factor of a different world shape" = "most flatworlds are bad".
My issue with this is that it's nothing to do with Flatworlds and is applicable to every possible element you could add to a setting.

The problem is that flatworlds are usually internally inconsistent and incoherent, and therefore a strain on disbelief, because the author/GM/worldbuilder usually doesn't follow through with all the differences. The issue is forgetful GM's and GM's who don't think through ideas, not flatworlds (at least with this issue).

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-17, 08:23 PM
My issue with this is that it's nothing to do with Flatworlds and is applicable to every possible element you could add to a setting.

The problem is that flatworlds are usually internally inconsistent and incoherent, and therefore a strain on disbelief, because the author/GM/worldbuilder usually doesn't follow through with all the differences. The issue is forgetful GM's and GM's who don't think through ideas, not flatworlds (at least with this issue).

Some concepts are more vulnerable than others to that sort of mistake. The bigger the change, the more vulnerable. The more obvious the change, the more vulnerable.


Edit:

I'm not saying "Never use a flatworld".

I'm saying "If you tell me the world is flat, don't show me that it's a sphere"... and rejecting the assertion a few people made that only "jerks" notice that sort of detail.

And I'm saying that if the flatworld isn't important to one's setting and/or story, perhaps one is better off expending the finite resource that is suspension of disbelief on speculative or fantastic elements that are more important.

Mechalich
2017-05-17, 09:21 PM
My issue with this is that it's nothing to do with Flatworlds and is applicable to every possible element you could add to a setting.


Actually no. A flat world isn't an addition to a setting, it's existence, which is otherwise impossible, implies that your setting has completely rewritten the laws of physics.

Here's the thing, there's basically two options in setting development:

1. A setting which is in all ways like the real universe, except where fantastical elements have been introduced.

2. A setting which is inherently fantastical and all elements must be justified via fantasical physics.

D&D has both types. Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and the Forgotten Realms are the first, while Spelljammer and Planescape are the second. The second type of setting is much more likely to encompass complete mechanical failure - which Spelljammer absolutely does - or be forced to simply embrace complete absurdity - which Planescape does. Note that embracing absurdity can be effective. IMO, Planescape is great. However, it imposes serious limits on the type of stories you can tell with such settings. That's a problem because many people produce settings that are utterly absurd and then attempt to pretend they can be played straight. RIFTS would be exhibit A, with Exalted right behind it. That creates all sorts of other problems that wreck the setting as a result.

It is much more difficult to create a functional, stable, sustainable type 2 game setting, and it is also much harder to maintain such a setting. In the first kind of setting fantastical elements are plug and play and you can just remove something that's problematic without any issues. In the second, a problematic setting element interacts with all the other ones and therefore removing it creates a change cascade that may actually produce even greater problems.

Effectively building a setting with a whole new set of physical laws is extremely challenging, especially when doing so for all the possible inputs of a TTRPG, as opposed to the much more limited inputs of a single-player RPG or novel. Even should you succeed, there's the problem that weird physics is very capable of overwhelming your storytelling, turning the creation into an exercise in speculative since rather than a functional narrative. This is a common comment regarding the novels of Greg Egan.

Xuc Xac
2017-05-17, 09:21 PM
I keep giving examples of large objects and details, and you keep coming back with things that conveniently ignore that.

Like an army of 10,000 suddenly appearing 3 miles away?

This is a picture of one soldier less than 3 miles away:
.

Here's an army of 10,000 at the same distance if they are marching at you in a column 30 feet wide (e.g. taking up both lanes of a two lane highway):
_


http://i1243.photobucket.com/albums/gg552/picarys/Kansas_zps34vv5fyg.png

It is literally flatter than a pancake. I do mean literally. It's been measured to have less topological variation than a pancake. The horizon is 3 miles away. On a flat world, the horizon would be one pixel higher. If you had very good vision, you would be able to pick out an army of 10,000 soldiers at 3.25 miles when they get close enough for their height to fill that extra pixel (unless they approach from behind some of those trees or tall grass). There are some farm buildings and houses over the horizon in that direction, but none of them are tall enough or close enough to appear over that line of vegetation if they were on a flat world.

The tallest building in Kansas is Epic Center (325 feet high) in Wichita. An object that large would shrink and disappear at 176 miles, just before everything disappears into the scattered blue light of the sky. You could see it as a little dot on the horizon that looks just like every other little speck on the horizon if it was the only thing around. In Wichita, the horizon is 3 miles away, but the Epic Center doesn't appear over the horizon when you approach it. It appears over the trees and one and two story houses that surround the downtown area. You can first see it from about a mile away depending on which direction you approach from.

If you head west toward the Rocky Mountains, you can go toward Denver, Colorado on Interstate 70. I don't want to dig out the USGS maps, so let's just do a rough estimate. The highest peak in the Rockies is Mount Elbert at 14,440 feet and it's not too far to the left of Denver as you come in on I-70 so let's use that. Under ideal conditions (which won't happen in the mountains, but let's assume a best case anyway), Mt. Elbert would appear out of the blue haze of the sky right about when you're passing through Limon, Colorado at an elevation of 5,377 feet. That's a difference of 9,063 feet (we'll ignore the difference caused by your eyes being 5 or 6 feet up from the ground). At that distance, it would appear to be 0.53 degrees of arc in your field of view, about half the width of your outstretched little finger (a little more than the apparent diameter of the sun or moon). On a curved Earth, the peak wouldn't rise over the horizon until you're 128 miles away at that elevation, which is 56 miles closer. In fact, it's pretty clearly visible above the horizon after only about 20 miles past Limon because the ground keeps rising as you approach the Rockies, because mountains don't just jut up out of the ground like big spikes.

So, some D&D style characters traveling on foot across flat world Kansas (an extreme example of "flat open ground") will see everything in Kansas (including skyscrapers) almost exactly the same as the real world. (How much higher is the Spot DC to notice an en-dash on the horizon instead of a big beefy em-dash?) When they approach the Rocky Mountains, they'll see the mountains half a day to a day earlier than they would have on a curved world if they're doing a 24 mile per day D&D walk. Things smaller than mountains will be affected even less (or not at all, if you're not on ground flat and open enough to provide a clear line of sight to the horizon). Did you have something bigger than mountains in mind?

Even in Kansas, there is vegetation to block the horizon. The only place you would often have a clear unobstructed view is at sea. Even this monstrous thing...
https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/198d9wi4di4thjpg.jpg

...would shrink and vanish into the distance at 135 miles. If you see something at sea that is big enough to appear out of the blue haze at the edge of the sky, you'd better hope it's land and not an angry elder god rising from the deep.

Cluedrew
2017-05-17, 09:26 PM
Of course, even then, deliberate digression, cherry-picking, etc, would still happen.Sure, along with overreactions to perceived insults, blatant dismissals of counter points, purposeful misreading & misrepresentation and on and on. Along with, of course honest miscommunication in its equally varied forms. I honestly spent half this thread trying to untangle why you were making such a big deal out of visibility range, I think I even asked at one point. But it has only been in the last few posts I think I have gotten the idea.

Anyways, hopefully we can move on now.

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-17, 10:25 PM
The tallest building in Kansas is Epic Center (325 feet high) in Wichita. An object that large would shrink and disappear at 176 miles, just before everything disappears into the scattered blue light of the sky. You could see it as a little dot on the horizon that looks just like every other little speck on the horizon if it was the only thing around. In Wichita, the horizon is 3 miles away, but the Epic Center doesn't appear over the horizon when you approach it. It appears over the trees and one and two story houses that surround the downtown area. You can first see it from about a mile away depending on which direction you approach from.


Great.

Consider the same example building ON FLAT OPEN GROUND so that the viewing conditions aren't different between the two worlds -- as I've said so many times I need a macro to retype it at this point.

That building "disappears" completely over the horizon at about 22 miles on Earth, with flat open terrain.

That same building is, by your own statement above, visible to eight times the distance on a flatworld. And at that distance, it's not the tip disappearing over the horizon, it's the entire building, down to the base, fading into the haze.

BUT, again, that's just fixating on the relatively small, and the very far, to avoid the immediately and inescapably visible differences. If that building were visible from 50 miles away, the entire building and not just part of it, against the backdrop of the infinitely receding un-horizon, one thing would be immediately obvious...

... you're not in Kansas any more.




blatant dismissals of counter points


"Counter points" that evade the actual point of contention, or that are deliberate attempts to introduce extraneous variables for the sake of obfuscation, deserve to be dismissed out of hand.

5a Violista
2017-05-17, 11:46 PM
I'm just wondering where the specific problem begins and ends.

My specific problem with flat worlds begins and ends with the fact that flatworlds (as well as other "It's Magic, so stop thinking about it" explanations) frequently are indicative of the worldbuilder not putting much more thought into the world other than "I want it to be generic fantasy." - which could just as easily be done with a round world (with the added bonus of the world being easier to intuit) (Plus, people who fail to put thought into the setting also frequently forget to put thought into the story.)

So, I don't really have a problem with flat worlds themselves; instead, I have a problem with the people who make the flatworlds following a trope for no reason. That is unless they can demonstrate they can create a setting I find enjoyable. The kinds of worlds I generally find enjoyable are ones that have an answer to the question "why", regardless of whether or not the question is asked. Or, in other words, if the setting creator can demonstrate that they are capable of answering my questions, then I can put my trust in them that there is a reason behind it (and, as a result, I don't have to ask them it.)
This can be accomplished by demonstrating they either understand the science behind their flat world, or they understand the ramifications on cosmology, or they can answer a bunch of the random questions I come up with.

So, that's where my personal specific problem ends and begins.


Edit:


The first allows the mystical to be explained while remaining mystical. "The Walking Palace of Iirnatha is powered by the tooth of Vagra, God of the Forge, who designed its unfathomable clockworks" explains sufficiently how The Walking Palace of Iirnatha manages to move around without making it less mystical and cool.

"The Walking Palace of Iirnatha functions on from the energy held within a large calcium deposit harvested from a highly intelligent creature, who also designed the mechanisms responsible for the Palace's movement. The palace is capable of seemingly violating the Square-Cube law due to clever use of...." is an exaggerated but illustrative position of the "Umm, Ackshually" thing that is super annoying. When the GM says the world is flat and you can see for about 50 miles in any direction and have it be meaningful/processable information, it's just being crappy to pull out your physics textbook and start a debate. Just play the dang game! It's such a tiny, tiny detail that does not need expounding upon. Just move on. It is inconsequential.
Um, actually, the former sounds boring and generic and designed to be ignored, while the latter sounds interesting and mystical and like a fun setting.

Xuc Xac
2017-05-17, 11:55 PM
That building "disappears" completely over the horizon at about 22 miles on Earth, with flat open terrain.

That same building is, by your own statement above, visible to eight times the distance on a flatworld.


Read it again. I said it is visible from about a mile away because it's hidden by much smaller things that surround it. It's visibility is completely unaffected by the horizon.

It would be visible at a much greater distance if nothing was in the way, but there's always something in the way on land. At those ranges, it doesn't take much of a bump or bush to block the view.

You said before that you've seen large buildings clearly from a great distance by getting a height advantage. What you're not getting is that you still need to do that on a flat world to see anything past three miles that isn't really huge. The lack of curvature gives you a free height boost but it's not infinite.

At 5 miles, the lack of curvature would make things appear about 2'8" taller. Do you know how big a yard stick looks from 5 miles away?

At 50 miles, objects would be effectively boosted 1473 feet. At 50 miles, that's an apparent height boost of a third of a degree. Even the Burj Khalifa would still be hidden behind your little finger (or an oak tree a mile away).

At the very extreme range of perfect visibility, the maximum height boost from lack of curvature is 1.29 degrees. Instead of disappearing over the horizon, the top of the Himalayas would be visible until they faded into the haze. On the other hand, it's a double edged sword. Things that big also suffer from shorter maximum visibility and would fade out sooner.

If it were my world, I would say they gain more than they lose just to have this massive mountain range visible from a week's walk away looming over everything in that direction. "How far is it? We keep walking but it doesn't look any closer!"

Edit: Whoops. I was trying to do too many things at once and made a mistake. The lack of curvature doesn't actually boost the apparent height. On a curved Earth, things large enough to be visible at the horizon appear to disappear behind it. They shrink with distance like everything else but once they reach the horizon, they start getting cut off at the bottom too. On a flat world, they only shrink with distance. They don't look taller, they just disappear at the distance that a taller object would have gone behind the horizon on Earth. My original calculations we're right because they were based only on angular diameter and didn't include that cutoff from curvature (because there is no curvature on a flat world). They would be more easily obscured by closer objects than I claimed above when I mentioned "boosting". I do still like the image of a mountain range looming on the horizon, but there's no reason they couldn't just be taller if I'm making the world. Mauna Kea would be higher than Everest if it wasn't mostly submerged.

FreddyNoNose
2017-05-18, 12:19 AM
What about hollowed earth?

LordCdrMilitant
2017-05-18, 12:53 AM
I find chainsaw swords and the topic of verisimilitude rather amusing. Lots of staple "sci-fi" things break verisimilitude for me.


It takes the better part of a decade to reach the outer planets, and there doesn't seem to be any remotely feasible way to travel between stars in a timely manner. All that fairly breaks with any pretense of realism, but doesn't break immersion because I expect a science fiction setting to include cheap and fast interstellar travel. And to that end, chainsaw swords and power-armored literal breastplates are silly and void any pretense of reality, but don't make me cringe, because they don't go out of their way to be contrary to expectation. I've got a shiny power armored suit, a sword of spinning chainsaw death, and a gun that's bigger than my head and shoots exploding .75cal shells.

Traveler has a line about the Nuclear Damper: "The Nuclear Damper projects a field of nodes and antinodes that cancels out the nuclear strong force and reduces the power of nuclear explosions." It's entirely nonsense. I don't even know where to begin to break down that sentence. It breaks the illusion of this being a thing that could be real with a ten-pound sledgehammer. But it doesn't really break immersion, or make me feel like I'm not playing sci-fi. I expect this sort of thing, and it's kind of cute, like reversing the polarity of a graviton particle beam and bouncing it off a deflector dish.

I hate Spelljammer because it says it's in space, but it's not sci-fi. The space part break expectations for a piracy in the age of sail game, and the rest of it breaks any attempt to be a sci-fi game.



I hate flat worlds not because they break with the expectation, though, but because nobody I've met whose run one for me to play has put effort into considering what it's like for the world to be flat, and how the laws that govern reality need to change and how those changes would affect the rest of the world. I would play a game in a planar world if the effects of being an infinite, or finite, plane were consider and I could interact with the effects of it being a plane, but I've yet to see that. It's cool to consider what it would be like to be on an planar world, or a toroidal world, or something else, but so far, all I've seen is "it's like as if it was round, but it's flat, but everything else is normal, because magic." I may have been a little excessive earlier with the declaration that I'd retire from adventuring to play a particle physicist [though, TBH, even if it wasn't a flat world, playing a particle physicist wounds more fun than plumbing ancient tombs full of traps and monsters, but that's besides the point] to spite the GM, but this is essentially what I'm getting at. If you've dropped your flat world at my feet with no consideration of the effects just to be "different" I might go out of my way to force you consider the effects of it being flat.



That's a great description of the science and science-fiction approach that I play fantasy games to escape from.

I also play SF games occasionally, and I can be quite interested in the physics of the setting -- when it is a setting in which characters getting involved in the physics fits in.

No; it's asking you to approach a medieval fantasy world with a medieval or fantasy approach instead of a modern or science-fiction approach.

Or, if you can't do that, to play in the games that you enjoy and let other people enjoy the games that they enjoy.

You can play fantasy just fine while trying to codify the way the world works. "Look at it, it's so pretty" is so boring. It's much more fun to interact with the world and tear it down and put it back together.

Knaight
2017-05-18, 12:57 AM
It takes the better part of a decade to reach the outer planets, and there doesn't seem to be any remotely feasible way to travel between stars in a timely manner. All that fairly breaks with any pretense of realism, but doesn't break immersion because I expect a science fiction setting to include cheap and fast interstellar travel. And to that end, chainsaw swords and power-armored literal breastplates are silly and void any pretense of reality, but don't make me cringe, because they don't go out of their way to be contrary to expectation. I've got a shiny power armored suit, a sword of spinning chainsaw death, and a gun that's bigger than my head and shoots exploding .75cal shells.

Exactly - the same thing applies to fantasy. Dragons make little to no sense, the entire concept of the undead breaks down terribly if you try to explain it with real world science, so on and so forth. You accept it because it's part of the genre, which also applies to flat worlds - and I say this as someone who basically never uses them.

LordCdrMilitant
2017-05-18, 01:06 AM
Exactly - the same thing applies to fantasy. Dragons make little to no sense, the entire concept of the undead breaks down terribly if you try to explain it with real world science, so on and so forth. You accept it because it's part of the genre, which also applies to flat worlds - and I say this as someone who basically never uses them.

As I said, it's not about explaining it with real world science. It's that, at least from experience, they don't have an internally consistent flat-world science, because they were written just to be different but didn't actually consider what would happen on a flat world.

It doesn't work. I can tell you why it doesn't work. So tell me why it works. And then tell me what the "why it works" does to the experience of living on the world.

I was being hyperbolic earlier. We don't fully understand how everything works on our spherical world, if you can work out a unified governing theory of everything for the flat world, work it out again for a spherical world and you can win a nobel prize. But you made the world flat, and I want you to consider what's different because it's flat and apply this consistently.

Xuc Xac
2017-05-18, 01:09 AM
What about hollowed earth?

What about it? Are you offering it as another option in addition to flat and round? Are you asking if we like them? Are you curious how they would look or work?

Mechalich
2017-05-18, 01:25 AM
A hollow earth is, effectively, a very small dyson sphere. There are challenges to the physics of making such a thing - the need for superstrong materials to prevent gravitational collapse, some sort of super-hot white dwarf like thing to serve as the inner sun, etc. - but it is actually much more reasonable to conceive of creating than a flat earth.

LordCdrMilitant
2017-05-18, 01:37 AM
A hollow earth is, effectively, a very small dyson sphere. There are challenges to the physics of making such a thing - the need for superstrong materials to prevent gravitational collapse, some sort of super-hot white dwarf like thing to serve as the inner sun, etc. - but it is actually much more reasonable to conceive of creating than a flat earth.

Sort of, but not really.

A planet could conceivably be a plate orbiting a star. There are a vast number of problems with a dyson sphere, though.

Xuc Xac
2017-05-18, 01:40 AM
If gravity works the way it does in reality, there would be no (net) gravity inside a hollow world. If there is a small sun floating in the middle, it would be the only gravity and you would fall toward it. The inside surface of the sphere would be all ceiling.

ImNotTrevor
2017-05-18, 02:42 AM
My specific problem with flat worlds begins and ends with the fact that flatworlds (as well as other "It's Magic, so stop thinking about it" explanations) frequently are indicative of the worldbuilder not putting much more thought into the world other than "I want it to be generic fantasy." - which could just as easily be done with a round world (with the added bonus of the world being easier to intuit) (Plus, people who fail to put thought into the setting also frequently forget to put thought into the story.)

So, I don't really have a problem with flat worlds themselves; instead, I have a problem with the people who make the flatworlds following a trope for no reason. That is unless they can demonstrate they can create a setting I find enjoyable. The kinds of worlds I generally find enjoyable are ones that have an answer to the question "why", regardless of whether or not the question is asked. Or, in other words, if the setting creator can demonstrate that they are capable of answering my questions, then I can put my trust in them that there is a reason behind it (and, as a result, I don't have to ask them it.)
This can be accomplished by demonstrating they either understand the science behind their flat world, or they understand the ramifications on cosmology, or they can answer a bunch of the random questions I come up with.

So, that's where my personal specific problem ends and begins.


If what my players really want to do is poke the setting, that's fine. They can. They will miss the more important things happening around them, but they are free to poke if that is what they really, really want to do. They just need to understand that the world isn't waiting for them.



Edit:

Um, actually, the former sounds boring and generic and designed to be ignored, while the latter sounds interesting and mystical and like a fun setting.

Yes yes yes my more elaborate rewording of exactly the same idea is very popular and I keep wondering why people don't notice that it's the exact same thing with a more dry and vague description.

Unless people like dry and vague for their mysticism. Then again I have once heard that the key to sounding wise and mystical is to speak vaguely but with great conviction. So that might be the problem. Maybe...

"It's a big building with legs on. Has a battery in it, makes these big gears go and makes the whole thing walk."
"How much power does it produce?"
"Enough to make it walk and keep the lights on."
"So... a lot?"
"Enough. I'm not an electrician, I'm a GM."
"How big is it?"
"Palace-sized. Imagine a palace. Give it crab legs. There you go. You gonna do something about it or are we gonna play 20 questions all day?"
"What are it's legs made of"
"Oh for.... metal."
"What kind?"
"The kind you build palace legs out of."
"If i made a weapon out of that stuff, what kind of bonus would it have?"
"A +2 bonus to supporting the weight of a palace."

This is pretty much how I deal with this kind of question outside of logistics with actual purpose that isn't just actively trying to break things. If you're actively trying to break things, I'm creative enough to sling out vague and unhelpful answers, but I'd rather just let the thing be since it's not the point of why we're playing.

Basically, I'm the kind of person who hopes that when my players find a purple cat they will say "neat" and give it scratchies, rather than disecting it to see how it works. Because the latter is theoretical biology, which i didn't sign up for. I signed up for pretend elf games.

My time is limited. Let's worry about the biology of the purple cat later, and for right now focus on why it is there to begin with.

(And if i really don't know the physics of how a thing works, I'm just going to say "I don't know. I'm not a physicist, this isn't science, feel free to come up with whatever explanation you think works and assume it's that." I've only had to do that like twice and neither time did it ever come up again.)

BeerMug Paladin
2017-05-18, 03:58 AM
All that fairly breaks with any pretense of realism, but doesn't break immersion because I expect a science fiction setting to include cheap and fast interstellar travel.

I'm a little more strict on what I expect from science fiction. What you describe here seems to be another genre entirely. Science fantasy. That is, fantasy that's wearing a really poor science fiction disguise. I expect a fantasy setting to have an interesting topology. No pretense of realism and doesn't break immersion.

If you've dropped your flat world at my feet with no consideration of the effects just to be "different" I might go out of my way to force you consider the effects of it being flat.

It's strange to consider, but we seem to have polar opposite viewpoints on when strict rigor applied to the underlying mechanics of a setting should be considered. In a science fantasy world, I would expect a player given a chainsaw sword to do that kind of tomfoolery once they've been given access to one. Or a giant robot or.. Well, probably just about any fantasy sci-fi object. But then again, I can't really say I'm a fan of science fantasy in general, so that thought/desire would probably be detrimental to game flow and be unwelcome at the game table.

In a more flat vs round world topic, any thought given to how the world is more easily mappable with a flat world and distances on the map can be consistent? I would think that effect would matter more for the game experience the larger scales the game adventure takes you on. So if you want a world-traversing journey or a military world war epic, flatness should make things easier.

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-18, 06:20 AM
Read it again. I said it is visible from about a mile away because it's hidden by much smaller things that surround it. It's visibility is completely unaffected by the horizon.

It would be visible at a much greater distance if nothing was in the way, but there's always something in the way on land. .


In other words, you refuse to eliminate the variables in order to make an honest apples-to-apples comparison.

"Flat open ground" has been mentioned multiple times, specifically to eliminate extraneous variables and concentrate on the singular variable in question, the shape of the world.

Anonymouswizard
2017-05-18, 07:15 AM
What about hollowed earth?

I've considered then, I can just rarely see any benefit. Maybe if I want a very specific 'land of the lost beings' feel, but otherwise I'll just slot the plot into a region on the surface (outer surface that is).


And to that end, chainsaw swords and power-armored literal breastplates are silly and void any pretense of reality, but don't make me cringe, because they don't go out of their way to be contrary to expectation. I've got a shiny power armored suit, a sword of spinning chainsaw death, and a gun that's bigger than my head and shoots exploding .75cal shells.


I think the idea here is that they're just justifications for 'sword, but more so', 'armour, but more so', and 'gun, but more so'. Exactly the same as lightsabres, force shields, and blasters. I know that monomolecular swords have problems if their own, but I want 'sword but more so' in my setting and it feels like the most realistic to me.


If what my players really want to do is poke the setting, that's fine. They can. They will miss the more important things happening around them, but they are free to poke if that is what they really, really want to do. They just need to understand that the world isn't waiting for them.

What could be more important than working out how calcium can produce so much energy? Understanding this could revolutionise alchemy and potentially jump start an industrial revolution, all I need is enough works in Knowledge (Arcana), Knowledge (Chemistry), Knowledge (Physics), Craft (Alchemy), and Profession (Dentist). Saving the world can wait a few years, I have stuff to poke.


Yes yes yes my more elaborate rewording of exactly the same idea is very popular and I keep wondering why people don't notice that it's the exact same thing with a more dry and vague description.

Unless people like dry and vague for their mysticism. Then again I have once heard that the key to sounding wise and mystical is to speak vaguely but with great conviction. So that might be the problem. Maybe...

I think the point is that to many of us you 'dry and vague' description sounded infinitely more interactive, and therefore more interesting because we can do stuff with it. If the moving palace doesn't interact with the game it might as well be a stationary palace with a giant 'please do not touch' sign on the giant thingy in the middle.

There's an entire row of mind which finds no wonder in you going 'wooooo, it's so mystical and you can't touch it'. This is the kind of mind that believes that wonder comes from understanding, the kind of mind that can spend for years investigating if you can detect a gas with a filter and an LED, the kind of mind where if you plonked a ghost on their table they'd start planning what tests to perform.

It's the entire 'scientists see the beauty in nothing' problem, people who don't find the wonder in knowing how something works will find it hard to understand why some people find beauty in breaking what they find beautiful into little pieces. I can see the beauty in how electrons move in a circuit, but I also understand that not everyone does.

But I'm still going to poke the thing, get out of the way of my stick!

EDIT: there's a difference between science fiction (technology will lead us forward/backward), science fantasy (magic in space!), and space opera (adventure in space, can be either of the other two). Casual Interstellar Travel can appear in any of them, it's how is used that determines the genre.

FWIW my favourite Fate setting, The Aether Sea, is everything I wanted Spelljammer to be. It's not sailing ships in space, it's magic spaceships (and the artwork implies magic computers and holograms as well). It's very much Science Fantasy wearing the skin of Science Fiction, the only thing it's missing is guns (which can be added in without too much trouble, it's Fate).

Cluedrew
2017-05-18, 07:22 AM
"Counter points" that evade the actual point of contention, or that are deliberate attempts to introduce extraneous variables for the sake of obfuscation, deserve to be dismissed out of hand.What was that about cherry picking? The list of examples was not the point. Miscommunication is a thing that happens.

And honestly I think the introduction of variables to view a wider variety of situations is useful. Especially since we did the math for "flat open ground" a few pages ago. By we I mean I think it was Xuc Xac, so I think that case has already been covered. Maybe the thing we can learn from this is that flat worlds have to avoid plans, so that there is a lot of obstructing objects. Or be prepared to give directions across the great plans like "See that red mark? That is the read brick of the city. Just walk towards it, it is three days journey from here."

awa
2017-05-18, 07:26 AM
so what if you can see slightly farther on a hypothetical absolutely flat surface with no grass or buildings.
I have played for nearly 20 years and do you know how often the horizon has come up? Exactly zero times.

When players see a dragon they dont try and dissect it and figure out how it flies or if its bones are hollow they say dragons fly lets get back to stopping the dark lord, they dont demand i break out my notes and explain why it can fly and breath fire it just does.

If one of my players asked about a flat earth in a way i could not answer easily i would simply say you dont know, maybe its something to look into after that dark lords been dealt with. If they persisted they can make a new character who actually wants to go on the adventure.

GungHo
2017-05-18, 07:37 AM
Not to mention minor details like: what happens at the edges.
Either you fall off or you hit the edge of the dome.

Lvl 2 Expert
2017-05-18, 07:56 AM
Bonus points if you fall for a few hours and die when hitting the surface of another world. The other PC's will immediately start building gliders. (After buying a really big telescope to make that knowledge in character.)

Anonymouswizard
2017-05-18, 08:06 AM
Bonus points if you fall for a few hours and die when hitting the surface of another world. The other PC's will immediately start building gliders. (After buying a really big telescope to make that knowledge in character.)

Gliders? Please, we just need a pulley, a strong rope, and a big bucket. We might need to get back up at some point.

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-18, 08:16 AM
What was that about cherry picking? The list of examples was not the point. Miscommunication is a thing that happens.

And honestly I think the introduction of variables to view a wider variety of situations is useful. Especially since we did the math for "flat open ground" a few pages ago. By we I mean I think it was Xuc Xac, so I think that case has already been covered. Maybe the thing we can learn from this is that flat worlds have to avoid plans, so that there is a lot of obstructing objects. Or be prepared to give directions across the great plans like "See that red mark? That is the read brick of the city. Just walk towards it, it is three days journey from here."

"Did the math"?

Xuc Xac is the one who keeps conveniently ignoring how different things would look at 3 miles, or 5 miles, or 10 miles, or 20, and asserting that there'd hardly be a noticeable difference because things disappear in the atmospheric interference closer to 200 miles away.

And conveniently ignoring the qualifier "flat open ground" so that "but trees!" and "but buildings!" can be used to avoid the apples-to-applies comparison.

Yeah, the math is great. This is also a great example of how wrong the platitude "numbers never lie" actually is.

Meanwhile, there are countless places I could go near my home here in hilly, woodsy Michigan, where the difference would be so obvious you'd need to be blind to not notice it.

Lvl 2 Expert
2017-05-18, 08:26 AM
Gliders? Please, we just need a pulley, a strong rope, and a big bucket. We might need to get back up at some point.

I hope your DM is not a fan of space elevators, no way would he let you get away with a rope going down far enough that the fall time is several hours. :smallwink:

Anonymouswizard
2017-05-18, 08:51 AM
I hope your DM is not a fan of space elevators, no way would he let you get away with a rope going down far enough that the fall time is several hours. :smallwink:

In my experience fans of space elevators and fans of flat worlds really collide in one person.

ImNotTrevor
2017-05-18, 08:56 AM
"Did the math"?

Xuc Xac is the one who keeps conveniently ignoring how different things would look at 3 miles, or 5 miles, or 10 miles, or 20, and asserting that there'd hardly be a noticeable difference because things disappear in the atmospheric interference closer to 200 miles away.

And conveniently ignoring the qualifier "flat open ground" so that "but trees!" and "but buildings!" can be used to avoid the apples-to-applies comparison.

Yeah, the math is great. This is also a great example of how wrong the platitude "numbers never lie" actually is.

Meanwhile, there are countless places I could go near my home here in hilly, woodsy Michigan, where the difference would be so obvious you'd need to be blind to not notice it.

>ignoring the mention of Kansas, which is literally flatter than a pancake

>ignoring Xuc Xac's ACTUAL point that the reason the difference for most non-huge objects is minimal. (Namely that they will become so tiny that they will not be distinguished from the background of things behind them, unless you are literally on a flat and UTTERLY FEATURELESS plane, in which case you aren't on a flatWORLD anymore, just a plane.

>needing to set up all this contrivance to produce the meaningful difference heralded as self-evident and obvious.

Yes, you'll see real big things from even further away than normal. But this will tend to be remarkably unhelpful and won't come up often.

Yes, there are inherent differences to the flatworld. My interjection would be that the stuff that comes up is the stuff that matters. In a world that has been forcefully turned into a massive labyrinth, the continuation of society becomes extremely hard. Cities split in half, groundwater distrupted, farmland utterly ruined. Starvation and suffering would abound. And did. Navigation would be a nightmare. And it was.

Did I miss some things that would logically be a problem in such a world? Yeah, probably. But they never came up so they weren't addressed. Plain ans simple.

ImNotTrevor
2017-05-18, 09:14 AM
What could be more important than working out how calcium can produce so much energy? Understanding this could revolutionise alchemy and potentially jump start an industrial revolution, all I need is enough works in Knowledge (Arcana), Knowledge (Chemistry), Knowledge (Physics), Craft (Alchemy), and Profession (Dentist). Saving the world can wait a few years, I have stuff to poke.
Well, when you emerge with your industrial revolution fuel, you may be disappointed when you realize the GM wasn't joking about that army of undead and demons the Lich was working on, and now everyone who might benefit is as alive as a cooked goose.




I think the point is that to many of us you 'dry and vague' description sounded infinitely more interactive, and therefore more interesting because we can do stuff with it. If the moving palace doesn't interact with the game it might as well be a stationary palace with a giant 'please do not touch' sign on the giant thingy in the middle.
I wonder what it means about thos culture that a thing described with character is assumed to be no-touchy, but a thing described as a list of properties is not. I think it is worth noting that neither description implies a Do Not Touch sign via its content. We have no context for why the palace is there. The whole point could be to steal its power source. I didn't feel the need to get that far for a quick example.



There's an entire row of mind which finds no wonder in you going 'wooooo, it's so mystical and you can't touch it'. This is the kind of mind that believes that wonder comes from understanding, the kind of mind that can spend for years investigating if you can detect a gas with a filter and an LED, the kind of mind where if you plonked a ghost on their table they'd start planning what tests to perform.

It's the entire 'scientists see the beauty in nothing' problem, people who don't find the wonder in knowing how something works will find it hard to understand why some people find beauty in breaking what they find beautiful into little pieces. I can see the beauty in how electrons move in a circuit, but I also understand that not everyone does.

But I'm still going to poke the thing, get out of the way of my stick!

This sounds like the kind of discussion that would need to be had in the group about what they care about. If what you really want is to pick apart the mechanics of a setting, your best bet may not be playing a TRPG at all but rather something like Microscope where the entire game is literally poking the setting with a fractal stick of infinite depth and finest precision poking. (If that truly is your absolute favorite part of the whole thing)

In the end, to each their own. But I generally play to find out WHAT HAPPENS, as opposed to HOW IT WORKS. The latter is a fun diversion when necessary/appropriate, but I prefer the first by leaps and bounds. I can do science experiments without dice or expending all the creative energy I need for GMing. It's not a thing I need to do at the gaming table.

(As a case in point, I like SCP. But a campaign ABOUT the SCP foundation would be dreadfully boring to me if it weren't about agents finding the SCPs or dealing with containment breaches, because otherwise very little would HAPPEN. Just poking at anomalous objects for a few hours until someone pokes it wrong and dies.)

5a Violista
2017-05-18, 09:46 AM
>ignoring the mention of Kansas, which is literally flatter than a pancake


That's actually the problem:
The flatter the area you are in, the more similar a round and a flat world would look like. On top of a hill or a mountain (which are fairly rare in Kansas, by the way), the difference between a round and a flat world would be more stark, largely because there would be no trees/buildings/hills/mountains in the way to block your view, because of the angle you are looking at, and because the relative height of closer objects will matter less, etc. It's only when you get to really really large mountains (where the "horizon" on top of the mountain would be the same distance whether you're in a flat or a round world; that only applies to really tall mountains).

Standing on the highest point in the area is more similar to a "flat open plain" than a hilly or wooded area. It's also a more logical place to go if you're looking for approaching armies.

ImNotTrevor
2017-05-18, 09:52 AM
That's actually the problem:
The flatter the area you are in, the more similar a round and a flat world would look like. On top of a hill or a mountain (which are fairly rare in Kansas, by the way), the difference between a round and a flat world would be more stark, largely because there would be no trees/buildings/hills/mountains in the way to block your view, because of the angle you are looking at, and because the relative height of closer objects will matter less, etc. It's only when you get to really really large mountains (where the "horizon" on top of the mountain would be the same distance whether you're in a flat or a round world; that only applies to really tall mountains).

Standing on the highest point in the area is more similar to a "flat open plain" than a hilly or wooded area. It's also a more logical place to go if you're looking for approaching armies.

But if there is a tall hill, then it is not a flat and featureless plane as we've been asked to assume.

2D8HP
2017-05-18, 10:06 AM
Either you fall off or you hit the edge of the dome.


Bonus points if you fall for a few hours and die when hitting the surface of another world. The other PC's will immediately start building gliders. (After buying a really big telescope to make that knowledge in character.)


Gliders? Please, we just need a pulley, a strong rope, and a big bucket. We might need to get back up at some point.


I hope your DM is not a fan of space elevators, no way would he let you get away with a rope going down far enough that the fall time is several hours. :smallwink:


In my experience fans of space elevators and fans of flat worlds really collide in one person.


Just wow.

You guys just do way more Worldbuilding (and deconstructing) than I ever thought to.

I pretty much still use:

100 years ago the sorcerer Zenopus built a tower on the low hills overlooking Portown. The tower was close to the sea cliffs west of the town and, appropriately, next door to the graveyard.
Rumor has it that the magician made extensive cellars and tunnels underneath the tower. The town is located on the ruins of a much older city of doubtful history and Zenopus was said to excavate in his cellars in search of ancient treasures.

Fifty years ago, on a cold wintry night, the wizard's tower was suddenly engulfed in green flame. Several of his human servants escaped the holocaust, saying their rnaster had been destroyed by some powerful force he had unleashed in the depths of the tower.
Needless to say the tower stood vacant fora while afterthis, but then the neighbors and the night watchmen comploined that ghostly blue lights appeared in the windows at night, that ghastly screams could be heard emanating from the tower ot all hours, and goblin figures could be seen dancina on the tower roof in the moonlight. Finally the authorities had a catapult rolled through the streets of the town and the tower was battered to rubble. This stopped the hauntings but the townsfolk continue to shun the ruins. The entrance to the old dungeons can be easily located as a flight of broad stone steps leading down into darkness, but the few adventurous souls who hove descended into crypts below the ruin have either reported only empty stone corridors or have failed to return at all.
Other magic-users have moved into the town but the site of the old tower remains abandoned.
Whispered tales are told of fabulous treasure and unspeakable monsters in the underground passages below the hilltop, and the story tellers are always careful to point out that the reputed dungeons lie in close proximity to the foundations of the older, pre-human city, to the graveyard, and to the sea.
Portown is a small but busy city 'linking the caravan routes from the south to the merchant ships that dare the pirate-infested waters of the Northern Sea. Humans and non-humans from all over the globe meet here.
At he Green Dragon Inn, the players of the game gather their characters for an assault on the fabulous passages beneath the ruined Wizard's tower.

:smile:

Town, monster and treasure filled tombs, and maybe bandit filled woods in-between.

Except in some games of Traveller, I've never seen a game where the PC's circumnavigated the globe and confirmed its "roundness", and I've never seen PC's reach World's Edge.

What's that like?

5a Violista
2017-05-18, 10:08 AM
But if there is a tall hill, then it is not a flat and featureless plane as we've been asked to assume.

But standing on a tall hill acts as a flat and featureless plane. (Frequently, in physics, when something acts like a flat and featureless plane or a vacuum or a frictionless spherical cow or whatever, then you assume it is one, even if it is not. That is because it acts as one.)


Anyway....
I had edited this into my last post, but I feel like it would be better placed here, since people posted after I edited:



I wonder what it means about thos culture that a thing described with character is assumed to be no-touchy, but a thing described as a list of properties is not. I think it is worth noting that neither description implies a Do Not Touch sign via its content. We have no context for why the palace is there. The whole point could be to steal its power source. I didn't feel the need to get that far for a quick example.

For me, it sounded like the former ("Powered by the god" "unfathomable") sounds like it is meant to be part of the backdrop. It isn't meant to be understood, it isn't meant to be affected, it isn't meant to be something that the PCs should do something with. In fact, it sounds so part of the background (being unfathomable, and all) that even the players aren't meant to understand anything about it, other than "hey, it's unfathomable" and "A god made it".
On the other hand, the latter seems and sounds approachable: it talks about the energy source, which implies the energy is there to be exploited by the plot or NPCs in the future. It mentions a "highly intelligent creature" which is world-building, telling that there are highly intelligent creatures that exist and that interact in a tangible way with the setting. "Mechanisms" implies these are things that can be interacted with by either the heroes of the story (in order to stop a grand plot) or the villains (in order to cause trouble). "Seemingly violate" (as opposed to "unfathomable") implies there's more going on under the surface: Although it appears to be one thing, there's something even deeper that can be explored. "Clever use" says that there are clever NPCs in the world (instead of just an all-powerful god) that will provide creative challenges, and that players may be able to use a similar mechanism to cleverly fight their way through an epic feat that would normally be impossible.

Those are the reasons the former sounds like a "Do not touch" sign while the latter sounds like it can be interacted with.
If the plot is stealing a power source, the former's description only tells you that the only points of interaction you already know about it is that it cannot be understood, and that you may have to hoodwink an all-powerful all-knowing god somehow in spite of him being a god.
If the plot is stealing a power source, the latter tells you about NPCs and beings that may come into play, as well as how they may act (the "highly intelligent creatures") and a direction to begin investigating. It also implies there is a way you can stop the walking palace (through these "mechanisms") or that you can temporarily shut down its power source, and that you can be creative to find a way to accomplish your goal. It also suggests the DM put more thought into it so you don't have to follow a single set railroaded solution (even if the DM put more thought into the former. First impressions are important, after all).

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-18, 10:12 AM
That's actually the problem:
The flatter the area you are in, the more similar a round and a flat world would look like. On top of a hill or a mountain (which are fairly rare in Kansas, by the way), the difference between a round and a flat world would be more stark, largely because there would be no trees/buildings/hills/mountains in the way to block your view, because of the angle you are looking at, and because the relative height of closer objects will matter less, etc. It's only when you get to really really large mountains (where the "horizon" on top of the mountain would be the same distance whether you're in a flat or a round world; that only applies to really tall mountains).

Standing on the highest point in the area is more similar to a "flat open plain" than a hilly or wooded area. It's also a more logical place to go if you're looking for approaching armies

The point of specifying "flat open land" was to avoid canards and distractions about intervening trees and buildings and terrain, and find something that was an apples-to-apples comparison.

The point of specifying larger features was to avoid the irrelevant debate about how far away small individual objects are visible.

Segev
2017-05-18, 10:14 AM
Max_Killjoy, the Kansas example was addressing your flat-world scenario. Yes, he mentioned grass and such, but only AFTER analyzing it without taking grass into account.

His primary analysis centered on the apparent height of an object at extreme distances. Even if we removed the "coming out of the haze" effect, and pretended air was vacuum-transparent, the fact that the army of 10,000 at 10 miles away appears to be the equivalent of laying a black piece of construction paper down on top of the green block that is your view of the ground and looking at it edge-wise means that you're having a devil of a time noticing it, let alone determining that it's an approaching army, at that distance.

You gain some benefit from height just because it lets you look at it from not-edge-on. By being taller than the army's collective heads, you can theoretically see its 2D profile along the ground. This also, coincidentally, helps you see over grass and other visual obstructions, should they be introduced.

Regardless, however, you probably get more information from the scouts you have patrolling your territory and its surrounding environs, and know of that army long before you can squint to make it out as more than a faint line on the horizon. Especially adding haze back into the equation, which is totally reasonable to do in a "flat world" scenario, because nothing in that require air to be less opaque than it is in a round world scenario.

So we're back to it mattering only a little bit, in terms of how the GM describes the visuals, and not to actual gameplay.

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-18, 10:22 AM
Max_Killjoy, the Kansas example was addressing your flat-world scenario. Yes, he mentioned grass and such, but only AFTER analyzing it without taking grass into account.

His primary analysis centered on the apparent height of an object at extreme distances. Even if we removed the "coming out of the haze" effect, and pretended air was vacuum-transparent, the fact that the army of 10,000 at 10 miles away appears to be the equivalent of laying a black piece of construction paper down on top of the green block that is your view of the ground and looking at it edge-wise means that you're having a devil of a time noticing it, let alone determining that it's an approaching army, at that distance.

You gain some benefit from height just because it lets you look at it from not-edge-on. By being taller than the army's collective heads, you can theoretically see its 2D profile along the ground. This also, coincidentally, helps you see over grass and other visual obstructions, should they be introduced.

Regardless, however, you probably get more information from the scouts you have patrolling your territory and its surrounding environs, and know of that army long before you can squint to make it out as more than a faint line on the horizon. Especially adding haze back into the equation, which is totally reasonable to do in a "flat world" scenario, because nothing in that require air to be less opaque than it is in a round world scenario.

So we're back to it mattering only a little bit, in terms of how the GM describes the visuals, and not to actual gameplay.


So what about everything large enough that it avoids that problem, so that it's visible at long distances but normally falls below the horizon on Earth?

What about smaller objects more distant than 3 miles but not far enough away that they're "too small" to make out?

What about someone standing on a watchtower so they have a better angle?

(Setting aside anything that an army of 10k on the march might kick up, such as dust, that would be behind the horizon on Earth, or the way movement tends to draw the eye even if detail is hard to discern...)

2D8HP
2017-05-18, 10:24 AM
....You gain some benefit from height just because it lets you look at it from not-edge-on. By being taller than the army's collective heads, you can theoretically see its 2D profile along the ground. This also, coincidentally, helps you see over grass and other visual obstructions, should they be introduced.....


It seems then that "Wizards Towers", would be more common on Flatworlds.

Anonymouswizard
2017-05-18, 10:30 AM
Just wow.

You guys just do way more Worldbuilding (and deconstructing) than I ever thought to.

I pretty much still use:

100 years ago the sorcerer Zenopus built a tower on the low hills overlooking Portown. The tower was close to the sea cliffs west of the town and, appropriately, next door to the graveyard.
Rumor has it that the magician made extensive cellars and tunnels underneath the tower. The town is located on the ruins of a much older city of doubtful history and Zenopus was said to excavate in his cellars in search of ancient treasures.

Fifty years ago, on a cold wintry night, the wizard's tower was suddenly engulfed in green flame. Several of his human servants escaped the holocaust, saying their rnaster had been destroyed by some powerful force he had unleashed in the depths of the tower.
Needless to say the tower stood vacant fora while afterthis, but then the neighbors and the night watchmen comploined that ghostly blue lights appeared in the windows at night, that ghastly screams could be heard emanating from the tower ot all hours, and goblin figures could be seen dancina on the tower roof in the moonlight. Finally the authorities had a catapult rolled through the streets of the town and the tower was battered to rubble. This stopped the hauntings but the townsfolk continue to shun the ruins. The entrance to the old dungeons can be easily located as a flight of broad stone steps leading down into darkness, but the few adventurous souls who hove descended into crypts below the ruin have either reported only empty stone corridors or have failed to return at all.
Other magic-users have moved into the town but the site of the old tower remains abandoned.
Whispered tales are told of fabulous treasure and unspeakable monsters in the underground passages below the hilltop, and the story tellers are always careful to point out that the reputed dungeons lie in close proximity to the foundations of the older, pre-human city, to the graveyard, and to the sea.
Portown is a small but busy city 'linking the caravan routes from the south to the merchant ships that dare the pirate-infested waters of the Northern Sea. Humans and non-humans from all over the globe meet here.
At he Green Dragon Inn, the players of the game gather their characters for an assault on the fabulous passages beneath the ruined Wizard's tower.

:smile:

Town, monster and treasure filled tombs, and maybe bandit filled woods in-between.

Except in some games of Traveller, I've never seen a game where the PC's circumnavigated the globe and confirmed its "roundness", and I've never seen PC's reach World's Edge.

What's that like?

For the record, I've never had PCs never the edge or been near the edge as a PC, exclusively played in sphere or 'probably sphere' worlds.

My next game is in a homebrew science fantasy setting using the following assumptions:
-Orcs, elves, humans, goblins and whatnot developed on seperate planets, with some exceptions.
-Light moves at a speed several orders of magnitude higher. This has minor repressions based on what would actually happen but not as severe (I asked a physicist friend for rough ideas, the short version is I've destroyed the universe again). One of these is that matter just isn't as stable as in our universe. This avoids mucking around with hyperspace and so on and if a player wants to work through and abuse the implications I'll help calculate.
-Ships travel between stars by moving to about 0.1c via 'aether engines', which increase thrust the further away they are from a gravity well.
-Magic is used to create technology, rather than the other way around. Ships are enclosed film the void but propelled by magic, with magic artificial gravity and flame and lightning cannons as primary weapons. Magic shields can be used, but are relatively rare.
-Primary personal weapons use magic to accelerate a slug at high speeds.
-Then we get to political stuff, which I'm currently building.

The entire idea is 'magic powered pulp science fiction', because I decided that it would be a fun idea compared to just another standard fantasy setting.

Segev
2017-05-18, 10:35 AM
So what about everything large enough that it avoids that problem, so that it's visible at long distances but normally falls below the horizon on Earth?

What about smaller objects more distant than 3 miles but not far enough away that they're "too small" to make out?

What about someone standing on a watchtower so they have a better angle?

(Setting aside anything that an army of 10k on the march might kick up, such as dust, that would be behind the horizon on Earth, or the way movement tends to draw the eye even if detail is hard to discern...)

Sure. You can see Mount Olympus from far, far away. If you have haze effects, maybe it's so huge you see it suddenly appear out of the haze looking some 20 feet tall from this distance.

The dust cloud isn't actually likely to be more than 50 actual feet tall, and is going to vanish into any haze effect very rapidly as it thins; this might make it notable a few miles sooner.


Ultimately, Max, I'm just not seeing what the point you're trying to make is, here. So you should see things from further out. So what?

My own efforts have included a mostly-implicit attempt to figure out what the real objection is and address it (hence mentioning that you're going to get more out of your scouts than out of your eyeballs in either case), but I'm just not sure that I'm guessing right.

What is your real problem? What about "you can see further on a flat world, technically" is so big a deal that it makes your dander rise? What has a GM done that makes it MATTER that he got the distance technically wrong?

Heck, before this conversation, I probably would have just spitballed a distance on a round world, too.

...and for that matter, why is it so important to establish this on a flat, featureless plain, and ignore anything which might be obstructing vision at a distance OTHER THAN the curvature? How is this so important that you're arguing with great vehemence that this poses a problem with "flat world" settings?

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-18, 10:57 AM
Sure. You can see Mount Olympus from far, far away. If you have haze effects, maybe it's so huge you see it suddenly appear out of the haze looking some 20 feet tall from this distance.

The dust cloud isn't actually likely to be more than 50 actual feet tall, and is going to vanish into any haze effect very rapidly as it thins; this might make it notable a few miles sooner.


Ultimately, Max, I'm just not seeing what the point you're trying to make is, here. So you should see things from further out. So what?

My own efforts have included a mostly-implicit attempt to figure out what the real objection is and address it (hence mentioning that you're going to get more out of your scouts than out of your eyeballs in either case), but I'm just not sure that I'm guessing right.

What is your real problem? What about "you can see further on a flat world, technically" is so big a deal that it makes your dander rise? What has a GM done that makes it MATTER that he got the distance technically wrong?

Heck, before this conversation, I probably would have just spitballed a distance on a round world, too.

...and for that matter, why is it so important to establish this on a flat, featureless plain, and ignore anything which might be obstructing vision at a distance OTHER THAN the curvature? How is this so important that you're arguing with great vehemence that this poses a problem with "flat world" settings?


The vehemence comes from multiple posters claiming that anyone who actually bothered to notice the differences had to be a game-ruining jerk who deliberately went looking for things to cause problems over.

At that point I actually needed to set out to show that the differences were blatant and immediately noticeable to any character standing on that flat world. And they would be.

The issue has been compounded by those doing everything they can to artificially obfuscate the differences. Forget the army example if you think it's too apparently small at long distances, it's not core to the point, it was just something that I could have seen a GM or author not taking into account because they said "flat world" but they're still unconsciously operating on their experiences with a sphereoid world.

LordCdrMilitant
2017-05-18, 11:16 AM
I'm a little more strict on what I expect from science fiction. What you describe here seems to be another genre entirely. Science fantasy. That is, fantasy that's wearing a really poor science fiction disguise. I expect a fantasy setting to have an interesting topology. No pretense of realism and doesn't break immersion.


It's strange to consider, but we seem to have polar opposite viewpoints on when strict rigor applied to the underlying mechanics of a setting should be considered. In a science fantasy world, I would expect a player given a chainsaw sword to do that kind of tomfoolery once they've been given access to one. Or a giant robot or.. Well, probably just about any fantasy sci-fi object. But then again, I can't really say I'm a fan of science fantasy in general, so that thought/desire would probably be detrimental to game flow and be unwelcome at the game table.

In a more flat vs round world topic, any thought given to how the world is more easily mappable with a flat world and distances on the map can be consistent? I would think that effect would matter more for the game experience the larger scales the game adventure takes you on. So if you want a world-traversing journey or a military world war epic, flatness should make things easier.


I like soft sci-fi for my games. I've never been impressed with hard sci-fi, because it's selling point is realism and generally fails to deliver. On the other hand, when the selling point is "Spaceships are awesome", it's a lot easier to meet my expectations.

Lord Torath
2017-05-18, 11:38 AM
So what about everything large enough that it avoids that problem, so that it's visible at long distances but normally falls below the horizon on Earth?

What about smaller objects more distant than 3 miles but not far enough away that they're "too small" to make out?

What about someone standing on a watchtower so they have a better angle?

(Setting aside anything that an army of 10k on the march might kick up, such as dust, that would be behind the horizon on Earth, or the way movement tends to draw the eye even if detail is hard to discern...)I'm pretty sure I mentioned the dust the army kicks up several pages back. :smallamused:

The 2E Player's Handbook has a section on vision and light, which states how far away you can see a man-sized figure moving, stationary, clearly enough to identify the type, and clearly enough to recognize a particular individual. To my knowledge, this table does not take the curvature of the world into account. Simply scale up those distances relative to the size of the object you're looking at compared to a human, and there you have your distances.

As mentioned previously, a tower will make the thin line of the army at three miles into a thin trapezoid, maybe doubling the apparent thickness of the line you'd see from ground level (depending on the height of your tower). If the army is moving really quickly in direction perpendicular to the line between them and you (to maximize the apparent velocity) at, lets say 10 mph (which is a very brisk run) that works out to 176 inches per second. That's an apparent speed at arm's length (28 inches) of 0.025 inches per second. Anyone know what the minimum apparent speed that will draw your eye is? I don't, but I bet it's a couple orders of magnitude faster than a 40th of an inch a second at arm's length.

Yes, you will be able to see massive objects like mountains and such from farther away (assuming there's nothing nearby to block your view, which was the point of mentioning the Kansas tower. How often in real life is there not something blocking your view?), but the effect is only significant at distances that are very large. When they are so far away that nothing you see from them will have an effect on you for at least a week (hyperbole. In a fantasy setting. And there will be the occasional exception, like a volcano. But even then, you probably have at least a day before the ash cloud reaches you from 184 miles away).

I did some math a while back for the Isle of Dread, and determined that the central volcano would first be visible above the horizon from 120 miles away, and the top of the cone (5 miles across) would be just over an inch wide (at arm's length). The mountain itself was only 13,000 feet, or 2.5 miles high, so the base would be about a half inch under the horizon at that distance (on a flat world, the top of the cone would be about a half-inch above). As it emerged from the blue haze of the distant atmosphere (I think someone mentioned 184 miles?) on a flat world, it would be a third smaller than that, maybe 1/3rd of an inch. Is that teeny smudge on the horizon really enough to put a hole in the boat of your fun?

Segev
2017-05-18, 12:52 PM
The vehemence comes from multiple posters claiming that anyone who actually bothered to notice the differences had to be a game-ruining jerk who deliberately went looking for things to cause problems over.

At that point I actually needed to set out to show that the differences were blatant and immediately noticeable to any character standing on that flat world. And they would be.

The issue has been compounded by those doing everything they can to artificially obfuscate the differences. Forget the army example if you think it's too apparently small at long distances, it's not core to the point, it was just something that I could have seen a GM or author not taking into account because they said "flat world" but they're still unconsciously operating on their experiences with a sphereoid world.

I suppose my issue with your declaration of "obviousness" and your declaration that people are operating unconsciously on expectations based on having lived in a spherical world their whole lives is spurious, because most people have probably actually lived in practical calderas. Whether it's literally a valley, or it's just in a city with a lot of buildings in the way, or in the country with tall grass, or in the Midwest (near St. Louis, where I grew up) with hills and trees...

Most people don't live in a place where their unconscious expectations rely on the spherical world to generate line-of-sight difficulties.

Which is why I'm not ignoring your arguments, but I find them to be trivial matters that are unlikely to come up. And, in the corner cases where they do, I still don't see the practical difference falling outside the "normal GM" range of getting numbers and distances wrong by a certain margin of guestimated error, anyway.

Let's be honest, most GMs are more likely to look in their rule books to see what the spot penalties are for seeing something at a great distance than they are to calculate whether that something would be "over the horizon" or not.

gkathellar
2017-05-18, 02:08 PM
@Max_Killjoy: Firstly, I don't think anyone was trying to attack you. There was a suggestion of responding to a flat world by basically attacking the GM, but it wasn't coming from you, and I think you can safely ignore response to that notion as being separate from the general debate here.

Second, I think what Xuc Xac and some others have basically been saying is that, for a variety of reasons (mostly perspective in combination with environmental features), the impact of a flat world on visual range would be less than one might give it credit for. That's not to say that there'd be no impact, just that diminishing visibility would absorb a lot of the difference. I'm thinking of it in terms of perspective in art - even if you don't have a horizon line, you do have a vanishing point, because eventually stuff just gets too small to bother drawing.

Thirdly, to step away from the "realistic" physics argument for a second, I actually think your critique is part of why flat worlds can work, and why they can feel strange and otherworldly. A flat world raises a lot of logical problems beyond just visibility - if it follows the rules we're familiar with. Its mere existence can demand alternative explanations - and therefore suggests that such explanations exist, and that this is a land governed by unfamiliar laws. Even without getting into the specific whys and wherefores (although those can also be interesting!), a flat world lets you know that you are a stranger in a strange land. That can be the point: letting the player know, immediately and viscerally, the tone and atmosphere underlying the world.

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-18, 02:27 PM
Another issue... weather. Here I have less of an idea, but lack of Coriolis effect, possible lack of distinct polar and tropical regions, etc, could make major changes in the climate and weather.

Griffith!
2017-05-18, 02:34 PM
My homebrew setting is a series of floating islands that corkscrew inward to the bottom, below which is an impenetrable black fog that leads, inevitably, to the abyss. At the top the islands are idyllic, beautiful pastoral scenes. The closer to the bottom you get the more shadowed and dystopic the land becomes. At the highest level, where the ring of islands is largest, there floats an enormous crystal - half luminous, half dark, that lights the world as it spins slowly in it's orbit. A pair of moons - one red and one white, spiral along the length of the corkscrew, making a full trip down and back up about once a month.

Each island has it's own topographical features, from mountains and forests to arid deserts. Each of these has a massive stone obelisk at it's center. These obelisks are the source of the climates and weather on each island, and also from whence magic flows. There are only three gods in this setting - the God of Light Ishtar, the God of Darkness Asura, and the World God, Ao.

Travel between island is accomplished by airships and bridges, and in one notable case a very long and structurally questionable staircase. You can't fly into the abyss because of terrible storms hidden below the surface, you can't fly too close to the crystal because of waves of wild magic that rend reality apart in close proximity, and you can't fly too far away from the world because of the massive silver dragon-fish named Bahamut in the clouds around the horizon.

I called the setting Coils of Mu and it's equal parts Final Fantasy nonsense and stolen mythology. It's my baby.

But to answer the original question - round, I guess? It's just easier to maintain internal logical consistency with a setting as earth-like as possible.

5a Violista
2017-05-18, 02:58 PM
Yes, you will be able to see massive objects like mountains and such from farther away (assuming there's nothing nearby to black your view, which was the point of mentioning the Kansas tower. How often in real life is there not something blocking your view?) Whenever I'm on top of a mountain, especially when it's the tallest mountain in the range.
Sure, that doesn't happen very often in the city but it does out in the wilderness. In a game, rangers would probably be the most likely to notice this phenomenon, because they like hanging out in the wilderness sometimes.

Segev
2017-05-18, 03:05 PM
Another issue... weather. Here I have less of an idea, but lack of Coriolis effect, possible lack of distinct polar and tropical regions, etc, could make major changes in the climate and weather.

Indeed. Though in truth, finding excuse to retain swirling cyclones is probably worthwhile just because they're majestic and terrifying.

But it would be interesting to explore what tornados, hurricanes, and the like would look like without the Coriolis effect. You still have hot air and cool air fronts bumping into each other. I wonder if the whirlwind still would occur, just in a random direction. At least for tornados.

Lord Torath
2017-05-18, 03:21 PM
Another issue... weather. Here I have less of an idea, but lack of Coriolis effect, possible lack of distinct polar and tropical regions, etc, could make major changes in the climate and weather.If the disk is still rotating about an axis that is at an angle to the ecliptic plane, you will still have seasons. Think flattening the globe into a disc, with the edges along, say, the 0o/180o line of longitude (sorry, Great Britain!), and still spinning around the same axis. The faces would have two seasons twice a year, while the edges of the world would still have our standard four seasons once a year. The faces would experience the same season, regardless of distance from the equator (depending on planet thickness, see below), and the warm season would coincide with the equinoxes, while the cold season would coincide with the solstices (assuming a Spelljammer-ish gravity plane centered between the two faces of the planet). The thicker the world, the more impact the weather on the edges would have on the weather on the faces. Edge Winter would intensify the facial winter at that pole, while the opposite pole's summer would ... attenuate?... the facial winter near that pole. The edges would be in spring/fall when the faces are in summer.

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-18, 05:07 PM
If the disk is still rotating about an axis that is at an angle to the ecliptic plane, you will still have seasons. Think flattening the globe into a disc, with the edges along, say, the 0o/180o line of longitude (sorry, Great Britain!), and still spinning around the same axis. The faces would have two seasons twice a year, while the edges of the world would still have our standard four seasons once a year. The faces would experience the same season, regardless of distance from the equator (depending on planet thickness, see below), and the warm season would coincide with the equinoxes, while the cold season would coincide with the solstices (assuming a Spelljammer-ish gravity plane centered between the two faces of the planet). The thicker the world, the more impact the weather on the edges would have on the weather on the faces. Edge Winter would intensify the facial winter at that pole, while the opposite pole's summer would ... attenuate?... the facial winter near that pole. The edges would be in spring/fall when the faces are in summer.

So you're picturing a disk that has two faces inhabited, and the edges, with the axis of rotation such that it's like a spinning coin? Yeah, I could see that creating fairly familiar weather.

That's completely different than I'd pictured the hypothetical flatworlds, based on most descriptions... my impression was of a stationary single-faced world with the sun passing overheard, and no "spin".

Xuc Xac
2017-05-18, 05:14 PM
So, for those of you just joining us, let's sum up...

Max_Killjoy: On a flat world, you could see forever, but my stupid DM would try to surprise me with an army appearing 3 miles away like there's a curved horizon.

Xuc Xac: Not forever. With no obstructions and perfectly clear air, you could see a maximum of 184 miles. Terrain, humidity, and dust will reduce that.

Max_Killjoy: Humidity wouldn't matter. You could see hundreds of miles.

Xuc Xac: 184 max. Things still shrink with distance so only huge things are visible that far away. Here's a picture to compare sizes at 250 feet and 1, 2, and 3 miles and how things blur together in the distance. Also math about perspective lines.

Max_Killjoy: That picture isn't a good example because it's probably humid. But "my GM had better have a better answer than 'sorry, haze'".

Segev: The horizon is rarely the limit of vision due to terrain anyway.

Max_Killjoy: That's why I specified "flat open ground". An army of 10,000 should be visible from much farther away.

ImNotTrevor: Would you feel better if it was 10 miles?

Max_Killjoy: 3 miles away is stupid and only works on a round world. It should be much farther.

Xuc Xac: On perfectly clear flat ground, it would be 3.25 miles. If you want to see farther, you need to stand on a hill for a better angle.

Max_Killjoy: I keep saying "on flat open ground" but you say "hills!" and "stuff!" And what about bigger stuff?

Xuc Xac: That was "flat open ground", but ok. Here's a photo of a real place which is literally as flat as you can get with ground made of dirt. An army would be a speck 3 miles away. If the world was flat, the view would be the same because that's how close the army has to get to be visible and there's nothing tall enough within 200 miles to stick up behind them. The difference is a change from 3 miles to 3.25 miles (about 8%). If you want bigger stuff, the tallest building within hundreds of miles is only visible from a mile away because it's visibility isn't limited by the horizon. For something that isn't obstructed by smaller things, look across this flat landscape toward the highest mountain around. In the real world, it's well above the horizon at 164 miles (it pokes up sooner than that, but this is high enough over the horizon to be obviously a mountain). On a flat world, it would appear this big at 184 miles (about 12% more).

Max_Killjoy: Yeah, but that building would be visible over a hundred miles away if the horizon wasn't there.

Xuc Xac: It's not blocked by the horizon. It's blocked by smaller, closer things. Curvature has nothing to do with it.

Max_Killjoy: Why won't you admit that flat open ground would make it more visible? And things would look different with hills or trees. There are places with hills and trees near my house that prove it! And forget the army example that turned out to be wrong. What about huge things?


At this point, I don't know what to tell you, Max. We already covered huge things too. If we keep going, you're going to get a hernia from hauling those goalposts around. You keep trying to say that the difference is obvious and huge, but every example you give comes out to be about 10% different in ideal cases. Most of the time, the horizon doesn't even come into it and the difference will be 0%. On a curved Earth, you can't see forever because there is stuff in the way. The horizon is just one thing that gets in the way and it's not the limit in most situations. On a flat world, the horizon doesn't get in the way, but everything else still does.

Do you want to know what Epic tower in Kansas would look like if it was the only object in Kansas and the rest of the state was a smooth barren plain of bare rock with no dust or humidity? It doesn't look like anything because you died of thirst while walking close enough to see it. Yes, a perfectly flat plain with no vegetation, bumps, or structures mathemagically created by Straitejj, the geometer god of the XY-coordinate plane, might have more significant differences than something only as flat as Kansas, but that's not a world that has people living and adventuring in it. If you think Kansas isn't flat enough, then no theoretical perfectly flat plane is going to matter to you either.

Most of the time, the lack of horizon won't matter because other things get in the way. When the flatness does matter, the difference in visible range is about 10%, give or take a bit. But, due to the Weber-Fechner law, even when there is a difference, you won't notice most of the time anyway because it isn't drastic enough to register. (Weber-Fechner is why you can see a 2 inch difference between 2 and 4 inches, but not between 102 and 104 inches. You could easily measure the difference, but they look the same if you just eyeball it. If an army of 10,000 soldiers is 3 miles or 3.25 miles away won't matter because human perception doesn't see "3 miles" and "3.25 miles", it sees both as "way over there".)

In Michigan where you are, there are no buildings or mountains tall enough to be visible from a hilly, forested area with or without a curved horizon, so I'm not sure what you mean by that. If you're standing in a forest and you can see a tall building above the trees, you're about to die because the building is falling on you. You would be able to look across the Great Lakes and see the opposite shore, but I already mentioned that when I talked about ships at sea.

If your only real objection is authors or GMs "unconsciously operating on their experiences with a spheroid world" when they make up a description without taking the lack of horizon into account, how does that apply to my math based on a flat plane with no horizon? You keep asserting that things would have to be much different. I show you exactly how different it would be and your only refutation is to insist that the difference would be bigger if conditions were different. That's the same problem from the other direction. They fail to take the lack of curvature into account and assume things are the same, but you seem to be hyper-correcting for the flatness and just assuming that things would have to be extremely different. From where I'm sitting, you both appear to be saying "It works like this because I want it to."

We live on a curved world where plumb lines all point toward the center of the planet. They aren't parallel but we treat them like they are because the difference is negligible until you get to really huge distances like putting stuff in orbit. (In theory, it matters for shorter distances like artillery bombardment over several miles, but in actual practice it's just "Round off then make adjustments after we see where the next shot lands".) On a flat world, plumb lines might really be parallel and the difference would go from "small enough to treat as zero" to "actually zero".

Effects like weather would depend on the shape of the world beyond just "the surface isn't a globe". Is the world a giant cube or disk with flat faces? Is it an infinite plane of land and sea with endless sky above and bedrock that goes down forever? Is it an object that orbits a star and rotates for day and night? Does the sun fly across the sky every day? If it does, what's its altitude? Does it always take the same path?

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-18, 05:19 PM
For those just joining, this has evidently morphed into a fiction thread, with Xuc Xac taking the lead.


You of all people on this thread don't get to make accusations against anyone of engaging in fallacies of any sort. You don't even have any goalposts left, they were torn down to build all the giant strawmen you've staked up. You've done nothing but engage in deliberate misrepresentation, cherry-picking, evading the point, and obfuscation from the start.


I've been to enough places where the world would look VERY different if were flat instead of sphereoid... I can get to plenty of them by taking a detour on the way home from work tonight. Places where things are over the horizon, that would be visible on a flatworld because there would be no horizon. You can go on and on about cherry-picked edge-cases all you want, it doesn't change a damn thing.

Segev
2017-05-18, 05:32 PM
For those just joining, this has evidently morphed into a fiction thread, with Xuc Xac taking the lead.


You of all people on this thread don't get to make accusations against anyone of engaging in fallacies of any sort. You don't even have any goalposts left, they were torn down to build all the giant strawmen you've staked up.

Max, I'm sorry, but his summary looks pretty much like what I have been reading for the last page or few.

It's gotten to the point that I'm not even really sure you know what point you're trying to make. Could you please try to at least make clear what your objection is, and what it is that you want to see from a GM running a flat world that you have generally not seen?

Specific examples, not "I want them to consciously avoid their unconscious experiences of growing up on a round world." Concrete things. How far off should that army of 10,000 be visible? Why is it so important that it be visible at that distance? What sorts of situations have you run into in actual play experience that make you raise these objections? If none, then what is the actual hypothetical scenario that has you so concerned?

I can't wrap my head around even what point you're trying to make, or what problem you think exists. Please try to frame your position again, with specific attention to why it's important and what the problematic situation looks like and what the corrected situation SHOULD look like.

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-18, 05:56 PM
Max, I'm sorry, but his summary looks pretty much like what I have been reading for the last page or few.


His "summary" is a caricature of what was actually posted. A funhouse mirror that someone is trying to hold up as reality.




It's gotten to the point that I'm not even really sure you know what point you're trying to make. Could you please try to at least make clear what your objection is, and what it is that you want to see from a GM running a flat world that you have generally not seen?

Specific examples, not "I want them to consciously avoid their unconscious experiences of growing up on a round world." Concrete things. How far off should that army of 10,000 be visible? Why is it so important that it be visible at that distance? What sorts of situations have you run into in actual play experience that make you raise these objections? If none, then what is the actual hypothetical scenario that has you so concerned?

I can't wrap my head around even what point you're trying to make, or what problem you think exists. Please try to frame your position again, with specific attention to why it's important and what the problematic situation looks like and what the corrected situation SHOULD look like.


The army was just a throwaway example of something that a GM might not give any thought to. It could just as easily have been that wizard's tower that should have been visible from farther away as the PCs approached it, or the hills in the distance that aren't over the horizon, or whatever. The specific example isn't the important part. It's not important how exactly far off some particular thing might be visible, it's important that there are going to be things that shouldn't be the same on these "wonder worlds", but are left just exactly like they would be on Earth. Often with a bunch of contrived after-the-fact excuses as to why.

My objection, as stated, is that the GM (or author) too often tells us "the world is fantastic in X way!" but then shows us a world in which none of the implications of that difference are followed through on. It's important how far away things are visible, how the weather behaves, how the celestial bodies appear to move, etc, and that those things are all internally consistent and coherent -- if they aren't, it makes it harder to play a character in that world, with that character's experiences and expectations. If I'm spending all my time thinking "why don't this aspect and that aspect of the world mesh together", if I'm distracted by the disconnects, then I'm being mentally kicked out of the world and out of character.

As I tried to explain earlier, telling me "just enjoy the wonder, don't worry about the details" is the same as telling me to turn my brain off -- it looks for disconnects and incongruities and "this doesn't make sense", all on its own, simply as part of its ongoing function. Don't tell me the world is fundamentally different and then fail to follow through. Don't tell me Detective Smith can pick locks with ease in an episode this season, and then pin a crucial story moment on her being trapped by a (pickable) locked door next season.

ImNotTrevor
2017-05-18, 06:41 PM
His "summary" is a caricature of what was actually posted. A funhouse mirror that someone is trying to hold up as reality.


This would be a good counteragument if none of us could read. But it's pretty much verifiable via reading the backlog and the numbers are in favor of it being fairly accurate.

Eventually, when the only person who is perceiving it your way is you, the problem is probably not everyone else. Food for thought.




The army was just a throwaway example of something that a GM might not give any thought to. It could just as easily have been that wizard's tower that should have been visible from farther away as the PCs approached it, or the hills in the distance that aren't over the horizon, or whatever. The specific example isn't the important part. It's not important how exactly far off some particular thing might be visible, it's important that there are going to be things that shouldn't be the same on these "wonder worlds", but are left just exactly like they would be on Earth. Often with a bunch of contrived after-the-fact excuses as to why.

So you expect perfection of presentation with no inconsistencies with how you imagine things ought to behave? Because with the behavior of flatworld horizons you are arguing vehemently against how it would ACTUALLY BEHAVE, meaning the problem isn't that you know how it would actually be and expect that, but you immediately come up with your own version of how it ought to work and things that don't fit that mold cheese you off, regardless of accuracy to how it would be for realsies.

But meh, just a theory.



My objection, as stated, is that the GM (or author) too often tells us "the world is fantastic in X way!" but then shows us a world in which none of the implications of that difference are followed through on. It's important how far away things are visible, how the weather behaves, how the celestial bodies appear to move, etc, and that those things are all internally consistent and coherent -- if they aren't, it makes it harder to play a character in that world, with that character's experiences and expectations. If I'm spending all my time thinking "why don't this aspect and that aspect of the world mesh together", if I'm distracted by the disconnects, then I'm being mentally kicked out of the world and out of character.
So the GM, on top of everything else they're doing for you, has to ensure that the physics perform as you expect them to? Because I'm not thinking you have an ultra-firm grasp on the physics of a flatworld.



As I tried to explain earlier, telling me "just enjoy the wonder, don't worry about the details" is the same as telling me to turn my brain off -- it looks for disconnects and incongruities and "this doesn't make sense", all on its own, simply as part of its ongoing function. Don't tell me the world is fundamentally different and then fail to follow through. Don't tell me Detective Smith can pick locks with ease in an episode this season, and then pin a crucial story moment on her being trapped by a (pickable) locked door next season.

I'll point this much out:
We all have our quirks. Your persistently active error-finder seems to be among your set. That doesn't actually affect the quality of GMing. Just your preference. As I've said in the past, avoid wording opinions as absolutes. It's grating, frustrating to deal with.

PS:
I don't want to get distracted by the example but i do have to point out that such a situation as the lockpicking is not contrived beyond reason amd solveable in a line of dialogue that will usually be present to explain the difference:
"Lockpicking requires tools, they took those away from me." Most situations like this have ways of signalling the difference in this situation as compared to others. Bad writing is bad writing but this sort of thing (noncontextualized changes in ability) are relatively rare. Also bear in mind that TV shows do not function like books. Each episode might have a different writer or team of writers. Even those shows that can afford a Loremaster to keep things straight may have the occassional goof because they are titanic efforts to produce, and their writing time is extremely limited compared to, say, a movie. (A tv series may need to write its new season within a month or two, as opposed to movies that can have literally years.) They also have a limited budget that has to be divided among tens of departments, and depending on the show's intended audience writing might have higher or lower priority.

Essentially, you are genuinely asking a lot.

Jay R
2017-05-18, 06:52 PM
I don’t think we disagree anywhere near as much as it looks like. I suspect we all have close to the same approach, with a slight difference based on what "hot buttons" would hold our attention.

My basic position is as follows:

Whatever you do should be done to enhance flavor, not detract from it.

I prefer to run a round world, even when I’m not using modern astronomy, primarily because (as I said in my first post on this thread), “Otherwise I'd have to work out a whole new approach to eclipses, and it's not worth it.”

I have no problem with a flat earth if somebody runs it well, and it enhances the flavor, rather than detracting from it.

If it’s well done, it will add to the flavor.

If it’s poorly done, it will detract from it.

I think just about everyone agrees with the above.

The only issues are where we draw the line of what’s poorly done. And that’s an emotional reaction; there’s no reason any two of us would have the same “hot-button” issues or the same level of intensity. [My first hot button was eclipses; Max_Killjoy’s was the horizon.]

Are we pretty much agreed on most of it except what specific issues would pull us out of the world and detract from the game?

Xuc Xac
2017-05-18, 07:12 PM
Max, I'm not saying the world wouldn't look different. I'm just saying that it's not as big a difference as you think. I expected it to be bigger too, but it doesn't seem to work out that way. If vision was unlimited, it really would be drastically different. You'd have a wall of bluish grey "stuff" in every direction because you'd see a blur of all the mountains and everything else between you and the edge of the world (if there is an edge). It would be like Olber's paradox ("If the universe is infinite and full of stars, why isn't the night sky full of light?") but along the ground. But vision is limited in air, so there's an upper limit to how far we can see through it.

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.

If you think there are places you see every day that would look "VERY different" on a flat world, let's test your hypothesis. Pick a place and tell me what you think you should be able to see from there on a flat world and we can do the math to check. I've personally been up and down the length of Michigan on I-75 and US-23 many times in my own life. Other than looking across Lakes Huron, Michigan, and Superior, I can't think of any time I've had an unobstructed view of the horizon. There's always a hill or a tree or a building or something.

I'm not kidding when I say I'd like you to prove me wrong. I was expecting drastic changes, but I'm not finding any other than the awesomely long sight lines at sea (which is cool, but not as cool as a great tower being visible from a huge distance).

Kantaki
2017-05-18, 07:21 PM
I like flatworlds. Ever since Golden Sun.

And how it works?
Well, when the gods created the world they build it from the basic elements- fire, water, earth, air, ice, rock, magic, maybe some others.
Stuff like things falling is governed by the interaction between those elements and by words/definitions the gods layed out. So things fall because the rock of the ground attracts the rock inside them, but they don't „fall” sideways because of how the gods defined „falling” and down.
For practically the same reason you would „fall” over the edge- the rock under you pulls you, but it doesn't glue you to the edge because „falling” leads „down”.
Flight and swimming are based on the similar mechanisms.
A bird can fly because it body was constructed with more air in it and with the ability to „manipulate” the air around them.
The same is true for fish and water.

Sight... well, if I had to explain it I would say it works by some kind of „sight-rays” that interact with the light to create a image of a object in the eyes of the observer.
The „horizon” is the distance that was defined as the limit to said sight-rays.
It's not a hard limit- you can still see some things beyond it- but it is almost impossible to discern many details.

gkathellar
2017-05-18, 07:32 PM
Yeah, Golden Sun's flat world was great. Worked into the narrative surprisingly well, too.

On the subject of disks with stuff on either side, Evan Dahm's Overside webcomics (Rice Boy, Order of Tales, Vattu) is a cool example. The flatness never comes up in the context of reaching the edge, but at one point a protagonist does make their way to Underside. It's pretty weird.

Segev
2017-05-18, 11:16 PM
Frankly, visual distances are not something that will bug me about "flat world" vs "round world" situations, simply because I wouldn't necessarily expect a DM to get the visual distances right if he were running Earth straight up. And if it was not critical, I wouldn't care enough to complain that his description was slightly inaccurate, and that we should have seen the wizard tower that morning rather than that afternoon.

I'm not asking you to turn your brain off. I am just wondering what the problems you see are.

"Where does the sun rise and set to?" is a valid question. And a DM who has it behave like it does on earth but "no it really is a flat world" without considering that question is not doing his worldbuilding well. But the majority of consequences of a flat world are cosmological, not everyday notable differences.

GungHo
2017-05-19, 09:16 AM
Another issue... weather. Here I have less of an idea, but lack of Coriolis effect, possible lack of distinct polar and tropical regions, etc, could make major changes in the climate and weather.

Yes, they could. Do you have any ideas that you'd like to submit on how you think it would change? Or even just what would be cool?


I'm not asking you to turn your brain off. I am just wondering what the problems you see are.
I think we've maximized the value of recapping things that happened in the last 40 posts.

gkathellar
2017-05-19, 01:39 PM
Relevant to questions about weather. (http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/tutorial_currents/04currents1.html) While it doesn't go into flat worlds, it does explain the basics of atmospheric behavior in the absence of the coriolis effect - basically, atmosphere would circulate between the low-pressure poles and the high-pressure equator, with far less variation. That suggests that weather on Flatworld would be defined by the locations of its high- and low-pressure zones. Also, if Flatworld itself was rotating around its epicenter, that might have some weird consequences.

pwykersotz
2017-05-21, 11:15 AM
I like flatworlds. Ever since Golden Sun.

And how it works?
Well, when the gods created the world they build it from the basic elements- fire, water, earth, air, ice, rock, magic, maybe some others.
Stuff like things falling is governed by the interaction between those elements and by words/definitions the gods layed out. So things fall because the rock of the ground attracts the rock inside them, but they don't „fall” sideways because of how the gods defined „falling” and down.
For practically the same reason you would „fall” over the edge- the rock under you pulls you, but it doesn't glue you to the edge because „falling” leads „down”.
Flight and swimming are based on the similar mechanisms.
A bird can fly because it body was constructed with more air in it and with the ability to „manipulate” the air around them.
The same is true for fish and water.

Sight... well, if I had to explain it I would say it works by some kind of „sight-rays” that interact with the light to create a image of a object in the eyes of the observer.
The „horizon” is the distance that was defined as the limit to said sight-rays.
It's not a hard limit- you can still see some things beyond it- but it is almost impossible to discern many details.

Your ideas intrigue me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

I only read pages 1 and then 9 of this thread, so I've missed a lot of it. But I don't see why people are getting so hung up on science. Everything about D&D defies science, because it is built on entirely different physical law. The four classical elements are one example. Another is Wildspace, the Crystal Spheres, and the Phlogiston. Another is <insert monster here>.

Questions like where the sun goes when it sets, how an eclipse works, or how far can you see are questions that should (in my view) have wonderous and interesting answers worthy of a quest, not a calculation. Basically, the world works as close to normal human experience as possible, but the "why" of everything is entirely different.

Of course worlds that are based in science are fine too. I just don't prefer it. And that doesn't stop the thought exercises from being fun either. :smallsmile:

Max_Killjoy
2017-05-21, 11:39 AM
Your ideas intrigue me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

I only read pages 1 and then 9 of this thread, so I've missed a lot of it. But I don't see why people are getting so hung up on science. Everything about D&D defies science, because it is built on entirely different physical law. The four classical elements are one example. Another is Wildspace, the Crystal Spheres, and the Phlogiston. Another is <insert monster here>.

Questions like where the sun goes when it sets, how an eclipse works, or how far can you see are questions that should (in my view) have wonderous and interesting answers worthy of a quest, not a calculation. Basically, the world works as close to normal human experience as possible, but the "why" of everything is entirely different.

Of course worlds that are based in science are fine too. I just don't prefer it. And that doesn't stop the thought exercises from being fun either. :smallsmile:

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?