Roleplay doing expirements or science!

[Spriteless]

The recent OotS made me think of all the fun to be had roleplay exploring the properties of magic traps, places, items, etc to find out how it works, and how to use it. One of my earlies memories was listening in to a game where my dad tried to figure out what this bag with an infinite supply of small furry creatures was, but the creatures dissappeared when he got a second one, and how to twist that to his advantage. Some of my favorite DMing moments are players trying to figure out how to beat or at least negate the minor sub-curses of the mournlands, and how exactly the super-science interracts with magic, and surprises from someone playing the Magewright from Grod's Guide to Greateness (tm).

Anyone have any good stories of neat devices, places, sundry that are fun to roleplay investigating?

[farothel]

Mixing spells and physics can be a lot of fun. We were in a combat in a D&D3.0 game (back in the day) and almost out of resources. Our cleric just had a create food spell left when he got an idea. The conversation went a bit like this.
player: "Say, this spell gives me enough to feed quite a lot of people."
GM: "correct"
player: "and this spell has range."
GM: "also correct."
player: "so, what is the nutritional value of a coconut? I think not a lot."
GM (hesitant): "no, not all that much. Where are you going with this?"
player: casts create food as high above the big bad guy as he can, making it all coconuts. Then gravity did the rest.

When we had stopped laughing, the GM allowed it just this once for the novelty. The spell was later errata'd so you can't do that trick anymore, but back then it was still possible.


But if you really want to mix all that stuff, play Scion as a craft god(-to-be). Quite a lot of fun can be had creating strange items. I had my demi-god actually build a working lightsaber (there was a knack under epic intelligence that allowed you to create just about anything) and had a combination of knacks, epic dexterity and boons that allowed her to run at mach 3 (and at full god level she could potentially go to mach 6.5). Another project in the works as soon as I were to go to god-level was a titan killing railgun that would do 800 damage dice.

[Martin Greywolf]

The certified science classic is to take your usual electric or magnetic power and make a railgun. Nothing says hello like a gold piece travelling at ten times the speed of sound.

One of my favourite shenanigans was in late game of a campaign that was in Naruto verse - Hiraishin is basically a spammable teleport that can take you or anything you mark with a seal over very long distances. What you do with it is take some graphite rods, carve the seals into them, reinforce them with magic (you already know this magic because it's what Hiraishin is based on) and, over the course of a few days, put them in orbit.

Then, find a guy you don't like and teleport the thing a centimeter in front of his face. Or teleport four of them so that the guy is in the middle of the resulting kerfluffle.

Another one is from a Harry Potter game, although it depends on how transfiguration works specifically in your version of HP verse. If you can transfigure anything you know the chemical composition of, have fun with chlorine trifluoride, a substance so mind-bogglingly dangerous rocket scientists refuse to work with it, whose chemical composition can be drawn on a napkin with a crayon. It's self-oxidizing, corrosive, gives out toxic chlorine smoke as it burns, happily burns through asbestos... Only thing I regret is that Voldemort was already dead in that game, because that means I will never get to transfigure the house he is in into it.

Another good one is using your lightning powers to send a bolt into the storm clouds and then directing the ten times more powerful return strike - sure, we saw Sasuke use it in his Kirin attack, but I thought of it before that chapter was out. Honest.

And if you have tech good enough to make robots and magic suddenly appears, you can use that to play silly buggers with a lot of systems that were programmed before that was a thing.

[Jay R]

Just be sure that your GM believes that her world's underpinning are modern science before you try it. This will work in some worlds, but not in all.

The introduction to my last campaign included the following:

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.

[Spriteless]

Just be sure that your GM believes that her world's underpinning are modern science before you try it. This will work in some worlds, but not in all.

If the GM does not believe the world's underpinnings are modern science, then that is invitation to do experiments to figure out what does underpin it. In fact, I'ma change the thread title so it isn't so pigeonholed now.

[JNAProductions]

If the GM does not believe the world's underpinnings are modern science, then that is invitation to do experiments to figure out what does underpin it. In fact, I'ma change the thread title so it isn't so pigeonholed now.

In theory? Awesome.

In practice... how many DMs make an unreal self-consistent and scientifically testable system for their world?

[Mastikator]

In theory? Awesome.

In practice... how many DMs make an unreal self-consistent and scientifically testable system for their world?

I think most would be annoyed that their players aren't getting on with the plot. Half the players too TBH. This feels like a downtime activity rather than the main focus of the game.

I do have a story where we tried to "science" an enchanted forest we were stuck in by leaving breadcrumbs for us to follow or backtrack. Yeah the enchanted forest moved our breadcrumbs intentionally to confuse us. We were simply forced to move at the speed of plot. :smallsigh:

[Lord Torath]

I do have a story where we tried to "science" an enchanted forest we were stuck in by leaving breadcrumbs for us to follow or backtrack. Yeah the enchanted forest moved our breadcrumbs intentionally to confuse us. We were simply forced to move at the speed of plot. :smallsigh:This reminds me of the scene in Labyrinth where Sarah uses her lipstick to mark tiles in the ground as she passes. Once she's moved on, little critters underneath them lift up those tiles, and either flip them over, or rotate them.

It's always fun to experiment with magic items or effects - like a magic fountain you find in a forest clearing - assuming the DM/Module won't punish you for experimenting. I've seen at least one module with a magical effect that was at first moderately beneficial, and then severely detrimental to "punish experimentation." :smallannoyed:

[PhoenixPhyre]

Just be sure that your GM believes that her world's underpinning are modern science before you try it. This will work in some worlds, but not in all.

The introduction to my last campaign included the following:



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.



I like this. And this is my general policy as well. I'll likely steal the phrasing, because it's better than mine.

You can experiment, but you can't use meta-knowledge. I'm willing to discuss your experiments--I actually know what the metaphysics really are. But you cannot assume that anything past about 13th century alchemical thought applies.

[Spriteless]

I think most would be annoyed that their players aren't getting on with the plot. Half the players too TBH. This feels like a downtime activity rather than the main focus of the game.

I do have a story where we tried to "science" an enchanted forest we were stuck in by leaving breadcrumbs for us to follow or backtrack. Yeah the enchanted forest moved our breadcrumbs intentionally to confuse us. We were simply forced to move at the speed of plot. :smallsigh:

Wow. I run a very different game than the one you're at. I would never rush people onto the plot. (Spoilers I don't have a real plot just situations.)

[Mastikator]

Wow. I run a very different game than the one you're at. I would never rush people onto the plot. (Spoilers I don't have a real plot just situations.)

Heh I don't play with that group anymore. But after we lost the DM we started rotating the DM job, it made it so that a plot could only really last 2-4 sessions. It was during this time that I learned to plan more flexibly. Whatever mcguffin I wanted them to find would have a 100% chance to be found in literally any next location they went to, followed by the villain, etc.

[NichG]

I mean, half of my campaigns these days are just 'more or less the plot is figure out how the world actually works in time to make a decision that depends on leverage or wisdom granted by that understanding'. So having at least one player willing to RP out doing experiments and science on things is pretty much a central party role now, as much as or more than having a Face.

I think one conclusion that I've drawn about it is that prompts that hook players in by relating 'how does the world work?' to their character's senses and experiences are more important than I'd otherwise think. So now whenever someone is playing a dedicated magic user for example, I tend to give them non-mechanical extra senses about magic when describing scenes or places to them rather than gating that behind skill checks and the like. 'The magic feels hard to grasp here, like its more raw and uncontrolled' and such. This goes for non-casters who get some other kind of supernatural connections or ties through training, events, compacts with spirits, what have you. Someone in my current campaign ended up accidentally inviting a Greater Feyr to make them into its familiar, and so now they're starting to get narration about what people's fears taste like. By having those hooks (and tuning them to what players seem to be interested in), it channels random experimentation towards specific things which I've at least thought a bit about and am willing to expand on. I get the feeling in the current campaign that 'how does innate telepathy work, I want to emulate it/get it' is going to be a thing for one of the players for example.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I mean, half of my campaigns these days are just 'more or less the plot is figure out how the world actually works in time to make a decision that depends on leverage or wisdom granted by that understanding'. So having at least one player willing to RP out doing experiments and science on things is pretty much a central party role now, as much as or more than having a Face.

I think one conclusion that I've drawn about it is that prompts that hook players in by relating 'how does the world work?' to their character's senses and experiences are more important than I'd otherwise think. So now whenever someone is playing a dedicated magic user for example, I tend to give them non-mechanical extra senses about magic when describing scenes or places to them rather than gating that behind skill checks and the like. 'The magic feels hard to grasp here, like its more raw and uncontrolled' and such. This goes for non-casters who get some other kind of supernatural connections or ties through training, events, compacts with spirits, what have you. Someone in my current campaign ended up accidentally inviting a Greater Feyr to make them into its familiar, and so now they're starting to get narration about what people's fears taste like. By having those hooks (and tuning them to what players seem to be interested in), it channels random experimentation towards specific things which I've at least thought a bit about and am willing to expand on. I get the feeling in the current campaign that 'how does innate telepathy work, I want to emulate it/get it' is going to be a thing for one of the players for example.

I do this as well. I also tie in a bit more with abilities like Divine Sense (5e's replacement for a paladin's Detect Evil) and detect magic--for example, if they're around someone who, while isn't demonic themselves, has participated heavily in demonic rites, he'll "smell like demon", like someone who hangs around a smoker will "smell like tobacco". Really strongly corrupted areas will be apparent to anyone attuned to either nature or the gods without any kind of ability; places with "broken" magic will be noticeable to more arcane types especially. While non-mages are more attuned to raw physical things.

That's tied into the nature of magic and (especially) demonic forces in my setting--demons corrupt the world around them by their very presence. And magic works by interfacing your nimbus (spirit, basically) with the ambient magical field. So you can sense such things to some degree, stronger if you're more tied into that world.

[Ettina]

I do this as well. I also tie in a bit more with abilities like Divine Sense (5e's replacement for a paladin's Detect Evil) and detect magic--for example, if they're around someone who, while isn't demonic themselves, has participated heavily in demonic rites, he'll "smell like demon", like someone who hangs around a smoker will "smell like tobacco". Really strongly corrupted areas will be apparent to anyone attuned to either nature or the gods without any kind of ability; places with "broken" magic will be noticeable to more arcane types especially. While non-mages are more attuned to raw physical things.

That's tied into the nature of magic and (especially) demonic forces in my setting--demons corrupt the world around them by their very presence. And magic works by interfacing your nimbus (spirit, basically) with the ambient magical field. So you can sense such things to some degree, stronger if you're more tied into that world.

In our group, we call Divine Sense the paladin sniff, and our vengeance paladin/zealot barbarian literally sniffs the air when he's using it, and experiences the information it gives him as smells.

[Jay R]

If the GM does not believe the world's underpinnings are modern science, then that is invitation to do experiments to figure out what does underpin it. In fact, I'ma change the thread title so it isn't so pigeonholed now.

I have no inherent problem with people who want to play that game instead of D&D, but I won't shut down a D&D campaign for it.

There are so many ways to respond to this, depending on how they approached it.

1. "After a few months of experimentation, you conclude that repeated experiments do not give consistent results. You discover that, while falling object do start falling faster, there is a limit to how much they do, consistent with the fact that there is a maximum damage for falling, regardless of height. And even before reaching that limit, the rate is not inherently consistent. It is very slightly altered when you have cast a Levitation spell immediately before. You conclude that the magic fields generated by thousands of spells of levitation, flight, telekinesis, and other movement spells have very minor effects all through the world."

2. "If your character spends her entire lifetime studying science, she can learn about as much as the average medieval scientist learned in one lifetime. You will certainly not reach a post-Renaissance level of understanding. But I don't know how to run adventures for such a quest, so you need to find another DM."

3. "As you climb the tower to drop two balls of off it, in order to measure their rate of fall, you see a large group of raiders approaching the nearby village. Do you run your experiment, or go save your neighbors?"

4. "Make a Knowledge (modern physics) check to see if your character, who does not have your modern knowledge of of science, can reach the Galilean level of brilliance needed to invent the scientific method. No, you cannot learn Knowledge (modern Physics) in this era."

5. "If you consult a sage, you will learn that the large number of gods affecting the world means that there are no universal principles to discover."

6. "The Temple of Ouranos can tell you that they have tracked the motions of the seven planets (moon, Mercury, Venus, sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) for centuries, and can show you the system of cycles and epicycles that they move in as the orbit the earth. If your PC spends eleven years (as Kepler did), she will conclude that there is no universal gravitational force, and conclude (as others have before) that there are some form of celestials or other creatures moving the planets."

Certainly any knowledge that the characters will need should be (eventually) available. I wrote that blurb for a campaign in which the seven planets were the basis for seven artifacts that the party had, and they slowly learned about the planets and their forces and meanings (moon for changeability, Mercury for speed, Venus for love, etc.). But I have no interest in running a game in which the players ignore the campaign to do something with no particular adventures. That would be like football players ignoring the ball in order to study the varieties of grass on the field.

In any case, PCs would not achieve some incredible scientific breakthrough in one lifetime, and I have no particular interest in running a campaign of scientific experiments. My job as a DM isn't to produce a laboratory, but an ever-increasing set of adventures, obstacles, difficulties, and enemies.

I'm running Dungeons and Dragons, not Theories and Theses.

[NichG]

An actual desire to understand how the world works (rather than a desire to justify a character building a nuclear weapon or railgun or something) is a lot of potential player engagement to leave on the table. You can just as well use that as a resource to lead the characters to adventure, rather than seeing it as something that distracts from adventure.

Someone is interested in 'why does magic really work the way it does?' Well okay then, a few low-grade Knowledge and Spellcraft checks dredge up a recollection that the same spell can take different literal forms when written down by different practitioners, even of the same class. One wizard's Magic Missile is not going to be the same, word for word, as another's. Furthermore, this is something that happens between the scroll and the spellbook - the same scroll transcribed by two different wizards will show different variations. If the character wants to understand more and pursue this line, they will need to accumulate a sufficient number of spellbooks from different casters but all containing the same spell, and basically try to trace the history of that spell. The older the spellbooks, the more this will reveal. Time to raid ancient wizard tombs!

Okay, now you found some recent spellbooks and some ancient ones, and you start to put together an understanding of how spells, on their own, evolve over time. By studying the process of an apprentice transcribing a spell while you watch under Arcane Sight and other divination effects, you detect weak traces of Conjuration and Divination magic being quickened by the mental state of the apprentice doing the scribing. You find that these traces don't appear if the same apprentice scribes the same spell into a new spellbook - they have something to do with the first time a given caster encounters a given spell. If you repeat the experiment with a fairly expensive setup to detect planar resonances and associations, you trace the signal to the Astral plane, but find it also bears a secondary resonance with Ysgard, Mechanus, and, alarmingly, a tertiary resonance with the Abyss that shows up only with a handful of particular spells. The strengths of those resonances seem to be fluctuating over a matter of hours, and the Abyss' influence is growing. Cue planar adventure to stop demons from corrupting the part of the Akashic Record responsible for the ancient compact binding the Words to proxy symbols to protect mortal-kind from their raw force and enable personalized forms of magic to exist within the multi-verse. And as a reward, somewhere along the way is the opportunity to tap and potentially alter the fundamental structure of how magic in the multiverse functions - anything from creating a new School of magic to permanently upgrading the effects of a particular spell for everyone everywhere to attempting to seize hold of one of the Words for the character's own usage (and probably get obliterated in the process, given how that went for Orcus).

[PhoenixPhyre]

Sure, if that's what everyone wants to do. But warping a whole campaign world around one person's ideas like that not only has implications for world building (is this character the first to ever discover these secrets? Why?) but risks leaving the rest of the party bored to tears.

I'll note that I love doing lore stuff with players. I've got a party now who has a source for additional knowledge (a certain cat), which is making me formalize some things that I had already kicking around. But that interaction is happening off-line (well...technically on-line but out of session) as posting links to the campaign setting wiki in response to questions. And it is relevant (to some degree) to the ongoing events. Not plot essential, but more of deep background. And if they use that information? Great.

But it'd take a very special and agreeable party before I'd cater to a "scientific experiment" style. Because mostly, scientific experiments are horribly boring. I got a PhD in Physics. I know from scientific experiments and the utter, mindless tedium of most of it. And I wasn't even a pure experimentalist (more a computational guy). Look at the Gold Foil experiment. Months of sitting in a dark room counting flashes, then moving the screen a fraction of a degree and repeating. Tedious doesn't even begin to describe it. And it doesn't fit well with the normal flow of a campaign.

[LordCdrMilitant]

The recent OotS made me think of all the fun to be had roleplay exploring the properties of magic traps, places, items, etc to find out how it works, and how to use it. One of my earlies memories was listening in to a game where my dad tried to figure out what this bag with an infinite supply of small furry creatures was, but the creatures dissappeared when he got a second one, and how to twist that to his advantage. Some of my favorite DMing moments are players trying to figure out how to beat or at least negate the minor sub-curses of the mournlands, and how exactly the super-science interracts with magic, and surprises from someone playing the Magewright from Grod's Guide to Greateness (tm).

Anyone have any good stories of neat devices, places, sundry that are fun to roleplay investigating?

I've definitely had my own character do experiments or engineering in games, but really only once have had players do it with me as the GM.

99% of the time we conduct experiments, we conduct experiments we know the outcome to, and after describing our set up and process, the GM usually just says "it works", because he doesn't want his game to turn into me giving a lecture on compressible fluid dynamics, and he doesn't want to have reality not ensue because then I'm going to go out of my way to conduct more experiments and force him to develop an entirely new [and reasonably self-consistent] physics model for his world.

Remember, it's much easier to just port in reality into your world and say "magic permits the limited violation of the laws of physics" than it is to decide you're going to be edgy or fantastical or whatever enforced nonreality crap you want and be forced to create your own replacement model.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Remember, it's much easier to just port in reality into your world and say "magic permits the limited violation of the laws of physics" than it is to decide you're going to be edgy or fantastical or whatever enforced nonreality crap you want and be forced to create your own replacement model!

Easier, yes. But as a recovering physicist, that hurts me deeply. "violations of the laws of physics" aren't a thing--physical law is not like legal law. It literally cannot be violated. If there is a violation, it means that what you thought was a law wasn't. Magic as a stapled-on thing breaks more than it solves.

And most people who try to do "experiments" don't actually understand physics anyway, so their attempts at explaining their stuff (even read charitably as anything other than munchkinry) are painful as well. Plus boring and out of sync with the flow of the table. And it's totally 100% metagaming--you're porting in stuff that your character has absolutely no real chance of knowing and using it for advantage. Not quite as bad as reading the DM's notes, but.

<gollum voice>I HATES IT, I DOES!</gollum>

[Mechalich]

Easier, yes. But as a recovering physicist, that hurts me deeply. "violations of the laws of physics" aren't a thing--physical law is not like legal law. It literally cannot be violated. If there is a violation, it means that what you thought was a law wasn't. Magic as a stapled-on thing breaks more than it solves.

This is only true if the axioms governing our universe hold in a fictional universe, which they need not.

The simplest stapled on magic scenario is that reality has multiple layers and magic acts by shifting something one layer up that results in phenomena that would otherwise be impossible in this layer of reality. We already build simulations that work this way so there's no reason why fictional realities - many of which are explicitly simulations created by a class of entities operating at an alternative level of universal construction commonly referred to as deities - would not function in the same manner.

[PhoenixPhyre]

This is only true if the axioms governing our universe hold in a fictional universe, which they need not.

The simplest stapled on magic scenario is that reality has multiple layers and magic acts by shifting something one layer up that results in phenomena that would otherwise be impossible in this layer of reality. We already build simulations that work this way so there's no reason why fictional realities - many of which are explicitly simulations created by a class of entities operating at an alternative level of universal construction commonly referred to as deities - would not function in the same manner.

Yes. If you change the fundamental laws to accommodate magic, you're fine. But then you're back at the "make a whole new set of physical laws" stage. "Magic as exception" and our current definitions of words like "laws of nature" are inherently contradictory. Choose one.

Unless you do, that doesn't work at all. Our current laws assume things like conservation of energy hold globally. Because that encodes fundamental properties of reality. And magic, especially d&d magic, shatters that presumption. In ways that invalidate everything we know about reality.

[Jay R]

The recent OotS made me think of all the fun to be had roleplay exploring the properties of magic traps, places, items, etc to find out how it works, and how to use it. One of my earlies memories was listening in to a game where my dad tried to figure out what this bag with an infinite supply of small furry creatures was, but the creatures dissappeared when he got a second one, and how to twist that to his advantage. Some of my favorite DMing moments are players trying to figure out how to beat or at least negate the minor sub-curses of the mournlands, and how exactly the super-science interracts with magic, and surprises from someone playing the Magewright from Grod's Guide to Greateness (tm).

Anyone have any good stories of neat devices, places, sundry that are fun to roleplay investigating?

Getting back to the OP's question, here is a story about exploiting a neat device.

My first game was original D&D, back in 1975. My first character had a Bag of Useless Duplication. You could put something inside it, and you would get back a useless duplicate -- swords that wouldn't hold an edge, food that wouldn't nourish, gems that were obvious fakes, etc. Put in a magic item, and you would get one back that looked identical, but had no magic. It was intended as a magic item that had no use.

This character was a fallen paladin. Actually, he was turned Chaotic (which meant Evil back then) by an intelligent, high-ego sword. But the other players still thought he was a paladin.

Shortly after I got it (and nobody knew about it), I heard about a party that had been turned to stone by a basilisk. I went out and got their stone bodies and brought them back to a cleric to be revived. I asked the DM how long it took for them to recover. Since the rulebook never considered that question, he decided that it would take several hours. So my "paladin" didn't wait for them to wake up; he left before they could thank him or reward him.

But somehow, none of their magic items worked. I'm told they spent a lot of time trying to re-activate their magic, and arguing with the DM that being turned to stone shouldn't have made the magic stop working.

Meanwhile, my fallen paladin had a bunch of new magic items. They never came looking for their stuff, because it never occurred to them that the items were stolen.

[NichG]

Sure, if that's what everyone wants to do. But warping a whole campaign world around one person's ideas like that not only has implications for world building (is this character the first to ever discover these secrets? Why?) but risks leaving the rest of the party bored to tears.

I'll note that I love doing lore stuff with players. I've got a party now who has a source for additional knowledge (a certain cat), which is making me formalize some things that I had already kicking around. But that interaction is happening off-line (well...technically on-line but out of session) as posting links to the campaign setting wiki in response to questions. And it is relevant (to some degree) to the ongoing events. Not plot essential, but more of deep background. And if they use that information? Great.

I know from scientific experiments and the utter, mindless tedium of most of it. And I wasn't even a pure experimentalist (more a computational guy).

Same background, actually. But I'm sort of surprised. In my case, having done lots of computational experiments where you can basically change the laws of the universe and see what the consequences are almost immediately (these days, even in real time) gives me a lot of material to pick out the exciting moments and ahas and things and basically abstract away the rest as much as possible. I mean, you wouldn't (hopefully) run a blow-by-blow of someone's training session in swordplay where they hack at a combat dummy 1000 times a day with each arm, and that's its own kind of tedious. Soft condensed matter stuff tends to be very dynamic and visually striking though - turbulence, avalanches in granular piles, solitons, etc, they're things you can look at and interpret directly rather than needing a layer or two of mathematical interface so you can know what the result implies like with some QM/particle physics things.

I wouldn't e.g. run something where a player had to protect themselves from accidental p-hacking when trying large numbers of combinations. I'd also tend to lean away from quantitative puzzles (like giving a list of observations and making them figure out that its an exponential decay), and focus more on qualitative and conceptual paradoxes - basically picking out the dramatic moments and emphasizing those.


Look at the Gold Foil experiment. Months of sitting in a dark room counting flashes, then moving the screen a fraction of a degree and repeating. Tedious doesn't even begin to describe it. And it doesn't fit well with the normal flow of a campaign.

An example from a past campaign, I had a sort of phase transition in physics that became fluidized at a certain amount of damage taking place all in one place and time (basically, attacks or effects that dealt more than 500 damage within a 5ft tile in one shot would trigger this effect - yes, that's laughably low, but it was designed to be a hittable target). If you triggered that, it'd be like a sort of Wild Magic effect that could twist or distort spells and powers on the things that were hit. But you could also use it as a kind of alchemical tool, permuting or reacting together various exotic energies or substances in a certain way. There was a specific GUT-like hierarchy I had in mind for how different energy types 'froze out' from deeper fundamental forces, and a few alternate ways they could freeze out if you hit those energy levels. It wasn't exactly a core plot point of the campaign, but it was a fun thing for players to mess with, and once or twice they used that sort of alchemical shift property to resolve things beyond their nominal paygrade.

In another campaign (this one based on Planescape), I had an overall plotline of an organization that was ostensibly trying to alter the alignment system (for various reasons for each member - one was an Athar and wanted to stick it to the gods, another was a Doomguard and wanted to see everything burn, another was a philosopher who wanted to understand the fundamental nature of truth in a multiverse created by collective belief). The party ended up aligning with the philosopher after sort of shearing off the Athar and Doomguard members, and helped them run an experiment creating a region of space completely devoid of the influence of belief. It was a one-off scene in an inventor's tower in a remote demiplane, but the party ended up using the results of that experiment to figure out how to alter the feedback loop between deities and their worshippers and hijinks ensued in a race for that one location in Pandemonium where you can say something and be heard by anyone (everyone) in the planes.

So I think it can be done, either as seasoning or as a main plot driver. Run it like a movie about science rather than the reality of science though :)

[Spriteless]

And most people who try to do "experiments" don't actually understand physics anyway, so their attempts at explaining their stuff (even read charitably as anything other than munchkinry) are painful as well. Plus boring and out of sync with the flow of the table. And it's totally 100% metagaming--you're porting in stuff that your character has absolutely no real chance of knowing and using it for advantage. Not quite as bad as reading the DM's notes, but.

<gollum voice>I HATES IT, I DOES!</gollum>

I mean, rl physics is getting more and more precise, but it takes less precision to, say, disprove the Four Humours based theory of medicine. You can't yell at someone with too little bile to fix them. Or to disprove the Platonic Ideal model; you can't refine silver into gold. Gold is the best metal, and when refined any metal is better, but just keeping on refining doesn't cause the metals to level up into the next best one. These theories are stories about the world that are poetic, but false.

Likewise, Mordenkainen's theory of The Weave can predict whatever story Hasbro or the GM needs any outcome post hock, but is very bad at telling you what you need to know about the future. Unless you trust Mordenkainen to explain it for you. You know, maybe this is a feature not a glitch.

I understand you don't want to derail your game going full "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" on every spell. But if a player is cursed then I expect them to test the edges of the curse, and if one player has a magic fire sword while another is a cook, I expect them to ask if they can stick the skillet on top of the sword. And the answer, is the DM simulating the experiment based on what they decide to be the properties of magical fire swords' fire while not slaying. There's, like, a spectrum.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I mean, rl physics is getting more and more precise, but it takes less precision to, say, disprove the Four Humours based theory of medicine. You can't yell at someone with too little bile to fix them. Or to disprove the Platonic Ideal model; you can't refine silver into gold. Gold is the best metal, and when refined any metal is better, but just keeping on refining doesn't cause the metals to level up into the next best one. These theories are stories about the world that are poetic, but false.

Likewise, Mordenkainen's theory of The Weave can predict whatever story Hasbro or the GM needs any outcome post hock, but is very bad at telling you what you need to know about the future. Unless you trust Mordenkainen to explain it for you. You know, maybe this is a feature not a glitch.

I understand you don't want to derail your game going full "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" on every spell. But if a player is cursed then I expect them to test the edges of the curse, and if one player has a magic fire sword while another is a cook, I expect them to ask if they can stick the skillet on top of the sword. And the answer, is the DM simulating the experiment based on what they decide to be the properties of magical fire swords' fire while not slaying. There's, like, a spectrum.

Except what if you can do those things? That's the nature of a fantasy world that gets away from "real world except magic works." Magic, to be meaningful, has to be part of the metaphysics from day 0.

My own setting is a take on "maybe Aristotle and early alchemists were righter than they knew." And I've built the core ideas around that.

Whereas if you try to keep to real physics, you get inconsistency immediately. You can't violate the conservation laws and keep the rest the same. Real world natural laws, consistent laws, magic. Choose 2. And if you choose magic as one of them, the one left out is gone completely.

Consistent magic won't look anything like real world physics, at least under the hood (you can make the surface similar by tweaking the dials).

And real world science plus magic is inconsistent at all scales. Which makes it rather unrealistic, because the defining characteristic of real science is its internal consistency.

Edit: And the central ideas at the heart of the Scientific Revolution don't exactly fit well into many (if not most) fantasy worlds. Heck, they were a really late addition even to our own, very-well-structured world. I have a book that describes in detail how the uptake of the idea that the world can (and should) be quantified and measured and that those measurements mean something was slow and inconsistent and how large chunks of the power structure (in all forms) fought it. Even the idea of having precise knowledge of time intervals (at a lower scale than "dawn, dusk, day, night") and having consistent lengths of time (ie 1 day = 24 hours) was pretty alien throughout the Medieval period until the end. Sure, they broke down the day into periods, but those weren't of consistent length (since they were dependent on inconsistent natural cycles like sunrise/sunset). So the idea of tracking "this spell lasts for exactly 6 seconds" or "I can cast 4 of these spells as long as I get exactly X hours of rest in between" are ideas not natural in an era before the Scientific Revolution.

Heck, even the idea that you can prove or disprove ideas by experiments is a late addition to the world of knowledge. Aristotle wouldn't have agreed that your experiments mean anything. Of course you couldn't do convert lead into gold--you weren't pure enough. Or didn't have the right methods. Or whatever. But the philosophy was sound (to him), so of course it's correct. Disproof by experiment was meaningless to many of the early "natural philosophers" (pre Scientific Revolution).

So trying to be all "scientific" about fantasy runs into a huge meta issue. How does your character know about these things, when none of the rest of the world does?

[Spriteless]

If people can turn lead into gold, then that is a fact about the world that science can be done with. Maybe it takes rituals so expensive that it doesn't cause inflation. Maybe it's rare because you do have to be special to do it. Or more skilled. Or too pure to be concerned with gold. Or in the feywild. Or few know the ritual, but if it became common knowledge people would use it until lead was worth more than gold. (And the people who know don't want that!)

Lead turning into gold isn't unscientific, it's a theory that is false. In a fantasy world, it can be true, and you can work out some broad story strokes about it being true, the same as you might for any situation. I don't think you need any more than that for experimentation to be rewarding.

As for why the characters might have a scientific bent in a pseudo-medieval world... It could be just a simple practicality spread out from another discipline: a herbalist knows that knows a herb that can be used to cure or to poison might be rigorous about testing magic potions, without thinking that they have crossed into wizards' territory. Or the blacksmith thinks in terms of getting stuff done, tests if the frostbrand can help them cool hot steel faster. And maybe every interesting success will not encourage scientific revolution, but be kept as a trade secret.

Or it might be the pseudo more than the medieval. I mean, the setting doesn't really encourage you to think about it too hard. All the bad bits of history, the slaving and the pillaging and superstition, are enacted by orks and hobgoblins. The good parts, the civilization and the building and wisdom, are done by various pretty demihumans. PCs are scientific because they are wise, civilized, builders who are also everything else good. Or because the players assume science works, and don't stretch their imagination much when creating their character!

[Brother Oni]

Lead turning into gold isn't unscientific, it's a theory that is false.

Anecdotally, we can these days. It just takes a particle accelerator to slam enough protons into a nuclei until you get gold. It's not economically viable, the infrastructure is ridiculous and the scientists have better things to do with their time, but it is theoretically possible.

One of the cornerstones of modern science is that the results are reproducible - if you do the exact same process again, you'll get the same result.

There's the Discworld test as known by Rincewind -flip a coin to test the laws of probability. Instead of the results being a binary heads/tails, he guessed that the coin would land on its edge in an area of high magic (other coins also turned into a butterfly, carried on spinning up into orbit and other weirdness). That sort of randomness would also be available to any GM who wants to limit the level of modern scientific metagaming.

Another example would be the railgun, one quick and easy method to shut down budding railgun manufacturers is to have their high level experiments not be reproducible or there's an underpinning effect that caps the magAnotnetic field strength to a party trick.

Say magnetic fields aren't a function of their spin, but are provided by the magnetic cousins of Maxwell's demons; when the PCs gather enough magnets together, the demons decide to have a party instead, resulting in the whole magnetic field failing because they're all too drunk to do their job.

Trying to teleport something thing into orbit results in it ending elsewhere as the LaPlacian demon in charge of that object's position, suffers from vertigo.

A thought hit me - as this is D&D, you could simply have certain underpinning effects (magnetism, etc) run by tiny demons (Chaotic Evil) while others are run by tiny devils (Lawful Evil). Gravity works consistently as it's run by devils, while magnetism only works sometimes as it's run by demons.

You can even stop players meta-gaming that as well - as I understand it, an infernal contract is with a single being; if a single demon/devil can manipulate one atom, the number of contracts required to achieve any sort of reasonable effect would be astronomical (3.05x1021 to shift one gram of gold freely).

[Jay R]

As for why the characters might have a scientific bent in a pseudo-medieval world...

That's not an issue. We know that there can be people with a scientific bent in a medieval world. We had them in our world.

And after generations of them toiled quietly for hundreds of years, examining the world very slowly, the scientific method was eventually developed, allowing a new, non-medieval approach that eventually produced scientific progress.

The question is why player characters in an adventure game would have a bent for years of slow, quiet toil that would likely not produce anything valuable in their lifetime, when there are villages to save, caverns to explore, and wilderness to tame.

I have no problem with a group that wants to play Theories and Theses. But I won't try to run that game in the middle of my Dungeons and Dragons game, for the same reason I won't let a baseball game break out on my football field during a football game.

Those two games are not compatible. If I'm refereeing one of them, I'm not refereeing the other one.

As I said earlier in the thread,


In any case, PCs would not achieve some incredible scientific breakthrough in one lifetime, and I have no particular interest in running a campaign of scientific experiments. My job as a DM isn't to produce a laboratory, but an ever-increasing set of adventures, obstacles, difficulties, and enemies.

But if there are players who want to play Theories and Theses, and a TM who wants to run it (and can figure out some way to do it), then have fun! You don't have to play my way.

[Roger_Druid]

Hi all!

Well, I was a 2nd Ed. Druid of 6th lvl, then. My DM asked the party (a fighter / thief, a fighter / mage, a bard, and me), as a quest for obtaining a particular spell for the mage / thief, to calculate how much time would it take for two singular unmoving points, each of 1'000gramms in an environment without friction, to touch. The points distanced 1meter and, of course, Newton's gravity constant was known. I was able to help my fellow teammate, by solving a 2nd grade, binomial differential equation; the answer is something more than 27hours. It was fun!

Roger Druid

P.S. I used everyday mathematics and then converted all symbols in a druidic-fashion solution (of my thinking). This was more fun!

[Bohandas]

I think most would be annoyed that their players aren't getting on with the plot. Half the players too TBH. This feels like a downtime activity rather than the main focus of the game.

I think it could be a game in and of itself. Like just doing SCP style experiments on wondrous items.

Like what happens if we use a decanter of endless water underwater? What if we set it going in a sealed chamber? What if we apply backpressure? etc.

[False God]

In theory? Awesome.

In practice... how many DMs make an unreal self-consistent and scientifically testable system for their world?

Not enough.


If the GM does not believe the world's underpinnings are modern science, then that is invitation to do experiments to figure out what does underpin it. In fact, I'ma change the thread title so it isn't so pigeonholed now.
Ugh.

----
I'm a huge nerd, physics is my JAM. But when I D&D? I'm not here to figure out the scientific underpinnings of the world beyond:
I want to make an arcana check about how well I understand magic, *rolls* 22, how well do I understand it?
*DM exposits the extent of my character's understanding*.
Great, lets get back to the adventure.

I understand some people do, and that's great, but my experience has been that while that's a lot of fun for them it is sort of it's own form of power-gaming, seeking advantage from the world that otherwise wouldn't exist (IE: meta-knowledging a rail gun out of an electric spell and some magnets). For the rest of us who want to play the game, it tends to be annoying as large amounts of time get spent on trying to figure out if you can build an internal combustion engine with a bunch of wands of firebolt and some oil monster or something.

I also find that these players can rarely "address it outside the session". I'm fine with working with people to understand the world, but in turn they need to understand how much IRL time that involves, and "game time" is not their time alone.

[King of Nowhere]

Easier, yes. But as a recovering physicist, that hurts me deeply. "violations of the laws of physics" aren't a thing--physical law is not like legal law. It literally cannot be violated. If there is a violation, it means that what you thought was a law wasn't. Magic as a stapled-on thing breaks more than it solves.

well, most of what we call "physical laws" are approximated and only reliable within certain constraints. exceptions are the universal forces, mass/energy conservation, and little else. so positing "magic" as a fifth fundamental force, so that as long as magic=0 the physical laws are identical to our own, but get changed when magic enters the equation, is good enough for anything but the most pedantic scrutiny.

furthermore, i am having a hard time imagining a self-professed recovering physicist (or anyone science-minded) actually prefer to run the universe based on ancient phylosophy. we can create a world as we like, and we choose to base it on bogus?



And most people who try to do "experiments" don't actually understand physics anyway, so their attempts at explaining their stuff (even read charitably as anything other than munchkinry) are painful as well. Plus boring and out of sync with the flow of the table. And it's totally 100% metagaming--you're porting in stuff that your character has absolutely no real chance of knowing and using it for advantage. Not quite as bad as reading the DM's notes, but.

<gollum voice>I HATES IT, I DOES!</gollum>
well, it seems you are referring to a specific set of experimenting, i.e. trying to make modern, potentially game-breaking achievements.

on the other hand, there are many perfectly good in-character ways to experiment. currently i have a player who is trying to cultivate stuff into a wild magic area to try and figure out if he can get something useful out of it. the wild magic area is constantly spawning denizens that threaten a nearby civilization, so it all ties into the greater plot.

and before that, i had a plot revolving around a druid who created a bacteria that would zombify animals, so that clerics would be called to turn those undead, because the bacteria were engineered to collect divine energy and bring it back to the druid through a convolute pathway relying entirely on mundane science - especially since the druid hides in the wild magic area, so magic means are unreliable.
and the players faced some limited zombie outbreaks (the duid was not evil, and he was very careful to engineer the zombies so that they would pose as little actual danger as possible), and they noticed the irregularities and started to dig, and they basically had to reconstruct all the chain of events to track down the druid, by making experiments on the bacteria they collected. until, bit by bit over many sessions - interspersed with other plots - they eventually determined that the bacteria would drop on the ground, become dormant, get flushed by rainwater, eventually making their way to the region's major river, that goes through the wild magic area, which would reawaken the bacteria, that would then follow a chemical signal secerned by a specially engineered algae on the bottom of the river that would collect the divine power and store it inside a fungus.
and it was a good plot. well received, had the players engaged

some people just want to roll some dice and slay some monsters, others have more of a puzzle-solving approach.

[PhoenixPhyre]

well, most of what we call "physical laws" are approximated and only reliable within certain constraints. exceptions are the universal forces, mass/energy conservation, and little else. so positing "magic" as a fifth fundamental force, so that as long as magic=0 the physical laws are identical to our own, but get changed when magic enters the equation, is good enough for anything but the most pedantic scrutiny.

furthermore, i am having a hard time imagining a self-professed recovering physicist (or anyone science-minded) actually prefer to run the universe based on ancient phylosophy. we can create a world as we like, and we choose to base it on bogus?


If I base it on "real", then everything breaks. Because magic is fundamentally incompatible with real world physics. At its core. And it's not as simple as just having another fundamental force that can be set to 0--everything, down to the conservation laws that represent the fundamental symmetries of reality have to change. That's what's not being understood. Magic and real world physics cannot coexist, at least if you want any thing with any kind of internal consistency. It's not about approximations. It's about the fundamental things. And magic, especially D&D-style magic, shatters those fundamental things as soon as it exists to any degree. And once shattered, they have to be rebuilt from the ground up and those new laws will look nothing like real ones. Drink deeply at the well of [real world physics] or not at all. There is no middle ground--that way lies madness (well, massive inconsistency and constant houserules and loophole hunting). Magic, consistency, real-world physics. Choose two.

Plus, the real world doesn't let me reach the results I want. I want a world where much of what we know isn't so. Where the entire universe is ~4 AU in diameter. Where the stars are the beacons of angelic fortresses as they endlessly hunt things from Beyond reality that leak in. Where "a wizard did it" is a valid reason for things. Where cats can see beyond the veil between life and death and usher souls into the next world (when they're not getting high on the good catnip). Reality imposes lots of constraints. And those constraints mean I can't have a D&D world that actually lives and breathes. You can add epicycles, but when the underlying physical laws make no sense at all in that context (as they cannot once you try to force real world physics into a magical setting), it hurts my scientific sensibilities. So given the choice, I'm going to sacrifice real world science and make that "bogus" into the (fictional) reality. Because it's only bogus here. In another world, what we call real is what is bogus. And the great part about fantasy is that I can do this. I can ask the "what if" questions without getting the answer "good job, now everything's broken and everyone's dead and there's no matter anywhere." Which is what happens when you try to "tweak" real world physics. There is only one self-consistent solution to the laws as we know them, the one without magic. Adding magic, like quantizing gravity (in the current theories), causes infinities and TILT errors everywhere.

[King of Nowhere]

If I base it on "real", then everything breaks. Because magic is fundamentally incompatible with real world physics. At its core. And it's not as simple as just having another fundamental force that can be set to 0--everything, down to the conservation laws that represent the fundamental symmetries of reality have to change. That's what's not being understood. Magic and real world physics cannot coexist, at least if you want any thing with any kind of internal consistency. It's not about approximations. It's about the fundamental things. And magic, especially D&D-style magic, shatters those fundamental things as soon as it exists to any degree. And once shattered, they have to be rebuilt from the ground up and those new laws will look nothing like real ones. Drink deeply at the well of [real world physics] or not at all. There is no middle ground--that way lies madness (well, massive inconsistency and constant houserules and loophole hunting). Magic, consistency, real-world physics. Choose two.


why not?
real world physics are true until magic comes in. then they locally stop applying. then they are in effect again.

oh, i think i get what you are saying. i am versed enough in physics myself. you say the laws are incompatible by meaning something like "if enthropy always increases, and then you can make magic and it decreases, then entrophy is not always increasing and a whole host of underlying theorems won't work anymore".
i still don't see why this would be a problem. the new law of enthrophy is that enthropy increases unless magicked, and that's it. the whole host of other theorems also work, as long as magic is not called into it.

when doing the fluff, i compare magic to programming. so, there is "reality", which is basically a program, with some objects and some rules (physical laws) telling them how to behave.
then a programmer can temporarily disable or alter some of those rules, locally. the program still works.
you can make a program, for example, that simulates a river flowing. and then you suddenly teleport a bunch of water somewhere else. then you reactivate normal physics. there will be some local chaos, then equilibrium is reached again. you won't get a fatal error. the system keeps working consistently.
i often describe magic as reprogramming reality, including using some of the same therminology in the description.
i don't see how the fundamental symmetries not being respected would impact any of that.
besides, that's modern physics. i'm not even sure that would apply to my setting, or if it stops at newtonian physics (you may argue that since i have atoms, then i must have modern physics, as atoms do not work otherwise. but there are many ways to handwave that. just because i want consistency it does not mean i want to actually write equations, even though i speak as if those equations do exhist and people in world could make sense of them). Because i'm not talking about making a DC 40 check and coming up with a lighting-bolt-powered railgun dealing 800d6 of damage. I'm talking about having a druid create bacteria to syphoon divine energy for himself. that's the kind of instances where i use science for my campaign.

and on the other hand, it's not like your approach of ignoring real world physics does actually solve anything. so, you decide real physics does not apply. where do you stop? is that bridge stable because of force balance, or not? are illnesses caused by viruses, or by "bad air"? and in the latter case, what is causing decomposition? you are not fixing any problem, you are merely avoiding them. If i ask you if matter in your world is made of atoms, you would tell me to shut up. and that becase otherwise, if you told me that atoms exhist and behave more or less like real ones, then you may want to make all manner of calculations involving fundamental forces and symmetries and you'd be unable to make ends meet. I don't see how stopping the consistence many steps before would improve things.
i think you either had some players try too hard to metagame their science knowledge and you put a blanket ban on it. a bit like some dm that forbids cross-gender roleplaying because once they had a dude roleplaying a girl as an excuse to do fetish stuff.
either that, or you fixate too hard on high-end modern physics. i never even cared about that, and it's mostly beyond me anyway. but chemistry, biology and non-quantum physics is still recognizable in my world. social sciences too, for the most part. evolution is a fact, even though magic and gods making new things appear at random is throwing everything off course all the time.

you may say that chemistry and biology require the underlying quantum. i can handwave it. you can throw all physics out of the window and handwave that fire just burns without worrying about enthalpy and enthropy and activation energy. i can keep all science that's understandable to the educated people in my group, and handwave every underlying principle.




Plus, the real world doesn't let me reach the results I want. I want a world where much of what we know isn't so. Where the entire universe is ~4 AU in diameter. Where the stars are the beacons of angelic fortresses as they endlessly hunt things from Beyond reality that leak in. Where "a wizard did it" is a valid reason for things. Where cats can see beyond the veil between life and death and usher souls into the next world (when they're not getting high on the good catnip). Reality imposes lots of constraints. And those constraints mean I can't have a D&D world that actually lives and breathes.

You can. with magic. just use magic to fix everything you want. look, we all know the square-cube law is a thing, so you can't have giant flying dragons, right? ok, dragons use magic. which in turn makes them dependent upon subsisting on magical fields. We know life need some energy source, so you can't have the underdark? ok, there are magic-eating plants. you want cats to see beyond the veil? cats have some minor magic power, why not. you can certainly have your stars be magical angelic fortresses, with the "planets" moving around the sky on giant rails that are made by magic. because magic overrules physics as long as it is in effect.

P.S. you keep saying that trying to add stuff to real physics would make it break and the numbers would not add up; but isn't our own understanding of physics broken already? correct me if i'm wrong, maybe there was some breakthrough in the last few years of which i'm not aware, but last i heard, we still had some inconsistencies between quantum mechanics and relativity. meaning the known physical laws are still not perfectly accurate. furthermore, we still have dark matter and dark energy making up 95% of the universe, and we still have no idea what they are and how they would fit into our neat schemes.
you say that it's impossible to add stuff to physics without making it inconsistent, but that's demonstrably wrong. Because there is a lot of stuff that we have to add to physics, and the universe still exhisting means that it can stay consistent.
it indeed happened several times in the history of science that a small inconsistency was explored further and led to discovering some fundamental flaw in our understanding. scientific revolutions followed, and a new self-consistent system was developed. until the next inconsistency that couldn't be smoothed over was discovered. Yet all the previous science was still good, in that it made predictions consistent with observations for most things. is it so incredible to accept that you could have another science revolution revolving around magic that would make for a consistent set of laws?

[PhoenixPhyre]

Yes, if you are willing to abandon internal self-consistency (ie "if I plug the output from this experiment back into the experiment, I should get the same answer out again unchanged"), you can keep real world physics and have magic. Otherwise, no. And without that self-consistency, you can't have experiments that mean anything. Because the answer is always "whatever the DM says in this instance". Do the same experiment 3 times--get 14 different answers. At that point, you no longer have natural laws at all.

And it's not even the high-level stuff.

Magic breaks the basic conservation laws that all the rest of our understanding of the world rest on. Everything, including basic Newtonian mechanics, is really just a symptom of those conservation laws interacting. If any of those are violated at all, anywhere, at any time, then everything we know has to be rearranged. And D&D magic (specifically) shatters those for each and every spell. And not just spells. Dragons existing and not being crushed under their own weight violates the Square-Cube law. Dragons breathing fire violates all sorts of conservation laws. Teleportation violates causality.

Magic and the real world are incompatible at the base, root layer. To use a programming metaphor, you're trying to run a program compiled on windows on an 8-bit microprocessor without an OS. The code won't even fit, let alone run.

And yes, I do know how my metaphysics works. At a deeper level than any player has reached yet. And I've taken pains to make sure it's broad enough to cover all the things and extensible enough to answer things I haven't been asked yet. It takes effort, but it's effort I, personally, am willing to expend to have a functioning world that's not just a theater stage with a 2D backdrop.

Edit: And adding stuff is fine if and only if it doesn't conflict with the existing structure. Theory A (covering X, Y, and Z) and Theory B (covering A, B, C, and Z) should make the same predictions about Z. If they don't, one or both is wrong. And if one conflicts with law (which isn't just theory after it's proven, it's more fundamental than that), you either have to rewrite the law to cover that case or you junk the theory. And when it comes to the basic conservation laws, you're not going to rewrite those. Because the knock-on effects of doing so are too horrible to contemplate (ie rewriting every single theory about every single fact about everything we know about the physical world, everywhere.). And the results of doing so would (after it all shakes out) result in laws completely unlike what we have now. It's like trying to shove a new piece into a puzzle by brute force. It doesn't work that way. The whole thing fits together at a tight level. You can add pieces around the outside, or take out the pieces that don't quite fit right and replace them, but you can't shove a piece in between two pieces that already fit. That just breaks the whole thing.

[NichG]

I think perhaps the thing that wouldn't be clear to non-physicists in this thread is that 'X is conserved except in case Y' is not a theory that the way physics is done as a discipline could actually produce or work with in practice, even if it could be a true statement about a world. A lot of the success of mathematical approaches to science depend on simplifying abstractions being so unreasonably effective that we can get away with assuming that they're fully general (and then do experiments to test that generality). The issue is, if you have a rule like 'X is conserved except in case Y' then that rule doesn't exclude an unseen case Z or Q or W in which X would also not be conserved. So a physicist seeing evidence that 'X is conserved except in case Y' would just say 'X is not conserved', because that is at the level of generality needed to be able to have any hope of extrapolating to totally unseen details.

If you have a world that has exceptions at every level, then the fundamental study of how the world works is going to be something with more similarity to biology or chemistry than to physics. Physics is what you can still be reasonably confident will be true even if you know almost nothing about the details of what you're trying to predict. I don't need to look at your circuit diagrams to know that your perpetual motion machine won't work; I only need to know the total mass you consume (including breathing, etc), the total mass you excrete, and your starting mass to know how heavy you are now - it doesn't matter how your digestion works. So once you add exceptions, in order to work with things I now need to know whether those exceptions are in play, or I have to conservatively assume that the exceptions are always in play.

That said, I think there are several ways to implement magic that wouldn't run afoul of a physics sufficiently like ours to be intuitive. A lot of this shows up in sci-fi magic setups. Imagine a planet with geosynchronous solar-powered satellites with onboard high-powered cameras and microwave or laser emitters. Whenever they detect a certain geometric shape at a scale above 1m diameter, they beam power down to that spot - enough to cook anything organic unfortunate enough to stand in the symbol. In that world, you could have a regressed civilization where the 'mages' of that society know the different symbols that act as control commands to the satellite network, though their magic would be very limited to 'burn anyone who stands in the ritual circle'. It wouldn't take much beyond some kind of biological receiver that had been engineered into the species' genes to expand that to general divination-style magic, if the satellites were part of a computing network and could share overland maps, tracking information about individuals or events, or the results of calculations and predictive models beyond what a person can evaluate with their brain. But you wouldn't have healing spells, freezing spells, or magic that worked inside buildings or underground in such a world, much less planar travel, spirits, afterlife stuff, etc. It'd be a particular setting, with its own particular characteristics.

Another way to sort of leave things with the possibility of being compatible (though this will collapse with enough attention to side-effects and consequences such as calculations of just how much potential energy would be bound up in a handful of dirt in this system...) is that 'magical' effects are all making use of the fact that local matter is infused with a dust of stabilized wormholes that connect to a variety of extreme locations. You wouldn't have gestures and words driving magic in such a system, but probably you'd be using some sort of driver to cause wormholes connected at specific distances and directions but not others to widen, letting energy and material flow from the one environment to the other. So a fireball doesn't create energy, it just helps energy from a star dozens of lightyears away to more quickly come to equilibrium with the relatively cold planet you're casting that fireball on. Such a system would not tend to have any kind of enchantment/illusion magic, no necromancy or healing, no afterlife stuff, etc, but lightning bolts and fireballs and freezing winds and sudden vacuums would all be pretty natural, and teleportation effects would also sort of be on the table. Some divination or luck-based things could be plausibly consistent here because of relativistic effects, though if you wanted to play this as hard science you probably need a Novikov self-consistency sort of picture.

And of course you could do the 'the whole setting is running in a simulation on some systems somewhere' backstory, though it tends to detract from the impact of choices and accomplishments of characters within that setting and is a pretty heavy sacrifice to make in general unless you want to run a game about that conceit.

I think the hardest thing to keep if you want a world that isn't just based on different principles is the degree to which magic is represented as a cognitive system. It's easy to make a facsimilie of a fireball in the real world - just use a fuel source or source of projected energy or whatever; its not as if the energy of a fireball would be hard to produce from the annihilation of a quantity of antimatter too small to see. But it's harder for me to imagine a cosmology that looks anything like real physics where a fundamental force is most strongly interacted with via saying words, making gestures, or thinking thoughts.

[Mechalich]

And of course you could do the 'the whole setting is running in a simulation on some systems somewhere' backstory, though it tends to detract from the impact of choices and accomplishments of characters within that setting and is a pretty heavy sacrifice to make in general unless you want to run a game about that conceit.

In most fantasy settings the whole setting is a simulation running in the mind of a deity. 'Magic' in such a setting means grabbing a hold of either the deity's influence directly, or treating the deity as divine programmer with mortals allowed to occasionally snatch and grab some of the coding commands for local implementation. OOTS, post-Thor exposition, is actually a very solid example of how this works.

Having the creator be a computer rather than a god is, at the level at which gameplay happens, largely semantic.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I think the hardest thing to keep if you want a world that isn't just based on different principles is the degree to which magic is represented as a cognitive system. It's easy to make a facsimilie of a fireball in the real world - just use a fuel source or source of projected energy or whatever; its not as if the energy of a fireball would be hard to produce from the annihilation of a quantity of antimatter too small to see. But it's harder for me to imagine a cosmology that looks anything like real physics where a fundamental force is most strongly interacted with via saying words, making gestures, or thinking thoughts.

It's a resonant effect. Your soul is tied into the ambient energy field (which is the same "stuff" as the matter, just diffuse and unaspected). When you feed bits of aspected personal energy into particular resonant patterns in your soul[1] (which patterns, because mortals are mortals, require movements, words, and/or material components as keys), the ambient field resonates in particular ways, taking on aspects that appear to be the "real thing". So a fireball is the forcible imposition of excess fire aspect onto the area of effect. It's not real fire (ie there is no combustion at its source), but it acts as if it were. Lightning bolt is imposition of "lightning" aspect (possibly a mix of various other aspects) onto a particular area, not anything to do with separated charges and electric potentials.

All matter is made up of the ambient energy (call it aether), just with particular aspects. The interaction, addition, removal, and change of these aspects is the equivalent of "chemistry" AND "magic". In this model, plants don't photosynthesize--they take in aether with particular aspects from the land and air (and possibly light) and convert those into condensed "plant matter" aether.

With careful dial setting, you can make a setting that has magic and has properties that an early-medieval alchemist would recognize. Sure, under the hood it's very very different (no conservation of energy or momentum, no atoms, light doesn't behave nearly the same way, "chemistry" is completely different), but the outward, gross effects are within epsilon.

But yes. If you want any of the explanations for things to match earth physics as we know it now, magic (at least in the D&D sense) poses all sorts of difficulties.

[1] these patterns might be called "spells", and the energy you use might come from "spell slots"

[Spriteless]

Plus, the real world doesn't let me reach the results I want. I want a world where much of what we know isn't so. Where the entire universe is ~4 AU in diameter. Where the stars are the beacons of angelic fortresses as they endlessly hunt things from Beyond reality that leak in. Where "a wizard did it" is a valid reason for things. Where cats can see beyond the veil between life and death and usher souls into the next world (when they're not getting high on the good catnip). Reality imposes lots of constraints. And those constraints mean I can't have a D&D world that actually lives and breathes. You can add epicycles, but when the underlying physical laws make no sense at all in that context (as they cannot once you try to force real world physics into a magical setting), it hurts my scientific sensibilities. So given the choice, I'm going to sacrifice real world science and make that "bogus" into the (fictional) reality. Because it's only bogus here. In another world, what we call real is what is bogus. And the great part about fantasy is that I can do this. I can ask the "what if" questions without getting the answer "good job, now everything's broken and everyone's dead and there's no matter anywhere." Which is what happens when you try to "tweak" real world physics. There is only one self-consistent solution to the laws as we know them, the one without magic. Adding magic, like quantizing gravity (in the current theories), causes infinities and TILT errors everywhere.
Okay. Now I understand. You meant science as the body of knowledge, and refined modern methodologies to get that knowledge. I meant science as any tool to gather knowledge besides a book.

Say I'm planning to go against a necromancer. If cats can see beyond the veil of death then I would ask a lot of cats if they saw anything unusual, before I go storming the skull castle. I don't expect it would take more time out of game than a more usual gather information roll, and might get some more interesting perspectives and world building. I imagine you would enjoy that someone paid enough attention to worldbuilding to do that.

And I also imagine you would get annoyed if someone asked "Hey can catamounts do it too? Lions and tigers? Tabaxi? Displacer beasts?"

[PhoenixPhyre]

Okay. Now I understand. You meant science as the body of knowledge, and refined modern methodologies to get that knowledge. I meant science as any tool to gather knowledge besides a book.

Say I'm planning to go against a necromancer. If cats can see beyond the veil of death then I would ask a lot of cats if they saw anything unusual, before I go storming the skull castle. I don't expect it would take more time out of game than a more usual gather information roll, and might get some more interesting perspectives and world building. I imagine you would enjoy that someone paid enough attention to worldbuilding to do that.

And I also imagine you would get annoyed if someone asked "Hey can catamounts do it too? Lions and tigers? Tabaxi? Displacer beasts?"
That's something I'm fine with. If people pay enough attention to the world lore documents and/or ongoing events to do stuff like that, I'm happy to play along.

Although I'll say that most cats have forgotten that that was their original purpose. A few haven't. But most of them are under orders to be cryptic. Although cats don't need much urging to be cryptic and superior. Because cats.