Words that break immersion.

[Talakeal]

This morning I was reading a review of the Willow TV show and it mentioned how their immersion was shattered by a character saying "gesundheit" as that would imply that there is a Germany in the world of Willow.

This is a frequent complaint I have seen; people complain about "firing" arrows in Lord of the Rings despite it being pre gunpowder. I have seen people complain about the DM using the term "navy blue" to describe a color as that term was anachronistic to the medieval period. I have seen complaints about Greek fire and Portuguese Man O' Wars in D&D.

And, at my own table, the players always crack jokes whenever I refer to something that uses a proper name such as a Polish sausage or a Gatling gun.


This line of logic has never made sense to me. In a fantasy world, or indeed most movies set in foreign countries or ancient times, the characters are clearly not speaking English and the actors are only doing to for the audience's benefit. Similarly, every word has an etymology, most of them foreign, and many of the etymologies will draw their roots back to specific historical contexts or to proper names.

Anyone else have any experiences with this or thoughts on why certain terms break immersion or exactly where the line is that people won't recognize the etymologies?

[BRC]

I feel like the question should really be about when this sort of thing is actually a problem, vs just a funny chuckle moment.


If I say, for example, "The shopkeeper is a young woman in a blue dress with blond hair done in a french braid" I'm providing a visual for the players in terms they understand, rather than going through hoops to avoid using the word "French" in a language without a France.

Similarly, in dialogue an NPC might say that they are "Training for a Marathon", even though the place (Marathon), battle, and subsequent events that lead to english using "Marathon" to refer to a long-distance foot race doesn't really exist. Trying to avoid this is where you get the shopkeeper in a blue cevelt with blond hair done in a tulven braid mentioning that she is training for a Paratel, or alternatively she's got a three-strand gathered plait braided together from the crown of her head to the nape of her neck and she's training to do a long-distance running race of a distance just over a day's normal travel on foot.


I feel like it becomes more of an issue when you start using these terms within idioms. Having an NPC refer to "Crossing the Rubicon" or describing a seemingly impregnable fortress as having an "Achillies Heel", feels off in a way that french braids and marathons don't. Probably because you could easily assume that "French Braid" is a translation of the fantasy term for that hairstyle, but once you get to specific events you have to start doing some assumed worldbuilding to get the same effect. "Achilles's Heel" implies a translation referring to some other famous weak spot. That such a term might exist in a fantasy culture is perfectly reasonable, but gesturing at it feels off somehow

[icefractal]

Not really any individual words, for the same reason - the characters aren't even speaking English, so obviously the exact words aren't the same.

Puzzles based off English homophones ("plain" / "plane", "mould" / "mold", etc), or other language-dependent features, do jar me a little. I mean, you can apply the same explanation - it's a translation of a different pun that would work in Dwarven - but it puts it more in the spotlight.

[BRC]

Mildly related, our current game is a Wild Beyond the Witchlight game, so we get to make up details about our PC's home dimension willy-nilly without much fear of it ever being actually relevant, and so there's a little game of every time one of these comes up, we make up why that phrase makes sense.

One example is that we decided our particular fantasy world has no Humans. "Half-Orcs" and "Half-Elves" are not half-human, they're just the types of orcs and elves that come from the continent of Half, which is largely controlled by Halflings (So named because they're from Half, not because they're "Half" of anything).

[Grod_The_Giant]

This morning I was reading a review of the Willow TV show and it mentioned how their immersion was shattered by a character saying "gesundheit" as that would imply that there is a Germany in the world of Willow.
Okay, I know I've only seen the first two episodes, but how the HECK do you watch that show without assuming there's a Germany when everything about the aesthetic is gothic, a style literally named after a Germanic tribe?

[Thrudd]

There's a difference in describing a thing as "they are eating food that looks like polish sausage" vs "they are eating polish sausage".
I think adding "looks like" might help you a bit...describe things without resorting to specific RL terms as briefly as you can, and then interject in OOC voice "it's sort of like a Portuguese Man o' War". Because it isn't really a Portuguese Man'o'war, is it? It's a ship the people of your setting developed, and have their own name for it.

describing something's color as "navy blue", as the narrator voice is fine. It is not the same thing as having an NPC use the term "navy blue", which does seem a little weird in a fantasy world.

So in short, if you're in narrator voice, and using those terms to help the players understand what a thing looks like, I'd say that's fine- it's really hard to totally avoid it. But it might help to say "looks like" rather than "is". If you're speaking in-character as an NPC using those terms, it is immersion breaking.

[Batcathat]

I don't love it, but I can accept it most of the time. Though I think I'm more bothered the more obviously it's referencing something not in the setting, so "gesundheit" would bother me less than "Greek fire" (since it's specifically referencing Greece, rather than "just" being a German word).

[Pauly]

Any words from a High School Physics class. Especially when half remembered and used without reference to the technical difficulties in applying such knowledge.
Ditto for High School Chemistry classes.
Double ditto for undergrad physics, chemistry, or engineering.

References to specific Earth locations in idioms is jarring. Even more jarring is taking said expression then redressing it. One example I remember is “ticking like a Swiss watch” getting redressed as “ticking like an ancient Earth chronograph”.

One that I feel may be peculiar to me was one GM who was an enthusiastic cook who liked to give elaborate descriptions of food. Trouble is I’m a professional chef and her descriptions just weren't technically accurate. They were close enough to pass by someone without technical knowledge, but for me it triggered ‘you don’t cook [that dish] [that way]” responses, which I couldn't say anything about without bringing the game to a screeching halt.

[awa]

There's a difference in describing a thing as "they are eating food that looks like polish sausage" vs "they are eating polish sausage".
I think adding "looks like" might help you a bit...describe things without resorting to specific RL terms as briefly as you can, and then interject in OOC voice "it's sort of like a Portuguese Man o' War". Because it isn't really a Portuguese Man'o'war, is it? It's a ship the people of your setting developed, and have their own name for it.
.

a portuguese man o war is actually an animal and the name of the country is just part of the animals name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_man_o%27_war

My experience with this is its wildly subjective some people will make a huge deal about some specific word but be fine with tons of others equally or perhaps more anachronistic. Sometimes this is reasonable other times less so their is no simply correct answer, though general I suspect people will be less bothered by it if it is spoken out of character.

[Talakeal]

There are lots of things where the etymology is based off a place name.

For example, Turkey the bird is named after Turkey the country and Orange the fruit is named after Orange the region of France. We don't have another name for these species.

I don't personally find it any weirder for a person to refer to turkey the bird in a fantasy world, in or out of character, than referring to a chicken. In both cases they are not speaking English and are instead speaking their world's translation.


Although I do find it odd when puns or linguistic riddles come up in fictional works where the characters don't speak english. Even JRR Tolkien, the great linguist that he was, has a lot of this in his writings.

[Alcore]

This line of logic has never made sense to me. Agreed.

Never truly had a problem with it.


In a fantasy world, or indeed most movies set in foreign countries or ancient times, the characters are clearly not speaking English and the actors are only doing to for the audience's benefit.this reminds me of the time critics were upset that Arnold was not speaking Summarien when he was doing Conan and that serfer guy talked with a surfer guy accent...

So the critics of a movie were upset that the actors would not learn a dead language for the movie? Weird...

[Lord Torath]

I try to avoid real-world place names. So the Portuguese Man-O-War might be called the Blue Bottle Man-O-War. Or even just Blue Bottle.

Foreign languages are something else I try to avoid, although with English (well known for knocking out other languages, dragging them into dark alleys, and going through their pockets for loose grammar) it becomes difficult to distinguish. "Gesundheit" roughly translates to "Health to you". I'd be more likely to have the character say that explicitly or call out a deity's blessing on the sneezer - "Hel spare you!" in OotS-World or something like that.

I agree about terms from Chemistry and Physics class, and a fair bit from Biology class being things to avoid. Also culture-specific idioms like the afore-mentioned Achilles Heel. But French braid? No problem. Navy blue? Sure. Especially coming from the narrator. If the PCs needed to describe her to someone else, I'd be fine with them using the same terms. It would be too much effort to come up with a different description

Long-story-short, I am occasionally bothered by it, but it depends on the terms, setting, what I'm doing with it, and how easy it is to avoid. Helpful, I know. I'm like that sometimes. :smallwink:

[Palanan]

On a related note, what I find immersion-breaking in historical fiction is the jarring introduction of a modern term when that term has a context which isn’t appropriate for the period.

Prime example is from one of Bernard Cornwell’s Uhtred novels, in a marvellous passage in which he’s describing a Danish ship under oar approaching a riverside wharf, all of it perfectly period, until Uhtred calls for the rowers to ship oars and allows the vessel’s momentum to carry her in.

Momentum just killed the mood for me, because it’s a modern term developed in the context of a scientific tradition that just didn’t exist in Anglo-Saxon England. This is also why I can’t stand Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, because both the words and the ways they’re used are so often jarringly modern.

This sort of thing also bugs me in a game context, although less so when DM and players are talking among themselves, rather than in character. And it depends on the specific players and the tone of the game. I prefer my games more serious than silly, so tone and language matter more to me.

[Fiery Diamond]

Like a lot of the people in this thread, it doesn't bother me unless it's 1) an obvious idiom referencing something Earth-specific, 2) something obviously referencing a real-world country/person (not just etymologically derived from it), or 3) just doesn't sit right with me on a personal level for some reason or other, like firing arrows in a pre-gunpowder setting. I have very little issue with things done in narration, even when they fall into these categories, though.

Unlike the person bothered by "momentum," though, I actually love anachronisms. And in a fictional setting that isn't supposed to be our Earth? I actually prefer anachronisms to Earth-historical accuracy for... pretty much everything.

What can still bother me? Idioms that don't make sense for the culture. There's a story (many stories, but one that is relevant) that I'm writing (that's my hobby, I don't actually publish things) in which the main character/narrator is an Earth human reincarnated in a fantasy world as a kobold. At one point, another kobold thanks him for being his "punching bag" to let off stress, and the narration (done in first person) notes that this wasn't a literal translation but that another idiom that meant the same thing was actually used, because... kobolds don't do boxing, and thus don't have punching bags. If I were to see "punching bag" used in a setting (or specific culture) without boxing or something similar that would have resulted in the creation of a literal punching bag, without it being called out as being an "equivalent idiom," it would bug me.

[icefractal]

Prime example is from one of Bernard Cornwell’s Uhtred novels, in a marvellous passage in which he’s describing a Danish ship under oar approaching a riverside wharf, all of it perfectly period, until Uhtred calls for the rowers to ship oars and allows the vessel’s momentum to carry her in.

Momentum just killed the mood for me, because it’s a modern term developed in the context of a scientific tradition that just didn’t exist in Anglo-Saxon England. Out of curiosity, is there a period-accurate term they should have used instead? The scientific definition didn't exist at the time, but the physical property still did, and those who dealt with ships (or sleds, wagons, etc) would have needed to deal with it.

[Talakeal]

Out of curiosity, is there a period-accurate term they should have used instead? The scientific definition didn't exist at the time, but the physical property still did, and those who dealt with ships (or sleds, wagons, etc) would have needed to deal with it.

I know there was a similar concept called "impetus" before momentum, but I am pretty sure the word is post anglo saxon english.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by icefractal
Out of curiosity, is there a period-accurate term they should have used instead? The scientific definition didn't exist at the time, but the physical property still did, and those who dealt with ships (or sleds, wagons, etc) would have needed to deal with it.

Really good question. I don’t know what the Anglo-Saxon term would have been, but I would describe it as a boat having enough way to carry her to the wharf. Based on my own experience, this use of “way” corresponds more or less with the idea of momentum, in the sense that the boat is “under way.”


Originally Posted by Talakeal
I know there was a similar concept called "impetus" before momentum, but I am pretty sure the word is post anglo saxon english.

Really good thought here. Impetus is from Latin, but I don’t know when it entered English. Latin was certainly known to Alfred’s court, since he learned it himself, so there’s a possibility it could have been used at the time. That’s just a guess and would need to be carefully checked.

The other issue in this case is that Uhtred, raised a Dane and no friend to certain institutions promoting Latin, wouldn’t be likely to use the term himself. Thus the next question is what the Old Norse word for “way” or “momentum” was in a seafaring context. That’s probably a question for the folks at the Roskilde museum.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Personally, I lean very heavily into translation convention and don't really worry about it much. I'm speaking for the players, not the characters.

On the other hand, word-based puzzles that rely on OOC knowledge of English words and spelling annoy me. Because there's no way the characters could have a translated version, especially if it relies on puns. So I avoid those kinds of puzzles except as knowing gestures toward the fourth wall in comic relief, sparingly. I did do a rebus puzzle that came out to the Konami code once (something that only works in English and that only barely[1]), just to break the tension of a long-fought moment so that the finale wouldn't fall flat from exhaustion.

[1] pup pup crown crown heft wight heft wight beta alpha (using the Greek letters for the latter). Utter gibberish in any of the setting's languages, but for a bunch of nerds...puzzled them for just long enough.

[animorte]

I read something that gave me this idea I used once:

There was a completely empty, nicely lit room, no traps, no secret doors, no monsters… nothing. One particular player wanted to search the room and I said sure. Nat 20 (+ like 14 in mods or some such).


You see every little curve in the stone floor, you see each grain in the wooden walls, several candles lining the mantle each casting shadows only on opposite sides of your group, and you continue to follow your gaze upward. Beyond the walls, you notice fabric behind them in what seems to be every direction, each one a different color. That fabric suddenly plateaus in several areas. Atop each plateau stands a large face looking down at you and your companions, a total of 5 faces all surrounding. Directly up seems to be 5 large wooden planks very slowly rotating, in the center floats… the sun… made of what looks like… metal?

Suddenly it all turns to white and just as rapidly into darkness. You are now merely looking into the ceiling of the room, now deep in thought.

Basically rolled obscenely high when nothing was to be found and i took the opportunity to break the fourth wall, so to speak.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I read something that gave me this idea I used once:

There was a completely empty, nicely lit room, no traps, no secret doors, no monsters… nothing. One particular player wanted to search the room and I said sure. Nat 20 (+ like 14 in mods or some such).


You see every little curve in the stone floor, you see each grain in the wooden walls, several candles lining the mantle each casting shadows only on opposite sides of your group, and you continue to follow your gaze upward. Beyond the walls, you notice fabric behind them in what seems to be every direction, each one a different color. That fabric suddenly plateaus in several areas. Atop each plateau stands a large face looking down at you and your companions, a total of 5 faces all surrounding. Directly up seems to be 5 large wooden planks very slowly rotating, in the center floats… the sun… made of what looks like… metal?

Suddenly it all turns to white and just as rapidly into darkness. You are now merely looking into the ceiling of the room, now deep in thought.

Basically rolled obscenely high when nothing was to be found and i took the opportunity to break the fourth wall, so to speak.

I ran a village full of crazy people once. One of them was obsessed and paranoid of "the giant" that loomed over everyone, pulling their strings like puppets. He was seriously weirded out when the party showed up and now there were 5 giants.

[hewhosaysfish]

Really good question. I don’t know what the Anglo-Saxon term would have been, but I would describe it as a boat having enough way to carry her to the wharf. Based on my own experience, this use of “way” corresponds more or less with the idea of momentum, in the sense that the boat is “under way.”

Really good thought here. Impetus is from Latin, but I don’t know when it entered English. Latin was certainly known to Alfred’s court, since he learned it himself, so there’s a possibility it could have been used at the time. That’s just a guess and would need to be carefully checked.

The other issue in this case is that Uhtred, raised a Dane and no friend to certain institutions promoting Latin, wouldn’t be likely to use the term himself. Thus the next question is what the Old Norse word for “way” or “momentum” was in a seafaring context. That’s probably a question for the folks at the Roskilde museum.

I would have thought it would be really weird and jarring to have Uhtred speak entirely in English apart from one word of Old Norse dropped into middle of a sentence.



"Ship oars!" Uhtred called to the rowers, "Let her momentum carry her in!"


versus



"Ship oars!" Uhtred called to the rowers, "Let her fremdrift* carry her in!"

* "fremdrift" is Danish for "impetus"


It make him sound like Poirot.

[Cluedrew]

I'm into the translation variation myself. I don't speak common, let alone Klingon or Elvish.

Maybe I am a bit resilient to this because I've read actual translated stories with translation notes. I also prefer that to trying to redo everything in the new language. I've also read stories, only two off the top of my head, Lord of the Rings and Spirit Island (a board game set on an island with a fictional culture), that are in their own cannon "written" in a different languages and are translated to ... English in this case, but any living human/earth language would also qualify.

In those stories I only know one place people complained about the translation being jarring, the use of Bedlam being use in a spirit power name.* On the other hand, no one was caught by Should of Silent Mist even though the local population does not use funeral shrouds that it is named after (a literal translation of its name would be more like Attenuating Death-Cataract Enfolding-Blanket) but it seems plausible. Which leads to the conclusion that this has a lot more to do with the preconceptions of the listener rather than how well it actually fits into the setting.

* Funny story: You will not find the word Bedlam in that spirit and more. Not because of translation but because of connections to the mistreatment of people with mental heath issues. I don't think it is a strong connection, but it hadn't been sent to the printers yet so the change was made. To what I don't know.

[Quertus]

the characters are clearly not speaking English

False. So long as the puns and wordplay (including riddles), word count (Sending, Message, etc), word viability (how much fits on a page, whether the letters can be easily carved, etc), and misreading, mishearing, and misunderstandings (which you struggle to determine which to fix, and how, as it is) are all based on English, the characters had better **** well be speaking English. Which is why I acknowledge “Common is English” at my tables.

And if we’re ever in a scenario where the language being spoken decidedly *isn’t* English, then I’ll crack down hard on any assumptions or actions based on English.


And, at my own table, the players always crack jokes whenever I refer to something that uses a proper name such as a Polish sausage

“Never put a gun in at 1 if it isn’t going to be used by act 2”.

If you have a character mentioned Polish damage or French fries, the campaign has better involve my character finding a portal to Earth.

If it’s used by the GM as conversational shorthand, that’s different.


Greek fire and Portuguese Man O' Wars in D&D.

D&D is canonically connected to Earth. So of course it can use Earth names for things. Anyone who says otherwise is wrong.

Unless, of course, the world in question is supposedly disconnected from the greater multiverse. Then it’s a fair complaint.


gesundheit

Even the fact that we say *anything* when someone sneezes is a cultural artifact (from a belief that the spirit leaves the body when one sneezes?), and should raise world building eyebrows.

And, the one time it came up in game, my Cleric explicitly said, “May the blessings of Amon-Ra shine upon you” when someone sneezed, rather than some idiom from this world.

[Gnoman]

“Never put a gun in at 1 if it isn’t going to be used by act 2”.

Ah, yes. An aphorism from one writer of an extremely limited subset of storytelling is inherently a law of nature that must be imposed on all forms for all eternity.

[Batcathat]

D&D is canonically connected to Earth. So of course it can use Earth names for things. Anyone who says otherwise is wrong.

Unless, of course, the world in question is supposedly disconnected from the greater multiverse. Then it’s a fair complaint..

There may be some settings where contact with Earth is common enough for it to make sense, but in most cases I feel like "the in-universe language borrowed the word(s) from a specific language native to another world for unclear reasons" would break my suspension of disbelief far harder than "it's translation convention".

[Vahnavoi]

Whenever immersion would get in the way of clear communication, wipe your ass with immersion. It's not like players can get immersed in the right thing if they don't understand what it is anyway.

Anyways, to summarize, there are a few related but different issues at hand here:

1) orphaned etymology - word is based on a thing that is known to not exist in a game setting. This will only bother you if you know what a word means AND the origin of that meaning. I would advice to not pay much heed to it. If you're using a natural language to describe something sufficiently removed from that language's origins, you will inevitably run afoul of this, and the only way around it is to invent new words. That's a nice hobby project, but unless creating and/or teaching a language is part of the point of your game, refer to the advice on top.

2) orphaned structure - puns, riddles, rhymes and other things that depend on words having a particular shape, and which strain any idea of "translation convention" that might be in play, since it's difficult (or in some cases, knowably impossible) to get that structure in the language the game characters are actually speaking. Here, the trade-off is between compelling verbal game design versus detail of the game world. At the end of the day, it's better to accept that your players operate in a real languages and make full use of those languages. The only real solution is to learn or invent an entire new language. Avoidance is not a solution, it's shooting yourself in the foot, as it keeps you from compact, memorable and fun uses of language.

3) knowing more than your game master, or the other people at the table, do. You know what a word means, but someone else clearly doesn't. Can occur within any field of expertise. Here, the question is about degree of accuracy the game is aiming for. If your immersion would require a level of detail that other players around the table are unwilling or unable to replicate, give it a rest - 100% immersion in such a game is not possible anyway. If, on the other hand, maintaining the level of detail is the point, this is where you speak up, to get things back in track and hopefully to keep the problem from occurring again.

4) knowing less than your game master, or the other people around the table, do. You think you know what a word means. You are wrong. Hopefully, this can be fixed by showing you a dictionary entry.

[Quertus]

Ah, yes. An aphorism from one writer of an extremely limited subset of storytelling is inherently a law of nature that must be imposed on all forms for all eternity.

For added giggles, I personally strongly disagree with the… “aphorism”(?). I just included it for those who think that way.


There may be some settings where contact with Earth is common enough for it to make sense, but in most cases I feel like "the in-universe language borrowed the word(s) from a specific language native to another world for unclear reasons" would break my suspension of disbelief far harder than "it's translation convention".

That depends. Are you the kind of berk who wants to pick up the cant, even if your anthill is filled with addle-cove bashers who haven’t the Voice?

(Ow, that hurt so much to type)

I personally favor minimizing the cognitive load on everyone as much as possible, and letting such flavorful additions act as a “bonus”, not a baseline requirement. Which relates to my “we’re speaking English, unless there’s such a sufficiently good reason we aren’t that you’re actually willing to police all the puns, mishearing, and other associated linguistic changes”. So, if we’re speaking English, the disconnect goes away; if we’re not, making the occasional transliteration is trivial next to the rest of the work that needs to be done to maintain sensible world building.


2) orphaned structure - puns, riddles, rhymes and other things that depend on words having a particular shape, and which strain any idea of "translation convention" that might be in play, since it's difficult (or in some cases, knowably impossible) to get that structure in the language the game characters are actually speaking. Here, the trade-off is between compelling verbal game design versus detail of the game world. At the end of the day, it's better to accept that your players operate in a real languages and make full use of those languages.

It doesn’t *have* to be a trade-off if you don’t unnecessarily complicate things by saying that the characters aren’t actually speaking English.

OTOH, if you leverage “not English” and translation (“speak friend and enter” springs to mind as a trivial example), great! Just… don’t evoke the cognitive load of “this isn’t English” without an adequate payoff - that’s just inefficient, and bad world building practices.

[Quertus]

I have seen people complain about the DM using the term "navy blue" to describe a color as that term was anachronistic to the medieval period.

I debated, and ultimately decided I am going to rant about this one.

First off, D&D as a franchise is canonically part of a multiverse which not only contains Earth, but includes multiple adventures which involve PC travel thereunto, and more that contain explicit or assumed travel therefrom. And this travel is not limited to medieval Earth.

Second, D&D contains *space ships* and numerous other technological wonders, some more subtle than others. The 3e DMG even has energy weapons statted out! If we’re thinking in terms of Earth, we should be thinking “future”, not “past”.

And do you really want D&D to feel like medieval Earth, where (depending on the setting) we’re probably burning at the stake all of the Wizards, most of the Clerics, all the lgbt characters, everything nonhuman, women who speak without being spoken to, and anyone who tries to help any of those, or who opposes slavery?

And are a lot of those anachronistic? Probably. I’m just going off the top of my head of things GM’s have done “for realism”.

I’m just not seeing any way in which complaining about anything - let alone a color - being “anachronistic” in D&D should be met with anything but rant-worthy levels of scorn and derision.

Yes, you should have good reasons for the things you do. But you should also have good reasons to stop doing things, and “D&D anachronism” fails every test for quality. [/rant]

[GloatingSwine]

Communicate in a way your players will understand, maybe leave out the pop culture references.

[GloatingSwine]

Interesting. Pretty sure I've seen enough movies where they command the archers "draw, fire" rather than "draw, loose". But it never even clicked with me.

TBH even commanding the archers when to draw and loose other than a first volley is silly (and that first volley at long range is mostly to try and make the enemy do something, in most pre-modern battles the army that moved first tended to lose). They perform better when each man is able to work at his own pace, trying to force the pace makes your archers tired and ineffective much faster.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Gnoman
Ah, yes. An aphorism from one writer of an extremely limited subset of storytelling is inherently a law of nature that must be imposed on all forms for all eternity.

Yeah. I’ve had players attack me for not adhering to Chekhov’s “law” in a game. What I considered worldbuilding, they thought should be part of an extremely linear narrative tailored for their constant benefit.

Didn’t game with them for long, but even after many years it leaves a bad taste in the mind.

[Quertus]

Communicate in a way your players will understand, maybe leave out the pop culture references.

Unless they’re Monte Python.


TBH even commanding the archers when to draw and loose other than a first volley is silly (and that first volley at long range is mostly to try and make the enemy do something, in most pre-modern battles the army that moved first tended to lose). They perform better when each man is able to work at his own pace, trying to force the pace makes your archers tired and ineffective much faster.

Thanks for clarifying, I’d long wondered about that. I could see it as an ammo-conservation technique, to discourage your archers from loosing all their arrows too early / before the foe got into effective range. And I could see “I’m in control, keep paying attention to me” being a leadership thing, both for morale, and to direct the archers’ attention against specific foes later in the fight. But from my limited experience with bow and arrow, I always felt like I’d do much better “firing at will” than with repeated volleys.

EDIT:
Yeah. I’ve had players attack me for not adhering to Chekhov’s “law” in a game. What I considered worldbuilding, they thought should be part of an extremely linear narrative tailored for their constant benefit.

Didn’t game with them for long, but even after many years it leaves a bad taste in the mind.

You clearly understand why I personally strongly disagree with the principle.

Still, “never include a toy unless you are willing to let the players play with it” might convey a less “Linear narrative” version of the part of the concept that is relevant to the discussion.

[Talakeal]

False. So long as the puns and wordplay (including riddles), word count (Sending, Message, etc), word viability (how much fits on a page, whether the letters can be easily carved, etc), and misreading, mishearing, and misunderstandings (which you struggle to determine which to fix, and how, as it is) are all based on English, the characters had better **** well be speaking English. Which is why I acknowledge “Common is English” at my tables.


And what do you do if the players aren’t speaking common?

And how do you handle interactions with people whose home tables don’t have english as the native language?

[Lord Torath]

And what do you do if the players aren’t speaking common?

And how do you handle interactions with people whose home tables don’t have english as the native language?I would tend to presume that whatever language the game is being played in is "common" for that group. This is not hard. If you have a player whose primary language differs from the rest of the group, then you might need to make some adjustments. That's not most groups, I'd wager.

[Talakeal]

I would tend to presume that whatever language the game is being played in is "common" for that group. This is not hard. If you have a player whose primary language differs from the rest of the group, then you might need to make some adjustments. That's not most groups, I'd wager.

Right, but what if they interact?

Like, if I have a game set in the dwarven kingdoms and establish that dwarven is English, and then run another game in the same world six months later set in the elven kingdom and establish that elven is also English, does that mean that anyone who speaks dwarven also speaks elvish and vice versa?


And this gets super weird if you are playing a historical game and thus declare that, say, Latin is English.

[Quertus]

And what do you do if the players aren’t speaking common?

The players *are* speaking common (assuming they’re communicating in English) :smallwink: :smallamused:

If the PCs aren’t speaking common, and, thus, aren’t following the ____s of English? Then I whip out the clue-by-four, and make sure that the players *understand* that they aren’t in Kansas any more, linguistically speaking.

As this involves then putting forth effort / literally thinking before they speak, and/or me telling them that they’re idiots, it’s almost a stealth ban on not speaking English, *unless* they deem the cost worth the benefits.


And how do you handle interactions with people whose home tables don’t have english as the native language?

Well, one would think that this covers it:



I would tend to presume that whatever language the game is being played in is "common" for that group. This is not hard. If you have a player whose primary language differs from the rest of the group, then you might need to make some adjustments. That's not most groups, I'd wager.

However… that presents two potential problems. You’ve hit the first:



Right, but what if they interact?

Like, if I have a game set in the dwarven kingdoms and establish that dwarven is English, and then run another game in the same world six months later set in the elven kingdom and establish that elven is also English, does that mean that anyone who speaks dwarven also speaks elvish and vice versa?

To which I say, “don’t do that” (don’t contradict yourself, don’t declare elven or dwarvish as English), and… I think I covered this:



Which is why I acknowledge “Common is English” at my tables.


Which relates to my “we’re speaking English, unless there’s such a sufficiently good reason we aren’t that you’re actually willing to police all the puns, mishearing, and other associated linguistic changes”..

So, unless your elves or dwarves have a really good reason not to, and to explicitly indicate that they’re not, they’re speaking common, which is English.

Which means you have to actually think about whether the cost of “this isn’t English” is worth it for your theoretical racial game where the PCs etc are all speaking their own tongue. Just like, you know, you should kinda be evaluating “what effect does this have / is this worth including” for every decision you make in campaign design.

Because, generally, it isn’t worth it, I try to have a convenient “English Common” whenever possible.

The second problem is… D&D racism. D&D Common is almost certainly English, regardless of the table language. But, as English speakers, we can ignore that, and just kinda sweep it under the rug and hope nobody notices.

[Pex]

In an episode of Doctor Who the Daleks interfere during the construction of the Empire State Building. Since this takes place in New York City everyone is talking in fake stereotypical New York accents. Not an issue, just amusing. However, I got a laugh when one character tells another "Let's take the lift" when they mean 'elevator'. As it's a British show no one would think anything of it, but for the American audience without knowing the British term it's 'what?'.

Playing and DMing D&D I have been known to say 'dollars' instead of 'gold pieces' or 'silver pieces" on occasion.

It's bad form for a player or DM to have a hissy fit over it when it happens. If not ignoring it then laughing about it is just as good.

In my opinion the concept of whether fire arms/gun powder being in a D&D game is a separate issue.

[BloodSquirrel]

Playing and DMing D&D I have been known to say 'dollars' instead of 'gold pieces' or 'silver pieces" on occasion.


Hey, the dollar was a unit weight of gold before they started printing paper money.

[Vahnavoi]

It doesn’t *have* to be a trade-off if you don’t unnecessarily complicate things by saying that the characters aren’t actually speaking English.

OTOH, if you leverage “not English” and translation (“speak friend and enter” springs to mind as a trivial example), great! Just… don’t evoke the cognitive load of “this isn’t English” without an adequate payoff - that’s just inefficient, and bad world building practices.

You are primarily concerned with use of translation convention in terms of a very specific type of secondary world fantasy. I am not. My main concern with and usage of translation convention is with contemporary or historical settings, for example, players playing Japanese people in Edo period Japan, and the convention exist so that not everyone has to learn Japan. A translation convention and the resultant complications are very much necessary for such play. The "world-building" is done, using it at a table might just not be practical for gameplay, and setting the bar for "good" world-building beyond that which can be practically played is where any reasonable person wipes their ass with world-building to focus on other things.

[Herbert_W]

I think that the only way the handle the "is Common English?" question that's both consistent and conducive to good gameplay is to say that Common is a language which just happens to line up with English in every way that matters. The words might be different, but the wordcount works out the same for every sending. The wordplay all happens to have a one-to-one translation that makes puzzles work. Puns in one language are coincidentally also puns in the other. The figures of speech might be different, but there's always a one-for-one translation. Common might not literally use the words "navy blue" but there is a phrase of the same length, just as well-known, which describes the same color and rhymes with the Common word for "shoe."

If the characters aren't speaking Common, then whatever they are speaking also lines up with English (and by extension with Common. This is a huge coincidence.) If the players aren't speaking English, then languages in-game line up with whatever they're speaking.

This convention only breaks down when tables with different languages want to interact in the same campaign, which I assume basically never happens. Any two tables which want to share a campaign will be overwhelmingly likely to also share a language.

[Vahnavoi]

Hah, no. You don't need different tables with different languages. Different players with different languages is enough for the breakdown to happen, something that's not all that uncommon in countries where people speak multiple languages. For example, the game system I use is written in one language, my campaign materials are written in another, and it isn't all that uncommon for a person to wander to my table who is fluent in one but not both, necessitating me or someone else acting as a translator.

On the plus side, this make most questions of "what to do when people who don't speak a common language?" kinda quaint. We all have experience of how that works, if we wanted to, we could even codify it so that the language spoken by most players is (functionally) the language most the characters are speaking in, with the other language reserved for foreigners or other special uses.

[GloatingSwine]

I think that the only way the handle the "is Common English?" question that's both consistent and conducive to good gameplay is to say that Common is a language which just happens to line up with English in every way that matters.

"Any languange your characters understand is being localised into English for you, any idioms or references have been translated to their nearest matching counterparts"

[Martin Greywolf]

Anachronisms

Look, this isn't historical fiction. They will bother me a lot in a movie that has millions of dollars in budget, because it means they didn't care enough to hire an intern to google for 5 minutes, but these aren't real worlds.

Something like navy blue is perfectly fine, because there may well be some navy that used that color, or it is a metaphor for sea. Whatever.

Non-existing-isms

Using a term that doesn't exist in setting. Fire for bows is an example, but so is anything involving vectors before 20th century, or referencing a thing that doesn't exist. The issue is, there are *so many* of these, for an example: if you called anything "up to scratch", you need to have a specific bare-knuckle boxing ruleset (IIRC Broughton rules) in your world for it to make sense.

What you should do instead is assume there is a more or less equivalent idiom in the language your PCs are speaking, but I concede that sometimes, referencing stock exchange may be a bit too much.

Different languages

I can speak three languages fluently, one almost fluently and can make a convincing attempt at about half a dozen others. Death will take me before I let the utility of that go to waste.

The solution isn't to ignore it, but to utilize it, assign a given language to a given faction in your game and you can communicate through cues like accents or occasional mixing of languages when upset.

It's not like we don't already have Scottish dwarves, so why not Greek sea-faring kingdom, or Victorian England-like Empire that speaks Australian?


TBH even commanding the archers when to draw and loose other than a first volley is silly (and that first volley at long range is mostly to try and make the enemy do something, in most pre-modern battles the army that moved first tended to lose). They perform better when each man is able to work at his own pace, trying to force the pace makes your archers tired and ineffective much faster.

The purpose of a salvo fire isn't to be faster than anything, you will always have faster rate of fire without it. The purpose is to hit the enemy all at the same time to cause morale damage and potentially do things such as cause mass tripping in a cavalry charge, or disrupt formation just before their charge hits you.

So, commanding your archers to go for mass volley is sometimes a good idea. What is very silly is to do it in "draw, hold, loose" steps - holding a warbow at draw for more than a second or so is a very bad idea. We don't really know what the orders were, because there are no standardized drills like we get from pike and shot era, but the best we can guess - and what works well enough in practice - is to go for "nock, shoot", or potentially if you really want a three-step process for dramatic effect, "nock, aim, shoot".

[awa]

The purpose of a salvo fire isn't to be faster than anything, you will always have faster rate of fire without it. The purpose is to hit the enemy all at the same time to cause morale damage and potentially do things such as cause mass tripping in a cavalry charge, or disrupt formation just before their charge hits you.

So, commanding your archers to go for mass volley is sometimes a good idea. What is very silly is to do it in "draw, hold, loose" steps - holding a warbow at draw for more than a second or so is a very bad idea. We don't really know what the orders were, because there are no standardized drills like we get from pike and shot era, but the best we can guess - and what works well enough in practice - is to go for "nock, shoot", or potentially if you really want a three-step process for dramatic effect, "nock, aim, shoot".

Yes, my understanding is that archers did not have enough arrows or physical endurance to fire at max speed the whole battle so fewer more psychologically damaging volleys was more useful.

[animorte]

Yes, my understanding is that archers did not have enough arrows or physical endurance to fire at max speed the whole battle so fewer more psychologically damaging volleys was more useful.
Let’s not forget the “shooting fish in a barrel” metaphor. Shooting a massive volley at a charging army guarantees you will hit something.

[Quertus]

You are primarily concerned with use of translation convention in terms of a very specific type of secondary world fantasy. I am not. My main concern with and usage of translation convention is with contemporary or historical settings, for example, players playing Japanese people in Edo period Japan, and the convention exist so that not everyone has to learn Japan.

No, I am primarily using as an example that which is most well known to the Playground and most relevant to the OP (whose own custom setting is very D&D esque).

Now, I happen to play more D&D than most systems, but I apply the same “we’re speaking a common language, and that language is English, unless there’s a really compelling reason to do otherwise” logic to every setting.

“Edo period Japan” is a pretty compelling reason that the PCs aren’t speaking English. You’ll get no argument from me on that count. But I’ll expect (for example) things like “difficulty reading water-damaged documents” or “what words can be misheard for one another” to follow the logic of Japanese, not English, in that setting.

(Which, ultimately, is pretty trivial next to all the (sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle) cultural differences necessary to properly run such a setting.)


I think that the only way the handle

(Inigo’s voice) I do not think that phrase means what you think it means.

[Talakeal]

No, I am primarily using as an example that which is most well-known to the Playground and most relevant to the OP (whose own custom setting is very D&D esque).

My setting doesn't have a common language, and is pretty explicit that the trade-tongue of the Imperium which comes closest to serving that function is not like English in several key ways, most notably by having a Gaelic sound, being a con-language, lacking digraphs, and having dozens of pronouns based on social standing and citizenship.

Of course, the doesn't stop the players from nit-picking my word choice or from making puns.

I tend to go with The Angry GM's "darkened mirror" approach where everything is translated through a filter so that dialogue that occurs in the game is roughly but not exactly the same meaning as what is said around the table.

So that, for example, in my last game when Feur told a dad joke about buying a glass coffin, and his reason for doing this remains to be seen, he is making a different pun involving something to do with corpses and materials that makes sense to the characters in the world.

[Thrudd]

Unless your table is composed of a bunch of linguists, I don't think it's reasonable to expect the GM or anyone else to nitpick over every choice of word or idiom. Very few people can police themselves enough to avoid every single modern idiom or expression when coming up with off-the-cuff descriptions and dialogue. I think it's appropriate to be lenient and good-humored about it.

D&D Common isn't a real language, its linguistic features aren't described anywhere. There's no reason to think that, in the fictional world, it would necessarily be anything like English. The designers of D&D aren't linguists. Obviously, whatever language the players use together is what represents "common" for their table- and also every other fictional language that their characters can understand. The players have no choice but to use the languages they know for all communication in the game, regardless of what fictional (or real) language the fictional characters are supposed to be speaking. So some baked-in idioms and terms in their language are going to creep in there. Apart from glaringly anachronistic things relative to the setting, it's probably not worth it to point out every time it happens.

It is certainly an uncommonly dedicated GM and world builder who goes about coming up with different idioms and expressions for all the different races and cultures in their game. Is it nice when they do that, and are attentive enough not to slip up and never use modern or real-world-culture specific expressions? Yes, it's great. But give people a break. Most people aren't full-time professional GMs or fiction writers with the mental bandwidth to do that sort of thing. You can't expect every GM to be Prof. Tolkien.

Everyone has different talents and areas of expertise. Each GM is going to detail the things they know how to detail in their fictional world, and have blind spots in the world building and narration where their knowledge is less.

[Vahnavoi]

No, I am primarily using as an example that which is most well known to the Playground and most relevant to the OP (whose own custom setting is very D&D esque).

Most people who play D&D don't do what you suggest, and indeed the basic rules for several editions straight imply a world that does not and cannot follow the kind of convention you outlined, because nearly all characters are supposed to be multilingual. There is no way to insist on "everyone is speaking modern English, no, really", without running into fairly obvious paradoxes.


“Edo period Japan” is a pretty compelling reason that the PCs aren’t speaking English. You’ll get no argument from me on that count. But I’ll expect (for example) things like “difficulty reading water-damaged documents” or “what words can be misheard for one another” to follow the logic of Japanese, not English, in that setting.

(Which, ultimately, is pretty trivial next to all the (sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle) cultural differences necessary to properly run such a setting.)


That part in parentheses? Yeah it's just wrong.

The only way to ensure that things like your examples follow logic of Japanese, is for the person making the game to know Japanese. Period. And the only way for players to check that the work lives up to that expectation, is for them to know Japanese as well.

This is a considerably higher practical bar to pass, than communicating surface-level or even moderately deep cultural knowledge to a non-Japanese speaker in their own language. If you are, say, native English speaker, with no skill in Japanese, you will have considerably easier time finding resources written in English, aimed at English-speaking audiences, that will get you up to a level that's fine for any game that would actually need a translation convention.

[Quertus]

Of course, the doesn't stop the players from nit-picking my word choice or from making puns.

Why am I not surprised?

Btw, what benefit does your world gain for the inordinately high cost of killing off puns and distancing the players from their characters?


Most people who play D&D don't do what you suggest, and indeed the basic rules for several editions straight imply a world that does not and cannot follow the kind of convention you outlined, because nearly all characters are supposed to be multilingual. There is no way to insist on "everyone is speaking modern English, no, really", without running into fairly obvious paradoxes.

Sure they’re multi-lingual. Most of my characters are as well. And, *unless I explicitly tell you otherwise*, they’re speaking Common (English).

That hard “you have to think before you speak in not-English and say you’re doing so” leads naturally to “you have to think before you speak in not-English about not using puns (or other traits keyed linguistically to English)”.

Win/win.


That part in parentheses? Yeah it's just wrong.

The only way to ensure that things like your examples follow logic of Japanese, is for the person making the game to know Japanese.

Um, what? I’m not sure if I’m not understanding you, or if this is an opportunity for me to learn.

So, I’ve got a party that includes characters who speak Elvish. I don’t personally know Elvish, but I know certain ways in which it differs from English, and I (importantly) know that it is not English.

If the characters are speaking in Elvish, the clue-by-four comes out, and I know that the language will not use English rules, will use what Elvish rules I understand, will not suffer from English-based “there vs their vs they’re, which Witch is which, etc “, etc.

I know that written Elvish is more fluid, and, if I didn’t have an instinct for it, I could expose some similar writing to water to understand how its characters degrade.

That didn’t require D&D to have been written by someone who knows Elvish.

So what, exactly, are you trying to say? What high complexity is necessary to meet your standards? Your standards for what?

Because my standards for culture require much more effort to achieve than my standards for language, I’m lost trying to understand what your standards look like.

[SimonMoon6]

I think it's important to at least have a vague notion of "this isn't actually English, but don't worry too much about it."

Problems with things (puns, smudged documents, etc) being different in different languages should only matter in the sense of "puns you think would work don't work, but don't try to come up with new puns" and "maybe the writing system is different and how much different matters only if real world languages are involved".

Like, I wouldn't expect a DM or player to have riddles in a Chinese setting along the lines of "Why don't monkeys like parallel lines?". Answer: Because they like intersections (aka bananas).

But one should also avoid assuming other languages are like English (if you're going beyond Common into possibly exotic languages). I mean, just think how weird Earth languages are. Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, the various South Asian languages, and all those weird writing systems for the dozens of African languages... none of them are just English with the numbers filed off.

An example of a DM who caused me to have crazy "you don't know how languages work" feelings was a guy who had us find a message in an unknown language, but we could use Decipher Script to translate each individual letter of the message. So, if we succeeded on the first letter, we'd find out it was "A" or something. And it wasn't meant to just be a cipher. It was meant to be a strange language. That's not how languages work. Other languages aren't just English with different letters.

They're also not just English with different vocabulary. Languages can be weird.

But for the most part, just assume everything is translated from Common to English and things should be okay.

[Xuc Xac]

What always bothers me is when the English (or Common) translation of another language was obviously written first and the "original" was translated after the fact. When the Spanish treasure map is "translated" into English, all the clues are rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter, but the "original Spanish" doesn't rhyme and the lines have different numbers of syllables.

Tolkien actually cared about this, so the inscription on the One Ring actually rhymes in Black Speech and the English "translation".


That's not how languages work. Other languages aren't just English with different letters.

It really drives me crazy when a fantasy alphabet has 26 letters and one of them corresponds to "C". It's bad enough that English uses C. Why would another language make the exact same mistake?

[Talakeal]

Btw, what benefit does your world gain for the inordinately high cost of killing off puns and distancing the players from their characters?

From a world building perspective, the idea of a fantasy world having a single "common" language, let alone one that just so happens to be exactly like English despite lacking the factors that gave rose to English is a bit hard to swallow. Although, I suppose its not weirder than a world with many of the same species, social customs, or elements of fashion / architecture, so, maybe not.

Having it be a constructed language doesn't do to much for the average player, but it gives me an excuse to wipe away a lot of the annoyances with English. Lack of gender-neutral pronouns has always pained me as a writer, especially now that the issue has become politicized.

As I said, if a pun comes up in the game, I assume its translated from something similar. This doesn't really hurt my immersion, and its not like puns are a staple of the game to begin with.

Not sure what you mean about distancing players from their characters. Is it the idea that its harder to identify with someone who speaks a different language? Or that its being translated? Or what?


Honestly, that's pretty low on my list of issues, especially when the fiction is already being translated imperfectly through game rules into the imperfect imaginations, and then memories, of half a dozen different players.

[GloatingSwine]

From a world building perspective, the idea of a fantasy world having a single "common" language, let alone one that just so happens to be exactly like English despite lacking the factors that gave rose to English is a bit hard to swallow. Although, I suppose its not weirder than a world with many of the same species, social customs, or elements of fashion / architecture, so, maybe not.

Most fantasy worldbuilding doesn't cover enough scope to move beyond the reach of one common language though. Common languages of trade, religion, and culture have been a feature of the real world since the pre-classical era (Akkadian, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, French, Arabic and English have all been or still are common languages for our world due to their use as trade languages or the language of learning or religion beyond their regions of origin).

Unless your fantasy world is so restrictive that people can't travel more than about 20 miles from where they're born at all, it is more unrealistic not to have at least some kind of common language that is at least sort-of understood by anyone worth talking to.

[Batcathat]

Unless your fantasy world is so restrictive that people can't travel more than about 20 miles from where they're born at all, it is more unrealistic not to have at least some kind of common language that is at least sort-of understood by anyone worth talking to.

Wouldn't that depend a lot on the local education system though? In the real world, a lot of non-English speaking countries teach English in their schools and those schools are typically open to every kid, so the population can indeed be assumed to be at least have some basic familiarity with it. But if we go back in history to, say, medieval Europe Latin might've been a common language for nobility, priests and other educated people, but I'm guessing those made up a very small part of the population.

[Gnoman]

Wouldn't that depend a lot on the local education system though? In the real world, a lot of non-English speaking countries teach English in their schools and those schools are typically open to every kid, so the population can indeed be assumed to be at least have some basic familiarity with it. But if we go back in history to, say, medieval Europe Latin might've been a common language for nobility, priests and other educated people, but I'm guessing those made up a very small part of the population.

There have been times where a lingua franca is imposed from the top down, but this is relatively rare.Much more often, they arose organically when people with different native languages interacted. This was hardly restricted to nobility - any seaside town was likely to do business with fishermen from a wide area, for example.

Your typical RPG adventurer is going to be exactly that sort of wanderer, dealing heavily with the kind of people who often interact with that sort of person and has a need for a common language.

[Batcathat]

There have been times where a lingua franca is imposed from the top down, but this is relatively rare.Much more often, they arose organically when people with different native languages interacted. This was hardly restricted to nobility - any seaside town was likely to do business with fishermen from a wide area, for example.

Sure, if a city in country A has a lot of visitors from country B, them having some sort of common language (at least between traders and such, but others might know at least a little) makes sense, but that's pretty far from there being a common language that travelers can expect people almost everywhere to be somewhat familiar with, much less speak with any sort of fluency.

[Vinyadan]

Orange the fruit is named after Orange the region of France. We don't have another name for these species.



Only partially true, the fruit is an Eastern name, probably a word that passed from an Indian language to Persian (narang) to Arabic (naranga) and from there to Europe (seen Spanish naranja, Venetian naranza).

The city of Orange instead traces its name to Latin Arausio, and an important battle happened there in the times of Marius. The name possibly comes from a Celtic water goddess.

It's possible however that the "o" at the beginning of the French word comes from the influence of the city name.

[Quertus]

From a world building perspective, the idea of a fantasy world having a single "common" language, let alone one that just so happens to be exactly like English despite lacking the factors that gave rose to English is a bit hard to swallow. Although, I suppose its not weirder than a world with many of the same species, social customs, or elements of fashion / architecture, so, maybe not.

lol, exactly. If you’ve already got pigs and sheep and polish sausage and recognizable fashion and architecture and the culture of saying something when someone sneezes and… then, yeah, make everyone’s life easier with a Common English language.

In fact, replace all those other things *first*, because, unlike English, they have no real value. Keep English until after your world building has removed all other, less useful artifacts of this world.


Having it be a constructed language doesn't do to much for the average player, but it gives me an excuse to wipe away a lot of the annoyances with English. Lack of gender-neutral pronouns has always pained me as a writer, especially now that the issue has become politicized.

As I said, if a pun comes up in the game, I assume its translated from something similar. This doesn't really hurt my immersion, and its not like puns are a staple of the game to begin with.

Hurts mine if something that supposedly isn’t English works just like English in every imaginable way. Where “mine” isn’t “immersion”, but “faith in the GM”.

Which, again, is why I asked what was gained by not using a Common English, to be worth either the effort to do it right, or the loss of faith from it being done wrong.

And I’m grouchy about pronouns, too. IMO, instead of repurposing “they/them” to neutral, they should have left “he/him” as neutral, and made a truly masculine new pronoun. I proposed “grrr”.


Not sure what you mean about distancing players from their characters. Is it the idea that its harder to identify with someone who speaks a different language? Or that its being translated? Or what?

As an author, you want the PoV character to be easy to step into. It’s jarring for the reader / viewer when the PoV character does not share their confusion, or is confused by something that is obvious.

In moderation, and handled with care, such dissonance can be a useful tool. “Huh, everybody’s treating it as perfectly normal and acceptable to see people being sold as slaves / to see maidens offering their first time at the church / to see prima nocte practiced.” Or “Aren’t I so smart, I figured out that the mustache-twirling vizier / guy in a bowler hat / surrendering villain wasn’t to be trusted (before protagonist-kun did)?”.

Contrast that to the illogical of mishearing “intersections” for “bananas”, of things that aren’t English having English-based meter, rhymes (and even the concept of “rhyming”), and puns, and it’s just an additional cognitive load that serves to unnecessarily distance the player from relating with their character’s experience.


Honestly, that's pretty low on my list of issues, especially when the fiction is already being translated imperfectly through game rules into the imperfect imaginations, and then memories, of half a dozen different players.

And which of these is it within your power to solve? Can you change your players’ imaginations, or upgrade their memories? Can you write rules to better match the fiction? Can you write fiction to better match the rules? What’s the low hanging fruit here?

[GloatingSwine]

Sure, if a city in country A has a lot of visitors from country B, them having some sort of common language (at least between traders and such, but others might know at least a little) makes sense, but that's pretty far from there being a common language that travelers can expect people almost everywhere to be somewhat familiar with, much less speak with any sort of fluency.

Languages in pre-modern times were a lot more local than a country.

Most fantasy RPGs are sort-of-medieval-europe, wherein the nobility all spoke French, the scholars and priests all spoke Latin, and commoners would speak a local language that probably ranged about 30-50 miles in any direction (some of which have survived to the modern day eg. Alsatian, Corsican, Basque, Catalan).

That's why trade languages got used. (eg. around the Med it was a blend of Italian and Provencal).

[Batcathat]

Languages in pre-modern times were a lot more local than a country.

Most fantasy RPGs are sort-of-medieval-europe, wherein the nobility all spoke French, the scholars and priests all spoke Latin, and commoners would speak a local language that probably ranged about 30-50 miles in any direction (some of which have survived to the modern day eg. Alsatian, Corsican, Basque, Catalan).

That's why trade languages got used. (eg. around the Med it was a blend of Italian and Provencal).

Sure, my example was obviously very simplified, but this seems in favor of my point rather than against it. Trade languages exist, but I don't think they're typically something that would be "sort-of understood by anyone worth talking to", which was what I questioned.

[Trafalgar]

I don't expect a DM to speak in Elvish or Infernal or Old English for that matter. If an rpg takes place in a fantasy version of 15th century Italy, I wouldn't expect the DM to speak Italian. The DM and players should speak in the vernacular even if it means using out of place words like "momentum".

Words that quickly break my immersion include:
like
really
umm
irregardless (not actually a word)
literally (when misused)
per se (when misused)
ironic (when misused)



The second problem is… D&D racism. D&D Common is almost certainly English, regardless of the table language. But, as English speakers, we can ignore that, and just kinda sweep it under the rug and hope nobody notices.

How is this racism? D&D was originally developed in English but quickly spread across the globe and has been published in numerous languages. Look at this list (https://technicalrpg.com/how-popular-is-dungeons-and-dragons-in-your-country-compared-to-others/) of countries where D&D is currently played. I highly doubt English is used as 'common' in the Philippines.

What is your definition of racism? Because I feel I should add 'misuse of words ending in ism' to the above list.

[Vinyadan]

It really drives me crazy when a fantasy alphabet has 26 letters and one of them corresponds to "C". It's bad enough that English uses C. Why would another language make the exact same mistake?


What I find odd is that K is a late import (12th century) to English. Old English poems, at least in their published forms, don't use it. In "ci/ce" the c were read as "tsh", in "ca/co/cu/cy" as "k". "sc" was read as "sh" (except when it didn't, scip=ship but ascian = to ask, I think it's because it's two sillables in as-cian), "cg" as "dg" in edge.

It had a somewhat dubious status even in Latin. At first, C was read "hard" G, and G did not exist as a letter. K was used for the sound K. Then, for some reason, the letter G developed, took over the hard G sound, and C shifted to K's sound. K then more-or-less disappeared for Roman use, except in certain crystallised cases, and especially shortenings. So one would usually write K for Kalendae and C for Caius, even though they were pronounced Calendae and Gaius.
(In the meantime, the Romans also were using Q.)
Later on, there was the shift that made ci/ce pronounced tshi/tshe in Vulgar Latin, too. One of the oddities of Sardinian is that it avoided this shift (for example, from circulus > English circle, Sardinian kirku (and a few more variants)).

[Jophiel]

What can still bother me? Idioms that don't make sense for the culture.
Not from a TTRPG but, when it happened, I immediately thought of this thread:

Playing a video game set in pseudo-ancient Greek setting. NPC complains about people being used "as guinea pigs in their experiments". Between the New World angle, the "named after British currency" angle and the scientific angle and the combined package (the idiom dates to the early 20th century) -- I don't usually notice or care about these things but that one popped right out at me.

[Quertus]

How is this racism? D&D was originally developed in English but quickly spread across the globe and has been published in numerous languages. Look at this list (https://technicalrpg.com/how-popular-is-dungeons-and-dragons-in-your-country-compared-to-others/) of countries where D&D is currently played. I highly doubt English is used as 'common' in the Philippines.

What is your definition of racism? Because I feel I should add 'misuse of words ending in ism' to the above list.

I mean that if you look at the artwork + culture + societal structure + words used by or to describe such (“calif”, etc), and even descriptions of the sound of the languages, it’s pretty hard to argue that many of the monstrous races in early D&D aren’t just goblinized versions of caricatures of then modern nations.

Demonizing the enemy is standard military procedure, and roleplaying games came from military war games, so it’s not unreasonable for the practice of demonizing foreign cultures to have carried over. It’s just not something we really want to think about while murdering the children of “always evil” races in our morally unambiguous RPG.

[Bohandas]

Okay, I know I've only seen the first two episodes, but how the HECK do you watch that show without assuming there's a Germany when everything about the aesthetic is gothic, a style literally named after a Germanic tribe?

The same way you can imply he's a philistine without implying he's a Philistine :D

You can also have thugs without Thugs, and vandals without Vandals. In practical terms of how the language is used, they've got nothing to do with each other

EDIT:
It's also worth noting that D&D is written in American colloquial english, so no food name in any way implies a place of origin. Names like "champagne" "maine lobster" "burbon" "roquefort" "feta" "brie" "parmigiano-reggiano" and "buffalo wings" are all meaningless* in the same way that any other name is meaningless and nothing stops them from all being produced in the same place.

*or maybe "arbitrary", would be a better way to describe it

EDIT:

Languages in pre-modern times were a lot more local than a country.

Most fantasy RPGs are sort-of-medieval-europe, wherein the nobility all spoke French, the scholars and priests all spoke Latin

You've just reminded me of another example of what I was initially saying. The word "Latin" can describe either of two entirely unrelated ethnicities. One from the former Spanish empire, and one from ancient Italy.

[SimonMoon6]

It really drives me crazy when a fantasy alphabet has 26 letters and one of them corresponds to "C". It's bad enough that English uses C. Why would another language make the exact same mistake?


This is one of the (many) things that bugs me about the Star Wars universe. The droids are all named with numbers and English letters mixed together. Now, I accept that the names may have been translated from some other language (apparently it's called "Galactic Standard") spoken in that galaxy. But under what set of circumstances would you ever translate some other language's letter into the letter "C"? There's no way that C3PO would have a name that translates to having a "C" at the beginning. No way.

And that's not even taking into account that, in a lot of languages, they don't even have "letters". Consider Chinese. Or even Japanese with its "syllabary". These languages don't have "letters", much less a letter that could translate into a "C".

And then... not to sidetrack this too much into a Star Wars discussion... Quertus mentioned something about "If you’ve already got pigs and sheep...", well, in Star Wars, they don't have pigs and sheep (as far as I know...even if they do have pig-people). But they have human beings. So, are we to believe that human beings evolved on a planet but no other Earth-style creatures evolved alongside them? How would that work? (Doing my own research, apparently some of the spin-off media seem to suggest that, even though the Star Wars saga takes place "long, long ago", the humans in the Star Wars galaxy originally came from Earth. But I'm not buying it.)

[Bohandas]

And then... not to sidetrack this too much into a Star Wars discussion... Quertus mentioned something about "If you’ve already got pigs and sheep...", well, in Star Wars, they don't have pigs and sheep (as far as I know...even if they do have pig-people). But they have human beings. So, are we to believe that human beings evolved on a planet but no other Earth-style creatures evolved alongside them? How would that work?


That's also something that really really REALLY bothers me about D&D. Even moreso than Star Wars.

(It also sligntky bothered me about the human kids from Homestuck. IIRC they were some weird self-causing time paradox that phylogenically unrelated to the rest of the population of Earth)


(Doing my own research, apparently some of the spin-off media seem to suggest that, even though the Star Wars saga takes place "long, long ago", the humans in the Star Wars galaxy originally came from Earth. But I'm not buying it.)


Maybe it's like the beginning of Winnie the Pooh ("Once upon a time, a very long time ago now, about last Friday...")

[Quertus]

And then... not to sidetrack this too much into a Star Wars discussion... Quertus mentioned something about "If you’ve already got pigs and sheep...", well, in Star Wars, they don't have pigs and sheep (as far as I know...even if they do have pig-people). But they have human beings. So, are we to believe that human beings evolved on a planet but no other Earth-style creatures evolved alongside them? How would that work? (Doing my own research, apparently some of the spin-off media seem to suggest that, even though the Star Wars saga takes place "long, long ago", the humans in the Star Wars galaxy originally came from Earth. But I'm not buying it.)

My personal canon is that, since Star Wars occurs “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”, and that they’ve got hyperdrives that can travel a whole galaxy in a day or so, that Earth humans originated from the Star Wars galaxy in their universe.

EDIT: yes, “humans” are similarly bad world building if you don’t have Earth, and a logical connection thereto. It is the *one* piece of really bad world building that I’ll willingly shrug aside in the name of letting the PoV character resonate with the reader / viewer / player.


That's also something that really really REALLY bothers me about D&D. Even moreso than Star Wars.

Earth is canonically connected to D&D. In fact, it’s almost certain that the portals to Earth aren’t to another *world*, but to another *time* - specifically, that D&D was originally set in the future of a post-apocalyptic Earth.

Regardless of the accuracy of my conjecture, complaining about humans on D&D worlds that are officially part of a multiverse that canonically includes Earth isn’t really a valid complaint, unless the world building tries to pretend that this specific D&D campaign is on a world that is disconnected from the greater multiverse. Then that’s fair.

[PhoenixPhyre]

For me, "humans" in any setting not explicitly Earth-based are called that because they're the closest analog. Not because they're the same species, have the same DNA, or even really have all the details the same. Just that if an Earth human were to look at them/read the description, they'd go "yeah, those look human."


My setting's humans
* are actually the descendants of hobgoblins after some significant magical manipulation a few millennia ago.
* were the first to develop religion--that's actually what they're known for. Being devout. Looking to other beings for power. Yes, this does make divine power a newcomer among the various forms of power.
* don't actually have DNA. Because no one does. Forget everything you know about modern science--of all the scientific thought throughout Earth history, a mishmash of Aristotelian element theory + Platonic "form" theory + early-medieval alchemical thinking is closest to reality.
* etc.

Each region where I set adventures tends to have a "Common" tongue. But the "Common" of various regions may not be the same or even similar. In western Noefra (where most of my campaigns happen), "Common" is the result of an empire about 800 years ago brutally enforcing a common language (now called Old Imperial) on everyone under their reign. Fast forward after the empire fell in a bloody civil war, plus linguistic drift, and you have a basically-mutually-comprehensible (although fairly dialectically-varied) lingua franca. Heavy influences from the various dwarven and elven languages which were maintained in this ethnically-diverse empire flavor things.

The establishment of an international body about 50 years ago which chose "common" as its official trade tongue means that most people in the more cosmopolitan areas speak it at least as a second language. In the Ikela region of Soefra (a separate continent with no communications, but whose human ancestors traveled there during the time of the empire), "common" is a degenerate form of old imperial + a lot of drift, local influence (from various groups, including lots of lizardfolk with their own tribal languages, plus some elven influence, etc).

OOC, what I do is choose a "base language" for my various languages (of which I have many). This real language serves as a source of inspiration, proper nouns, and phonemes. After they've been put through a blender.

So "Noefran common" is based on English--those groups who speak it natively tend to use good old British-isles names for places and people. Yonwach (the high elven language of western Noefra) uses Welsh-ish names and sounds. Vaguely. Metsae (the wood elven language most common in western Noefra) is based (vaguely) on Finnish[1]. Ard-teang, the language commonly known as "orcish" in that region is based on Irish Gaelic. Tumni (the regional dwarf language) is based on Mongolian...and written in a knock-off of Norse-ish runes, although the sounds and names are different. Ngyon Toi (the regional "goblin" language, which is somewhat universal since goblins have tribal genetic memory) is based on Vietnamese for sounds only. Old Imperial uses Latinate sounds and names. Too-til (giant/goliath) is based (again, for sounds and names) on Kyrgyz. Primordial (in all its forms) is written in characters reminiscent of Arabic, although the sounds are very different.

[1] it wasn't until after the fact that I learned I was copying Tolkien on this. Great minds and all that, I guess...:smallbiggrin:

[Trafalgar]

I mean that if you look at the artwork + culture + societal structure + words used by or to describe such (“calif”, etc), and even descriptions of the sound of the languages, it’s pretty hard to argue that many of the monstrous races in early D&D aren’t just goblinized versions of caricatures of then modern nations.

"Calif" is an abbreviation for California. Do you mean Caliph? I can't recall the last time I heard that word used in D&D. I definitely have never heard that word used when talking about orcs or goblins. You use "etc" as if "calif" should remind me of many obvious examples that prove your point. It doesn't. A proper use of etcetera would be "Many words used in D&D like elf, dwarf, orc, goblin, ogre, troll, etc have their roots in European literature, folklore, and myth and predate the game by centuries."

You seem to be using the whole monstrous race debate as a red herring to get away from what you originally wrote. I really don't want to restart that whole debate, lets just agree to disagree on it. What you seemed to say was that D&D is so racist that it doesn't matter what language we play it in. Which I strongly disagree with and don't see any evidence of.


Demonizing the enemy is standard military procedure, and roleplaying games came from military war games, so it’s not unreasonable for the practice of demonizing foreign cultures to have carried over. It’s just not something we really want to think about while murdering the children of “always evil” races in our morally unambiguous RPG.

No standard procedure exists in the military for demonizing the enemy. That sort of thing is usually done by civilian news organizations. I don't know if Arneson or Gygax were ever in the military but they definitely weren't in the 60s or 70s. Those old Avalon Hill games they played had nothing to do with wargames played in places like the Pentagon. So this line of reasoning doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

Your character's in game actions have no affect on your real world morality. Just because I steal something in game does not mean I am a thief in real life. Feeding the poor in game does not mean you are a good person. A character of mine once burned down a city block through misuse of a fireball spell. I probably killed hundreds of innocents and didn't lose any sleep over it. PVP is about the only thing with a real world effect in that it might hurt someone else's feelings. So if the game I am playing requires me to kill some orcs, I don't care.

[Bohandas]

My personal canon is that, since Star Wars occurs “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”, and that they’ve got hyperdrives that can travel a whole galaxy in a day or so, that Earth humans originated from the Star Wars galaxy in their universe.

EDIT: yes, “humans” are similarly bad world building if you don’t have Earth, and a logical connection thereto. It is the *one* piece of really bad world building that I’ll willingly shrug aside in the name of letting the PoV character resonate with the reader / viewer / player.



Earth is canonically connected to D&D. In fact, it’s almost certain that the portals to Earth aren’t to another *world*, but to another *time* - specifically, that D&D was originally set in the future of a post-apocalyptic Earth.

Regardless of the accuracy of my conjecture, complaining about humans on D&D worlds that are officially part of a multiverse that canonically includes Earth isn’t really a valid complaint, unless the world building tries to pretend that this specific D&D campaign is on a world that is disconnected from the greater multiverse. Then that’s fair.

Now to me that seems even more hamfisted. It's one step away from one of those terrible movies where the characters from a fantasy TV show randomly go to New York (ie. He-Man, The Smurfs, etc)


I mean that if you look at the artwork + culture + societal structure + words used by or to describe such (“calif”, etc), and even descriptions of the sound of the languages, it’s pretty hard to argue that many of the monstrous races in early D&D aren’t just goblinized versions of caricatures of then modern nations.

Demonizing the enemy is standard military procedure, and roleplaying games came from military war games, so it’s not unreasonable for the practice of demonizing foreign cultures to have carried over. It’s just not something we really want to think about while murdering the children of “always evil” races in our morally unambiguous RPG.

I think you may be projecting an issue with your specific group onto the game as a whole

[Xuc Xac]

Earth is canonically connected to D&D. In fact, it’s almost certain that the portals to Earth aren’t to another *world*, but to another *time* - specifically, that D&D was originally set in the future of a post-apocalyptic Earth.


Elminster from the Forgotten Realms and Mordenkainen from Greyhawk regularly traveled back and forth to Earth, but they never stayed for a long time. There's an early D&D adventure that features a magical storm that opens portals to other dimensions. It summons a "demon", which is just an big alien from another universe, and some random dude from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin who is freaking out. If you don't figure out how to return him to Earth, he dies in a few months because the Forgotten Realms doesn't have a particular amino acid that Earth humans require.

[GloatingSwine]

This is one of the (many) things that bugs me about the Star Wars universe. The droids are all named with numbers and English letters mixed together. Now, I accept that the names may have been translated from some other language (apparently it's called "Galactic Standard") spoken in that galaxy. But under what set of circumstances would you ever translate some other language's letter into the letter "C"? There's no way that C3PO would have a name that translates to having a "C" at the beginning. No way.


No, they're named with phonemes which sound like English letters to us.

We actually see the writing system of galactic standard on some screens in Return of the Jedi, it does not use any recognisable characters at all.

The words and sounds have been rendered into English for your convenience.

[Duff]

To me, gesundheit is fine. They're speaking English in a world with no England. Why object to a German word, whether or not there is a Germany?

"The shopkeeper is a young woman in a blue dress with blond hair done in a french braid" is fine.
Though if you want to add "which in these lands is called a tulven braid" and then you use the term "tulven braid" often enough in a short enough period that the players learn the new term, that's a little bit of worldbuilding and imerssion that would be cool.
OTOH, if the last time anyone used tulven braid was a year ago, no one remembers what it looks like.

If I'm speaking in character to my hairstylest, I'm going to be happyer if I can ask for a tulven braid, but french is fine too. I'm certainly not going to be bothered by another player asking for a french braid

"Crossing the Rubicon" is heading into less comfortable territory.
You have to either; accept that the metaphor is also translated into English, use less poetic language "utterly committed", make up some lore on the spot "We've entered the City of Duffness" and rely on everyone deducing what's going on, or the group need enough shared lore to draw on so they can appreciate such metaphors on their merits
- or not. "Entering the city of Duffness is a terrible metaphor for what we're doing. That story's all about making peace with another nation, not launching a bloody coup"



Puzzels based on English wordplay do bother me though

[Trafalgar]

"Crossing the Rubicon" is heading into less comfortable territory.
You have to either; accept that the metaphore is also translated into English, use less poetic language "utterly comitted", make up some lore on the spot "We've entered the City of Duffness" and rely on everyone deducing what's going on, the group need enough shared lore to draw on so they can appreciate such metaphores on thei merots - or not. "Entering the city of Duffness is a terrible metphore for what we're doing. That story's all about making peace with another nation, not launching a bloody coup"



Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra!


https://youtu.be/3-wzr74d7TI

Shaka, when the walls fell.

[Xihirli]

Heck, even the word "hello" is anachronistic. It was invented specifically for use on the telephone.

[Jay R]

Immersion is broken constantly. I’m rolling dice, reading a rulebook, consulting a character sheet, ordering a pizza, getting another drink, letting the dog out, moving a miniature, dropping my pencil on the floor, and whatever else happens over the course of an afternoon or evening gaming in the den.

So the essential skill isn’t “not breaking immersion”. The essential skill is re-immersion. And a crucial tool for re-immersion is not focusing on what just broke immersion.

OK, so somebody just spoke in modern English, or said “Gesundheit!”, or went to the bathroom, or made a pun, or referred to a “saving throw”. It happens. Focusing on the modernity gives it more power, for a longer time, and prevents re-immersion.

So let it go, move on, and get back to fighting the ghouls.

[Satinavian]

I am usually not bothered by modern words. We are playing the game in a modern language, because none of use is really fluent in archaic ones. Additionally the fictional languages tend to not be the real ones anyway, if not using a historical setting.

Sure, some words or phrases feel better than others, but there is no logical reason behind and it differs from person to person. As it should. It is mainly about association. If a phrase conjures images that don't fit the setting, it is bad, but there is no way to make a rule or even guideline out of this.

However, stuff i have a problem is :
a) characters making pop culture references to stuff they can't know.
b) characters using rule keywords that only exist on the abstract rule layer, not accessible in game.

[Gnoman]

Heck, even the word "hello" is anachronistic. It was invented specifically for use on the telephone.

No, it wasn't. The specific form "hello" dates back to the early 19th century, and the original "hallo" is old enough that there is fairly strong evidence of the etymology but no certain origin date.


Sure, my example was obviously very simplified, but this seems in favor of my point rather than against it. Trade languages exist, but I don't think they're typically something that would be "sort-of understood by anyone worth talking to", which was what I questioned.

Except it didn't work that way. Pretty much every period in human history has had at least one language that was extremely widely used in large regions for the specific purpose of talking to people from other parts of the same region. Anybody who either traveled or dealt with travelers would speak it. The historical Mediterranean Lingua Franca, which has become the generic term for all such languages , was a pigdin mixture of Italian and other languages that was nearly universal in the Mediterranian for a short period of about five hundred years, and didn't die out entirely until the 19th century. This saved a salt-seller or fishmonger from having to learn a dozen different languages and still risk having a customer he can't talk to, or a fisherman from being unable to buy salt or sell fish because ha can't find a common language.

[Batcathat]

Except it didn't work that way. Pretty much every period in human history has had at least one language that was extremely widely used in large regions for the specific purpose of talking to people from other parts of the same region. Anybody who either traveled or dealt with travelers would speak it. The historical Mediterranean Lingua Franca, which has become the generic term for all such languages , was a pigdin mixture of Italian and other languages that was nearly universal in the Mediterranian for a short period of about five hundred years, and didn't die out entirely until the 19th century. This saved a salt-seller or fishmonger from having to learn a dozen different languages and still risk having a customer he can't talk to, or a fisherman from being unable to buy salt or sell fish because ha can't find a common language.

Yeah, that does seem more widespread than I thought (though at first glance I'm not able to find any number or percentage of speakers, which slightly annoy me). I still suspect there's quite a difference between something like that and the kind of "Common" that usually shows up in fiction (where everyone is completely fluent in the same language across entire continents if not the entire world) but it's admittedly closer than I imagined.

[Satinavian]

Yeah, that does seem more widespread than I thought (though at first glance I'm not able to find any number or percentage of speakers, which slightly annoy me). I still suspect there's quite a difference between something like that and the kind of "Common" that usually shows up in fiction (where everyone is completely fluent in the same language across entire continents if not the entire world) but it's admittedly closer than I imagined.
Depends.

For example in Splittermond, the shared language every PC starts with is called "Bazaar Gnomish" and, while having some words from the language of the extinct gnome dominated empire of Kesh, is the native language of literally no one. It is explicitly a trade language.

It is mostly D&D that is weird, again.

[Zombimode]

It is mostly D&D that is weird, again.

Isn't this entirely setting dependent?

In Eberron "common" is just the language of Galifar, the almost continent-spanning kingdom that was splintered in the Last War.

Likewise, in Greyhawk "common" is a somewhat simplified version of modern oeridian and was the official language of the Great Kingdom of Aerdy that at one point dominated most of the Flanaesse. In regions that were never really under the influence of Aerdy (like Keoland) common isn't really all that widespread. It is useful to learn Keolandish when you venture into that kingdom for instance.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by GloatingSwine
We actually see the writing system of galactic standard on some screens in Return of the Jedi, it does not use any recognisable characters at all.

This is a writing system called Aurebesh (https://omniglot.com/conscripts/aurekbesh.htm), initially developed for Return of the Jedi and fleshed out in later properties. It’s a one-to-one correspondence with our alphabet, plus a few odd diphthongs.

Enemies of the letter C will gnash their teeth at its presence here, but bemoaning its existence leaves it unaffected.


Originally Posted by Trafalgar
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra!

…Shaka, when the walls fell.

Can’t play the video, but I always love any reference to one of my favorite TNG episodes. One of the best first-contact stories Trek has ever done.

[Talakeal]

And which of these is it within your power to solve? Can you change your players’ imaginations, or upgrade their memories? Can you write rules to better match the fiction? Can you write fiction to better match the rules? What’s the low hanging fruit here?

One can, although it isn't always for the good of the game to try. I know you are a big "rules as physics" guy, but for me it is enough to accept that the gaming medium is an imperfect translation of the fiction.

For me, it is much easier to restore immersion by saying "Terran isn't English, I am just translating it into something you would understand" than try and come up with and explain an etymology for the word "Phoenician" on a planet without a Carthage. I guess YMMV though.


You know, come to think of it, I have had similar instances where players take the models overly literally; like I will describe a female wizard with red hair, and then put down the closest model I have, a female sorceress with brown hair, and the players will call me out on the difference. So maybe its just that some player's brains work differently, or maybe they are just nit-picky.



Most fantasy worldbuilding doesn't cover enough scope to move beyond the reach of one common language though. Common languages of trade, religion, and culture have been a feature of the real world since the pre-classical era (Akkadian, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, French, Arabic and English have all been or still are common languages for our world due to their use as trade languages or the language of learning or religion beyond their regions of origin).

Unless your fantasy world is so restrictive that people can't travel more than about 20 miles from where they're born at all, it is more unrealistic not to have at least some kind of common language that is at least sort-of understood by anyone worth talking to.

As I said above, my world absolutely does have a trade tongue. It just isn't English*.

Also, its unlikely that this is going to be the only, or even the primary, language that the players are talking in, as most people prefer their native tongues when speaking to those who understand them, so the whole idea that this removes immersion breaking etymology or word games doesn't hold much water.

*Its a constructed language forced on the people by a super-continent spanning Empire for ease of use across different regions. English, on the other hand, is a complete mess. As an English major and a semi-professional writer, part of the fantasy for me is playing a character who doesn't have to deal with its idiosyncrasies :)

[Quertus]

Elminster from the Forgotten Realms and Mordenkainen from Greyhawk regularly traveled back and forth to Earth, but they never stayed for a long time. There's an early D&D adventure that features a magical storm that opens portals to other dimensions. It summons a "demon", which is just an big alien from another universe, and some random dude from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin who is freaking out. If you don't figure out how to return him to Earth, he dies in a few months because the Forgotten Realms doesn't have a particular amino acid that Earth humans require.

Ah, thanks. There’s more, including an adventure to the Smithsonian that talks about similar perils for D&D characters remaining on Earth long-term. And (iirc) High Level Adventures details more perils of going to Earth.


Now to me that seems even more hamfisted. It's one step away from one of those terrible movies where the characters from a fantasy TV show randomly go to New York (ie. He-Man, The Smurfs, etc)

That was a rather long swath of text you quoted, so I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. Having a canon is bad? Having reasons for why things are the way they are is bad? I’m not familiar with your references, so I can only contrast your “randomly” with my general theme of “having a reason”.


I think you may be projecting an issue with your specific group onto the game as a whole

Eh, more protecting / injecting some Internet opinions.


You seem to be using the whole monstrous race debate as a red herring to get away from what you originally wrote. I really don't want to restart that whole debate, lets just agree to disagree on it. What you seemed to say was that D&D is so racist that it doesn't matter what language we play it in. Which I strongly disagree with and don't see any evidence of.

Given that that not only wasn’t my point, but was nearly the opposite of what I was saying, it’s no wonder that you feel that way. My point was that Common probably was English in Gygax’s head canon.


Your character's in game actions have no affect on your real world morality. Just because I steal something in game does not mean I am a thief in real life. Feeding the poor in game does not mean you are a good person. A character of mine once burned down a city block through misuse of a fireball spell. I probably killed hundreds of innocents and didn't lose any sleep over it. PVP is about the only thing with a real world effect in that it might hurt someone else's feelings. So if the game I am playing requires me to kill some orcs, I don't care.

This is so far from what I was talking about, I almost didn’t even see how it was connected.

So, sure, you’ve got to kill some orcs Tuscan Raiders. Who cares? Most people just gloss over it. But some players get bothered when they realize that the Raider camp included women and children. And that’s something some people don’t want to think about.

Just as “this D&D species might serve as a proxy for some real-world race” is something some people don’t want to think about when making a habit of attacking them on sight, or while preparing an Epic Genocide Spell in their elf games.

There’s plenty of topics people want to “fade to black” around, whether it’s sex or gore or politics or hairy hobbit feet. That’s generally less about “morality” (let alone protecting that moral judgement into themselves) than about “squick”, or even just “that’s too heavy for elf games”.


Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra!

Shaka, when the walls fell.

That episode was great, but on a technical level, it was a little sketchy.

How would the next generation learn a completely referential language? If you can’t tell the story, how can they get the concept?

Sure, Picard told a story in the referential language, which we the audience understood. So it makes sense, right?

Except… how could they have a word for “wall” to say “Shaka, when the walls fell” in a purely referential language? How would the next generation learn what that means? We in the audience have the advantage of already knowing those words.

Also, we already know the story, because we just watched it play out. If we don’t recognize the story, how impactful are the emotional beasts told in out of context parallel? Cap in the plane. Tony, his armor off. Jarvis with the prototype. Tony, the prototype deployed. Odin asking Thor’s pardon. Loki at the theater. Even if you feel the same emotional beats as I intended by those scenes, does it really paint a picture of a compelling story (ignoring that my History is not so good (Darn senility), and the actual events I’m trying to describe may have occurred differently)?

And if they have an answer to the problem of teaching the words and other components of the story, if they have a method to teach vocabulary and concepts to their children, why not apply it to teaching an alien species, instead of their nuclear option?

The whole cup brown hot bit would have been good, but also demonstrated how our MCs have the linguistic IQ of a gerbil, with not devising sets of “X and not X”. (although I’m told that’s less “they’re idiots” and more “they’re not programmers” - apparently most humans, even otherwise smart ones, aren’t trained to think and test and design that way.)

Although not as good a story (I’d be lucky to remember 30 seconds worth of content from that episode), I think “eyes in the darkness… one moon circles” is a better depiction of overcoming linguistic barriers, from a technical perspective. Heck, even the episode of Babylon 5 involving possession and time travel handled language barriers better, IMO.

[Satinavian]

Isn't this entirely setting dependent?Some D&D setting might explain it somehow, but i can't remember any non-D&D derived system that has the mechanical language "Common". When systems bother with languages at all, those are languages linked to cultures, not universal languages spoken by humans basically everywhere.

[Bohandas]

That was a rather long swath of text you quoted, so I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. Having a canon is bad? Having reasons for why things are the way they are is bad? I’m not familiar with your references, so I can only contrast your “randomly” with my general theme of “having a reason”.

Basically in all these cases it seems like the inclusion of Earth, rather than solving the issue, simply adds another arbitrary and unnecessary thing that they've added. There's simply no reason for anyone from Star Wars or D&D to go to Earth.

As for the movie references, The Smurfs was a TV and comicbook series from the 1960's that was set in a medieval fantasy world, but in 2011 some movie studio got the rights and made a movie where for some reason they go to modern day New York City. He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was a TV series from the 1980's, it was set more-or-less entirely on a planet called Eternia, yet somehow when it got a movie in 1987 the characters wound up in New York.

And my whole point is that none of these characters have any reason to go to Earth, none of their settings have anything to do with anything on Earth - and they certainly don't have anything to do with New York City. Earth doesn't fit into or contribute to the setting in any way, so it's jarring and immersion breaking that Earth would ever be referenced.

Instead of fixing the issue it's another incongruous addition

EDIT:
Actually The Smurfs might have been on Earth to begin with, but it definitely wasn't in modern times and definitely wasn't in America, so the general idea I was trying to express of arbitrarily including a time and place that has no business in the series still stands

[Quertus]

Basically in all these cases it seems like the inclusion of Earth, rather than solving the issue, simply adds another arbitrary and unnecessary thing that they've added. There's simply no reason for anyone from Star Wars or D&D to go to Earth.

Ah, especially with your explanation of your movie references, your concern makes sense.

Original (2e and earlier) D&D characters have a *glut* of reasons to go to Earth, what with all the tanks, jets, guns, computers, Cursed Robes of Blending being labeled “cuisinart”, etc, not to mention the abundant physical connections to the world. Tracking down the origin of those (let alone the origin of Isekai’d characters, or the “giants pulling strings”) would lead them to Earth. So, most likely, the only reason you feel this way is due to WotC’s failure to be true to the brand.

Star Wars, the only reason to go to Earth is to explain the presence of humans in both galaxies, when theirs is “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”. It’s simply a nice explanation for why the PoV characters are human - something a lot of world building fails to cover, to its detriment.

[Batcathat]

Original (2e and earlier) D&D characters have a *glut* of reasons to go to Earth, what with all the tanks, jets, computers, Cursed Robes of Blending being labeled “cuisinart”, etc, not to mention the abundant physical connections to the world. Tracking down the origin of those (let alone the origin of Isekai’d characters, or the “giants pulling strings”) would lead them to Earth. So, most likely, the only reason you feel this way is due to WotC’s failure to be true to the brand.

It would seem that they still lack any good reason to call it "Greek fire", "French braid", etc. unless you suggest that all of those things are imported from Earth?

[Quertus]

It would seem that they still lack any good reason to call it "Greek fire", "French braid", etc. unless you suggest that all of those things are imported from Earth?

I suggest that Original D&D characters *are on Earth*, just a post-apocalyptic future Earth. Which explains why all the “magic from the past” includes things like guns and airplanes.

Ignoring that (well-supported) conjecture, yes, it would make sense that Greek Fire got its name via the numerous canonical connections to Earth. How else could one reasonably explain such a name?

[Batcathat]

Ignoring that (well-supported) conjecture, yes, it would make sense that Greek Fire got its name via the numerous canonical connections to Earth. How else could one reasonably explain such a name?

Sure, if the name is literally "Greek fire" something like that is basically the only explanation. Which is why it seems easier to either give it a new name or use "Greek fire" but assume it's just the translation of a in-universe term.

Either one breaks my suspension of disbelief less than "it's another world but everyone's speaking modern English and they imported numerous Earth terms" or "it's a post-apocalyptic future but everyone's speaking modern English and they kept numerous terms from their distant past".

[Satinavian]

Ah, especially with your explanation of your movie references, your concern makes sense.

Original (2e and earlier) D&D characters have a *glut* of reasons to go to Earth, what with all the tanks, jets, guns, computers, Cursed Robes of Blending being labeled “cuisinart”, etc, not to mention the abundant physical connections to the world. Tracking down the origin of those (let alone the origin of Isekai’d characters, or the “giants pulling strings”) would lead them to Earth. So, most likely, the only reason you feel this way is due to WotC’s failure to be true to the brand.

Star Wars, the only reason to go to Earth is to explain the presence of humans in both galaxies, when theirs is “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”. It’s simply a nice explanation for why the PoV characters are human - something a lot of world building fails to cover, to its detriment.When i played 2e, i never stumbled about any canonical connection to Earth. I am sceptical there were any in the material that got translated into my language. I only learned later from the internet that some early authors liked to do this and i don't miss to have missed it at all. It was never important and honestly, it is best forgotten like many other subpar early ideas.

And sure, in the early days of D&D post-apocalypse fantasy was all the rage and the game reflected this. But now this genre is nearly dead and not something the game should chase.

[Quertus]

Sure, if the name is literally "Greek fire" something like that is basically the only explanation.

Yup. Same page so far.


Which is why it seems easier to either give it a new name

You could. That’s not what the D&D devs did, so that ship has largely sailed. But for designing your own system, sure.


or use "Greek fire" but assume it's just the translation of a in-universe term.

Eh, I mean, you *could* do that, but unlike “Polish sausage” or “French braids”, “Greek fire” is a phrase I expect could show up in the rules books with specific mechanics attached. At that point, it’s less effort for the devs to give it a new name.


Either one breaks my suspension of disbelief less than "it's another world but everyone's speaking modern English and they imported numerous Earth terms" or "it's a post-apocalyptic future but everyone's speaking modern English and they kept numerous terms from their distant past".

You’ve got to look at the big picture here, and evaluate all of the costs and benefits.

Even if you favor the Simulationist “But linguistic drift” over the Gamist “But effort”, that’s not taking into account the constant canonical contact with contemporary Earth. Or the immortal beings, like deities, who are already maintaining medieval stasis. It’s no stretch to imagine they might not be thrilled when their followers invent new phrases like “basic *****”, and might threaten to smite the unruly children if they continue to soil the divine tongue so.

In the context of D&D, where “why things are the way they are” is so well spelled out, it’s actually more jarring to *not* have Common be modern English without a really good reason.

And, again, that’s ignoring all the content that’s language-dependent, and all the effort necessary to police the players (and (especially) GMs) to not make jarringly English-based assumptions, and the disconnect formed when the words that the player says and hears (and mishears) canonically aren’t related to their character’s experience, and…

Yeah, no. It’s just not worth it.

Wheel of Time does a decent job of hinting at linguistic drift, with “tomats” and “tobac” and so many others almost familiar words. Someone building their own system, who wanted to go the “linguistic drift” route, I’d say that that was definitely a good place to start.

Also… “not really” is a horrific rabbit hole. They’re not really speaking English… and they’re not really humans… and they’re not really casting spells… or swinging swords… or fighting monsters. It’s all just allegorical translation for…

Yeah, no. A work has to stand 100% coherently on what it *seems* to be before caring about any “translation value”.

[Batcathat]

Yeah, no. It’s just not worth it.

To each their own, I suppose. To me, pretending that the language spoken around the table is a "translation" of the one spoken in the game and avoiding or glancing over potential issues (which doesn't come up that often, in my experience) is far less taxing on the suspension of disbelief than having the languages being the same one, which (my opinion) make absolutely zero sense, regardless of inter-dimensional travelers and immortals.

[Quertus]

To each their own, I suppose. To me, pretending that the language spoken around the table is a "translation" of the one spoken in the game and avoiding or glancing over potential issues (which doesn't come up that often, in my experience) is far less taxing on the suspension of disbelief than having the languages being the same one, which (my opinion) make absolutely zero sense, regardless of inter-dimensional travelers and immortals.

Between players mishearing things, characters mishearing things, puns / innuendo / double entendres, puzzles, Message/Sending (word-count-based) / recordings (time-based), cut-off / partial messages (word-order-based), choice of writing materials, reading at a distance, rhymes, and lip-reading, let alone oddly specific one-offs, like caring about what kind of message one can write and conceal while one’s hands are tied behind their back, what information can be written onto a postage stamp, or what class of random doodles are most likely to be mistaken for words, I’d say it matters multiple times per session at my tables. Whereas, “it’s English, and here’s why” need come up exactly once per setting, if handled correctly.

And… “the immortal gods who created the world spoke English” counts as “makes zero sense” as an explanation for why English might be spoken in a world? I mean, I’ll admit, “English as we know it still exists in the far-flung future simply because of occasional contact between the present and the future” is a bit of a stretch of Gamist logic over pure Simulation unless those immortal beings are aware of and interested in this phenomenon, and pulling strings to facilitate communication for some reason; “we speaketh ye olde English, because the powers that be want to fool interlopers into believing that they’re in the past rather than the future” at least matches the general convoluted feel of Realms thought, that has Elminster stocking dungeons to empower future pawns that he sends indirectly against his foes.

As a programmer, I find it preferable to fix a problem *once* (“it’s English, it follows the rules of English, done.”) than constantly fixing every single instance of “it wouldn’t make sense to misheard those specific words that way, as “intersections” doesn’t sound like “bananas”, let alone the fact that we have redundant systems with lip reading not mistaking those words, either”.

I admit, I do value certain things that others might not, or might not value as highly as I do, including puzzles (which includes wording Sending or requests of genies), puns (“open sesame”), double entendres (“you’ve demonstrated that you’re skilled with your tongue; now let’s see how you do with your sword*”), consistency, and the ability of the PCs to be wrong in a reasonable way (misinterpreting “4 fathers” as “ancestors” via hearing “forefathers”), for example.

*hilariously, that one was entirely accidental.

[Psyren]

This morning I was reading a review of the Willow TV show and it mentioned how their immersion was shattered by a character saying "gesundheit" as that would imply that there is a Germany in the world of Willow.

I view this complaint like saying that "Millennium Falcon" implies there is a France somewhere in Star Wars. (https://xkcd.com/890/) At some point you have to accept in fantasy that there is an interface between whatever language the characters are speaking in-universe (with its own etymologies, idioms etc) and what we experience as the audience, and that the translation from one to the other is for our Doylist benefit.

[Batcathat]

And… “the immortal gods who created the world spoke English” counts as “makes zero sense” as an explanation for why English might be spoken in a world?

"Zero sense" might be a slight exaggeration, but yeah, the creator gods not only speaking modern English (including references to specific countries and people on Earth) but enforcing it to such a degree that it's still the exact same in the game's present doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.


As a programmer, I find it preferable to fix a problem *once* (“it’s English, it follows the rules of English, done.”) than constantly fixing every single instance of “it wouldn’t make sense to misheard those specific words that way, as “intersections” doesn’t sound like “bananas”, let alone the fact that we have redundant systems with lip reading not mistaking those words, either”.

Sure, I will agree that having a single solution like that has a certain elegance to it, but I won't prioritize elegance at the cost of credibility, at least not to this degree.

[Quertus]

"Zero sense" might be a slight exaggeration, but yeah, the creator gods not only speaking modern English (including references to specific countries and people on Earth) but enforcing it to such a degree that it's still the exact same in the game's present doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

Before I get lost in minutia, I’ve gotta ask: if you’re willing to just “gloss over” things, why not gloss over *1* thing (“it’s English… because”), rather than having to gloss over numerous things (cadence and meter and rhyme and word count and spelling and letter shape and puns and homophones and puzzles and…)?

Are you old enough to have noticed linguistic drift in your lifetime? Can you imagine being an immortal being, and being caught speaking anachronistic language (Dracula, perhaps?)? Can you imagine being an immortal deity, and not wanting your followers to find you old-fashioned? I’d say it’s pretty easy to see why the gods might fight to limit linguistic drift, even if they didn’t care about travelers from modern Earth…

… which, yes, is just an *excuse* to use English, rather than a “first principle” from which one would logically derive the setting as intended. Although it does *also* serve to explain medieval stasis.

For such first principles… you’d need “the creator gods are earthlings” (which… they are, at the metaphorical layer, but I’d be contradicting myself if I gave that precedence), or “the D&D campaign is taking place inside a simulator” (cool trope that I haven’t actually seen brought to conclusion at a table), or “the gods / the realm / whatever is intrinsically or conceptually connected to Earth” (the “giants pulling strings” concept explicitly made part of game physics, or “Humans and Earth are Strong in the realm of Platonic Ideals, causing the gods to subconsciously create Humans and modern English (or to have pulled them in as building blocks when grabbing the raw Platonic Ideal Stuff of Creation)”, for example).

Shrug. I’ll admit, I *literally* handle a root canal without anesthetic better than I handle having a splinter or paper cut for days. It’s just part of my nature that getting past a one-time large pain point is easier for me than the constant detraction from the game that is the near-constant dissonance and required mental effort of “this isn’t actually English”.

If your response to seeming inconsistency is to ignore it, rather than, as in my case, it triggering a desire to explore it, of wanting a campaign world that holds together upon inspection and is worth thinking about? If someone saying “Greek fire” isn’t meant as a signal that the game’s afoot, but is just another thing in the background to ignore? If details are to be ignored rather than being indicative of depth? That’s not my cup of tea, but I guess I can see how, under such circumstances, how much value one places of “fixing” such things might vary.

Or maybe I’ve been talking to too many anime snobs, who contend that too much is lost in translation for English dubs to be worth watching. :smallbiggrin:

[PhoenixPhyre]

The gods wouldn't have to fight linguistic drift, they'd have to continuously update the language live (ie in everyone's head) as idioms, references, and jargon changes. And would have to do so even though none of the references would make any sense at all in the fictional context.

Because it's not just linguistic drift (the big slow drift that happens over decades). It's pop culture references, slang, context-aware puns, etc. All of which change on a day by day and location-by-location basis.

And no, you can't just say "well, there are instances of very powerful beings having intermittent contact with unspecified points on Earth". You'd have to have continuous, 100% coverage monitoring of everyone everywhere and live, continuous updates of everyone's language models.

Which causes way more issues than the translation convention.

[Batcathat]

Before I get lost in minutia, I’ve gotta ask: if you’re willing to just “gloss over” things, why not gloss over *1* thing (“it’s English… because”), rather than having to gloss over numerous things (cadence and meter and rhyme and word count and spelling and letter shape and puns and homophones and puzzles and…)?

I'm fine with glossing over inconsistencies like that for the same reason I'm fine with the differences between rolling a die and actually swinging a sword or the difference between saying "I cast Magic Missile" and actually casting a spell. It's part of the abstraction of the game, while your explanation changes the game world itself (for the worse, in my opinion).


Are you old enough to have noticed linguistic drift in your lifetime? Can you imagine being an immortal being, and being caught speaking anachronistic language (Dracula, perhaps?)? Can you imagine being an immortal deity, and not wanting your followers to find you old-fashioned? I’d say it’s pretty easy to see why the gods might fight to limit linguistic drift, even if they didn’t care about travelers from modern Earth…

Sure, I can imagine them wanting something like that, but for them to actually be successful (to the point that the language has changed basically nothing at all over the usually fairly long period between the creation of the world and the present of the game) it would require intervention at a level unheard of in any setting I can think of. Not to mention that it still doesn't explain why they talk like that to begin with (again, not just the language itself but the very obvious references to things in our world). Your "one fix" creates question upon question upon question.


For such first principles… you’d need “the creator gods are earthlings” (which… they are, at the metaphorical layer, but I’d be contradicting myself if I gave that precedence), or “the D&D campaign is taking place inside a simulator” (cool trope that I haven’t actually seen brought to conclusion at a table), or “the gods / the realm / whatever is intrinsically or conceptually connected to Earth” (the “giants pulling strings” concept explicitly made part of game physics, or “Humans and Earth are Strong in the realm of Platonic Ideals, causing the gods to subconsciously create Humans and modern English (or to have pulled them in as building blocks when grabbing the raw Platonic Ideal Stuff of Creation)”, for example).

That might actually be a pretty interesting idea for a setting. But it's not a concept I would like to apply to every single game I play.


If your response to seeming inconsistency is to ignore it, rather than, as in my case, it triggering a desire to explore it, of wanting a campaign world that holds together upon inspection and is worth thinking about? If someone saying “Greek fire” isn’t meant as a signal that the game’s afoot, but is just another thing in the background to ignore? If details are to be ignored rather than being indicative of depth? That’s not my cup of tea, but I guess I can see how, under such circumstances, how much value one places of “fixing” such things might vary.

I admit, fixing it would be better than ignoring it. But only if it's a good fix and I don't think one that just raises further questions and leaves my suspension of disbelief crying in the corner meets that description.

[Xuc Xac]

Sure, if the name is literally "Greek fire" something like that is basically the only explanation. Which is why it seems easier to either give it a new name or use "Greek fire" but assume it's just the translation of a in-universe term.


You could. That’s not what the D&D devs did, so that ship has largely sailed. But for designing your own system, sure.

"Greek fire" was changed to "alchemist's fire" in 3rd edition. I don't know if it was included in the original game, but I suspect it was a later addition and the substance in question has actually been called "alchemist's fire" for more years now than it spent being called "Greek fire".

[Fiery Diamond]

At this point I'm just watching this thread because of how utterly bizarre Quertus's perspective is (to me specifically, but also clearly to nearly everyone in this thread that isn't Quertus) and watching the back-and-forth between Quertus saying "up is down" level of strange things while convinced that he's the one being perfectly reasonable and logical and everyone else trying to point out that his premises are not universally accepted and in fact are counter to most people's perspectives. It's entertaining.

Mind, I'm not trying to say anyone is "doing it wrong," but that the trains of thought and premises (I hesitate to call them "beliefs") are... very much not the same across the board for everyone, and that Quertus appears to be the odd man out without realizing it. At least with how much he seems to insist that D&D canon supports his views, it appears he doesn't realize it.

I can't speak for everyone, but I suspect that most people don't actually care overmuch about D&D canon compared to their own individual games, which most frequently do not involve Earth in any way. Gonna throw that out there. More importantly, though, Quertus seems to think that "Common is English" is somehow the default, rather than a him thing. Translation convention is far more common with fictional worlds than "actually, they're speaking English."

Also, I want to address Quertus's "Common is English, so that's what we're always speaking unless otherwise noted, and speaking in another language is notable and one must be extra careful" is... not how people running multilingual characters usually do things. Why in the world should the player of a character that speaks languages A, B, C, and D who regularly interacts with people who only speak B, C, or D (where A is "Common"), need to be extra special careful when speaking to such people but not when he talks to people that speak A? And what if there is no "Common?" Why should the player of a character who has multiple native languages have to be extra special careful with some of them but not another? That's completely bizarre.

[animorte]

At this point I'm just watching this thread because of how utterly bizarre Quertus's perspective is (to me specifically, but also clearly to nearly everyone in this thread that isn't Quertus)
Are you new to Quertus?

I appreciate a different perspective and I can always count on Quertus to provide that. I can also respect that generally Quertus is self aware enough to know that Quertus is sometimes an outlier. You keep being yourself, Quertus.

Side note: I’ve ever seen one person’s name used so much in one post before these two except Psyren’s. (Honorable mention goes out to LudicSavant and PhoenixPhyre).

[Fiery Diamond]

Are you new to Quertus?

I appreciate a different perspective and I can always count on Quertus to provide that. I can also respect that generally Quertus is self aware enough to know that Quertus is sometimes an outlier. You keep being yourself, Quertus.

Side note: I’ve ever seen one person’s name used so much in one post before these two except Psyren’s. (Honorable mention goes out to LudicSavant and PhoenixPhyre).

I generally enjoy reading what Quertus has to say, too. Sometimes I even agree with him! He's definitely often an outlier, but not everything he says is strange to me. It's just that when it is strange to me, it's very strange to me. Quertus is one of the big names on these forums, so I'm not entirely unfamiliar with his sometimes rather unique views. In fact, seeing Quertus as a vocal participant in a thread practically guarantees it'll be interesting in one way or another. I didn't mean to imply that I thought badly of him or anything like that, so if I came across that way, I apologize.

[animorte]

In fact, seeing Quertus as a vocal participant in a thread practically guarantees it'll be interesting in one way or another. I didn't mean to imply that I thought badly of him or anything like that, so if I came across that way, I apologize.
Agreed! No, I don’t think it necessarily came across as offensive, but it does help to clarify for anyone that might. :smallsmile:

[Bohandas]

The real problem with humans andnpigs and cows and these other real world creatures isn't so much that it implies the real world or reak world places - that's a seperate problem - but that it implies real world chemistry. In order to have humans and cows and stuff your chemistry has to reduce to earth chemistry at the nano to micro scale

[PhoenixPhyre]

The real problem with humans andnpigs and cows and these other real world creatures isn't so much that it implies the real world or reak world places - that's a seperate problem - but that it implies real world chemistry. In order to have humans and cows and stuff your chemistry has to reduce to earth chemistry at the nano to micro scale

Disagree. Unless you're requiring that those humans etc are identical to earth humans etc. As long as they're similar enough on the surface to the point a casual observer isn't weirded out by calling them humans, the details can differ a lot. Translation convention applies to more than just language. And calling them "human-analogues" or making up some nonsense term is way more distracting.

And once you include magic in the basic physical laws of the universe, you can get really similar surface level phenomena with very different underlying laws. Don't look too deep and expect things to stay the same, however. But 2 legs, 2 arms, basic human capabilities and incapabilities (within broad limits), red blood (at least to a surface examination)? That's trivial with radically different physical laws.

[Witty Username]

Interesting. Pretty sure I've seen enough movies where they command the archers "draw, fire" rather than "draw, loose". But it never even clicked with me.

I personally like, "Let Fly!", I think it is still anachronistic, since the only reference I know for it is cannon fire, but it reminds me of a cool scene from Master & Commander so it is much more fun, and doesn't reference guns by mechanics ("fire!" really only makes sense for firearms)

--
My immersion is pretty easy in terms of vocab, I think the only thing that gets me is overt religious references. I came to the conclusion awhile back that most fantasy is 1 to 2 steps away from literary nonsense anyway, and that helps most of it.

What more gets me is rules, generally if your setting has a magic system, and you can sum it up in a couple sentences without leaving anything out, my immersion is irrevocably broken. I prefer soft magic systems, and rules that are bendable, breakable, and have exceptions and asterisks. Something that comes off as a product of people trying to figure out something they still don't necessarily understand.

[Bohandas]

("fire!" really only makes sense for firearms)

Or for rocket launchers, which date back to the 1400's.

or for greek fire, which dates back to the 7th century

or for flaming arrows


And once you include magic in the basic physical laws of the universe, you can get really similar surface level phenomena with very different underlying laws. Don't look too deep and expect things to stay the same, however. But 2 legs, 2 arms, basic human capabilities and incapabilities (within broad limits), red blood (at least to a surface examination)? That's trivial with radically different physical laws.

I didn;t say that it had to have the same underlaying phenomena, just that it had to reduce to normal biochemistry in certain contexts (similar to how relativity reduces to Newtonian mechanics when dealing with objects that aren;t particularly massive or fast moving)

[GuzWaatensen]

Words that break immersion:
If you are underwater Word of Recall will break immersion. (Unless your sanctuary is also submerged)

[Gnoman]

"Greek fire" was changed to "alchemist's fire" in 3rd edition. I don't know if it was included in the original game, but I suspect it was a later addition and the substance in question has actually been called "alchemist's fire" for more years now than it spent being called "Greek fire".

I can't find it in the AD&D 1st Edition ruleset, but I was able to locate it in 2E, where the description is rather illuminating.


Oil: Greek fire is a general name given to all highly flammable oils used in combat. (Historically, Greek fire was a special combination of oil and chemicals that was sticky and difficult to extinguish.) These oils are highly flammable and a little dangerous to carry. Lamp oil is used for lamps and lanterns. It is not particularly explosive although it can be used to fuel an existing blaze.


It is explicitly a "we're lumping anything close to this into one thing, and calling it Greek Fire for convenience" thing.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I didn;t say that it had to have the same underlaying phenomena, just that it had to reduce to normal biochemistry in certain contexts (similar to how relativity reduces to Newtonian mechanics when dealing with objects that aren;t particularly massive or fast moving)

I still don't agree.

This only holds if you demand exact modern-science parity--that is, if a fictional!human and a RL!human can meet in the same universe and be indistinguishable. For me, "human" in this context is a statement of surface similarity.

If you take a human from my setting and cut them open, they bleed red. They have organs that look, to a casual naked-eye inspection, similar to those of an earth!human. But a quartus!human doesn't have biochemistry at all. No cells. The blood is an undifferentiated red fluid--why red? Because it's suffused with an increased proportion of luminous fire-aspected aether. Quartus!blood doesn't carry oxygen (because oxygen doesn't exist). The principles on which they operate are utterly alien to an earth human. But the surface-level outcomes of those principles, as observed by someone limited to roughly a 12th-century understanding and tool set, is similar. Not identical, similar. Similar enough to not cause dissonance when you call them humans.

If you brought a RL!human to Quartus or vice versa, they would suffer a critical existence failure. The physical laws on which they operate are utterly incompatible. But they're close enough visually and phenomenologically (at a surface level) for translation convention to cover the gaps.

[Lord Torath]

I think this is the most sensible way to handle it, right here:

Immersion is broken constantly. I’m rolling dice, reading a rulebook, consulting a character sheet, ordering a pizza, getting another drink, letting the dog out, moving a miniature, dropping my pencil on the floor, and whatever else happens over the course of an afternoon or evening gaming in the den.

So the essential skill isn’t “not breaking immersion”. The essential skill is re-immersion. And a crucial tool for re-immersion is not focusing on what just broke immersion.

OK, so somebody just spoke in modern English, or said “Gesundheit!”, or went to the bathroom, or made a pun, or referred to a “saving throw”. It happens. Focusing on the modernity gives it more power, for a longer time, and prevents re-immersion.

So let it go, move on, and get back to fighting the ghouls.
Thanks, Jay!

[kyoryu]

Immersion is broken constantly. I’m rolling dice, reading a rulebook, consulting a character sheet, ordering a pizza, getting another drink, letting the dog out, moving a miniature, dropping my pencil on the floor, and whatever else happens over the course of an afternoon or evening gaming in the den.

So the essential skill isn’t “not breaking immersion”. The essential skill is re-immersion. And a crucial tool for re-immersion is not focusing on what just broke immersion.

OK, so somebody just spoke in modern English, or said “Gesundheit!”, or went to the bathroom, or made a pun, or referred to a “saving throw”. It happens. Focusing on the modernity gives it more power, for a longer time, and prevents re-immersion.

So let it go, move on, and get back to fighting the ghouls.

I feel like this is accurate.

In most cases, it seems like people really have issues with immersion, because, on some level, they don't want to get over the thing that's causing the immersion block.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I feel like this is accurate.

In most cases, it seems like people really have issues with immersion, because, on some level, they don't want to get over the thing that's causing the immersion block.

Agreed. Most complaints about immersion really aren't about immersion at their roots--the root cause is actually somewhere else (and varies tremendously).

[Fiery Diamond]

Disagree. Unless you're requiring that those humans etc are identical to earth humans etc. As long as they're similar enough on the surface to the point a casual observer isn't weirded out by calling them humans, the details can differ a lot. Translation convention applies to more than just language. And calling them "human-analogues" or making up some nonsense term is way more distracting.

And once you include magic in the basic physical laws of the universe, you can get really similar surface level phenomena with very different underlying laws. Don't look too deep and expect things to stay the same, however. But 2 legs, 2 arms, basic human capabilities and incapabilities (within broad limits), red blood (at least to a surface examination)? That's trivial with radically different physical laws.


I still don't agree.

This only holds if you demand exact modern-science parity--that is, if a fictional!human and a RL!human can meet in the same universe and be indistinguishable. For me, "human" in this context is a statement of surface similarity.

If you take a human from my setting and cut them open, they bleed red. They have organs that look, to a casual naked-eye inspection, similar to those of an earth!human. But a quartus!human doesn't have biochemistry at all. No cells. The blood is an undifferentiated red fluid--why red? Because it's suffused with an increased proportion of luminous fire-aspected aether. Quartus!blood doesn't carry oxygen (because oxygen doesn't exist). The principles on which they operate are utterly alien to an earth human. But the surface-level outcomes of those principles, as observed by someone limited to roughly a 12th-century understanding and tool set, is similar. Not identical, similar. Similar enough to not cause dissonance when you call them humans.

If you brought a RL!human to Quartus or vice versa, they would suffer a critical existence failure. The physical laws on which they operate are utterly incompatible. But they're close enough visually and phenomenologically (at a surface level) for translation convention to cover the gaps.


I agree with you completely, and it causes me consternation when people refuse to accept this as reasonable. People keep insisting "but unless you explicitly say otherwise in the fiction, we must automatically assume that it is identical to modern scientific understanding except where it obviously can't be!" No, that's dumb. You should NOT assume fantasy natural law is identical to modern physics unless explicitly stated, the exact reverse of what those people claim. If the surface level looks similar, that does not even remotely imply that the underlying principles are.

Related: I tend to get into arguments with people on the subject of "But Dragons," which those people insist is a fallacy. I say: if a fantasy world has real-world-impossible dragons (or whatever other overtly fantastical element we're dealing with to trigger "But Dragons"), assume the underlying principles are different unless told otherwise. Don't assume they're the same unless told otherwise.

[Talakeal]

Related: I tend to get into arguments with people on the subject of "But Dragons," which those people insist is a fallacy. I say: if a fantasy world has real-world-impossible dragons (or whatever other overtly fantastical element we're dealing with to trigger "But Dragons"), assume the underlying principles are different unless told otherwise. Don't assume they're the same unless told otherwise.

A lot of “but dragons” fallacy usage is about silencing criticism of plot holes and logical contradictions and irrational behavior. Stuff like “if the hero can teleport as we see in chapter three, why didn’t use that power to escape the dungeon in chapter seven?” rather than insisting everything follow real world logic.

[PhoenixPhyre]

A lot of “but dragons” fallacy usage is about silencing criticism of plot holes and logical contradictions and irrational behavior. Stuff like “if the hero can teleport as we see in chapter three, why didn’t use that power to escape the dungeon in chapter seven?” rather than insisting everything follow real world logic.

I see many more offensive invocations of that fallacy than I do defensive ones. That is, claiming (often without basis) that the opponent is invoking the fallacy if they allow for non-real-world logic or physical laws. I haven't seen it used to defend plot holes, logical contradictions, or irrational behavior[1].

Personally, my "immersion breaking" happens when media
1) claims to be accurately depicting something I know stuff about
2) and makes egregious mistakes.

Both parts are important. Media that doesn't make any special claim to accuracy/realism or claims to be in a fantasy world can get away with a heck of a lot more before I say "yeah, no." It mostly has to break its own internal logic. But if you claim to be accurately portraying, say, real-world physics and then do something dumb like make grandiose claims about quantum mechanics and philosophy...yeah. I'm out.

It's why I could tolerate the original 3 Star Wars movies despite their utter failure at worldbuilding and incoherent physics and depictions--they were basically tongue in cheek low budget action movies. The later ones took themselves way more seriously, which meant I did as well. And then utterly failed at doing anything right.

[1] although really, people are illogical and engage in "illogical" behavior all the time. And lots of behavior appears illogical/irrational from the outside because there's missing context that makes it perfectly (or more perfectly) rational for the person doing it. Most invocations of plot holes and illogical behavior comes down to armchair quarterbacking and assuming that smart === perfect. Smart people do dumb things. Not only that, the people in the fiction have access to a wealth of information and context that cannot be conveyed to the reader. So really, most of the time the appropriate defense is rejecting isolated demands for rigor.

[Talakeal]

I agree with you completely, and it causes me consternation when people refuse to accept this as reasonable. People keep insisting "but unless you explicitly say otherwise in the fiction, we must automatically assume that it is identical to modern scientific understanding except where it obviously can't be!" No, that's dumb. You should NOT assume fantasy natural law is identical to modern physics unless explicitly stated, the exact reverse of what those people claim. If the surface level looks similar, that does not even remotely imply that the underlying principles are.

Related: I tend to get into arguments with people on the subject of "But Dragons," which those people insist is a fallacy. I say: if a fantasy world has real-world-impossible dragons (or whatever other overtly fantastical element we're dealing with to trigger "But Dragons"), assume the underlying principles are different unless told otherwise. Don't assume they're the same unless told otherwise.

More to the point, how do you expect people to get invested in (let alone make rational decisions about) the setting if you don't establish a normal baseline first?

Like, something as simple as a PC ordering a beer at a tavern becomes impossible in a world where beer could be poisonous, or explosive, or worth more than gold, or a dangerous living creature.

And, likewise, few players (or readers) want to listen to a gigantic lecture about all of the ways in which seemingly ordinary things are different than the real world, let alone remember it when it matters!


I see many more offensive invocations of that fallacy than I do defensive ones. That is, claiming (often without basis) that the opponent is invoking the fallacy if they allow for non-real-world logic or physical laws. I haven't seen it used to defend plot holes, logical contradictions, or irrational behavior[1].


I see it used quite often as a defense against lazy or inconsistent world-building. Although, I do say it is most often tangled up with the guy at the gym fallacy.*

I also see it used a lot in politicized debates that we shouldn't get into here, like about social issues and demographics in the campaign world. Like, for example, a couple years ago there was the big controversy about wheelchair accessible dungeons, and it was commonly used to deflect questions about why able-bodied villains would make strongholds easier for handicapped PCs to invade or why someone would spend hundreds of thousands of gold building a magical levitating wheelchair rather than just paying a cleric to cast regenerate on them.

*: Which, after 20 years, I still am not sure what exactly is meant by “guy at the gym fallacy” as the original post presents half a dozen or so claims and doesn't actually say which one they find fallacious.

[BloodSquirrel]

I see many more offensive invocations of that fallacy than I do defensive ones. That is, claiming (often without basis) that the opponent is invoking the fallacy if they allow for non-real-world logic or physical laws. I haven't seen it used to defend plot holes, logical contradictions, or irrational behavior[1].


https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/652/244/974.png

[Fiery Diamond]

More to the point, how do you expect people to get invested in (let alone make rational decisions about) the setting if you don't establish a normal baseline first?

Like, something as simple as a PC ordering a beer at a tavern becomes impossible in a world where beer could be poisonous, or explosive, or worth more than gold, or a dangerous living creature.

And, likewise, few players (or readers) want to listen to a gigantic lecture about all of the ways in which seemingly ordinary things are different than the real world, let alone remember it when it matters!



I see it used quite often as a defense against lazy or inconsistent world-building. Although, I do say it is most often tangled up with the guy at the gym fallacy.*

I also see it used a lot in politicized debates that we shouldn't get into here, like about social issues and demographics in the campaign world. Like, for example, a couple years ago there was the big controversy about wheelchair accessible dungeons, and it was commonly used to deflect questions about why able-bodied villains would make strongholds easier for handicapped PCs to invade or why someone would spend hundreds of thousands of gold building a magical levitating wheelchair rather than just paying a cleric to cast regenerate on them.

*: Which, after 20, I still am not sure what exactly is meant by guy at the gym as the original post presents half a dozen or so claims and doesn't actually say which one they find fallacious.

I genuinely do not comprehend what is so difficult to understand about "similar on the surface" PLUS "don't make further assumptions about below-the-surface layer unless you're specifically given information to work with." That should be the default. Maybe you get your kicks by making unwarranted assumptions based on real-world properties that aren't even mentioned, but it's not difficult at all to refrain from that while still remaining immersed in the familiar aspects (the similar surface layer). Do you just have issues with "modern scientific understanding" not being a baseline while still having an unspoken and obvious baseline? Because that makes no sense to me that anyone would have issue with that.

[Talakeal]

I genuinely do not comprehend what is so difficult to understand about "similar on the surface" PLUS "don't make further assumptions about below-the-surface layer unless you're specifically given information to work with." That should be the default. Maybe you get your kicks by making unwarranted assumptions based on real-world properties that aren't even mentioned, but it's not difficult at all to refrain from that while still remaining immersed in the familiar aspects (the similar surface layer). Do you just have issues with "modern scientific understanding" not being a baseline while still having an unspoken and obvious baseline? Because that makes no sense to me that anyone would have issue with that.

I apologize. I wasn't reading you literally enough.

Yes, if the surface world seems to be identical except where it isn't, then trying to dig deeper is mostly just meaningless navel-gazing.


IMO nobody understands the underlying principles of our reality, let alone a fictional one, well enough for such arguments to have much merit.

[PhoenixPhyre]

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/652/244/974.png

I see that as a statement of "hey, they don't take themselves seriously. So you're investing way more effort in trying to make sense out of something that isn't intended to be coherent than it's worth." Not a statement that it is coherent based on some non-real-world physical law. Which is what the But Dragon's "fallacy" is trying to do (if actually taken seriously).

Personally, all invocations of "fallacy" are offensive (as opposed to defensive) "shut up because I don't like your argument" statements. They're weaponized vocabulary. Attempts to shut down the conversation. Because fallacies
a) don't mean that the argument is actually wrong, merely that those premises don't logically entail that endpoint by that particular method.
b) only hold with any teeth in formal logic. Which describes approximately zero actual conversations. When someone presents a formal proof, go ahead and claim fallacies. Until then, it's a "shut up, they explained" tactic.

[Talakeal]

I see that as a statement of "hey, they don't take themselves seriously. So you're investing way more effort in trying to make sense out of something that isn't intended to be coherent than it's worth." Not a statement that it is coherent based on some non-real-world physical law. Which is what the But Dragon's "fallacy" is trying to do (if actually taken seriously).

Personally, all invocations of "fallacy" are offensive (as opposed to defensive) "shut up because I don't like your argument" statements. They're weaponized vocabulary. Attempts to shut down the conversation. Because fallacies
a) don't mean that the argument is actually wrong, merely that those premises don't logically entail that endpoint by that particular method.
b) only hold with any teeth in formal logic. Which describes approximately zero actual conversations. When someone presents a formal proof, go ahead and claim fallacies. Until then, it's a "shut up, they explained" tactic.

That may be your experience, but mine is pretty much the exact opposite. "But dragons," is almost always invoked to tell someone who is discussing speculative fiction to stop talking.

Heck, I remember back when the first Matrix movie came out and I would discuss the whole premise of "humans as batteries" fundamentally violates thermodynamics and being told repeatedly to shut up because "it was just a movie" rather than anyone actually trying to defend the bad science.

[PhoenixPhyre]

That may be your experience, but mine is pretty much the exact opposite. "But dragons," is almost always invoked to tell someone who is discussing speculative fiction to stop talking.

Heck, I remember back when the first Matrix movie came out and I would discuss the whole premise of "humans as batteries" fundamentally violates thermodynamics and being told repeatedly to shut up because "it was just a movie" rather than anyone actually trying to defend the bad science.

In that case, it's a "hey, you're boring me" response. "It's just a movie" is exactly a "hey, this isn't intended to make any sense. And no one else cares if it does or not" response. Not an attempt at a logical argument. But Dragons can only be a fallacy if it's part of an argument as to why it actually does make sense on the merits. It's not just a name for any response that shortcuts actually caring about the merits at all.

[Fiery Diamond]

PhoenixPhyre's experience with "But Dragons" is the same as mine, so they're not alone about that.

Also, apologies if I came across a little harsh in my last post. While now that you understand I was being literal and we've got that cleared up (Yay!) I unfortunately have had to deal with people insisting, for example, that modern understanding of [I]must be the way things work in a fantasy world with magic, and making assumptions based on that and extrapolations based on those assumptions, and then crying foul when something doesn't conform to their thusly derived expectations. When someone replies that they had no reason to make those assumptions "because it's a fantasy world with magic," they respond "BUT DRAGONS FALLACY!"

Actually, that's a fairly decent benchmark for "what assumptions can you safely make about how things work on a physical level," now that I think about it. "What would an intelligent but not particularly scientifically-inclined 10-year-old assume about how things work." "You must have air to breathe" level, rather than "you must breath in oxygen, which your blood carries around your body" level. "Your blood is red" level, rather than "you have white and red blood cells that perform different tasks in your body" level. Etc.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Actually, that's a fairly decent benchmark for "what assumptions can you safely make about how things work on a physical level," now that I think about it. "What would an intelligent but not particularly scientifically-inclined 10-year-old assume about how things work." "You must have air to breathe" level, rather than "you must breath in oxygen, which your blood carries around your body" level. "Your blood is red" level, rather than "you have white and red blood cells that perform different tasks in your body" level. Etc.

Yeah, my default is "12th century alchemist". So naked eye (no microscopes), simple weighing, and elementary (and crude) chemical techniques (but not the right theory behind them). That's mostly because my own setting uses a physical law set for which that's actually a fairly good approximation. But "reasonably intelligent 10-year-old" is probably a fair standard for most games and settings.

My experience is that people who try to apply real-world physical understanding beyond this level (in a D&D context at least) are one or both of
a) mistaken about what the real-world physical understanding is
b) trying to munchkin and gain unfair advantage by carefully splicing between game mechanics and half-remembered physical laws.

Or (and much less annoyingly) just nerding out and saying "hey, look at the random stuff I know!). Which is fine, as long as we all realize it's utterly irrelevant to anything game related.

[Vinyadan]

IMO nobody understands the underlying principles of our reality, let alone a fictional one, well enough for such arguments to have much merit.

This is more-or-less my view, too, as far as fantasy adventures are concerned. There used to be humour and miasma and self-generation theories. Now we have cells and hormones and microbes and we know how to stop flies from laying eggs on a certain plate. These are huge steps forward in understanding the world, but they certainly aren't the final destination. We still don't have that famous "unified theory". This isn't new, we already didn't have a unified theory when geologists calculated the age of the planet and Darwin used a similar scale for evolution, but Kelvin observed that there was no way the Sun could have been lit for that long, because atomic fusion hadn't been theorised yet.

So there shouldn't be dragons and Gollums and what-have-you? Sounds about right. Modern science is probably missing some information yet. It can't understand Alzheimer, and you expect it to explain dragons?

[Jay R]

People keep insisting "but unless you explicitly say otherwise in the fiction, we must automatically assume that it is identical to modern scientific understanding except where it obviously can't be!" No, that's dumb.

Yes, that's dumb. It's also an inaccurate, grossly exaggerated revision of what people are saying.

On a very basic, non-scientific level, everyone assumes that the fantasy world is similar to ours in general, and when it isn't, we treat that as an exception.

When our character drops something, we expect it to fall down, not sideways or up. If it falls up, we expect that to indicate some kind of spell or other exception handling.

We expect swords to have edges and points, not feathers and tails.
We expect our characters to hold swords with their hands, not their navels.
If the monster has fangs, we expect them in its mouth, not in its armpit.

So on a very simplistic level, everybody actually assumes a great deal of similarity between our world and the fantasy world. The difference between us is not whether we expect that at all, but how much of it we expect. That's merely a matter of degree.

Even people comfortable with lots of alien or fantastic or anti-scientific elements expect their characters to wear pants and wield swords against the evil werewolves, to save the innocent children. If we start a game and the GM has our characters wearing werewolves, while wielding a child against the evil pants to save the innocent swords, then it feels wrong.

And it isn't made right with "but dragons...".

[BloodSquirrel]

I see that as a statement of "hey, they don't take themselves seriously. So you're investing way more effort in trying to make sense out of something that isn't intended to be coherent than it's worth." Not a statement that it is coherent based on some non-real-world physical law. Which is what the But Dragon's "fallacy" is trying to do (if actually taken seriously).

That one poster has caused more desperate backtracking attempts than I ever would have believed.



Personally, all invocations of "fallacy" are offensive (as opposed to defensive) "shut up because I don't like your argument" statements. They're weaponized vocabulary. Attempts to shut down the conversation.

The "But dragons" fallacy is literally an attempt to shut down the conversation by insisting that something's logic can't be criticized because dragons. "Shut up because I don't like your argument" is exactly what you're being criticized for saying. This entire thread has devolved into "Shut up about things breaking your immersion because I said so".

[Fiery Diamond]

Yes, that's dumb. It's also an inaccurate, grossly exaggerated revision of what people are saying.

On a very basic, non-scientific level, everyone assumes that the fantasy world is similar to ours in general, and when it isn't, we treat that as an exception.

When our character drops something, we expect it to fall down, not sideways or up. If it falls up, we expect that to indicate some kind of spell or other exception handling.

We expect swords to have edges and points, not feathers and tails.
We expect our characters to hold swords with their hands, not their navels.
If the monster has fangs, we expect them in its mouth, not in its armpit.

So on a very simplistic level, everybody actually assumes a great deal of similarity between our world and the fantasy world. The difference between us is not whether we expect that at all, but how much of it we expect. That's merely a matter of degree.

Even people comfortable with lots of alien or fantastic or anti-scientific elements expect their characters to wear pants and wield swords against the evil werewolves, to save the innocent children. If we start a game and the GM has our characters wearing werewolves, while wielding a child against the evil pants to save the innocent swords, then it feels wrong.

And it isn't made right with "but dragons...".

You say that, but I'm not strawmanning here. It is a matter of degree, absolutely, and I maintain that expecting cells and atoms to exist is a ludicrous, ridiculous degree. See my most recent post. And yes, on these very forums, people have claimed that "of course we assume atoms exist unless you explicitly say they don't! Doing otherwise is ridiculous!" Specifically that example, too - about atoms existing, with extrapolations to then expecting chemistry to work as it would in the real world because of the principles of chemistry as regards atoms. That's not a straw man, it's a direct example of what I stated that you quoted that actually exists. And I maintain that it's completely absurd.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I got a little lost in this. Are you saying that you see it used as a fallacy fallacy, claiming someone else's argument is invalid because they're defending their idea with a "but dragons" argument (whether or not they actually are)?

I see people claim that the other side is using a fallacy (many different ones, but dragons being one of the many) even when any of the following is true
a) the other side isn't even making an argument on the merits at all. Things like "dude, I think you're taking this way too seriously, lighten up" aren't arguments on the merits. They're saying that you've made a category error (at best) or are just being conversationally inapposite. Which may or may not be true. But they're not anything to which a fallacy can apply.

b) the other side hasn't made their argument yet (ie preemptive "if you say otherwise you're just claiming because dragons")

c) the other side is actually saying something that avoids the fallacy but sorta-kinda-looks like it. Saying "this world has dragons so you should be careful what else you assume it has or doesn't have" is not the But Dragons fallacy. It's merely a statement of epistemic caution. And a justified one. Similarly, saying "in my experience, people who focus on mechanical optimization don't tend to spend as much effort on thematics/roleplaying" isn't Stormwind--Stormwind is only a fallacy if you are claiming inherent incompatibility. Saying X correlates with Y isn't that.

I see "fallacies" used as "you're wrong and I'm going to deploy a big word to 'prove' that." Which is a fallacy all on its own, as you say.


You say that, but I'm not strawmanning here. It is a matter of degree, absolutely, and I maintain that expecting cells and atoms to exist is a ludicrous, ridiculous degree. See my most recent post. And yes, on these very forums, people have claimed that "of course we assume atoms exist unless you explicitly say they don't! Doing otherwise is ridiculous!" Specifically that example, too - about atoms existing, with extrapolations to then expecting chemistry to work as it would in the real world because of the principles of chemistry as regards atoms. That's not a straw man, it's a direct example of what I stated that you quoted that actually exists. And I maintain that it's completely absurd.

And I fully agree with this. I've had that same conversation here on these forums many a time.

And no, there's a substantial difference between

a) the basic surface phenomena are similar to earth's, but teh underlying causes and mechanisms are very different

and

b) nothing makes any sense at all and none of the words mean the same things.

[GuzWaatensen]

Ok so let me chime in with an actual response:

First regarding the discussion of scientific accuracy and „because magic“:
I think people underestimate how much knowledge would be available in a fantasy setting on scientific topics, because people also tend to underestimate how much e.g. the ancient Greeks already knew or accepted as fact and also how much about the world one can deduce with logic alone even without advanced measuring methods.

My approach has always been „everything in the world works exactly like in ours, but there‘s also magic, which also has a modern scientific explanation, it‘s just not known to the players or the inhabitants of the world“. If you try to do it another way you almost inevitably run into contradictions, because the more you deviate in details the harder it becomes to get the same superficial results and the more you need to rely on „but dragons“ fallacies.

Ultimately this approach has the same issue as explaining stuff with dragons if the knowledge of the DM is less than that of the players. But at the heart TTRPGs are collaborative games, so if the DM gets something wrong, you either find a better solution together or you ignore it to not break immersion further.

Now regarding use of languages:
I found that if you have people at the table speak multiple languages it can greatly enhance the gaming experience. E.g. we typically play in German, so German is common. But everybody also understands English so the one guy who‘s originally from Scotland and plays a dwarf does so in an intentionally thick Scottish accent, and if he wants the rest of the table to not understand something he throws in some Gaelic. Would be even better if the DM also understood it and he could converse with NPCs that way but it still created a number of memorable moments. We‘ve long discussed that having e.g French or Spanish as Elven would be great but unfortunately we do not have any other languages that multiple people on the table speak fluently. When someone speaks in anything other than common, we usually explain the content to avoid such issues: E.g. „my character explains to him in elven tongue that….“ Any anachronisms or figures of speech are obviously the players and everybody can assume that this is the players representation of what is actually being said. If people directly speak for their characters in common it‘s usually to make a bad joke, pun or wordplay. We are not professional voice actors so while this usually breaks immersion, it‘s mostly the point anyway, regardless of if there are also factual errors with the wording.


I‘m always impressed with how there can be 5 pages of discussion on such an issue, which seems to have an obvious answer but then people bring up valid arguments and one realizes that having been ignorant about this until now was a blessing :D

[Batcathat]

I feel like assuming that things work as they do in reality unless otherwise specified is pretty reasonable (at least when the setting is an Earth-like planet with human-like people, etc.) but it's obviously not the only alternative and trying to exploit it (by "inventing" gunpowder or something like that) should obviously be treated the same way as a any other form of metagaming.

[Satinavian]

I genuinely do not comprehend what is so difficult to understand about "similar on the surface" PLUS "don't make further assumptions about below-the-surface layer unless you're specifically given information to work with."

The problem with this approach is where the surface layer ends. A lot of stuff that is not that easily accessible and presumably beyond the surface layer, has implications and indirect consequences that easily are noticeable but the connection gets overlooked. And that leads to people claiming that details X,Y and Z are totally different from real world but you can't see it on the surface level to be in for nasty surprises because now totally obvious thing U suddenly doesn't work anymore and needs a new explaination.

That is why "identical unless explicitly stated otherwise" is superior. You wouldn't really see a difference between both approaches anyway unless someone made a mistake about surface level and introduced inconsistencies where he didn't intend to.

[Gnoman]

I feel like assuming that things work as they do in reality unless otherwise specified is pretty reasonable (at least when the setting is an Earth-like planet with human-like people, etc.) but it's obviously not the only alternative and trying to exploit it (by "inventing" gunpowder or something like that) should obviously be treated the same way as a any other form of metagaming.

My preference is always "everything we know, with the addition of magic which may or may not also have roots in science (my usual setting uses Law and Chaos in a way that can easily be read as "matter" and "energy"), and attempts to exploit it can be handled entirely in character. Even if the player knows the recipe and proportions for gunpowder, the character doesn't. If they try to just declare "i am mixing these powders in this formula that I am handing to you now", it doesn't work because the character didn't get properly purified saltpeter, or measured the ratios wrong, or blew himself up by using the wrong materials to mix it (grinding the ingredients for black powder in metal is a bad idea!), or some other reason. You want to make inventing gunpowder, or antibiotics, or nuclear weapons, or whatever a character arc? Go right ahead! No guarantee you'll manage it, but I'll happily let you try.

[PhoenixPhyre]

For me, personally, "it works just like it does on Earth with all the latest scientific underpinnings, except plus magic" is a complete no-go. It's the worst possible option, because it requires me to believe multiple simultaneously incompatible things. It's basically a giant middle finger to everything I know about science.

Because D&D magic and modern science are fundamentally incompatible. If you have one, you can't have the other. Just like you can't have 1+1 = 2 and 1 + 1 = 0. Modern science does not allow for (and cannot allow for without rewriting all the fundamentals) D&D-style magic.

So the options are
a) try to preserve as much of the trappings modern science as you can, accepting that the result is utterly incoherent and you can't reason about anything, because the premises are false.
b) accept that having D&D-style magic means that the underpinnings are dramatically different and only caring that the surface level is similar enough to avoid mental overhead.
c) go full bore on the D&D-style magic and don't worry about making even the surface match.

I strongly prefer b. It's the most honest and causes the fewest issues as far as I'm concerned. And solves a lot of munchkinry and prevents a lot of introduction of external, non-character-level knowledge in jarring ways.

[King of Nowhere]

I genuinely do not comprehend what is so difficult to understand about "similar on the surface" PLUS "don't make further assumptions about below-the-surface layer unless you're specifically given information to work with."
the problem is that different people has different ideas of what is a surface. for me, the exhistance of atoms and cells is enough of a fundamental fact that I keep it unless told otherwise.

You say that, but I'm not strawmanning here. It is a matter of degree, absolutely, and I maintain that expecting cells and atoms to exist is a ludicrous, ridiculous degree.

No, it's not. It is my default assumption. I would say that assuming we stop being made by atoms just because there are dragons... why would we? what is the benefit of discarding modern scientific thinking?
Why a section of fantasy readers dislike science? Most of us are people of higher education! personally, I like fantasy specifically because I can accept magic as patching up any holes in science stuff; in other media, I cannot, and I always spot inconsistencies.

This thread started about immersion, and the main thing for me about immersion is consistency. a world that makes logical sense. keeping science, applying scientifical thinking to magic, helps a lot with that. I want to be able to ask questions and get sensible answers, because what breaks MY immersion is being told "dude, relax, it's just a story, don't take it too seriously". How am I supposed to get invested into the world if I am constantly reminded that it makes no sense? How can I care about the plot if there are plot holes and I'm just supposed to ignore them.

In fact, I pride myself in combining magic and science. There was a plot by a druid to raise to godhood by having zombi bacteria store divine energy into special organelles and carrying it to the druid using the water flow and following hormones, and I put in a very detailed scientifical explanation for it all. And then I decided it would be cool to use radiations as an environmental hazard that the characters would have no knowledge of and no defence against, and when the characters figured it out, I realized they could use that knowledge to conjure a nuke. And I let them conjure a nuke (though with limitations that were already inherent in the setting, mostly related to "the gods didn't want mortals to have this knowledge and they worked really hard to suppress it"). which became a plot point, because the wizard wanted to kill some gods, and I had accidentally dropped him a way to do so.
Anyway, I got my players very invested in my fictional world, and I couldn't act in character if my life depended on it. Nor could I give expansive descriptions or other stuff generally correlated with immersion. So, I like to think that I got them invested by creating a consistent, believable world. And by being able to give coherent answers to any question.

Now, this kind of consistency is not always required. In a comedy, I accept rule of funny and I take for granted that the world is not supposed to make sense. I can appreciate a dumb action movie and get entertained, even though I won't get invested. I can watch a more serious movie/book and gloss over some minor problems and still get invested, provided the problems are minor and not directly related to the plot.
I can absolutely accept an honest "huh, I didn't think of it. Please just ignore it for the sake of the game". Because I can accept that the dm (or writer) is not infallible. And especially when it's a dm, that his time is limited and he's not as science oriented as I am. Just in the same way that I am very accepting towards a person saying "that's a flaw of mine, I'm not perfect, please accept me as I am".
What I can't accept is being told to shut up and not make questions, or not analyze stuff. How dare you tell me to stop thinking? You made a plot hole, and now you are trying to spin the narrative as if it's my fault for noticing it? This is like the hypocritical guy who never admits faults, always blames others for his failings, and tell people that they have to change and become more stereotypical. This is something I totally can't accept.

tl,dr the words that break immersion to me are "this is a fantasy world, you can't apply logic to it" or "this is a story, don't think too hard", or "just sit down and enjoy the ride", or other similar ideas.

[Bohandas]

Science + Magic is the quickest way to break immersion for me in a fantasy setting. Because as PhoenixPhyre points out, they're inherently contradictory. You can't have both.

What about Ghostbusters?

[King of Nowhere]

Science + Magic is the quickest way to break immersion for me in a fantasy setting. Because as PhoenixPhyre points out, they're inherently contradictory. You can't have both.

That's why Science Fantasy where they try to get all technical about magic is such a disaster.

midichlorians Break immersion and verisimilitude.
Turtles all the way down doesn't. It's just funny and we move on.

midiclorians are not science + magic.
midiclorians are an attempt to justify magic with made-up science.
it's a completely different thing.

science + magic means that when magic is not in effect, science keeps working, and that the two can work together. when you cast lightning bolt on a rod to power up an electric device, that's science + magic. what you are objecting to is trying too hard to explain where the lightning bolt comes from.

[PhoenixPhyre]

midiclorians are not science + magic.
midiclorians are an attempt to justify magic with made-up science.
it's a completely different thing.

science + magic means that when magic is not in effect, science keeps working, and that the two can work together. when you cast lightning bolt on a rod to power up an electric device, that's science + magic. what you are objecting to is trying too hard to explain where the lightning bolt comes from.

That's an abnegation of science, and a statement that is more offensive against science than anything else I've heard yet. You can't just "turn off" science. Because science is internally consistent.

Either magic is a fully-incorporated part of science (in which case the fundamental assumptions and principles of that science/magic hybrid will be very different from earth-science) or there is no magic (aka the real world) or there is no science (so you can't reason about anything and everything is ad hoc, aka most "science fantasy"). Those are the options. There are no other options.

[Easy e]

When it comes to immersion breaking words, I don't sweat about it. If some word, phrasing, or pronunciation does break me out, I don't bother mentioning it. After all, it is hard enough to play/GM these games without adding on more layers of friction.


To me, table talk is much more immersion breaking; but I LOVE table talk. It is what makes RPGs so much fun for me. Non-in-person games just do not do it for me because of the lack of table talk. Strange, I recognize it is immersion breaking, but I also see it as an integral art of the RPG experience. Perhaps because I see TTRPGs as a communal social experience more than anything else.

[Batcathat]

Science + Magic is the quickest way to break immersion for me in a fantasy setting. Because as PhoenixPhyre points out, they're inherently contradictory. You can't have both.

That's why Science Fantasy where they try to get all technical about magic is such a disaster.

midichlorians Break immersion and verisimilitude.
Turtles all the way down doesn't. It's just funny and we move on.

Does that apply to science fiction as well? For example, there is a lot of science fiction with faster than light travel or time travel, both of which are generally considered impossible in reality. If I encounter something like that, I don't assume that no real life science at all apply to the setting.

[Bohandas]

Or what about Star Trek, where you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a psychic, or a god, or some kind of incorporeal being (or in one case a woman who put a curse on the Emterprise by burning an effigy of it and it worked)

and where the most logical people in the galaxy have proven the existence of the soul

[PhoenixPhyre]

Does that apply to science fiction as well? For example, there is a lot of science fiction with faster than light travel or time travel, both of which are generally considered impossible in reality. If I encounter something like that, I don't assume that no real life science at all apply to the setting.


Or what about Star Trek, where you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a psychic, or a god, or some kind of incorporeal being (or in one case a woman who put a curse on the Emterprise by burning an effigy of it and it worked)

Both of those fall into the "it's internally incoherent so you shouldn't think about it too hard, everything is ad hoc" category. Both of those (especially Star Trek) work entirely by authorial fiat, because they make claims that are inconsistent with the existence of modern physics as we know it. And with their own stated physics.

The first set can sorta be made to work, but you have to have huge caveats of "well, if you can do FTL travel without shattering causality, then XYZ probably has a good explanation as well and we should be very wary of claiming plot holes due to modern science. Because we've stated that we're departing from it substantially and in unknown/unstated ways."

[Fiery Diamond]

the problem is that different people has different ideas of what is a surface. for me, the exhistance of atoms and cells is enough of a fundamental fact that I keep it unless told otherwise.


No, it's not. It is my default assumption. I would say that assuming we stop being made by atoms just because there are dragons... why would we? what is the benefit of discarding modern scientific thinking?
Why a section of fantasy readers dislike science? Most of us are people of higher education! personally, I like fantasy specifically because I can accept magic as patching up any holes in science stuff; in other media, I cannot, and I always spot inconsistencies.

This thread started about immersion, and the main thing for me about immersion is consistency. a world that makes logical sense. keeping science, applying scientifical thinking to magic, helps a lot with that. I want to be able to ask questions and get sensible answers, because what breaks MY immersion is being told "dude, relax, it's just a story, don't take it too seriously". How am I supposed to get invested into the world if I am constantly reminded that it makes no sense? How can I care about the plot if there are plot holes and I'm just supposed to ignore them.

In fact, I pride myself in combining magic and science. There was a plot by a druid to raise to godhood by having zombi bacteria store divine energy into special organelles and carrying it to the druid using the water flow and following hormones, and I put in a very detailed scientifical explanation for it all. And then I decided it would be cool to use radiations as an environmental hazard that the characters would have no knowledge of and no defence against, and when the characters figured it out, I realized they could use that knowledge to conjure a nuke. And I let them conjure a nuke (though with limitations that were already inherent in the setting, mostly related to "the gods didn't want mortals to have this knowledge and they worked really hard to suppress it"). which became a plot point, because the wizard wanted to kill some gods, and I had accidentally dropped him a way to do so.
Anyway, I got my players very invested in my fictional world, and I couldn't act in character if my life depended on it. Nor could I give expansive descriptions or other stuff generally correlated with immersion. So, I like to think that I got them invested by creating a consistent, believable world. And by being able to give coherent answers to any question.

Now, this kind of consistency is not always required. In a comedy, I accept rule of funny and I take for granted that the world is not supposed to make sense. I can appreciate a dumb action movie and get entertained, even though I won't get invested. I can watch a more serious movie/book and gloss over some minor problems and still get invested, provided the problems are minor and not directly related to the plot.
I can absolutely accept an honest "huh, I didn't think of it. Please just ignore it for the sake of the game". Because I can accept that the dm (or writer) is not infallible. And especially when it's a dm, that his time is limited and he's not as science oriented as I am. Just in the same way that I am very accepting towards a person saying "that's a flaw of mine, I'm not perfect, please accept me as I am".
What I can't accept is being told to shut up and not make questions, or not analyze stuff. How dare you tell me to stop thinking? You made a plot hole, and now you are trying to spin the narrative as if it's my fault for noticing it? This is like the hypocritical guy who never admits faults, always blames others for his failings, and tell people that they have to change and become more stereotypical. This is something I totally can't accept.

tl,dr the words that break immersion to me are "this is a fantasy world, you can't apply logic to it" or "this is a story, don't think too hard", or "just sit down and enjoy the ride", or other similar ideas.

And your default is ridiculous and shouldn't be the default of a consumer of fantasy media. There, now it's your word against mine.

See, this is the real issue: "But Dragons," as you would accuse me of it, isn't a fallacy. A fallacy is incorrect argument from a given premise. My stance, which you characterize as "But Dragons," isn't an incorrect argument from a given premise -- it's a fundamental disagreement with you about what the correct PREMISE is. That's why, no matter how much we argue, we'll never come to an agreement: we fundamentally disagree on the starting premise. I'm not saying people shouldn't hold your views because they are self-contradictory (though I believe they are), I'm saying people shouldn't hold those views because I believe the views I hold are correct. Much like in a debate about morals, you eventually have to boil down to either "there are no fundamental principles and everything is whatever" or "there are fundamental principles, there is not further supporting 'why' infrastructure, it just is" and (if the second) people who disagree on what they are won't be able to convince each other, similar logic applies when disagreeing on a fundamental premise for a subject matter, as in this case. There is no you convincing me or me convincing you.

With that said, I'm bowing out of this conversation, as I feel that 1) any further argumentation is pretty pointless, as noted above, and 2) I'm probably going to say something I regret if the heat keeps getting turned up.

[Bohandas]

This conversation reminds me of something I made with one of those AI art programs. It's a cross between the Magician tarot card and a scientist

https://artbreeder.b-cdn.net/imgs/beb583ad6b0e08590adca00e48ad.jpeg

[Talakeal]

For me, personally, "it works just like it does on Earth with all the latest scientific underpinnings, except plus magic" is a complete no-go. It's the worst possible option, because it requires me to believe multiple simultaneously incompatible things. It's basically a giant middle finger to everything I know about science.

Because D&D magic and modern science are fundamentally incompatible. If you have one, you can't have the other. Just like you can't have 1+1 = 2 and 1 + 1 = 0. Modern science does not allow for (and cannot allow for without rewriting all the fundamentals) D&D-style magic.

So the options are
a) try to preserve as much of the trappings modern science as you can, accepting that the result is utterly incoherent and you can't reason about anything, because the premises are false.
b) accept that having D&D-style magic means that the underpinnings are dramatically different and only caring that the surface level is similar enough to avoid mental overhead.
c) go full bore on the D&D-style magic and don't worry about making even the surface match.

I strongly prefer b. It's the most honest and causes the fewest issues as far as I'm concerned. And solves a lot of munchkinry and prevents a lot of introduction of external, non-character-level knowledge in jarring ways.

Gee, I wonder which of these three options Phoenix feels is correct, it is so hard to tell from the wording!

I have had this argument with you many times before, not much point into going into it. I will say though that I have played games with PhDs and NASA engineers before and you are the only one who has ever called my world building out as being utterly incoherent as a result.

IMO the problem you have is with cheating / metagaming. Just because a player can describe the process for using chemistry doesn't mean you should let their character do it anymore than you should let them cast spells or craft medieval tech items using skills their characters don't possess just because they can spell out the process for you.*



You say that, but I'm not strawmanning here. It is a matter of degree, absolutely, and I maintain that expecting cells and atoms to exist is a ludicrous, ridiculous degree. See my most recent post. And yes, on these very forums, people have claimed that "of course we assume atoms exist unless you explicitly say they don't! Doing otherwise is ridiculous!" Specifically that example, too - about atoms existing, with extrapolations to then expecting chemistry to work as it would in the real world because of the principles of chemistry as regards atoms. That's not a straw man, it's a direct example of what I stated that you quoted that actually exists. And I maintain that it's completely absurd.

It may be ludicrous to you, but I would bet good money that a majority of gamers feel that way.

I assume you are talking about D&D specifically? Because I typically play western, post-apocalyptic, or urban fantasy games, and it would be really weird in those genres not to have cells or atoms exist.

But, even D&D assumes that cells exist. For example, most of the monsters lay eggs, and giant amoebas are explicitly described as single celled organisms in some editions. As an experiment, I asked my D&D group what a gnomish scientist would see if he invented a microscope and looked at your blood, and all of them said red blood cells.

So maybe it is important to get a consensus understanding around the table before assuming other peoples views or calling them ludicrous?


Or, actually, maybe just don't make assumptions on way or the other. I can't think of a single time when microscopic stuff actually mattered at the gaming table, and IMO if you are actually going to draw a hard line (like the 12th century alchemist or intelligent 10-year-old mentioned up thread) why not make the line at the point where things are actually going to come up in the game?


*: Of course, I have also had / read about bad experiences where DM's do the opposite as a form of railroading. Like on guy on here was trying to smoke a monster out of its lair rather than going in and fighting it, and the DM, in what imo is a fairly transparent bid to railroad the encounter, told him that was impossible as in his world fire isn't a chemical reaction but rather a gateway to the elemental plane of fire.
I also had an experience playing Rune-quest where the DM let us make our characters, and I created a tinket / inventor, only to be told after creating and getting invested in my character that science and technology don't exist in Rune-quest and even something as simple as forging a sword is a magical ritual performed by a priest who beseeches the spirits of metal and fire to make a weapon for them rather than actually using a hammer and anvil.
That kind of surprise really takes the fun out of the game for people and should really be addressed up front if you deem it absolutely necessary for your consistency.

[Fiery Diamond]

Gee, I wonder which of these three options Phoenix feels is correct, it is so hard to tell from the wording!

I have had this argument with you many times before, not much point into going into it. I will say though that I have played games with PhDs and NASA engineers before and you are the only one who has ever called my world building out as being utterly incoherent as a result.

IMO the problem you have is with cheating / metagaming. Just because a player can describe the process for using chemistry doesn't mean you should let their character do it anymore than you should let them cast spells or craft medieval tech items using skills their characters don't possess just because they can spell out the process for you.*




It may be ludicrous to you, but I would bet good money that a majority of gamers feel that way.

I assume you are talking about D&D specifically? Because I typically play western, post-apocalyptic, or urban fantasy games, and it would be really weird in those genres not to have cells or atoms exist.

But, even D&D assumes that cells exist. For example, most of the monsters lay eggs, and giant amoebas are explicitly described as single celled organisms in some editions. As an experiment, I asked my D&D group what a gnomish scientist would see if he invented a microscope and looked at your blood, and all of them said red blood cells.

So maybe it is important to get a consensus understanding around the table before assuming other peoples views or calling them ludicrous?


Or, actually, maybe just don't make assumptions on way or the other. I can't think of a single time when microscopic stuff actually mattered at the gaming table, and IMO if you are actually going to draw a hard line (like the 12th century alchemist or intelligent 10-year-old mentioned up thread) why not make the line at the point where things are actually going to come up in the game?


*: Of course, I have also had / read about bad experiences where DM's do the opposite as a form of railroading. Like on guy on here was trying to smoke a monster out of its lair rather than going in and fighting it, and the DM, in what imo is a fairly transparent bid to railroad the encounter, told him that was impossible as in his world fire isn't a chemical reaction but rather a gateway to the elemental plane of fire.
I also had an experience playing Rune-quest where the DM let us make our characters, and I created a tinket / inventor, only to be told after creating and getting invested in my character that science and technology don't exist in Rune-quest and even something as simple as forging a sword is a magical ritual performed by a priest who beseeches the spirits of metal and fire to make a weapon for them rather than actually using a hammer and anvil.
That kind of surprise really takes the fun out of the game for people and should really be addressed up front if you deem it absolutely necessary for your consistency.

Since you addressed me, I'll respond before I quit. No, I'm not talking about D&D specifically. I'm not even talking about RPGs specifically. I'm talking about Fantasy set in a setting that is not supposed to be our universe. I feel that, as a consumer (not the creator of a setting), one should only assume that surface-level similarity exists unless told otherwise, rather than the reverse. Creator of the setting says otherwise? Go for it. But making the assumptions that I call ridiculous and then complaining when your extrapolations from them turn out to be incompatible with things in the story (or game setting) and calling out those things in the setting as being wrong rather than your assumptions? That's completely wrong and unjustified, and people who take that approach are flat out wrong. That is a premise, not an argument.

[Jay R]

I suspect that some of us are on one side of one question arguing with people on the other side of a different question, and that we are a lot closer than we think.

I don't care how the science works, but like everybody else, including those arguing against it, I assume most simple ordinary things work like they do here.

I assume that rivers flow downhill, and rain falls from the sky.

I assume that standing on the earth doesn't feel like motion. It doesn't matter if it's the unmoving center of the universe, or orbiting a sun, or part of a solar system in a rotating galaxy. But the PCs should walk, run, and otherwise move like we do here.

I assume that if there is a sun, then "day" happens when the sun is up. I don't care if the earth rotates or the sun goes around the earth.

I assume that granite is hard and heavy, but I don't care if it's mostly composed of the elements silicon, oxygen, and aluminum, or the element earth.

If planets exist, I don't care if they orbit the sun in ellipses, or orbit the earth in circles and epicycles. I do assume until told otherwise that they move relative to the stars.

I assume that putting something back together is much harder than breaking it was, and that stirring a potion mixes its ingredients. I don't care if there is a thing called "entropy" to explain it.

I assume that pushing something that rolls is easier than pushing something that slides, and I don't need a "coefficient of rolling friction" and a "coefficient of sliding friction" to explain it.

I assume that if my human PC is stabbed, red blood will come out. I don't care if it's red because of the iron content of his hemoglobin or because of the sanguine in his humors.

I expect an object in motion to remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. I don't care if the force is mass times acceleration. My PC isn't measuring force when he aims an arrow at an ogre; he just wants it to keep going until it hits the ogre.

If it doesn't affect the business of slaying monsters and defending cities, I don't see how such things could matter to my PC. And I suspect that some of the arguments here are between the people who expect normally things to work normally vs. people who want the laws of physics to be different (while most normal things work normally).

Here are a few paragraphs from the introduction I gave my players for my latest game:


Gaea has the same general climate, terrain, and gross physical laws as our earth. Or at least, the parts of it the PCs will see early on has the same characteristics as certain parts of our earth. There is a single moon, and the tide follows it. Water flows downhill; mountains are usually part of a mountain range; as you go south, the climate gets warmer, etc.

But there are differences. It is not true that this world is run by the laws of modern physics except when somebody casts a spell. It has different physical laws. You have no idea if there are galaxies; the sun clearly and obviously orbits the earth, there are 9 or 10 known planets, which are bright lights in the sky that move relative to the stars. They are the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and two or three more that I will name if I ever need them.

The earth is not a planet; it is the unmoving center of the universe. There are (as far as you know) no electrons, neutrons, protons, plate tectonics, relativistic speeds, radioactivity, or 92 natural elements. [Of course, nobody on our earth knew of those things in medieval times, either, so who knows?]

Cold is an active force, not merely the lack of warmth. Electricity does not flow from highest to lowest potential (or wizards could not aim lightning bolts). There is no cube-square law (or there would be no giants, and dragons couldn’t fly). Gravity is not universal (or flight and levitation spells wouldn’t work). Some creation spells violate conservation of mass, and many attack spells violate the three laws of thermodynamics.

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 [I]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.

That's how it works in my game. If somebody wants a game that is different, that doesn't bother me one bit. Your world runs via modern physics unless magic? No problem; that's what I just described. In your world, the laws of modern physics don't apply? Again, no problem; that's also what I just described.

But if my PC trips in an orc in your game, I expect him to fall down, not east.

[King of Nowhere]

And your default is ridiculous and shouldn't be the default of a consumer of fantasy media. There, now it's your word against mine.

See, this is the real issue: "But Dragons," as you would accuse me of it, isn't a fallacy. A fallacy is incorrect argument from a given premise. My stance, which you characterize as "But Dragons," isn't an incorrect argument from a given premise -- it's a fundamental disagreement with you about what the correct PREMISE is. That's why, no matter how much we argue, we'll never come to an agreement: we fundamentally disagree on the starting premise. I'm not saying people shouldn't hold your views because they are self-contradictory (though I believe they are), I'm saying people shouldn't hold those views because I believe the views I hold are correct. Much like in a debate about morals, you eventually have to boil down to either "there are no fundamental principles and everything is whatever" or "there are fundamental principles, there is not further supporting 'why' infrastructure, it just is" and (if the second) people who disagree on what they are won't be able to convince each other, similar logic applies when disagreeing on a fundamental premise for a subject matter, as in this case. There is no you convincing me or me convincing you.

With that said, I'm bowing out of this conversation, as I feel that 1) any further argumentation is pretty pointless, as noted above, and 2) I'm probably going to say something I regret if the heat keeps getting turned up.

I wasn't really trying to convince you. In fact, I wasn't even replying directly to you, except that you had a couple of particularly juicy quotes where I could inject my retorts.
yes, people are different and I totally accept that some - most - of them don't want to have deep science thoughts. Though fantasy fans are generally nerds, and nerds are generally well versed in science, and so I am surprised to still find that sentiment here.


That's an abnegation of science, and a statement that is more offensive against science than anything else I've heard yet. You can't just "turn off" science. Because science is internally consistent.

Either magic is a fully-incorporated part of science (in which case the fundamental assumptions and principles of that science/magic hybrid will be very different from earth-science) or there is no magic (aka the real world) or there is no science (so you can't reason about anything and everything is ad hoc, aka most "science fantasy"). Those are the options. There are no other options.

so...
you don't want to incorporate science into your games, because you are even more of a science nazi than i am?:smalleek: never thought i'd find one :smallsmile:

anyway, you are proposing a false dicotomy. yes, there would be very different fundamental principles than in our world. no, that does not break anything.
for decades (after becoming pretty certain atoms were real) we thought atoms were fundamental, indivisible particles. then we discovered that they are not; did it change anything? not much. We simply got an explanation for some stuff that we hadn't figured out.
forever we assumed time runs the same everywhere. then we discover that time and mass can be changed. did it change anything? no. those phenomena only become noticeable when you move very close to the speed of light, or when you are near a black hole, and they approximate to 0 every other time. we could advance science with it, yes, but it's not like suddenly things became different.
Just assume that the fundamental laws of the universe are radically different, but they still approximate as our own plus magic, and are internally consistent.
just because you cannot imagine such laws it doesn't mean they can't exhist. I mean, last time I checked we still hadn't figured out all the laws of our own universe, and some of those we "know" are not fully consistent, but it hasn't stopped us. And yet, while our best scientists still can't come up with our own fundamental laws, you come out here and say that an hypotetical different set of laws that include "magic" and that approximate to our reality when "magic" is 0 cannot possibly exhist. how can you say that? it strikes me as remarkably unscientific to claim with such certainty that a similar set of laws cannot exhist without anything resembling proof.
as for calling my position "offensive to science", insults do not help your argument.

I also find weird that you are already doing what I suggest: you are already assuming that the laws of the universe are the same as our, plus magic. stuff still falls down. heat still flows from hot to cold. combustibles still burn. but there are no cells? why not? but chemistry is different? why would it be?
where do you draw the line? why assume that fire still burns, but not that aluminium exhists and can be used with the proper knowledge? and what's so fascinating with middle age technology that apparently everyone sets it as a standard of proper fantasy?

everyone will pick their own preference. Me, I found that grounding magic in science - especially in terms of some general laws of how magic act, and what magic can and cannot do, and what the gods can and cannot do - has helped me a lot to shore up my worldbuilding. As in, suddenly something really weird comes up in the campaign, and I have to figure out what happens, and having a framework to work with helps me a lot to give an answer - and it helps my players to accept it as a sensible answer and not one I pulled out of my arse for convenience.
It also let me create interesting puzzles. Though I suspect it works because my players are also nerds and interested in science. If I had the party investigate magic-carrying bacteria with a group of average teenagers, it may have been poorly received.

Finally, I must point out that brandon sanderson uses a scientific approach to magic and his books are full of scientific thinking, and he's extremely popular. and many of his fans quote that reason as one of his main attractors. which proves you can do awesome things by mixing science and magic, you can inject scientific thinking into fantasy and make it better.

[PhoenixPhyre]

@King of Nowhere--A few responses.

As to basic principles--when you start violating the conservation laws, that has observable effects. And D&D magic is inherently a massive violation of conservation laws. An internally-consistent world-model whose basic principles include D&D magic cannot include quantum mechanics as we know it or even newtonian mechanics. Let alone the things that build on them like chemistry. Because all of those take as premises the basic conservation laws. So no. The existence of D&D-style magic is incompatible with anything like modern scientific laws. To say otherwise is to say that cause and effect are not connected.

Beyond that, D&D magic breaks basic causality and universality principles, which are axiomatic in modern scientific theory. And relies on lots of things whose existence would have observable effects. So no, modern science predicts that D&D magic cannot exist. The two aren't in any grey area. They're just flat incompatible.

You can still apply scientific thinking to a magical world. But you're doing so from a very different baseline set of axioms.

I prefer to take settings and works seriously and at their word. If they claim that the metaphysics[1] is like X, then I expect that X will hold or at least they'll do their darndest. But "the world uses modern scientific principles all the way down with magic as an exception" is like claiming that 1 = 0. You can do it, but you've just uttered something meaningless unless you redefine the words you're using.

Note that there is a huge difference between the things that @Jay R mentions, which are the surface phenomena. People bleed red. Things fall down, not up, when dropped (usually). Cause precedes reaction. Do the same thing and you'll (if nothing else has changed) get the same response. Those must be assumed for the world to be accessible to people. What I reject is the assumption that the reasons that those surface phenomena are the way they are must be the same as we understand it on earth now.

--------

My default state as a consumer of worldbuilding (ie a player, a viewer, a reader, etc) is that I don't try to make any more assumptions than I have to. It's only if the worldbuilding makes a claim and then doesn't follow through or contradicts itself that I have issues. As a player or watcher, I'm with @Jay R entirely. If the seams are way too obvious, it may limit my engagement[2]. But that's about it.

As a creator of worldbuilding, however, I hold myself to a much higher standard. Metaphysics is my first love as far as worldbuilding goes--it's the thing I'm most naturally attuned to, the thing I find the most enjoyment in. I'm much better (in my experience) at doing deep dives on the underpinnnings of reality than at doing the people, places, and events. So for myself, I spend a lot of time building the underpinnings. And in doing so, I take advantage of the fact that I don't have to assume real-world metaphysics. Making those assumptions is highly constraining[3], in fact. In ways that produce worlds that have the depth of cardboard (metaphysically speaking).

And yes, I'm a setting/metaphysics snob. I consider every published D&D setting to be an incoherent jumble of ideas thrown together because it seemed cool at the time. I consider the Great Wheel an aesthetic nightmare, box-checking for the sake of checking boxes, a straightjacket for interesting metaphysics. And yes, I think that people who describe oozes as "single-celled organisms" or otherwise use "science speak" are demonstrating their lack of knowledge/interest in actual science. Because that's a huge break in versimilitude.

[1] the "physics" underlying the physical laws. The basic axioms on which we build reality.
[2] For example, I find the MCU to be so shallow and internally inconsistent that I can't watch them with any interest in anything but the spectacle. I can "sit back and watch the pretty explosions" and ignore the glaring holes. But I can't actually bring myself to care about the characters or the world, because it's just a jumble of things that happen however they need to be and consequences are ignored.
[3] For example, having active, living deities you can planeshift to and talk to breaks all so many assumptions about the nature of reality (among others, the idea that you have repeatable, objective facts). Because if a deity can and does alter things at a whim...yeah. That breaks a lot of metaphysical principles we rely on to do science the way we do it.

[Satinavian]

a) try to preserve as much of the trappings modern science as you can, accepting that the result is utterly incoherent and you can't reason about anything, because the premises are false.
b) accept that having D&D-style magic means that the underpinnings are dramatically different and only caring that the surface level is similar enough to avoid mental overhead.
c) go full bore on the D&D-style magic and don't worry about making even the surface match.

I strongly prefer b. It's the most honest and causes the fewest issues as far as I'm concerned. And solves a lot of munchkinry and prevents a lot of introduction of external, non-character-level knowledge in jarring ways.
I agree that b) seems the best.

But i don't agree with your way to get there.

If you only claimed that modern science was not fully replicated to make playce for magic and the fantasy stuff, no one would disagree.

But instead you went :


If you take a human from my setting and cut them open, they bleed red. They have organs that look, to a casual naked-eye inspection, similar to those of an earth!human. But a quartus!human doesn't have biochemistry at all. No cells. The blood is an undifferentiated red fluid--why red? Because it's suffused with an increased proportion of luminous fire-aspected aether. Quartus!blood doesn't carry oxygen (because oxygen doesn't exist)

No cells, No oxygen, blood is fire infused.

That are three new and definitive statements about the physics of the fantasy world. None of them is required to explain magic. At least two of them (the oxygen and the fire in blood) lead to strange unintended consequences. Now we suddenly need different properties of air to explain suffocation or why can't put fire into some closed container without it going out despite having fuel. Now suddenly giving water to someone who is injured and has lost lots of blood seems questionable because it is the opposing element.

Every single decision about what not works like on Earth carries lots of baggage and unintended consequences. So you really should not abandone Earth science unless you have a good reason to. Unless you really need to to explain something you want to keep.

Again, that is not the same as saying that all of Earth science is true.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I agree that b) seems the best.

But i don't agree with your way to get there.

If you only claimed that modern science was not fully replicated to make playce for magic and the fantasy stuff, no one would disagree.

But instead you went :



No cells, No oxygen, blood is fire infused.

That are three new and definitive statements about the physics of the fantasy world. None of them is required to explain magic. At least two of them (the oxygen and the fire in blood) lead to strange unintended consequences. Now we suddenly need different properties of air to explain suffocation or why can't put fire into some closed container without it going out despite having fuel. Now suddenly giving water to someone who is injured and has lost lots of blood seems questionable because it is the opposing element.

Every single decision about what not works like on Earth carries lots of baggage and unintended consequences. So you really should not abandone Earth science unless you have a good reason to. Unless you really need to to explain something you want to keep.

Again, that is not the same as saying that all of Earth science is true.

But you have to abandon earth science wholesale. Because it comes as a unit. That's the whole point. Accepting earth science as true (rather than leaving things undefined) drags in a whole lot of baggage that you can't tolerate if you have magic.

I'll note that those things are actually downstream of all the other metaphysical decisions I made. Specifically, there's the core idea that everything is actually only one fundamental thing. There's a lot more detail there that I didn't mention, so no, I reject the concerns. But that's because I've done the work.

The "safest" option is to leave the deeper causes indeterminate. As in "don't ask. Ignore anything below the surface". Otherwise you have to make decisions, and saying "real world physics applies" is the only absolutely unacceptable answer, because that immediately demands a lot of other things that make having magic impossible in any coherent way.

[Satinavian]

You talk about "undefined" and "indeterminate".
But that is the opposite of what you do when you say there are no cells and no oxygen.

Sure, you can't combine the whole of earth science and magic. But that doesn't get any better by including arbitrary unrelated alterations like the above. Just the opposite, it gets even worse with the inconsistencies.

And you are obviously not just changing stuff below he surface. If you did, no one would see any effect in the game.

[PhoenixPhyre]

You talk about "undefined" and "indeterminate".
But that is the opposite of what you do when you say there are no cells and no oxygen.

Sure, you can't combine the whole of earth science and magic. But that doesn't get any better by including arbitrary unrelated alterations like the above. Just the opposite, it gets even worse with the inconsistencies.

And you are obviously not just changing stuff below he surface. If you did, no one would see any effect in the game.

To be honest, people don't generally see any effect on the game. That's part of the whole point of the "surface" facade, plus the social contract to not try to delve too far unless you really want to know the answer[1]. The surface works basically how you expect. And I've done a crap-ton of (non-arbitrary, related) alterations because I, personally, enjoy coming up with what the underlying metaphysics is. And because it helps me predict what would happen. It's been tremendously productive as a DM and worldbuilder--the basic underlying principle that connects all those facts has actually made all the various parts a breeze to keep consistant.

The problem is that you can't combine any of modern earth science and magic. Anything since the Scientific Revolution (or even end-of-the-alchemical-era pre-scientific revolution) relies on principles that D&D magic explicitly contradicts. Irreconcilably. Because at its core, the fundamental axioms are in conflict.

[1] I do have the answers. And share them with players if they ask (until their eyes glaze over). Seriously. I've put in a lot of work making this part work. Way more than fits in these margins. But there is an underlying set of axioms and principles out of which all of those changes flow. It isn't to the point of a full mathematical model, but as working theories go, it's pretty darn solid.

[Satinavian]

The problem is that you can't combine any of modern earth science and magic. Anything since the Scientific Revolution (or even end-of-the-alchemical-era pre-scientific revolution) relies on principles that D&D magic explicitly contradicts. Irreconcilably. Because at its core, the fundamental axioms are in conflict.
D&D magic is a mess. And trying to make sense of it is an excersice in futility.

But this is the general roleplaying section and most other magic systems are more coherent and easier to work with.

As for how conductive the merging of partial, incomplete science and magic stuff is, well, i disagree. You can get very very far until you find inconsistencies that can't be resolved. Generally further than you can get if you try to build an alternative system instead. I acknowledge that you have trust in your concept but i certainly don't share it.

[PhoenixPhyre]

D&D magic is a mess. And trying to make sense of it is an excersice in futility.

But this is the general roleplaying section and most other magic systems are more coherent and easier to work with.

As for how conductive the merging of partial, incomplete science and magic stuff is, well, i disagree. You can get very very far until you find inconsistencies that can't be resolved. Generally further than you can get if you try to build an alternative system instead. I acknowledge that you have trust in your concept but i certainly don't share it.

Any kind of magic of any substantial kind will violate at least one of
a) conservation of mass-energy
b) conservation of momentum (linear or angular)
c) causality
d) conservation of particle number
e) conservation of charge

Because if it doesn't, then it's just normal earth science that we already understand. Magic is inherently that stuff that is impossible on earth.

[Gnoman]

Any kind of magic of any substantial kind will violate at least one of
a) conservation of mass-energy
b) conservation of momentum (linear or angular)
c) causality
d) conservation of particle number
e) conservation of charge

Because if it doesn't, then it's just normal earth science that we already understand. Magic is inherently that stuff that is impossible on earth.


First off, there are magic systems where none of those physical laws are violated. It isn't an inherent part of the concept. Even the very nebulous magic used in D&D has potential explanations for some of them, such as the elemental planes (which have parallels in some exotic but seriously considered concepts in physics).

Second, there are plenty of things done today that were thought to be physically impossible not that long ago. Until the 1930s or so, changing an element into another element was considered to be absolute rubbish, fit only for superstitious fools and would-be wizards. Today it is done routinely and deliberately in nuclear reactors. Not because the scientists of those eras were fools or idiots, their knowledge of the universe was simply incomplete.

Third, science isn't some Grand Blueprint For Everything. It is the sum total of what we have deduced based on our observations and analyses of the universe. If we were to discover tomorrow that our understanding of what causes gravity was wrong, nothing would change. Because our models are derived from the effects of gravity. Scientists working in a "identical to our physical universe, but with magic" world would come up with very different sets of laws. But that does not render such a setting logically impossible. If you see a woman turn into a cat in front of you, the scientific solution is not to deny that it is happening Because Impossible, nor is throwing out everything the way to go. You now have a data point that contradicts your models, so you need to develop better models.

[TexAvery]

This morning I was reading a review of the Willow TV show and it mentioned how their immersion was shattered by a character saying "gesundheit" as that would imply that there is a Germany in the world of Willow.

This is a frequent complaint I have seen; people complain about "firing" arrows in Lord of the Rings despite it being pre gunpowder. I have seen people complain about the DM using the term "navy blue" to describe a color as that term was anachronistic to the medieval period. I have seen complaints about Greek fire and Portuguese Man O' Wars in D&D.

And, at my own table, the players always crack jokes whenever I refer to something that uses a proper name such as a Polish sausage or a Gatling gun.


This line of logic has never made sense to me. In a fantasy world, or indeed most movies set in foreign countries or ancient times, the characters are clearly not speaking English and the actors are only doing to for the audience's benefit. Similarly, every word has an etymology, most of them foreign, and many of the etymologies will draw their roots back to specific historical contexts or to proper names.

Anyone else have any experiences with this or thoughts on why certain terms break immersion or exactly where the line is that people won't recognize the etymologies?

I haven't watched the series yet but started with the movie again this morning (well almost all the way, will finish tomorrow).

There's a sarcastic line from Madmartigan I'll paraphrase as "... and I'm the king of Kashmir".

Everyone's entitled to feel like whatever breaks their immersion does so, but this always felt to me like a world that was half ours, half not. I think Tolkien had a few similar things in LOTR. And yes on the language - if they said "loose arrows" much of the audience would be confused. Though I'd rather the language not be too modern, which of course underlines that it is personal. Even if I think the complaint in that review was precious and just looking for something without really remembering the original.

[Bohandas]

We could probably get to most magic systems by layering a bunch of extra fields and fundamemtal interactions over the rules that govern the real world.

[TaiLiu]

First off, there are magic systems where none of those physical laws are violated. It isn't an inherent part of the concept. Even the very nebulous magic used in D&D has potential explanations for some of them, such as the elemental planes (which have parallels in some exotic but seriously considered concepts in physics).
Could you name the magic systems and the media they come from? I'm not invested in this argument but I personally can't recall any magic systems that are just basically science. Maybe... Vancian magic if the universe is a computer simulation?

[PhoenixPhyre]

We could probably get to most magic systems by layering a bunch of extra fields and fundamemtal interactions over the rules that govern the real world.

Except that those interactions would have observable effects on the real world by necessity. Which would violate what we know. Because if they didn't violate them...we'd already see them. And that's the fundamental problem here. Any magic system would have effects at a level that would be observable with our current tools and predictive models. We don't see them. Therefore they don't exist in real-world physics and are incompatible with it.

Remember, the laws of physics aren't like human laws. They're a description of everything we observe. If we have observations that contradict our current laws, then our current laws are wrong. But at the level we're talking about (throwing fire from nowhere, summoning beings made of pure elemental evil, etc...) yeah. No. Not even close.

[sithlordnergal]

Could you name the magic systems and the media they come from? I'm not invested in this argument but I personally can't recall any magic systems that are just basically science. Maybe... Vancian magic if the universe is a computer simulation?

I wanna say the Inheritance series actually uses that kind of magic, or something very similar. You can't create something from nothing, and it takes about an equal amount of energy to create something as it normally would to do it. Its mostly used to save time or help push things into working a certain way. You rarely, if ever, see someone throw out some big fireball, or cast some massive spell. And the few times that does happen, the caster is dead on their feet, or they tapped into a special mana reserve they were building up for years since they can store energy in certain objects to use as a battery.

Most mages can't really do anything that impressive because they're limited by what their regular form could do. There are some exceptions, but they're usually people connected to the supernatural. I.E. they are connected to Dragons, which basically have limitless magical energy, or some special evil deity.

[animorte]

I wanna say the Inheritance series actually uses that kind of magic, or something very similar. You can't create something from nothing, and it takes about an equal amount of energy to create something as it normally would to do it.
I swear, I thought you were launching into the Full Metal Alchemist intro.

[sithlordnergal]

I swear, I thought you were launching into the Full Metal Alchemist intro.

You would think so, but I feel like the Inheritance series actually is a better example here. Magic is treated very much like magic in that series, and is not a science by any means. You also have a lot of supernatural creatures, from demons to dragons, that basically subsist purely off of magic. And finally, they have that little requirement that the caster has to exert an amount of energy equal to what it'd take to do as thing without tools, more or less. From what I remember, the only differences between an experienced mage and a novice are:

1) their bodies are acclimatized to exerting that amount of magic

and

2) skilled mages know how to word their spells in a way that uses less energy.

I.E. a novice might just cast a spell that makes a bonfire, and nearly kill themselves in the process. An experienced mage would start with a spark, and slowly grow it from there.

[Bohandas]

Except that those interactions would have observable effects on the real world by necessity. Which would violate what we know. Because if they didn't violate them...we'd already see them. And that's the fundamental problem here. Any magic system would have effects at a level that would be observable with our current tools and predictive models. We don't see them. Therefore they don't exist in real-world physics and are incompatible with it.

What I'm talking about it that the difference between that world's rules and our world's rules could consist solely of that world having additional fundamental interactions, while leaving all of the real world interactions fundamentalky unchanged but enabling matter to also be affected by these new forces as well. By fine tuning the way the new forces work we could make the effects of our simulated world's new forces be as overt or subtle and as simple or complex as we care to.

By way of comparison, consider the opposite case, a world with no gravity, (or equivalently (I think?) one with a gravitational constant of zero). Changing from this zero gravity universe to the real one doesn't entail changing any of the forces that act upon our imaginary universe, merely allowing a new force to act upon it. Additionally, while this additional force completely changes the structure of the universe on a macroscopic scale, on smaller scales it's subtle enough that it could be ignored outside of certain extreme cases (as indeed it usually is; and IIRC it's exact effects in the cases on the quantum scale where it can't be ignored is still an open question). Everything from the quantum scale up to the molecular scale would still work almost exactly the same way (although the universe with gravity would see complex chemical interactions much earlier because heavy elements would be formed in first generation stars, whereas the zero gravity universe would be wholly reliant on chance high speed collisions to form heavy elements)

[Satinavian]

Any kind of magic of any substantial kind will violate at least one of
a) conservation of mass-energy
b) conservation of momentum (linear or angular)
c) causality
d) conservation of particle number
e) conservation of charge

Because if it doesn't, then it's just normal earth science that we already understand. Magic is inherently that stuff that is impossible on earth.

First, none of that has anything to do with cells or oxygen or fire in the blood.

Second, all those conservation laws are bound to additional constraints. In the easiest form those are "In a closed system, ...". So they are nothing magic necessarily violates, as often it is described as manipulating arcane energies or interacting with other planes and stuff.

A special case is causality. Usually that is only violated by forms of certain prediction/time-travel magic. Which most magic systems don't even have. And it is not different from any (speculative) prediction/time-travel science. I don't think i need to tell you how general relativity allows for closed timelike trajectories or how causality elsewhere comes out of models only when we put it in or is a local property.

[Bohandas]

Speaking of time travel, causality, and magic, I've had the idea in my head for a while that luck would naturally arise as a consequence of the combination of access to time travel and inviolable causality. There are kinds of bad things that could happen to you which in theory ought to be easy to change if you had somehow had access to a time machine. In order to maintain self consistency these events would have to either A.) not happen in the first place or B.) Prevent themselves from being changed. The price of condition A would be that you would have to commit to going back and trying to change things when these sort of things happened, even though any time when the thing actually happened it would show that condition B was in play and the mishap was indelible.

You could also make cleromancy work by setting up an apparatus that produces a readout based on some non-deterministic process, and then setting things up so that any result other than the correct answer to whatever you were trying to figure out woukd cause a paradox and thus be unable to come up

[Satinavian]

Honestly, i don't really like to include time travel into any of my games. For most players it is too difficult to really understand all the implications, possible paradoxa and how to avoid them. And i am not happy with the level of plausibility and consistency that is deemed enough in e.g. Star Trek.

[kyoryu]

How do you say "I haven't studied science" without saying "I haven't studied science".

Seriously though, I think that's the issue there. The more you know about something, the more verisimilitude and immersion can be broken.

I know basically nothing except pop culture knowledge about medieval skirmishing, so the way armor and weapons work in D&D doesn't bother me. I know lots about rock climbing, so the way climbing rules work frequently bothers me.

PhoenixPhyre and I have advanced degrees in hard science, and so the idea that you can just tack on magic to he real world is something we know is not possible. So we find it jarring if you try and maintain pop knowledge of semi-science and then add magic.

Well, ultimately, I think that's the key. It's not actually about whether or not something is realistic. It's about whether something meets what you expect.

I think D&D armor/weapons is actually a good analogy in this case, especially armor. It used to be decried as unrealistic... but then more recent research/HEMA etc. has shown that, no, in fact it's actually a fairly good model - in most cases, when any reasonable armor is used, it will almost completely protect you unless you hit a vulnerable spot. So what armor ends up doing in a lot of cases is actually making you pick your shot or having to maneuver yourself/the opponent to the point where you do have one of those available shots. (Note that this glosses over the whole "HP as meat points argument, and what do they actually represent" thing).

So if you weren't aware of that, you might say AC is unrealistic. If you were aware of it, you might say it's fairly realistic. If you became aware of it, your opinion might change... but the actual realism of it hasn't changed one iota.

And, of course, there's the overriding factor of whether or not you're willing to use enough suspension of disbelief to not worry about it and just get on with the game. My experience is that, if you're willing to do so, even the most unrealistic things will eventually become expected and not bother you any more.

[Batcathat]

Yes, obviously the laws of nature can't work quite the same if a setting includes magic or something else that doesn't work within them, but I don't think that's mutually exclusive with the assumption of "everything works the same, unless otherwise noted". Well, I suppose there might be an issue if the players wanted to explore the setting's physics in extreme detail, but that seems rather unlikely.

[Satinavian]

How do you say "I haven't studied science" without saying "I haven't studied science".

Seriously though, I think that's the issue there. The more you know about something, the more verisimilitude and immersion can be broken.

I know basically nothing except pop culture knowledge about medieval skirmishing, so the way armor and weapons work in D&D doesn't bother me. I know lots about rock climbing, so the way climbing rules work frequently bothers me.

PhoenixPhyre and I have advanced degrees in hard science, and so the idea that you can just tack on magic to he real world is something we know is not possible. So we find it jarring if you try and maintain pop knowledge of semi-science and then add magic.
You are thoroughly mistaken. I am aware of PhoenixPhires degree and can easily match it. I got my PhD working on relativistic quantum thermodynamics and afterwards worked on it as postdoc.

And i still disagree with PhoenixPhyre.


But it is not a fundamental disagreement. We both know you can't just attach magic to our scientific models and get something remotely working. The disagreement is about what we do with this knowledge and how the best way to create a fantasy setting that is seemingly familiar and still has magic is. PhoenixPhyre is explicitely modyfying it, pinning down the differences. I am not and leaving them vague because i am certain that trying to build an alternative system that looks close to realworld, has magic and still is consistent is way too difficult. Any change leaves ripples elsewhere and unintended consequences are bound to blow up in your face sooner or later. Best to not explicitely change anything but still leave room for deviations.

[KorvinStarmast]

Unless your table is composed of a bunch of linguists, I don't think it's reasonable to expect the GM or anyone else to nitpick over every choice of word or idiom. And even at a table of linguists, we are there to play a game, so play it.:smallwink:

D&D Common isn't a real language
Anymore than D&D 5e Thieves Cant is a real language. (Yes, I know it is derived from a thing that was real some centuries ago...) We did have a philosopher major who tried out Thieve's Kant back in the day, however.

Languages in pre-modern times were a lot more local than a country. When we moved to Italy, it was taught to us that Italy had, before the mid 20th century, over 300 dialects. With the implementation of universal public education, they were at roughly 30 dialects still being used after about three generations of that substantive change. This was a quarter of a century ago. Not sure about what they would teach me today were I to move there now.

Immersion is broken constantly. I’m rolling dice, reading a rulebook, consulting a character sheet, ordering a pizza, getting another drink, letting the dog out, moving a miniature, dropping my pencil on the floor, and whatever else happens over the course of an afternoon or evening gaming in the den.
So the essential skill isn’t “not breaking immersion”. The essential skill is re-immersion. And a crucial tool for re-immersion is not focusing on what just broke immersion.

So let it go, move on, and get back to fighting the ghouls. This is the correct answer to the OP.

Words that break immersion:
If you are underwater Word of Recall will break immersion. (Unless your sanctuary is also submerged) And this. (Laughed, I did) :smallsmile:

More to the point, how do you expect people to get invested in (let alone make rational decisions about) the setting if you don't establish a normal baseline first? The amount of investment and/or immersion varies with each person. To expect all to be equally immersed is to set yourself up for disappointment.

Yes, that's dumb. It's also an inaccurate, grossly exaggerated revision of what people are saying. On a very basic, non-scientific level, everyone assumes that the fantasy world is similar to ours in general, and when it isn't, we treat that as an exception. If I may expand on this fundamental point.
This is what Tolkien alluded to in his essay On Fairy Stories as regards the Primary and Secondary World. Good Sci Fi and good Spec Fiction writers follow similar patterns; grounding the reader in that which is familiar and adding the fantastic to it. (And don't over do it!)
Tolkien's description of this structure came from studying storytelling in great detail (part of what philologists do above and beyond simply looking into language)


When our character drops something, we expect it to fall down, not sideways or up. If it falls up, we expect that to indicate some kind of spell or other exception handling.

We expect swords to have edges and points, not feathers and tails.
We expect our characters to hold swords with their hands, not their navels.
If the monster has fangs, we expect them in its mouth, not in its armpit.

So on a very simplistic level, everybody actually assumes a great deal of similarity between our world and the fantasy world. The difference between us is not whether we expect that at all, but how much of it we expect. That's merely a matter of degree.
Even people comfortable with lots of alien or fantastic or anti-scientific elements expect their characters to wear pants and wield swords against the evil werewolves, to save the innocent children. If we start a game and the GM has our characters wearing werewolves, while wielding a child against the evil pants to save the innocent swords, then it feels wrong.

And it isn't made right with "but dragons...". Granted, with the infamous four archetypes of role players ~ Real Man, Role Player, Loonie, Munchkin ~ the Loonie might be able to find a way to wear a wolf while wielding a child against evil pants. :smallbiggrin: But {we} Loonies never cared about immersion. :smallwink:

When it comes to immersion breaking words, I don't sweat about it. If some word, phrasing, or pronunciation does break me out, I don't bother mentioning it. After all, it is hard enough to play/GM these games without adding on more layers of friction. This is a great answer for the OP, who appears to need to hear this.

I feel that, as a consumer (not the creator of a setting), one should only assume that surface-level similarity exists unless told otherwise, rather than the reverse. Creator of the setting says otherwise? Go for it. But making the assumptions that I call ridiculous and then complaining when your extrapolations from them turn out to be incompatible with things in the story (or game setting) and calling out those things in the setting as being wrong rather than your assumptions? That's completely wrong and unjustified, and people who take that approach are flat out wrong. That is a premise, not an argument. I tend to be on your side of the discussion here.

As to the esoteric world building that Phoenix does and how that structure informs our play: it's pretty damned good. And I for one do not find that my eyes glaze over when he answers my questions on some of the inner workings. I can't say I am fond of the renaming of the races (I have to keep a 3x5 card handy) but it is all built on a solid foundation and holds together pretty well.

[TaiLiu]

I wanna say the Inheritance series actually uses that kind of magic, or something very similar. You can't create something from nothing, and it takes about an equal amount of energy to create something as it normally would to do it. Its mostly used to save time or help push things into working a certain way. You rarely, if ever, see someone throw out some big fireball, or cast some massive spell. And the few times that does happen, the caster is dead on their feet, or they tapped into a special mana reserve they were building up for years since they can store energy in certain objects to use as a battery.

Most mages can't really do anything that impressive because they're limited by what their regular form could do. There are some exceptions, but they're usually people connected to the supernatural. I.E. they are connected to Dragons, which basically have limitless magical energy, or some special evil deity.
Oh, I see. I'm not sure that quite meets the criteria, what with the dragons and gods and mana batteries, but that's pretty cool to learn.


You are thoroughly mistaken. I am aware of PhoenixPhires degree and can eBut it is not a fundamental disagreement. We both know you can't just attach magic to our scientific models and get something remotely working. The disagreement is about what we do with this knowledge and how the best way to create a fantasy setting that is seemingly familiar and still has magic is. PhoenixPhyre is explicitely modyfying it, pinning down the differences. I am not and leaving them vague because i am certain that trying to build an alternative system that looks close to realworld, has magic and still is consistent is way too difficult. Any change leaves ripples elsewhere and unintended consequences are bound to blow up in your face sooner or later. Best to not explicitely change anything but still leave room for deviations.
This is approximately my position. It seems super duper hard to create a alternative physics and then have everyone stay consistent to those physics.

[gbaji]

Well. This thread derailed quite a bit. Let me first address the OT:

The players sitting around the table are speaking a language (or languages in some cases). Whatever that is, they need to be able to communicate with eachother and the GM to describe what their characters are doing.

The characters are speaking whatever languages they are speaking at any given time. Unless the setting includes our Earth, those languages are *not* English, or Spanish, or French, or German, or whatever. They are "common", "Elvish", "Darvish" or whatever. None of those languages "are English" (or whatever language is spoken by the players.

But here's the thing. The players express at the table what is spoken by the characters into the language the players use, not the characters. So if character A is speaking Elvish, the player says what the character is saying in English (assume when I say "English" that can be whatevert language the players themselves speak). If another character is speaking in Dwarven', that player also says what their character is speaking in English. There is seriously zero problem with this unless you choose to make it one.

Just assume that whatever idioms, expressions, phrases, names, etc the players are speaking in English are just our understanding of whatever is actually being said in whatever language the character(s) are actually speaking in the game. It's the only sane way to manage this. Otherwise you go down a rabbit hold of insanity (and make your game sessions a complete mess). As a GM I don't care at all what my players say. There is no break of immersion becuse it doesn't matter. Nothing they say, whether it's an idiom or not, is actually in Elvish, or Dwarven, or whatever. It's all being translated. Neither are the clothes they are wearing matching what their characters are wearing, or well, anything else.

Why get hung up on this? It's just not important.

On to the non-linguistic stuff:


Science + Magic is the quickest way to break immersion for me in a fantasy setting. Because as PhoenixPhyre points out, they're inherently contradictory. You can't have both.

They are not contradictory at all. I think you guys are confusing "science" as a concept with "science" as a set of discovered truths in one specific universe/world/whatever.

There is no reason at all to assume that because a game system has magic, that other things can't also be ruled by science. Again, if we assume that we're talking more about scientific method than the results of that method here on Earth specifically. Presumably, D&D wizards learned to create the spells in the game via the same sort of trial and error and exerimentation and testing that scientists here on Earth use to do things. The "rules" are the same, just the results are different in different worlds.

I think where some people go off the rails (and where the "But dragons!" bit comes in) is the insistence that if we're expected to suspend disbelief for one thing, we must suspend it for everything. This applies in sci-fi and fantasy films/shows a heck of a lot, but also to some games and how some people may play them. And in this cases, it's 100% about "consistency". And that's what science is about. if I do X and Y and Z I should get consistent results. That's science. Full stop. Conditions and actions affect outcomes.

So if a magic spell works one way in one episode, but completely differently in another, I"m going to have issues with that. And no amount ot "but dragons" excuses it. And yes, I've overwhelmingly seen this argument used to dismiss or defend agains complaints about inconsistencies in a story/game universe.


Third, science isn't some Grand Blueprint For Everything. It is the sum total of what we have deduced based on our observations and analyses of the universe. If we were to discover tomorrow that our understanding of what causes gravity was wrong, nothing would change. Because our models are derived from the effects of gravity. Scientists working in a "identical to our physical universe, but with magic" world would come up with very different sets of laws. But that does not render such a setting logically impossible. If you see a woman turn into a cat in front of you, the scientific solution is not to deny that it is happening Because Impossible, nor is throwing out everything the way to go. You now have a data point that contradicts your models, so you need to develop better models.

This. Science is the method we use to determine what things are and how they work. As long as we live in a universe in which there are consistent rules as to how things work (which should be the case in any game system, cause... rules, right?), then there is "science".

More to the point, the fact that magic exists should not be used as an excuse to avoid consistency in a story/game at all. "It's magic" is a dumb excuse, unless you've previously established that magic actually works that way. If this "magic" thing directly contradicts something else, then that's a bad thing.

[TexAvery]

People all have things that will break their verisimilitude, and it differs based on their knowledge and expectations. Some will cry "but dragons!" as if this proves theirs are universal. I am one who has seen it used far more to decry any magic they dislike than inconsistencies. If there are poorly-written inconsistencies, say that, don't parrot the eye-roll-inducing "but dragons!".

[Jay R]

I think you can run your games however you like. I'm not arguing against people who think and play differently from me. But Let me try to explain why some people think you can’t have “science except when magic is cast”.

I'm not trying to convince you to think this way; I'm trying to show you a reasonable way to think that may not be your own.

I’ll start with a simple example: universal gravitation. “Universal” has a clear, unambiguous meaning. Saying that gravitation is universal except when somebody casts a levitation or fly spell is simply saying that gravity is not universal. The clearer your image of universal gravity is, the more obvious this becomes. If you understand that right now, the entire Milky Way galaxy is exerting gravitational forces on us, and that’s crucial to how the galaxy rotates, the more impossible it is to think that a spell negates a tiny piece of all the gravitational forces on you

Similarly, in D&D, cold acts as an independent force, not merely the absence of heat. That negates all our understanding of thermodynamics. Lightning goes where you point it; it doesn’t go from high potential to low potential.

Either there are four natural elements, or there are 92. It can’t be 92 until somebody summons an elemental. Either it’s 92 and not 4, or it’s 4 and not 92.

Various creation spells reduce entropy, and violate the second law of thermodynamics.

Many spells violate conservation of mass and energy. Oh, sure, you can say, “Well, the mass and energy come from some other plane,” but that doesn’t answer anything; it just says to stop looking at what really happened, and pretend something happened somewhere else, to no purpose, just to balance an equation. It’s the equivalent of Oz saying “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

It’s much easier for me to believe that there are four elements comprising all things, four humors balanced in the human body, and that the earth is the unmoving center of the universe in a world with magic, than to try to reconcile what I know about science with magic spells.

If these inconsistencies don’t bother you, then great! Have a fun game. But they do bother me, and I’d rather assume that scientific laws don’t work when we see plainly that they aren’t working.

I'm not suggesting that you should have to think like this. There's nothing wrong with that. Just please understand that other people do think like this. And there's nothing wrong with that. either.

For me, any sufficiently understood science is impenetrable by magic.

[PhoenixPhyre]

This is approximately my position. It seems super duper hard to create a alternative physics and then have everyone stay consistent to those physics.

But it's even harder (ie impossible) to have everyone stay consistent inside a system that's already inherently inconsistent with itself. Which is what you get if you combine modern scientific understanding of reality + magic.

The best solution is to stay agnostic as long as you can. Don't make any assumptions about what's going on beneath the surface. As a player, only play with knowledge your character would have, don't import any real-world understanding that goes beyond about a smart 10 year old and don't go looking for inconsistencies/loopholes (no matter if you're trying to exploit them or not) unless you're willing to bear the consequences[1]. As a DM, only worry about things at the naked-eye observable level. At least until you have to dig deeper. And then find a consistent way to answer the question at hand. Because 99.99999999% of the time...it ain't gonna matter and ya ain't gonna need it.

I, personally, love thinking about physical systems and metaphysics. So I develop speculative ones all the time, just for fun. Sometimes, those speculative metaphysics help explain various things in games, so they get grafted in...if they fit. But it always stays behind the scenes--as long as the players don't go searching for these "deeper truths", it all works just fine if you think of it as "mostly like the real world, at least on the surface" (ie the things @Jay R brought up). And if you have opinions on the deeper stuff as a player, I'm all ears. Maybe I'll like your answer better than the one I may have come up with already.

@gabji--I think you're misunderstanding what people are saying. In that statement, "Science" was explicitly (from context) meaning "the content of physical laws as understood by modern scientists in the real world". Not the process of science, which I completely agree can be compatible with magic. There are also types of magic where it is not compatible, because the scientific method assumes a lot of things about the metaphysics of the world that may or may not hold in any arbitrary world (such as repeatability, universality, objectivity, and self-consistency).

[1] because if you look for inconsistencies between any game world and the real world...you'll find them. Or even inconsistencies inside the real world. Just like looking for shapes in the clouds, what you find there is much more a function of who you are and what you're looking for than anything about the world itself. So any breakage from looking for loopholes/inconsistencies is entirely on your own shoulders.

[Talakeal]

People all have things that will break their verisimilitude, and it differs based on their knowledge and expectations. Some will cry "but dragons!" as if this proves theirs are universal. I am one who has seen it used far more to decry any magic they dislike than inconsistencies. If there are poorly-written inconsistencies, say that, don't parrot the eye-roll-inducing "but dragons!".

In my experience people DO point out the inconsistencies, and are then told to shut up by someone using a variant of “but dragons”.

[Bohandas]

They are not contradictory at all. I think you guys are confusing "science" as a concept with "science" as a set of discovered truths in one specific universe/world/whatever.

That's a very good point

[TexAvery]

In my experience people DO point out the inconsistencies, and are then told to shut up by someone using a variant of “but dragons”.

I have never seen "but dragons!" invoked by anyone doing anything except assuming that a fantasy world is exactly like the real world. Often misunderstanding the real world, or not wanting to eliminate the inconsistency so much as push it to a place they're more comfortable with.

It annoys me to no end when I'm reading a setting and the stars are other suns, there's a moon just like ours, a week is seven days, and so on. "More dragons, please", in other words. Don't tell me it's a rich, vibrant, interesting world only to serve me up a Spam sandwich of my own life with a wizard hanging around somewhere. I'd rather have Discworld than something that pretends to be realistic when it obviously isn't.

Another example is Star Wars vs Star Trek. I prefer Wars. Trekkies will laugh and say it's not really science fiction and full of wizards, while Trek is realistic. Except, of course, for Q. And the Borg. And the holodeck and transporter working as the plot demands this week. Give me something that feels great and fantastic, or give me a real story, but don't pretend you can mix the two and spackle the holes. And especially not act as if it's obviously superior.

And if I may rerail the thread, I'm almost through episode 3 of Willow. I lost count of the "kinda"s. There's a "really sorta", several "yeah"s, "Cashmere", "Saracen Pass", and the "Lux Arcana", so obviously Latin is magic. Or magic is Latin. And "Bruenhilde" is a name girls make fun of. I can't imagine how you get through that and get offended by a "gesundheit".

[Batcathat]

It annoys me to no end when I'm reading a setting and the stars are other suns, there's a moon just like ours, a week is seven days, and so on. "More dragons, please", in other words. Don't tell me it's a rich, vibrant, interesting world only to serve me up a Spam sandwich of my own life with a wizard hanging around somewhere. I'd rather have Discworld than something that pretends to be realistic when it obviously isn't.

While I have similar issues with some settings (though mine is mostly about how magic is added to the world, but doesn't really change much about it), I'm not sure what alternative is here. Is it better that stars are, I don't know, a god's tears that just happen to look like the distant suns in our world?

[PhoenixPhyre]

While I have similar issues with some settings (though mine is mostly about how magic is added to the world, but doesn't really change much about it), I'm not sure what alternative is here. Is it better that stars are, I don't know, a god's tears that just happen to look like the distant suns in our world?

Or stars are dots painted on the crystal sphere. Or large balls of glowing crystal, like lamps. As long as you don't demand that they follow all the exact same patterns as on earth, you can get real creative. Heck, you can have worlds without discrete stars in the sky, whether black or swirling patterns.

[KorvinStarmast]

Or stars are dots painted on the crystal sphere. Or large balls of glowing crystal, like lamps. As long as you don't demand that they follow all the exact same patterns as on earth, you can get real creative. Heck, you can have worlds without discrete stars in the sky, whether black or swirling patterns.
Or you can have stars that are sentient beings. (Spec Fiction, A Wrinkle in Time, if I recall that story correctly after many decades...) (I refer to Mrs Whatsit)

[TexAvery]

While I have similar issues with some settings (though mine is mostly about how magic is added to the world, but doesn't really change much about it), I'm not sure what alternative is here. Is it better that stars are, I don't know, a god's tears that just happen to look like the distant suns in our world?

Holes in the shroud of night, nameless gods, whatever. Yes. I do not need the assumption they are other stars. I do not need the assumption that electrolysis works (if I could harness a lightning bolt spell or whatever). My point though is, once I've accepted that we're in a fantasy world, I'm not going to throw a fit because I discover that my dragon tale also involves ghosts. Or that the world is in fact actually flat. The creator is allowed to add more fantasy, and doing so is not always papering over inconsistency.

Another example is the people who stopped watching GoT when Melisandre summoned the shadow, offended at the inclusion of magic. Because apparently that was the bridge too far, not the actual dragons or wights or the million other impossibilities. Including the ability to determine parentage by looking at hair color.

[Batcathat]

Or stars are dots painted on the crystal sphere. Or large balls of glowing crystal, like lamps. As long as you don't demand that they follow all the exact same patterns as on earth, you can get real creative. Heck, you can have worlds without discrete stars in the sky, whether black or swirling patterns.

Sure, I'm not saying a fantasy world has to be "realistic", but I don't see why having stars as distant gas balls is inherently worse or less realistic than having them be anything else. I'm fine with it being completely different under the surface (and often prefer it, since for a genre called "fantasy" its authors are often remarkably uncreative in my experience) but I'm also fine with it being the same under the surface, as long as it doesn't clash with anything else.

[Satinavian]

Heck, you can have worlds without discrete stars in the sky, whether black or swirling patterns.Sure, you could do that. But that certainly is not "no difference on the surface level".
But what is more important is that you should consider how that changes navigation by the stars or how you won't have astrology or horoscopes anymore without stars and how you can't have magic rituals demanding that the stars are aligned in a certain way etc.

Most of the time people change such things because it is fancy and forget the implications.

[TexAvery]

Sure, I'm not saying a fantasy world has to be "realistic", but I don't see why having stars as distant gas balls is inherently worse or less realistic than having them be anything else. I'm fine with it being completely different under the surface (and often prefer it, since for a genre called "fantasy" its authors are often remarkably uncreative in my experience) but I'm also fine with it being the same under the surface, as long as it doesn't clash with anything else.

And I'm agreeing that it also doesn't have to be different... but I'd be upset if I were writing a fantasy story, partway in mention that stars really are the Valkyries waiting for the dead, and someone cries that I just "but dragons!"ed them. And I'd rather have a fantasy setting (and consumers) open to introducing new elements rather than being limited to "reality + narrowly-defined magic". Which, as mentioned, usually also falls apart if you think about it hard enough, but also comes at the cost of fewer interesting elements.

[Batcathat]

And I'm agreeing that it also doesn't have to be different... but I'd be upset if I were writing a fantasy story, partway in mention that stars really are the Valkyries waiting for the dead, and someone cries that I just "but dragons!"ed them. And I'd rather have a fantasy setting (and consumers) open to introducing new elements rather than being limited to "reality + narrowly-defined magic". Which, as mentioned, usually also falls apart if you think about it hard enough, but also comes at the cost of fewer interesting elements.

I would say it depends. Yes, an author should be able to introduce previously unknown elements in a story, but do it too much or go against whatever "rules" you have established and people are likely to have a problem, whether the world is "reality, but..." or completely made up from scratch.

[Elkad]

Communicate in a way your players will understand, maybe leave out the pop culture references.

My table is FULL of pop culture references, including in direct character conversations, and I can't see ever wanting or trying to change it.

The players doing that simply reflects what any tight-knit group does naturally - develop their own semi-secret communication language based on mutual past experiences.

One recent example.
A player said "Pop Quiz Hotshot!" and everyone knew what it meant, without communicating that to the bad guy holding a valued NPC hostage.

Some of the others really are based on our own group of players - so they are personal culture rather than pop.
Overwhelming challenge - which hadn't quite turned to combat yet. One player said "I'll be the sorcerer."
That has a specific meaning based on a session from more than a decade ago. And the player who said the line hadn't even been in our group then, but it's part of our table lore.
The same if someone yells BACON! - based on a session from more than FORTY years ago - a character of mine is the one who originally said that.
Or an exaggerated "NINE". Or more other things than I could possibly list.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I would say it depends. Yes, an author should be able to introduce previously unknown elements in a story, but do it too much or go against whatever "rules" you have established and people are likely to have a problem, whether the world is "reality, but..." or completely made up from scratch.

I, personally, want people to approach stories with only the assumptions the author gives them. If I'm inconsistent within the rules I've established, that's on me. If I'm inconsistent with rules I never said I was following...that's not my problem.

[TexAvery]

I would say it depends. Yes, an author should be able to introduce previously unknown elements in a story, but do it too much or go against whatever "rules" you have established and people are likely to have a problem, whether the world is "reality, but..." or completely made up from scratch.

Well yes, breaking a previously-established rule for the setting/game is of course bad. What I'm talking about is breaking a rule from real life that had not been "confirmed" in the setting.

But again, my experience is usually people will accept almost anything from a setting they like, and complain bitterly about anything from a setting they don't. With whatever excuse is ready at hand.

[PhoenixPhyre]

But again, my experience is usually people will accept almost anything from a setting they like, and complain bitterly about anything from a setting they don't. With whatever excuse is ready at hand.

Yeah. This.

[GloatingSwine]

Well yes, breaking a previously-established rule for the setting/game is of course bad. What I'm talking about is breaking a rule from real life that had not been "confirmed" in the setting.

But again, my experience is usually people will accept almost anything from a setting they like, and complain bitterly about anything from a setting they don't. With whatever excuse is ready at hand.

Depends how early you do it, and how far it deviates from the real-life rule.

Like if you're four books deep into your fantasy magnum opus and that's when you reveal that humans in this world actually have three heads, that's probably not going to do down very well.

[TaiLiu]

But it's even harder (ie impossible) to have everyone stay consistent inside a system that's already inherently inconsistent with itself. Which is what you get if you combine modern scientific understanding of reality + magic.

The best solution is to stay agnostic as long as you can. Don't make any assumptions about what's going on beneath the surface. As a player, only play with knowledge your character would have, don't import any real-world understanding that goes beyond about a smart 10 year old and don't go looking for inconsistencies/loopholes (no matter if you're trying to exploit them or not) unless you're willing to bear the consequences[1]. As a DM, only worry about things at the naked-eye observable level. At least until you have to dig deeper. And then find a consistent way to answer the question at hand. Because 99.99999999% of the time...it ain't gonna matter and ya ain't gonna need it.

I, personally, love thinking about physical systems and metaphysics. So I develop speculative ones all the time, just for fun. Sometimes, those speculative metaphysics help explain various things in games, so they get grafted in...if they fit. But it always stays behind the scenes--as long as the players don't go searching for these "deeper truths", it all works just fine if you think of it as "mostly like the real world, at least on the surface" (ie the things @Jay R brought up). And if you have opinions on the deeper stuff as a player, I'm all ears. Maybe I'll like your answer better than the one I may have come up with already.

[1] because if you look for inconsistencies between any game world and the real world...you'll find them. Or even inconsistencies inside the real world. Just like looking for shapes in the clouds, what you find there is much more a function of who you are and what you're looking for than anything about the world itself. So any breakage from looking for loopholes/inconsistencies is entirely on your own shoulders.
Yeah, I guess we don't disagree. Maybe where potential players and DMs may clash is re: their surface-level understanding of the world. People, including smart 10-year-olds, just seem to have different notions about physics and social interactions and whether or not you can make a flour explosion. And also re: loopholes and exploits, but those can be resolved ad hoc.

Also, I know very little about contemporary physics. But isn't our modern scientific understanding already inconsistent? Something something general relativity and quantum mechanics are incompatible?

[TexAvery]

Depends how early you do it, and how far it deviates from the real-life rule.

Like if you're four books deep into your fantasy magnum opus and that's when you reveal that humans in this world actually have three heads, that's probably not going to do down very well.

Well yes, but that's quite a bit more extreme than anything I've seen happen in the situations people whip out the "but but dragons" fallacy and make me roll my eyes.

[Bohandas]

Also, I know very little about contemporary physics. But isn't our modern scientific understanding already inconsistent? Something something general relativity and quantum mechanics are incompatible?

Yes. I touched on this in one of my earlier posts. Quantum mechanics produces bizarre unrenormalizable results when you try to factor in the effects of gravity.

[Talakeal]

I have never seen "but dragons!" invoked by anyone doing anything except assuming that a fantasy world is exactly like the real world. Often misunderstanding the real world, or not wanting to eliminate the inconsistency so much as push it to a place they're more comfortable with.

It annoys me to no end when I'm reading a setting and the stars are other suns, there's a moon just like ours, a week is seven days, and so on. "More dragons, please", in other words. Don't tell me it's a rich, vibrant, interesting world only to serve me up a Spam sandwich of my own life with a wizard hanging around somewhere. I'd rather have Discworld than something that pretends to be realistic when it obviously isn't.

Another example is Star Wars vs Star Trek. I prefer Wars. Trekkies will laugh and say it's not really science fiction and full of wizards, while Trek is realistic. Except, of course, for Q. And the Borg. And the holodeck and transporter working as the plot demands this week. Give me something that feels great and fantastic, or give me a real story, but don't pretend you can mix the two and spackle the holes. And especially not act as if it's obviously superior.

So, it seems that the problem is the fallacy has taken on multiple meanings, some of them directly contradictory, in a case of "literal means figurative".

The way I use it is to label statements that boil down to "In a setting with fantastic elements, one should not expect any form of logic or consistency." Which is usually used to silence criticisms of plot holes or inconsistencies.

But, doing a google search, I also see people use it to mean "In a setting with fantastic elements, I refuse to accept any mundane elements" or "In a setting with fantastic elements I like, I still reject other fantastic elements I don't like on the basis of realism".

I recall seeing the phrase first coined on this forum ~2011, and I whole heartedly supported it as it was something I had experienced many times before, my dad loves using to dismiss my love of genre fiction and overly analytical nature, and I often saw it used in online debates, the earliest clear example being people defending the Matrix ignoring thermodynamics in 1999. But, it is wholly possible that my memory is faulty or I misunderstood.

As I said above, I still don't actually understand where the fallacy is in "guy at the gym" despite being able to read and reread the original post.


In your case, I don't really disagree with you, as long as you are upfront about it. Allowing the audience / players to believe something is mundane and then suddenly pulling the rug out from under them can easily come across as a screw-job or a deus ex machina. Heck, in RPGs even something as simple as a surprise genre switch (pitching a game as a spy thriller and then having it turn into an alien invasion / superhero / zombie apocalypse story is a common one, the fantasy world is post-apocalyptic / prehistoric Earth is another) is something I have never seen not end in a player revolt. Heck, I had a player revolt because I introduced a lone plane-traveling cowboy NPC in a D&D campaign as, afaict it broke their ideas of genre (or maybe they were just pissed than an NPC had guns and they didn't?).

Like, you have seen the whole argument about taking the eagles to Mordor, right? Imagine how much worse it would be if, in the last fifty pages, Frodo had just decided to flap his arms and fly the ring up Mount Doom and then carry Sam back to the shire at supersonic speeds. After all, it is a fantastic setting with dragons and wizards, and nobody ever said that hobbits COULDN'T fly, so why not?




And if I may rerail the thread, I'm almost through episode 3 of Willow. I lost count of the "kinda"s. There's a "really sorta", several "yeah"s, "Cashmere", "Saracen Pass", and the "Lux Arcana", so obviously Latin is magic. Or magic is Latin. And "Bruenhilde" is a name girls make fun of. I can't imagine how you get through that and get offended by a "gesundheit".

Interestingly enough, "Cashmir" is actually a place mentioned in the original movie. Though it is a homophone for Kashmir (a region in India) or Cashmere, a fabric named after said region, it is spelled differently and is, presumably, merely a fantasy kingdom with no relation to either aside from a similar name.

I know this because one of the ancient kingdoms in my setting is called Cashmir as a homage to Willow.

Pedantry aside, yeah, the dialogue in that show just feels so terribly off.

[Bohandas]

Interestingly enough, "Cashmir" is actually a place mentioned in the original movie. Though it is a homophone for Kashmir (a region in India) or Cashmere, a fabric named after said region, it is spelled differently and is, presumably, merely a fantasy kingdom with no relation to either aside from a similar name.

Much in the same way thay the Candy Kingdom from Adventure Time is wholly unrelated to the Kingdom of Kandy in renaissance era Sri Lanka

[TaiLiu]

Yes. I touched on this in one of my earlier posts. Quantum mechanics produces bizarre unrenormalizable results when you try to factor in the effects of gravity.
Makes sense that someone said it already (and better)! :smallbiggrin:

[Witty Username]

Yes, obviously the laws of nature can't work quite the same if a setting includes magic or something else that doesn't work within them, but I don't think that's mutually exclusive with the assumption of "everything works the same, unless otherwise noted". Well, I suppose there might be an issue if the players wanted to explore the setting's physics in extreme detail, but that seems rather unlikely.
Everything works the same unless otherwise stated is a pretty good description of CSI, which has things that could be described as actual magic.

[Witty Username]

I, personally, want people to approach stories with only the assumptions the author gives them. If I'm inconsistent within the rules I've established, that's on me. If I'm inconsistent with rules I never said I was following...that's not my problem.

I actually don't agree, internal consistency I feel is overvalued by fantasy writing, especially with magic systems.I feel it trends towards overly simplistic writing.
I recognize it is a bit different for games because players need to interact with the game, but much like when our set of assumptions are found to not conform with reality, we change our assumptions, not call reality inconsistent.

Magic should, at least sometimes, work in a similar way, false assumptions that are disproven by apparent results.

[animorte]

Magic should, at least sometimes, work in a similar way, false assumptions that are disproven by apparent results.
And thus the transition from theory to law.

[TexAvery]

So, it seems that the problem is the fallacy has taken on multiple meanings, some of them directly contradictory, in a case of "literal means figurative".

The way I use it is to label statements that boil down to "In a setting with fantastic elements, one should not expect any form of logic or consistency." Which is usually used to silence criticisms of plot holes or inconsistencies.

But, doing a google search, I also see people use it to mean "In a setting with fantastic elements, I refuse to accept any mundane elements" or "In a setting with fantastic elements I like, I still reject other fantastic elements I don't like on the basis of realism".

I recall seeing the phrase first coined on this forum ~2011, and I whole heartedly supported it as it was something I had experienced many times before, my dad loves using to dismiss my love of genre fiction and overly analytical nature, and I often saw it used in online debates, the earliest clear example being people defending the Matrix ignoring thermodynamics in 1999. But, it is wholly possible that my memory is faulty or I misunderstood.

As I said above, I still don't actually understand where the fallacy is in "guy at the gym" despite being able to read and reread the original post.

I think much of my issue with the "but but dragons!" argument is that, as with most "fallacies" bandied about on here, it is treated as a gotcha that is expected to be an auto-win when presented (as with a true logical fallacy), but is just a phrase for "something I disagree with". It is then weaponized as "thing X is objectively bad" as opposed to "I do not enjoy thing X because it does not match my expectations".

Someone could, for example, have Conan as their only fictional background and reject the concept that in D&D, magic can be used without driving the mage insane or evil. As in, "I can accept magic, but not easy magic". Someone who came from Harry Potter might, by contrast, find Conan difficult to accept. Both people could say "but dragons!" in an attempt to "prove" their opinions are objectively correct. Both would be better served by saying "this is a form of fiction I don't enjoy".

The Matrix issues, as well, are an example of poor writing I'm willing to ignore for an otherwise great story. I rapidly mind-caulked it to compute power rather than electrical power and continued enjoying it. If that had been the point of the story (say, the machines searching for a solution to their electrical needs and finally settling on using humans as generators) I'd have had a harder time.


In your case, I don't really disagree with you, as long as you are upfront about it. Allowing the audience / players to believe something is mundane and then suddenly pulling the rug out from under them can easily come across as a screw-job or a deus ex machina. Heck, in RPGs even something as simple as a surprise genre switch (pitching a game as a spy thriller and then having it turn into an alien invasion / superhero / zombie apocalypse story is a common one, the fantasy world is post-apocalyptic / prehistoric Earth is another) is something I have never seen not end in a player revolt. Heck, I had a player revolt because I introduced a lone plane-traveling cowboy NPC in a D&D campaign as, afaict it broke their ideas of genre (or maybe they were just pissed than an NPC had guns and they didn't?).

Genre switching is just being dishonest with your players, or other audience. No spoilers, but I enjoyed 10 Cloverfield Lane. I understand why others did not, however. Your players are noted as being unreasonable by the standards of most around here.


Like, you have seen the whole argument about taking the eagles to Mordor, right? Imagine how much worse it would be if, in the last fifty pages, Frodo had just decided to flap his arms and fly the ring up Mount Doom and then carry Sam back to the shire at supersonic speeds. After all, it is a fantastic setting with dragons and wizards, and nobody ever said that hobbits COULDN'T fly, so why not?

As opposed to the sudden wings in The Dark Crystal, beloved by most?


Interestingly enough, "Cashmir" is actually a place mentioned in the original movie. Though it is a homophone for Kashmir (a region in India) or Cashmere, a fabric named after said region, it is spelled differently and is, presumably, merely a fantasy kingdom with no relation to either aside from a similar name.

I know this because one of the ancient kingdoms in my setting is called Cashmir as a homage to Willow.

Pedantry aside, yeah, the dialogue in that show just feels so terribly off.

I, ah, did mention that in my first post in this thread. The captions even spell it "Kashmir" in the movie (And while I'm in the captions-always camp, I still wouldn't accept them as proof that "Kashmir" is a coincidence while "gesundheit" is not. Particularly since the movie also spelled the name "Arik" rather often. If I'm misremembering either of those, I apologize, as noted below I watch while on the exercise bike.). And I didn't even mention the denim on the woodswomen. I'll finish watching the show (it's something to have on while working out) but it's disappointing compared to what I'd hoped.

If I missed those quotes, I apologize - I usually can't stand wall-o-text posts but wound up creating one myself.

[Jay R]

The best solution to the unanswerable questions is not to ask them.

Back in the 1970s, when I first started playing D&D, I tried to invent a background that fit everything.

I posited a mundane world, exactly like ours, until the light from the super-nova in the Crab Nebula was first seen on Earth, in 1066. It brought manna with it – the raw stuff of magic, which can be manipulated by mental effort.

At first it had little effect, except on children. If adults think their minds don’t change the world, then they don’t. But children believed the stories they were told, so they actually began seeing bogey-men, exactly as described to them. Over time all fictional beasts in European legend started existing.

Europe quickly went to ruin and civilization collapsed. A very few great heroes were able to maintain little pockets of order, because their wills were strong enough to hold people together and to keep the world as it was. Eventually, these great heroes died, but their spirits joined together, and became the Archetypes of the Fighter, the Magic User, the Cleric, etc.

People could start to attune themselves to these archetypes, but only at certain quantum levels. These became the levels of each character class. [This explained why somebody one point away from third level was still entirely second level.]

Native Americans lived closer to nature than Europeans. Their world view was to live with nature, rather than to conquer it, so their world changed less, and they became even closer to nature – and eventually became the first elves.

The world's technology cannot grow. If your mind affects the world, then the scientific method doesn't work. A Newton-level scientist who carefully measured falling objects would conclude that gravity is not universal, and that bodies stopped falling faster after 200 feet. Once he saw a fireball or lightning bolt spell, he would conclude that mass and energy are not conserved.

Meanwhile, phenomena are not repeatable. If the fighter does exactly what the wizard did, nothing happens.

I eventually explained character classes, levels, experience points, monsters, level limits for non-humans, weapon restrictions for magic-users, individual magic spells, why the culture and technological development is medieval, and a host of other things. It was carefully constructed and extremely detailed, and I was quite proud of my structure.

Until I realized that it changed nothing. Not one aspect of the game was affected for the players. This was all stuff happening inside my head.

I eventually realized that the best solution to the unanswerable questions is not to ask them.

Is the world run by the laws of modern physics until somebody casts a spell? The answer is that it doesn’t matter. One player can believe one answer, another player can believe a conflicting answer, and the DM can know the truth is something entirely different, and it doesn’t change the game at all.

Gross effects of these laws do matter and they are what people expect. Rivers flow downhill. It gets warmer when the sun is up. Poison hurts or kills people. But the details of how this happens? I won’t describe it, because I don’t know – or care.

[Similarly, I don’t describe the skin color of my NPCs at the table. (My players comprise two different races.) If one person thinks they are all one color, and another player thinks they are another color, and a third player thinks they are mixed, no problem. It doesn’t affect the game. If somebody asks, I would answer, “I don’t know – or care.”

So beyond a very basic level, if a player started asking questions about the scientific background of the world, I would answer, “How many points of Knowledge (modern physics) does your PC have?”

Your character doesn’t know these answers. Your character doesn’t even know these questions. The important question is how to stop the marauding giants, not how does the sun shine.

We’re playing Dungeons and Dragons, not Theories and Theses.

[TexAvery]

Lordy.

"Wanna"
"got the hots for each other"
"vermathrax(sic)"
"dog-sitting"
"groupthink"
"Fibonacci hex"

And there was more I can't remember in that 75 minutes. I think the reviewer mentioned in the OP just doesn't like German, because there's no other way that that word crosses a line the rest of this hasn't.

[Talakeal]

I think much of my issue with the "but but dragons!" argument is that, as with most "fallacies" bandied about on here, it is treated as a gotcha that is expected to be an auto-win when presented (as with a true logical fallacy), but is just a phrase for "something I disagree with". It is then weaponized as "thing X is objectively bad" as opposed to "I do not enjoy thing X because it does not match my expectations".

I totally agree that whether or not something is fallacious has little bearing on whether it is correct.

I actually think we are coming from similar places though. You appear to be tired of people saying an opinion is invalid because it is fallacious, and I am tired of people saying that an opinion is invalid because it pertains to a work with fantastic elements. Same argument, different direction.

[Witty Username]

The Matrix issues, as well, are an example of poor writing I'm willing to ignore for an otherwise great story. I rapidly mind-caulked it to compute power rather than electrical power and continued enjoying it. If that had been the point of the story (say, the machines searching for a solution to their electrical needs and finally settling on using humans as generators) I'd have had a harder time.


This is an example for me of the internal consistency is valuable, to a point.

Matrix was written to have humans as a power source for a few reasons but there is one I want to highlight:
For its original draft and pitch, the idea was that the matrix and the humans plugged into it were essentially a massive computer processor for solving complex problems. But this was thrown out for being to difficult a concept to grok for an average movie goer.

Whether this would be a better/worse solution is not what I want to highlight, but that the solution is perfectly compatible with the movie, if you assume that it is true that this would be a difficult concept for people to understand and articulate.

And once you start entertaining the idea that some of these people are talking out of their ass about things they have no knowledge base to comprehend, the movie suddenly doesn't have the plot problem, its just dumb humans trying to fight against forces they don't understand and looking cool doing it.

First rule of "Laws of Magic", don't assume any exposition given by a character is infallible. They can be wrong, lying, giving the short version, etc.

[TexAvery]

I totally agree that whether or not something is fallacious has little bearing on whether it is correct.

I actually think we are coming from similar places though. You appear to be tired of people saying an opinion is invalid because it is fallacious, and I am tired of people saying that an opinion is invalid because it pertains to a work with fantastic elements. Same argument, different direction.

Yeah. Also different phrasing, but yes, I think we agree overall.

Which is nice, as it appears I'll finally be moving to your neck of the woods in a couple of months. Later than originally intended.

[Bohandas]

The problem with The Matrix is that uch of the time it looks like relatively realistic science fiction but then in places it abruptly shifts into fantasy with things like perpetual motion machines and sympathetic magic

[TaiLiu]

And thus the transition from theory to law.
Are you referring to scientific theories and laws? In the history of science, I'm not quite sure that distinction (that we're more certain about laws than we are about theory) tracks. In fact there are laws, like the ideal gas law, that are untrue. The fact that we have two names for the same kind of thing seems like an accident of history.

[animorte]

The fact that we have two names for the same kind of thing seems like an accident of history.
I thought about this after I posted. We do indeed have instances labeled with law and decades later discover a greater depth of truth and clarification.

[KorvinStarmast]

The best solution to the unanswerable questions is not to ask them.
We’re playing Dungeons and Dragons, not Theories and Theses.
Nice post. If we are writing a book, the world building may be more necessary.

Most of the time people change such things because it is fancy and forget the implications. yes! Some decades ago one of our DMs had us pick a horoscope sign, and to pick a year (Chinese based calendar style, year of the dragon, year of the tiger, etc) and this provided the player some bonuses or minuses depending on how the calendar was moving. (That DM kept campaign time very well). In retrospect, I'd not try to do that now as it's another fiddly bit, but we all found it playable.

My table is FULL of pop culture references, including in direct character conversations, and I can't see ever wanting or trying to change it. Half of the fun can be cracking jokes during a round or during an encounter. At least, in most groups I have played in. I have been in some groups where that kind of OOC reference gets evil looks, but that's been a long time.

Like if you're four books deep into your fantasy magnum opus and that's when you reveal that humans in this world actually have three heads, that's probably not going to do down very well. *chuckle* A good example of the Primary/Secondary World texture being woven badly.

[SimonMoon6]

Oh, I just thought of a word that broke immersion for me when watching Frozen.

"My power flurries through the air into the ground
My soul is spiraling in frozen fractals all around"

But Frozen is supposed to take place in not-quite Norway (Arendelle) in the late 1800s. But the word "fractal" wasn't coined until 1975.

I don't think this is fixed by simply saying that we're hearing a translation into English of the not-Norwegian (Arendellian?) word for "fractal ", since no language should have a word for "fractal" during this time period, over 100 years before the word was coined.

So, perhaps Arendelle has more advanced mathematics (by over a hundred years ) than the entire rest of the world?

"But Dragons Disney..."

[kyoryu]

I'm curious what people would think about this idea, and how it fits into the "science" argument.

Assume that the world is effectively a computer simulation. As such, it behaves according to certain rules, and does so in a discoverable, predictable way (in the same way our physics works).

However, assume also that the programmer of the system can basically "breakpoint" the simulation, and make changes in real time. These changes would be whatever said programmer wanted, and wouldn't be bound by the rules of the system, though the results likely would.

So, like, the laws of thermodynamics (as an example) would hold unless there was programmer interference. A programmer could just make fire somewhere (without worrying about the laws of thermodynamics). However, the simulation and the fire, from that point, would still be bound by the laws.

[KorvinStarmast]

Assume that the world is effectively a computer simulation. As such, it behaves according to certain rules, and does so in a discoverable, predictable way (in the same way our physics works).

However, assume also that the programmer of the system can basically "breakpoint" the simulation, and make changes in real time. These changes would be whatever said programmer wanted, and wouldn't be bound by the rules of the system, though the results likely would.

So, like, the laws of thermodynamics (as an example) would hold unless there was programmer interference. A programmer could just make fire somewhere (without worrying about the laws of thermodynamics). However, the simulation and the fire, from that point, would still be bound by the laws. Wouldn't a General Protection Fault (or other error message) crop up now and again as the programmer inserted an instruction that caused an internal conflict among those bazillions of lines of code?

[kyoryu]

Wouldn't a General Protection Fault (or other error message) crop up now and again as the programmer inserted an instruction that caused an internal conflict among those bazillions of lines of code?

Presumably it's more messing with data :smallbiggrin:

Like, as a super trivial example, consider Conway's Game of Life. Totally deterministic. Assume that between the frames, the programmer/runner of the app can set whatever they want, but then what they put in the sim will from there on act according to the rules of the sim.

[gbaji]

I’ll start with a simple example: universal gravitation. “Universal” has a clear, unambiguous meaning. Saying that gravitation is universal except when somebody casts a levitation or fly spell is simply saying that gravity is not universal. The clearer your image of universal gravity is, the more obvious this becomes.

Saying that gravitation is universal except when someone fills a balloon with a lower density gas than the surrounding air and generates lift, or when a wing is shaped such that it produces pressure differential above/below and generates lift, or when a rocket is ignited producing lift, or.... oh wait! That's exactly how we overcome a universal thing like gravity. How is a levitation or fly spell any different? How is that different than an advanced technology producing anti-gravity fields and flying that way? Or bending space and allowing FTL flight? Any/all of those are perfectly acceptable in a sci-fi or fantasy world. The point is that if one uses the existence of these things to declare that all other "rules" must just not apply either is the fallacy that many of us are talking about.

"magic" can just be some other means to accomplish things in an otherwise "normal" physical world than we use (or work) in our own. This doesn't mean that you can't have other things in the world also work competely differently, but it would be absurd to assume that just because a levitation spell exist in the world that water no longer flows downhill, and objects can no longer be expected to fall back down to the ground when hurled into the air, or any of a number of other "normal" things that gravity does.



Many spells violate conservation of mass and energy. Oh, sure, you can say, “Well, the mass and energy come from some other plane,” but that doesn’t answer anything; it just says to stop looking at what really happened, and pretend something happened somewhere else, to no purpose, just to balance an equation. It’s the equivalent of Oz saying “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

Spells produce specific, well documented and measured effects. How they do that is up to whatever, but the argument against "but dragons!" is that just because there is magic in the world doesn't mean that you toss out everything else as well.

So just because there is a lightning spell in the game, does that mean that if I stand out in a lightning storm holding a long metal rod above my head, I should be perfectly safe? Cause... dragons? Or do we assume that lightning in nature in our fantasy world works just like lightning in the real world, except when it's being generated and controlled by a magic spell? I think the latter makes a lot more sense, and frankly requires a heck of a lot less world building and rule creating. Now, if you want to go through every "natural" action/reaction in the universe, think about how magic changes how it must work, and then work out the new "natural" function of lightning, and water flow, and gravity, and everything else, then more power to you.

I think most of us are perfectly fine with assuming our fantasy worlds work pretty much how our real world works, except where specifically outlined in the game rules.


The way I use it is to label statements that boil down to "In a setting with fantastic elements, one should not expect any form of logic or consistency." Which is usually used to silence criticisms of plot holes or inconsistencies.

But, doing a google search, I also see people use it to mean "In a setting with fantastic elements, I refuse to accept any mundane elements" or "In a setting with fantastic elements I like, I still reject other fantastic elements I don't like on the basis of realism".

I find that it can be used both ways. I also find that both ways it's incorrect (as in, it's fallacious). A setting should be consistent regardless of whether that setting is fantasy, sci-fi, or "real world". Also, while folks can reject stuff they don't like, rejecting it on the bounds that only their own personal version of things can/should exist is silly.


I recall seeing the phrase first coined on this forum ~2011, and I whole heartedly supported it as it was something I had experienced many times before, my dad loves using to dismiss my love of genre fiction and overly analytical nature, and I often saw it used in online debates, the earliest clear example being people defending the Matrix ignoring thermodynamics in 1999. But, it is wholly possible that my memory is faulty or I misunderstood.

I've seen the concept and argument made for many decades now, even if not by that specific term.

My overwhelming experience with this is in the form of "It's a show with people with <superpowers, or wizards, or people with mental powers, or transporters and FTL> so why do you have a problem with <insert complete inconsistency or character stupidity here>. As if, the moment we susped disbelief for anything, we must suspend it for everything. And yes, it's usually used to dismiss criticism of a particularly poor bit of story writing in a film or tv or novel.



Like, you have seen the whole argument about taking the eagles to Mordor, right? Imagine how much worse it would be if, in the last fifty pages, Frodo had just decided to flap his arms and fly the ring up Mount Doom and then carry Sam back to the shire at supersonic speeds. After all, it is a fantastic setting with dragons and wizards, and nobody ever said that hobbits COULDN'T fly, so why not?

Exactly. When something is introduced into a story to solve a problem, where that same exact thing, had it existed previously should have also been used to solve numerous other problems, is an inconsistency. Many many writers include such things, and yes, handwave them away with "but it's all suspension of disbelief". Er. No, it's not. I'm ok with suspending disbelief, but not logic and reason. Present me with fantasic things, but have them behave in logical and reasonable ways, and I'm on board. Have them behave in a "whatever is needed to resolve the day's plotline" and we'll have problems.


Matrix was written to have humans as a power source for a few reasons but there is one I want to highlight:
For its original draft and pitch, the idea was that the matrix and the humans plugged into it were essentially a massive computer processor for solving complex problems. But this was thrown out for being to difficult a concept to grok for an average movie goer.

Interesting story on that (and yeah, I'm sure there were a lot of revisions and re-writes involved). I have a friend who went to film school in the early 90s, graduated and worked on a number of projects in LA (blink and you'll miss his credits on various "worlds wildest/scariest ..." stuff, which I think he was doing for a while). Anywho. At one point (not sure if this was while he was in school, or sometime after) he read thorugh a draft someone had submitted for a screenplay. It included a guy slowly realizing that the world he was in was really virtual, and the entire plot revolved on him having to "wake up". After a series of varous conflicts and computer generated enemies trying to stop him, he eventually does figure out a way to do so. He then wakes up on a ship called the Nebuchadnezzar. It's a colony ship travelling through space and he's the engineer in charge of managing the sleep pods for the passengers. To keep them in deep sleep for the journey, the computer has to constantly subject them to a very real virtual environment. This includes him, which is why he had to go through extreme steps (and many levels of VR) to finally wake up for real.

My friend always speculated (or was told, not sure), that this story eventually became the core (or part of the core) story behind the Matrix. And when the second film came out, it looked like they were going to head in that very cerebral direction (the talk with the architect, and him being able to manipulate the machines in the "real world" all pointed to said "real world" just being another layer of VR to go through). Sadly, they just went with the survace level stuff, stuck with the "humans as batteries", and kept the whole "war with machines" thing. Too bad.


Er. Then I saw the ending of 1899... Maybe somebody used that old screenplay idea afterall.



First rule of "Laws of Magic", don't assume any exposition given by a character is infallible. They can be wrong, lying, giving the short version, etc.

Sure. But they should still be consistent and make sense. Even if a character is wrong or lying or whatever, the newly revealed "truth" should function in a manner consistent with all previous things in a story.

[Talakeal]

I'm curious what people would think about this idea, and how it fits into the "science" argument.

Assume that the world is effectively a computer simulation. As such, it behaves according to certain rules, and does so in a discoverable, predictable way (in the same way our physics works).

However, assume also that the programmer of the system can basically "breakpoint" the simulation, and make changes in real time. These changes would be whatever said programmer wanted, and wouldn't be bound by the rules of the system, though the results likely would.

So, like, the laws of thermodynamics (as an example) would hold unless there was programmer interference. A programmer could just make fire somewhere (without worrying about the laws of thermodynamics). However, the simulation and the fire, from that point, would still be bound by the laws.

That was almost exactly the analogy I used for my campaign setting. IIRC Phoenix didn’t buy it, cant remember why.

[kyoryu]

That was almost exactly the analogy I used for my campaign setting. IIRC Phoenix didn’t buy it, cant remember why.

Well, it's basically the meaning of "super-natural", as in outside the natural order.

If you really want everything to be governed by the natural order, then that's not gonna work.

The real impact of that depends on how often super-natural things occur. If it's all the time then any kind of scientific method falls apart. If it's "occasionally, and when it does, it's obvious" then it's a lot easier to work with and incorporate some kind of scientific method.

[KorvinStarmast]

Well, it's basically the meaning of "super-natural", as in outside the natural order.

If you really want everything to be governed by the natural order, then that's not gonna work.

The real impact of that depends on how often super-natural things occur. If it's all the time then any kind of scientific method falls apart. If it's "occasionally, and when it does, it's obvious" then it's a lot easier to work with and incorporate some kind of scientific method.Meteors don't always hit the earth, but sometimes they do. :smallsmile:

[Jay R]

Saying that gravitation is universal except when someone fills a balloon with a lower density gas than the surrounding air and generates lift, or when a wing is shaped such that it produces pressure differential above/below and generates lift, or when a rocket is ignited producing lift, or.... oh wait! That's exactly how we overcome a universal thing like gravity.

No, it isn't. Gravity is universal; the earth's gravity pulls on the contents of the hot air balloon or the rocket exactly as much as it did before. In the case of the hot air balloon, since it is lighter than air, the earth pulls down on the surrounding air more, so the balloon goes up. In the case of the rocket, the engine has to push enough to outdo the universal pull of gravity.


How is a levitation or fly spell any different?

They do not provide the thrust of a rocket engine or a big bag of stuff that's lighter than air, or course. They affect a heavy body like an ogre exactly the same way they affect a lighter body like a gnome. A rocket engine or hot air balloon could lift a gnome-sized load quicker than an ogre-sized load, which a levitation or fly spell can't.


How is that different than an advanced technology producing anti-gravity fields and flying that way? Or bending space and allowing FTL flight?

It isn't different from saying that science laws in a fictional world don't work the way they do in our world. That was my point -- science laws in D&D don't work like the real world.


Any/all of those are perfectly acceptable in a sci-fi or fantasy world.

I'm not sure what position of mine you think you are arguing against. I never claimed that these spells are unacceptable in a fantasy world. I said that they violate the laws of our universe. That's part of what a fantasy world is for.

And I haven't said that others should agree with me. As I said in that post (and you chose not to quote): "I'm not trying to convince you to think this way; I'm trying to show you a reasonable way to think that may not be your own."


The point is that if one uses the existence of these things to declare that all other "rules" must just not apply either is the fallacy that many of us are talking about.

Fortunately for me, I never said that. I have said, more than once, that things generally work as they do here. But it is impossible for me to D&D magic with the notion of "modern physics with exceptions".


"magic" can just be some other means to accomplish things in an otherwise "normal" physical world than we use (or work) in our own. This doesn't mean that you can't have other things in the world also work competely differently, but it would be absurd to assume that just because a levitation spell exist in the world that water no longer flows downhill, and objects can no longer be expected to fall back down to the ground when hurled into the air, or any of a number of other "normal" things that gravity does.

Yes, of course. That's what I said in an earlier post:


I don't care how the science works, but like everybody else, including those arguing against it, I assume most simple ordinary things work like they do here. [I also assume that most PCs have no idea how they work. Adventurers aren't modern scientists.]

I assume that rivers flow downhill, and rain falls from the sky.

I assume that standing on the earth doesn't feel like motion. It doesn't matter if it's the unmoving center of the universe, or orbiting a sun, or part of a solar system in a rotating galaxy. But the PCs should walk, run, and otherwise move like we do here.

<snip>

I expect an object in motion to remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. I don't care if the force is mass times acceleration. My PC isn't measuring force when he aims an arrow at an ogre; he just wants it to keep going until it hits the ogre.

You seem to be working hard trying to get me to agree with myself.


Spells produce specific, well documented and measured effects. How they do that is up to whatever, but the argument against "but dragons!" is that just because there is magic in the world doesn't mean that you toss out everything else as well.

Agreed. I've said that several times. But I do have to toss out the universal laws that cause those effects here, since those universal laws don't allow for the kinds of exception that D&D magic causes.


So just because there is a lightning spell in the game, does that mean that if I stand out in a lightning storm holding a long metal rod above my head, I should be perfectly safe? Cause... dragons? Or do we assume that lightning in nature in our fantasy world works just like lightning in the real world, except when it's being generated and controlled by a magic spell?

I assume that it acts generally (not necessarily exactly) like it does on earth. I don't assume that the mechanism is the same, because that mechanism can't be reconciled with the spell. If it worked like on earth except when a spell is cast, then what happens when a spell is cast? Do the electrons stopped being attracted to a more positive charge? Or does a positive charge appear on the target? Either one violates some law of modern physics.

It's easier for me to believe that lightning always goes where it's aimed and that the gods generally aim at mountains, trees, and tall buildings, or that nobody knows why it goes where it does.

But if you want to believe that a lightning spell cancels conservation of charge, and that somehow that doesn't violate the laws of physics, feel free. Just don't tell me I have to agree with you -- just as I keep saying that you don't have to agree with me.


I think the latter makes a lot more sense, and frankly requires a heck of a lot less world building and rule creating.

This is simply false to fact. Zero equals zero. Saying "physical laws are different from those on earth" and then playing by the rules, requires no world building or rules creating at all. Saying "physical laws are the same as those on earth except when magic is cast" and then playing by the rules, requires no world building or rules creating at all.


Now, if you want to go through every "natural" action/reaction in the universe, think about how magic changes how it must work, and then work out the new "natural" function of lightning, and water flow, and gravity, and everything else, then more power to you.

No thanks. Unnecessary and unhelpful. If you want to work out how it is possible for a lightning spell to change the very nature of electrical particles for six seconds without violating conservation of charge, and how cold spells turn "lack of heat" into a positive force, and how all other spells actually can function in a world with natural laws that say they don't, more power to you.

But you don't have to do that any more than I have to do the equally farcical task you set for me.


I think most of us are perfectly fine with assuming our fantasy worlds work pretty much how our real world works, except where specifically outlined in the game rules.

This is in response to a post that ended, "I'm not suggesting that you should have to think like this. There's nothing wrong with that. Just please understand that other people do think like this. And there's nothing wrong with that. either."

So if we have any disagreement, it's right there. I think it's all right for you to think your way and for me to think my way. You are arguing against me thinking my way.

[TaiLiu]

I thought about this after I posted. We do indeed have instances labeled with law and decades later discover a greater depth of truth and clarification.
Right. :smallsmile:

[Witty Username]

Presumably it's more messing with data :smallbiggrin:

Like, as a super trivial example, consider Conway's Game of Life. Totally deterministic. Assume that between the frames, the programmer/runner of the app can set whatever they want, but then what they put in the sim will from there on act according to the rules of the sim.

Well, assuming we were recording data and calculating values periodically, we would detect the change from then and now, see the Animatrix short where a group of kids find a glitch with hit detection in a abandoned warehouse that allows them and objects to float above the ground, then the Agents come in and fix it. Those aware of the before and after would be aware that something changed. So far the universe has appeared to have internal consistency, what was true before, is true now, what is true here is true there and so on. When there differences there is a variable previously unaccounted for.

[Bohandas]

Regarding cold as a positive force, I think I can field that one without even having to invoke magic in the explanation.

It's my understanding that heat (as well as sound), can be modeled as a quasiparticle called a phonon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonon) (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le_ORQZzkmE). Hypothetically if something were bombarded with anti-phonons it would cancel out the heat. Potential problems include that the energy of annihilation would likely turn back into heat pretty quickly. (Additionally, I'm not sure if the phonon is truly neutral (which means something different in physics) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truly_neutral_particle); if it is then I think the incoming phonons would uave to be really finely tuned)

[KorvinStarmast]

Last night I had to sub in to play for a bard, whose player was feeling ill.
The party had to kill off a couple of zombies that were the children of two parents (yes, we are in the fun filled land of Barovia) with whom the bard had interacted as they were being evicted from their home by the local version of a militia.

The party killed off the zombies and I (as bard) then went to console the two parents and their remaining child.
I got out the bard's fiddle (it's on the character sheet) and I began to sing "Willie McBride" {No Man's Land, Eric Bogle} with some words changed to fit the situation. It's a sort of lament/funeral dirge/ballad as a song.

Will they beat the drums slowly
Will they sound the fife lowly
Will the candle flames flicker
As they lower you down?
Or will they burn your corpse into ashes,
While the bard plays an ode to the su-u-unrise?
(I don't have a great voice, but I can carry a tune)
Does me reaching into modern music for a funeral dirge break immersion?
Not at our table, it didn't.
One of the other players follow up with a quip along the lines of "{Bard} plays Adagio in Z minor" ... and that didn't break immersion either.
We all had fun with it.

During play the question arose as to whether or not zombies can cry. When the encounters were over I opined that {Bard}'s next album would be called Tears of the Zombie. That got a few smiles/grins out of the party. Oh, no, album implies record! There's an anachronism! :smalleek:
Fiddles? Not sure if that is in D&D 5e's equipment list. Whoa, is that a yellow card?
Did I "break immersion" by playing an anachronistic musical instrument?
Did our DM violate some sacred trust by allowing that instrument on the bard's character sheet?

We had fun. Getting wrapped around the axel about "oh no, we broke immersion because you said that word/made that real world reference! Two minute minor, into the penalty box with you!" isn't something our table does.
I suspect that "why we play" informs this - we play to have a good time and enjoy each other's company.
FWIW: in my experience it is a lot harder to stay immersed in a scene with on-line play than it is in person.

[gbaji]

No, it isn't. Gravity is universal; the earth's gravity pulls on the contents of the hot air balloon or the rocket exactly as much as it did before. In the case of the hot air balloon, since it is lighter than air, the earth pulls down on the surrounding air more, so the balloon goes up. In the case of the rocket, the engine has to push enough to outdo the universal pull of gravity.

Yes. That was my point. I'm using Socratic method here (ok. kinda).



They do not provide the thrust of a rocket engine or a big bag of stuff that's lighter than air, or course. They affect a heavy body like an ogre exactly the same way they affect a lighter body like a gnome. A rocket engine or hot air balloon could lift a gnome-sized load quicker than an ogre-sized load, which a levitation or fly spell can't.

Not the point. Does gravity cease to affect the person/object being flown or levitated? Or is the fly or levitation spell simplly counteracting gravity in a very specific way for a specific target for a specific period of time? Gravity still works exactly the same in a universe in which fly and levitation spells exist as one in which they do not. Or it should.

That was my point. Some people will insist that the very existece of such spells means that gravity is no longer "universal" or something. That's what you appeared to be arguing. Now maybe that was a miscommunication that went on. But the fact is that gravity is just as "universal" and just as much a "constant" in both worlds. You seemed to be arguing otherwise.



It isn't different from saying that science laws in a fictional world don't work the way they do in our world. That was my point -- science laws in D&D don't work like the real world.

They *can*, but they are not required to. Again. Does gravity work differently in D&D than her on earth? No. It doesn't. It works exactly the same. Objects travel towards other high mass objects at exactly the same acceleration rate as they do in our world, unless some other force acts on them to move them in some other way (within the limits of "falling rules" which in most games are pretty questionable abstractions anyway). The fly and levitation spells don't work like rocket propulsion, or lighter than air objects do, but that does not mean that gravity itself works differently. You still fall if you step off a cliff and still take damage when you hit the bottom, right?

And that's a difference that is absolutely key to the examination of "but dragons!" arguments.



I'm not sure what position of mine you think you are arguing against. I never claimed that these spells are unacceptable in a fantasy world. I said that they violate the laws of our universe. That's part of what a fantasy world is for.

I'm arguing against your apparent argument that the existence of fly and levitation spells in a universe must mean that gravity itself works differently or is no longer "universal". My counter is that gravity is unchanged, but that the spells work differently when countering gravity than the methods we use here on earth do.


Fortunately for me, I never said that. I have said, more than once, that things generally work as they do here. But it is impossible for me to D&D magic with the notion of "modern physics with exceptions".

Again though, modern physics doesn't change (or does not have to). D&D magic does not have to invalidate modern physics. It only introduces some additional means to create outcomes that we can't do in our own world. We can't generate high levels of heat and flame by merely waggling our fingers and chanting a few words (and maybe tossing a pinch of sulphur in the air). But, once generated, we should assume that the fire in a fireball is still fire, acting in the same way as fire does in our world (well, except for the whole "generated from nothing and disappears a second later" bit). The game rules for damage done is about simulating the effects of extreme heat applied to a target. So maybe we need a flamethrower to do something similar, but the fireball spell's existence should not make us think that a cookfire now operates differently in our game world, right?



Agreed. I've said that several times. But I do have to toss out the universal laws that cause those effects here, since those universal laws don't allow for the kinds of exception that D&D magic causes.

I think you are tossing around terms like "universal laws" a bit too broadly though. And no, you don't have to "toss them out". That's the position I disagree with. There are water elementals in D&D right? Does that mean that water no longer otherwise functions the same for anything that isn't a water elemental? It's the same water. It works the same way. Animals and plants drink it. It rains from the sky, and flows down rivers and streams. It sometimes forms into lakes and oceans. Why assume that everything else about water must change because you've introduced a handful of things that manipulate water in ways that don't seem to work here on Earth?

And if you're not saying that, then why do you keep going back to "universal rules" and such? Because when you say "universal rules" that means you're saying that gravity now longer pulls masses together, and water isn't wet, and air isn't ligher than earth or water, or metal doesn't melt at high temperature, and hold its shape when cooled (well, for various temperature ranges and metals of course). There's a whole lot of "universal" in the phrase "universal rules".

Maybe be less broad in your statement about what must be tossed out?



I assume that it acts generally (not necessarily exactly) like it does on earth. I don't assume that the mechanism is the same, because that mechanism can't be reconciled with the spell. If it worked like on earth except when a spell is cast, then what happens when a spell is cast? Do the electrons stopped being attracted to a more positive charge? Or does a positive charge appear on the target? Either one violates some law of modern physics.

It's easier for me to believe that lightning always goes where it's aimed and that the gods generally aim at mountains, trees, and tall buildings, or that nobody knows why it goes where it does.

But if you want to believe that a lightning spell cancels conservation of charge, and that somehow that doesn't violate the laws of physics, feel free. Just don't tell me I have to agree with you -- just as I keep saying that you don't have to agree with me.

Huh? Or a lightning spell simply generates and directs the charge. Exactly the same way we do in CRT monitors (for those of us who remember such things. It's not impossible at all to direct a stream of electrons. We just can't do it by "casting a spell". The underlying rules of how electricity flows does not have to change for lightning spells to operate. We'd just need to build some big honking lightning generator and then carefully create poles for that lightning to travel between to generate the effect. It's the "how it's done" that changes, not what is being done.

No need at all to "toss out" the rules of how electricity works. But that's the point I'm trying to make here. You *can* toss out those rules if you want, but don't have to. Unfortunately, some people assume that if one thing isn't in exact alighment with how things work in our world, then everything has to be "tossed out".

Again. Maybe I misunderstood you, but that seems to be what you are saying.


Saying "physical laws are different from those on earth" and then playing by the rules, requires no world building or rules creating at all.

...

No thanks. Unnecessary and unhelpful. If you want to work out how it is possible for a lightning spell to change the very nature of electrical particles for six seconds without violating conservation of charge, and how cold spells turn "lack of heat" into a positive force, and how all other spells actually can function in a world with natural laws that say they don't, more power to you.

Except if you are re-writing the physical laws to do this, then you kinda have to actually re-write those. Or, you do what most people do, and don't worry about how a lightning spell manages to manipulate strong charges like that, and move on. What we shouldn't do is throw our hands up, and decide that since we can't explain in Earth terms how a lightning spell can do what it does with the materials it uses, that no other "rules" should be assumed at all.

And my argument is that if you adopt that thinking, then the entire thing will devolve into chaos *unless* you spend the amount of time/effort writing your own "rules" (which we both seem to agree is a waste of time and effort).

So my position is "don't do that". Makes sense to me. But the "but dragons" argument proceeds from the assumption that we should, and that any "rule" can just be ignored when convenient just because "dragons". Get it?


So if we have any disagreement, it's right there. I think it's all right for you to think your way and for me to think my way. You are arguing against me thinking my way.

No. I'm saying you are free to think that way and run your game that way if you want. I am saying that the kind of thinking you are engaged in is one of the sources of the "but dragons" fallacy though. In the absence of writing a complete set of "new rules" for your world, but "tossing out" the ones in our world, you leave yourself open to "anything can happen and be allowed". Which is exactly the "but dragons" condition that many posters were talking about.

[KorvinStarmast]

Yes. That was my point. I'm using Socratic method here (ok. kinda). Well, it is going down about as well as a cup of hemlock, kinda. :smallcool:

D&D magic does not have to invalidate modern physics. It only introduces some additional means to create outcomes that we can't do in our own world. We can't generate high levels of heat and flame by merely waggling our fingers and chanting a few words (and maybe tossing a pinch of sulphur in the air).
Dude, bat guano!!!!!

But, once generated, we should assume that the fire in a fireball is still fire, acting in the same way as fire does in our world (well, except for the whole "generated from nothing and disappears a second later" bit). Mostly agree.

Huh? Or a lightning spell simply generates and directs the charge. Exactly the same way
Emperor Palpatine did, right? :smalltongue: Or was that not really lightnnig, but force damage (whatever the frappe that is) coming out of his fingers?

[Vinyadan]

Ok, this is probably a weird thing to argue, but bat guano always struck me as a very strange concept. On one hand, the terminology feels too modern and tecnical for a witch. On the other, bats aren't birds and I would expect (without proof) that their digestive tract doesn't have much to do with a bird's, so the droppings would be qualitatively different enough from guano to deserve a different name.

[Delicious Taffy]

On the other, bats aren't birds and I would expect (without proof) that their digestive tract doesn't have much to do with a bird's, so the droppings would be qualitatively different enough from guano to deserve a different name.

Yeah, but the people responsible for naming things are often lazy. For example, a "sea lion" doesn't look much like a lion, and a "seahorse" doesn't act much like a horse. People just fixate on one characteristic of something that's similar to another and shove them both in the same box. Bats fly, birds fly, guano for everyone.

[Satinavian]

Ok, this is probably a weird thing to argue, but bat guano always struck me as a very strange concept. On one hand, the terminology feels too modern and tecnical for a witch. On the other, bats aren't birds and I would expect (without proof) that their digestive tract doesn't have much to do with a bird's, so the droppings would be qualitatively different enough from guano to deserve a different name.Consistence of animal droppings generally has more to do with their diet than with the species. (But yes, the latter has some influence as well)

Also guano seems to be a really old word going back to precolumbian languages. Only its industrial use is a bit of a modern phenomenon.

But associations are an individual thing. If it feels to modern to you, well, then it does so. That it is used as a composite for fireball is certainly a joke feeling to modern considering that is a reference of its real world use to make explosives.

[Arkhios]

A certain F-word in swear use comes to mind, in related to several anachronistic contexts. Not to mention it's quite (c)rude word to begin with.

[Batcathat]

A certain F-word in swear use comes to mind, in related to several anachronistic contexts. Not to mention it's quite (c)rude word to begin with.

Swear words are a quite interesting category in relation to immersion, since I feel like they can be problematic in two different ways. On one hand, a fantasy character starting to sound like Samuel L. Jackson might feel out of place, but on the other hand I feel like using made up or pseudo-medieval swears often sounds incredibly forced. I do think there's a middle ground between the two, where I'm not bothered for either reason, but what fits in it is obviously very subjective.

[Morgaln]

Consistence of animal droppings generally has more to do with their diet than with the species. (But yes, the latter has some influence as well)

Also guano seems to be a really old word going back to precolumbian languages. Only its industrial use is a bit of a modern phenomenon.

But associations are an individual thing. If it feels to modern to you, well, then it does so. That it is used as a composite for fireball is certainly a joke feeling to modern considering that is a reference of its real world use to make explosives.

Bird droppings are quite different to mammal droppings, since mammals excrete urea while birds excrete ureic acid. That's the white stuff in bird droppings and the reason why pigeons are so problematic for buildings. As it's an acid, it eats into the facades of buildings and other landmarks.
However, the stuff that turns guano into guano is guanin, which is also excreted by birds, but not by mammals. Except for bats, who do excrete guanin (probably because it uses less water than creating urea). Thus, using the term bat guano is actually correct, since guano formed from bat droppings is a thing.

Edit:fixed spelling

[Asmotherion]

Anachronistic references occure all the time in Medieval Fantasy. That is partially tolerated because it's fantasy and thus not a recounting of real events. After all, an expression like "Fire an arrow" could have been organically introduced after "Fire a spell", or something similar. Or a cultural referance can be made about some slightly re-imagined version of what it references. Those could both enrich worldbuilding and make for fun moments during gameplay.

A second point is that the very language you use is not only anachronistic, but also supposed to translate the language the characters are speaking. So, when someone uses anachronistic referances, I imagine their character made an appropriate referance in their tongue. This way, the point is made, but without breaking immersion.

Overall, the best way to play D&D is the one that is more fun for everyone. For example, do meta jokes break immersion? Sure. Should they be outright banned? Not nessesarily, as long as everyone is on the same page.

[KorvinStarmast]

A certain F-word in swear use comes to mind, in related to several anachronistic contexts. Not to mention it's quite (c)rude word to begin with. The Witcher uses it (a lot) in Season 1, so it's OK. :smallbiggrin:

[kyoryu]

The Witcher uses it (a lot) in Season 1, so it's OK. :smallbiggrin:

That and "hrmmmm" comprise about 80% of Geralt's dialog.

[Easy e]

Overall, the best way to play D&D is the one that is more fun for everyone. For example, do meta jokes break immersion? Sure. Should they be outright banned? Not nessesarily, as long as everyone is on the same page.

You can take my meta breaking jokes from my cold, dead hands!

[PhoenixPhyre]

That and "hrmmmm" comprise about 80% of Geralt's dialog.

*nods*/*punches fist into palm* in FFXIV WoL. :smalltongue:

[Xuc Xac]

A certain F-word in swear use comes to mind, in related to several anachronistic contexts. Not to mention it's quite (c)rude word to begin with.

The English F-word predates two-handed swords and full plate armor. In order for it to be "anachronistic", you have to go so far back that all of Modern English would be anachronistic. That's not "modern English" as in "21st century English", but "Modern English" as in Shakespeare.

If "you stab a knife into a knight's knee", it's not out of place for him to use the F-word in response.
If, on the other hand, "ye staben a knyf into a knightes kne" (and pronounce all the letters, including those Ks), it's still appropriate for him to use the F-word.
You have to go all the way back to "ðu sticiaþ cnif into riddan* cneow" before another exclamation is more appropriate.

*At this time, a knight was "ridda" and the word that later became the word "knight" was "cniht" and referred to a knight's servant (what would later be called a squire).

[TexAvery]

The English F-word predates two-handed swords and full plate armor.

You, sir, are my sort of nerd. :smallcool:

[Boci]

The English F-word predates two-handed swords and full plate armor. In order for it to be "anachronistic", you have to go so far back that all of Modern English would be anachronistic. That's not "modern English" as in "21st century English", but "Modern English" as in Shakespeare.

If "you stab a knife into a knight's knee", it's not out of place for him to use the F-word in response.
If, on the other hand, "ye staben a knyf into a knightes kne" (and pronounce all the letters, including those Ks), it's still appropriate for him to use the F-word.
You have to go all the way back to "ðu sticiaþ cnif into riddan* cneow" before another exclamation is more appropriate.

*At this time, a knight was "ridda" and the word that later became the word "knight" was "cniht" and referred to a knight's servant (what would later be called a squire).

The word existed sure, but it wasn't a common swear word. Shakesperian characters tended to say "God's Blood" unless I'm mistake. I believe Dead Wood had a similar problem, trying for a period appropriate swear, but that sounded too wierd to a modern audience so it was dropped in favour of the F word.

[Xuc Xac]

The word existed sure, but it wasn't a common swear word. Shakesperian characters tended to say "God's Blood" unless I'm mistake.

Yes. The F-word was just a verb until relatively recently. Medieval English swear words were based on blasphemy—mostly referring to God's various body parts. Outside of the Anglo-Saxons, their neighbors tended to use swear words based more on body parts, usually about how someone's body parts were particularly large, small, hairy, or hairless. (If a part of your body wasn't of average size and hairiness, you were going to hear about it!) In the early Modern period (Shakespeare's time), English swearing became more scatologicaly focused: they had a lot of suggestions about putting poo in places where poo shouldn't be. (Although Shakespeare manages to sneak in a lot of filthy sex jokes that modern audiences miss because the actors don't pronounce the words with the right emphasis to make the puns obvious.)

The hypothetical injured knight in my examples would probably exclaim something like "fī" or "wei-la-wei" in Middle English and "wā lā" or "ēow" in Old English.

"Ēow" sounds like such a normal exclamation of pain that English speakers in the present day wouldn't even think it was a word. That's just the noise you make when something suddenly hurts. Strangely enough, saying "ow!" or "ouch" isn't a universal human noise. It's a word: speakers of other languages say other things. (Mostly, variations on "Ay!" or "Och!", but my favorite is Vietnamese "đau!" which is the word for "pain" and sounds kind of like Homer Simpson when he gets hurt.)