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Venatius
2008-03-06, 03:23 AM
Most D&D games, and many games of other systems, are set in some sort of previous world. Maybe something as (relatively) recent as a Rennaissance type era, or more typically the middle ages. Possibly something a bit earlier, with a Roman Empire, Greek, Babylonian, even prehistoric feel is possible. But a lot of players in my experience, be it out of pure or impure motivation, want to be the ones to move history forward. I'm talking about players whose characters want to invent something.
This in of itself isn't all that horrid at first, not at all. If you're in some primitive-ish society, a character inventing the ballista might be the only way to turn the tide of a war that no combined party action could on its own affect. Unfortunately, the power of a good idea is also its greatest peril. Where does it stop? For instance, a character decides to be the inventor of gunpowder. For one thing, is it really fair to be able to use contemporary understanding and knowledge and retroactively apply it to the character? It's not clear-cut. Many characters in games are startlingly brilliant. In D&D, it's entirely possible to start the game right off the bat with a rough ballpark IQ of 180 (using the game FAQ rule of 10 IQ per Int). Such a character has a level of brilliance that would grant them incredible levels of insight, logic, etc. Then it's entirely possible to take relevant craft skills to back things up. As brilliant as many real-world scientists have been, to use D&D as the template again, it's hard to make the case for many real life people being more than maybe level 3 NPC classes. A 12th level Int 20 prodigy should theoretically be an intellect beyond most known to our history.

The problem is twofold. For one, how DO you really know what ideas such a character, however brilliant, really would or wouldn't come up with? Furthermore, how do you neccessarily rationalize such ideas? Obviously, technologies lead into each other. But the "trees" of technological advancements required can be nearly impossible to trace. The invention of firearms required knowledge of metallurgy, of certain woodworking techniques, ballistics, a little bit of physics, chemistry, etc. etc. etc. The character obviously can't go and invent the musket when no one has even found a reliable way to handle metalworking or gunpowder. I don't think anyone wants to have to accumulate enough info for a twenty page research paper just to settle this topic. Then, of course, what's to stop the player from declaring, "I can't invent the steam engine yet? Okay, so MY guy will figure out coking fuel then!"
Then of course, there's the storyline impact and possible power imbalance of such discoveries. The guy who invents gunpowder suddenly has a frightening material to weaponize, one he can dole out to anyone he pleases, and with no real objective way to determine how much he can produce without, again, going into undue levels of research. Particularly in a primitive and/or low magic setting, someone who can blow open walls, vault doors, dragons, etc. without so much as sacrificing a first level spell slot has gained a frightening asset. Yet they never really had to work for it. All it took was just declaring their character works on inventing it, and likely, just having to wait until you finally bit the bullet and told them they've had enough time to come up with it.

So, how DO you handle reconciling a character's discoveries with the complicated and probably not perfectly understood (by you or the other players, or perhaps by anyone but history professors and/or scientists) web of scientific advances and prerequisites? How DO you balance the story impact and power of an invention of tremendous potential that really requires no actual effort on the player's part? And how DO you deal with saying no to something that there is every reason they COULD come up with, but would simply be a grotesquely unfair advantage? And can that be done fairly without outright stifling creative(-ish) thinking on the player's part? I leave it to you. The problem has come up for me often enough that I badly need some answers, and personally, I have few or none.

I've seriously contemplated trying to come up with some kind of "system" for inventing new thingamajigs, but that would inevitably fail to cover some possibilities unless I just ruled, maybe a bit unreasonably, that ONLY things governed by the system can be invented. And also, the headache of that seems like a bit much.

Khanderas
2008-03-06, 03:45 AM
Our world does not have "magic" included in the natural physics.
The game world might not have normal chemical reactions, or what is normal to us. Charcoal + sulphur + salpeter = gunpowder to us, in the DnD world there might not BE salpeter anywhere. Or if there is, it just dont work that way, or is so rare it is hideouly expensive.
Gunpowder might simply not explode, just burn (like in the Zorro movies when they spread it on the ground to make a fuse).

Infact, when looking at steampunk settings, I assume that combustion is not possible (you may have gasoline, it may burn, but just plain dont work that way if you try to build gasoline powered car. Gasoline is for starting fires only here :) ).
They could make a train if they wish, but it would be hideously inefficient and not lead to higher tier tech (such as combustion engine), or not work at all.

Explosives. Dynamite is Nitroglycerin + stabilizer (sawdust or something like that, not important anyway). Nitro is not something you just "mix up". Before Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, Nitroglycerin was used to blow mineshafts. Shake it and you die. Burn it and you die. Not something I would bring to a dungeoncrawl (knocked prone or fireballed ? roll d20. lower then 5 and you do are a stain on the walls.


If the players complain it works in the real world, just tell them this isn't the real world. Harsh, perhaps, I'm just saying game physics don't have to work like Real World -metagame physics.



Edit nr <whatever>: As for inventing things, yes they can do that. But to invent something they gotta explain why they need something. Where would the character get the idea that packing a mix of powders that burns sparkly (and little else when out in the open), in a small pipe with a bullet in the end would propel said bullet with the force enough to pierce metal ? That is assuming that it WILL pierce metal in that world. If not it is just an arrow that costs 100-1000 times more to make (and has to be kept dry to function at all).

Just becuase it is gunpowder, dont assume it is kalchnikov grade results. Derringers were about as dangerous as a slingshot. And a slingshot takes much less time to reload (also see bows).

Roderick_BR
2008-03-06, 04:01 AM
Basically, a character can't make up new invents without support from the local available technology. For example, mixing up a dust that explodes when you apply fire, or a real hard impact is easy. Find out how to actually use it in a useful way is not. He'll be, at first, able to create cannons, like the ones used in ships, but to refine it into handguns would take decades to develop, and probably many more people to work on it.

You can just say that a character doesn't have enough support from the currently technology. For instance, where the character will even get the idea of passing steam through pipes to move wheels to begin with? What he'll do with a liquid that explodes when applied sparks? He can make up small inventions, but can't create the whole thing. It takes years of study, and a lot of people to think about several things, and how to apply it on day-to-day life, or even military use.

It's like trying to build computers, but you don't even have the technology needed to build the *tools* to *start* building the most *basic* components. No character can build up the whole thing alone.

Emperor Tippy
2008-03-06, 04:01 AM
The real problem comes with players who want to combine magic and tech in perfectly logical ways. Or apply magic to the world at large.

Take the Decanter of Endless Water and a Water Wheel. Thats unlimited energy.
Or a Windmill and some permanent gust's of wind.

Look at permanent teleportation circles. The players can corner the world shipping market in a week or so. And with that control comes lots and lots of power. As in the players can rule the world easily.


Depending on the actual starting tech level of the world and how much of real world physics are known/in play you can do some very nasty things.

"Why yes, that is a kinetic kill vehicle with an impact energy of 20 megatons."

But what happens if that kinetic impacter goes boom inside a closed forcecage? You have 20 megatons of energy contained inside a 10 cubic foot area with no way out.

Emperor Tippy
2008-03-06, 04:14 AM
Basically, a character can't make up new invents without support from the local available technology. For example, mixing up a dust that explodes when you apply fire, or a real hard impact is easy. Find out how to actually use it in a useful way is not. He'll be, at first, able to create cannons, like the ones used in ships, but to refine it into handguns would take decades to develop, and probably many more people to work on it.
Actually not really. If you can come up with an explosive compound the uses for it are fairly obvious. The problem is the trial and error involved. You don't get to make mistakes when messing with explosives.


You can just say that a character doesn't have enough support from the currently technology. For instance, where the character will even get the idea of passing steam through pipes to move wheels to begin with? What he'll do with a liquid that explodes when applied sparks? He can make up small inventions, but can't create the whole thing. It takes years of study, and a lot of people to think about several things, and how to apply it on day-to-day life, or even military use.
The steam engine was around pre fall of the roman empire. And as for where the character gets the idea, shear dumb luck. Its where most new ideas/fields come from. The party wizard is making tea 1 day and starts wondering why the top part pops up when the water is ready. He starts experimenting and realizes that steam in a confined area is powerful.

Eventually the wizard decides to make a steam engine. A Decanter of Endless Water, a permanent wall of fire, and 1 adamantium box later and you have a steam engine.


It's like trying to build computers, but you don't even have the technology needed to build the *tools* to *start* building the most *basic* components. No character can build up the whole thing alone.
You fail to take into account things like fabricate. So long as the character can come up with the idea of a computer and has the skills to make it then 1 spell later and he has the computer.

Funkyodor
2008-03-06, 04:17 AM
Or you could have the inventor repeat many modern day inventor mistakes and:
Fail to have repeatable experiments.
- Yay you invented a Ballista! Twang! Here comes shot number 2! Snap... What do you mean that was the only shot! Argh!

Unstable experiments.
- Yay you invented the steam engine, and it's going strong, steady outpour of steam, turning and all that jazz. (hooks it up to something expensive and important) Wait the steam output is getting slow... The table is shaking some... Boom! Bit's of metal all over the place.

Lack of monetary flow due to the above.
- Can't make an omlette with out breaking eggs. Unless they are impossible to scramble, then I guess they can't be beat!

Elbow Grease.
- Inventing takes alot of time, effort, and (as mentioned above) money.

Theft of ideas
- It sucks when you put alot into an invention and fail, only for some strange commoner to glance over and through random chance realize where you are screwing up. Whip up the invention by himself and take all the credit. Wow, I guess thats why they came up with patents and the Patent Office.

Lack of foresight
- Wow, what do you call that? The 'Paper Clip'? Sounds stupid! I'll take it off your hands for $5. No? How bout $10? (Hand shake, transfer of funds, and the grinning BBEG departs with his shiny revolutionary device).

Kol Korran
2008-03-06, 05:16 AM
I usually refrain from answering questions that try to correlate things/ objects/ science rules between the real world, and any game system. (because it can't- the game world is a game world, and is based on entirely other basic assumptions- mainly, that it should be fun and playable. while the real world doesn't give ahoot whether you like living or not. and we barely even begun to understand how it works anyway), but what you're describing is actually a game problem. so, i'll try to give yousome ideas of how to handle it-

first of all, lets deal with this basic assumption:

Most D&D games, and many games of other systems, are set in some sort of previous world. Maybe something as (relatively) recent as a Rennaissance type era, or more typically the middle ages. Possibly something a bit earlier, with a Roman Empire, Greek, Babylonian, even prehistoric feel is possible.

they aren't set at those eras, they draw inspiration from them. the difference may seem minute, but it is not. none of the historical eras ever had dragons or monsters, magic wether devine or orcane, other competing intelligent races, and so on. in most settings (even those "technologically advanced") the majority of "technology" is still directed towards magical implications (which tend to surpass the "mundane ones by far". teleportation? flight? fireballs? raise dead?). you can tell the character that s/he has grown up in this kind ofworld/ setting, and thus is geared up more towards magical inovations. (i'll get more into "changing disciplnies a bit later). thus- he may create new magic spells and such, but not mechanical thingies. but this may not satisfy you, so-


And how DO you deal with saying no to something that there is every reason they COULD come up with, but would simply be a grotesquely unfair advantage? And can that be done fairly without outright stifling creative(-ish) thinking on the player's part

there isn't every reason for him/hher to "come up with it. (but i'll explain that later). as to saying him/ her "no"... the DnD system is quite broken, and many DMs need to exclude/ alter certain material/ actions/ rules. this is done for game balance and keeping things fun for everyone. that is a perfectly good reason to say "no!". and as to the player claiming it is "creative thinking"... when a player decides to play a renegade dark elf who wields two scimitar do youcall that creative, or copycat? stealing from scientific history i just as he steals from literature. if the player claims "creativity", let him/her invent something NEW... otherwise, s/he is just trying to create an unjust advantage, on the guise of "creative insight".
As simple as it sounds- "just say NO" is my best advice.

but, if you're still worried about "scientific advances", here are a few things you should know about magical reearch through the ages (i'm a bit learned on the subject from my real life background):
- science and research DO NOT advance by some sort of a technological tree. real science and innovation are far more a matter of chance, persistence, observation and ispiration than they are looking at past achievements and saying "oh, we have mettalurgy, it's time to work on steam". science is NOT a civilization game! very, very, very few people were ever able to forsee what the future might hold (the astounding majority of them were artisticaly inclined by the way). it is nearly unanimously accepted in the scientific community that if you'd have taken the human race back to it's beginnings, and then have fast forwarded time. it is CERTAIN that you would have an entirely different technological state now. it is theorised that less than 4% of the technologies would be similar. (and just to make things clear- a car and any other combustion based self propelling automation would be considered identical for this comparison).
my point in this is- just that a certain technology exist, it doesn't mean you can now move to "the next in line" (argumentavly, there are millions "next in line", how do you choose?) so you can argue that to your character.

- science takes TIME. most advances took people years, most time decades to create. true, some of this took money gethering, and preparing the right laboratory and experiments (which a PC should have no problems of accomplishing), but nearly everything else took Time, to experiment over and over again. even today, when scientific breakthroughs are at the fastest rate they ever been, most smimpe advances takes a minimum of a year or two.
can your character take time for that?

- science most times also requires other sources of knowledge other than the self- colleagues, other written material, and so on. this isnot an a requistie as such, but most scientific advances were made possible by such "collection of information and ideas". one of the greatest leaps in terms of science (and humanity in large) was the invention of the Print (which is an intriguing story in itself). less than 0.2% of the worlds "scientists" lived before that. (and the birth of the computer marked the beginning of the realy exponential growth of knowledge).
does your character have the needed resources? the colleagues? they might be envious.

- disciplines: nearly all real world scientist dedicated themselves to a specific discipline (the more talented ones could dablle in another), and usually a particular field inside that discipline. Darwin couldn't do squat in engineering. Einstein knew nothing "construcive" of Biology. Leonardo dabbled in many things, but finished nearly none of his works! (and most of his inventions, contrary to poular belief, never would have worked.).
in order to gain that high knowledge in your discipline, it usually demanded expertise in many smaller fields. many breakthroughs were due to the extensive specialization, and accumulation of specific knowledge, by one (or a few) person/s.
the point in this- can the character says is specialized? it has dedicated her life to the adventuring life style. suddenly she is an inventor? you could check the desired invention, and then declare that "you need knowledge 10 in mechanics, knowledge 10 in ballistics, proffesion 12 in siege engineer, craft 8 in ...." and so on. this will either dissuade the player, or at least creae some "cost/ benefit mechanism".

- the "breakthrough barrier" (there is a far more accurate term, and explenation ofthis, but i've chosen the simplistic version): even if your theory is right, the experimental conditions at a peak, and still it didn't succeed. you see mto be doing everything jsut right (including things you've done before and worked!) and still you don't get the result. this oculd be to some minute detail you missed, or, more probably- something you are completly unaware of and have no way of explaining or measuring. NEARLY ALL of scientifically "assured data", still has some unexplainable phenomnons about them (even fire- we still don't know WHAT it is exactly, or why does it makes those patters... strangely enough, most of the most basic concepts in the scientific world are far from fully understood, explained, or defined- life, energy, order, chaos, rule, number, matter, and more...). in most new discoveries there are weird unexplainable phenomenons. later, someone explains part of it, but raiseseven mroe questions.
the point is, you could let you player try to build something new. but he will have to roll some roll to make it actually work, and it still might have bugs later.

enough ranting about science i nthe real world. if that didn't help you, a few short advicesfor your game:
- again, "just say no". the player is not "creative", s/he is just abusing the rules to change the ballance of the game. s/he wants to be creative- let him find a way to achieve his/her goal within the confines of the rules and the world as it is.
- alternetavly. declare that the basic knowledge. proffesion and craft skills represent skills in the normal state of the world (theoretical approved knowledge, ability to craft every known world object of that field, and so on). the "inventing spark"- the ability to go beyond normal understanding demands more- double (or triple) the skill points. (i.e.- knowledge 12 in war machines allows you to understand all the influences mechanisms of the lizardman's rock thrower, and the common crossbow. knowledge 12 (inventor- costing double or triple the points) in siege engines might give you the insight to combine them to create the ballista)
- demand the players invest the time and other hindrances that take to (perhaps), make a breakthrough, as i detailed above.
- if you do allow inventions, is till suggest you make some sort of test/ roll to see if it worked, and if it has bugs. the roll can be lowered/ bugs reduced if the invention is less ambitious/world power changing.

still, if it realy throws your game of bend- just say no

holywhippet
2008-03-06, 05:16 AM
In the fictional world used in the book Magician by Raymond E. Feist, he has a simple way of dealing with gunpowder - it just doesn't work. You can mix up charcoal, saltpeter and sulfur to your hearts content, it just will never go boom (technically only gunpowder ignited in a confined area explodes) when you try to burn it. The Gods have decided not to allow it and they have the first, last and only word in the matter.

As for technology not advancing - basically it's the path of least resistance. If you can do something difficult with magic, then you do it with magic. Since magic can do it, nobody feels the need to invent some other way of doing it.

Back to gunpowder though, Feist writes his books in the world that was invented by his old RPG group when they played in University. Occasionally other creatures find their way onto this world via rifts. One such group was a platoon of Scottish musketmen. During the players adventure, they got their hands on the musketmen's weapons and were annihiliating all that stood in their path with such powerful weapons. The muskets were only working because the nearby rift was allowing reality from their home dimension to leak in and let them work. Unfortunately for the players, when they moved too far away from the rift they found themselves surrounded by enemies and the muskets stopped working.

As for the problem of players trying to invent things. I'd require them to have lots of ranks in knowledge: engineering (and possibly alchemy). I'd also require them to make a roll on a d100 with a very slim chance of success - this would simulate the odds of actually coming up with a new idea. As well as that, perhaps a intelligence check would be a good idea. Finally, I'd require them to have a prerequisite need for the invention like working in a field that would benefit from the invention for quite some time.

Or, you could just tell the player no, they can't do it.

Titanium Dragon
2008-03-06, 05:23 AM
I think one thing worth noting about the whole "IQ" thing is that, really, they AREN'T all that smart. An IQ of 180 may SOUND very high, but is it really?

The answer is "not really, relatively speaking". IQ is a metric used to compare to the average, but the average intelligence of people has risen sharply since midieval times; in the 20th century, the Flynn effect has caused IQs in first world countries to increase by approximately 3 points per decade.

To put it into perspective, the average IQ of people in sub-saharan Africa, according to some studies, is like 50-60. In the US, you'd probably be mentally retarded with an IQ that low; there, it is average. Why? Because an education and good nourishment make you smarter. This may seem bizzare, but it has been bourne out by numerous studies; I'd say taking that average IQ and applying it to midieval Europe would not at all be unfair, given they, too, were a largely uneducated and malnourished lot.

Someone with an IQ of 180 is really smart, but if you say 100 back then was 60 today, you're looking at someone with an IQ more like 140 today. Even someone with 23 intelligence would have an IQ score today of only about 170, which is really high, but not beyond reason. I have an IQ in that range and trust me, while I'm smart I don't exactly advance the world's technology by a hundred years. Indeed, it seems I mostly spend my time typing stupid posts on forums. Hm... Anyway! >>

Your intelligence is relative to what is known, and no matter how smart you are you just can't really do things you have no ability to make useful predictions about. The Greeks, for instance, figured out that the earth was round, the distance to the moon (highly accurately), the distance from the Earth to the Sun (not accurately at all), and some of them even figured out that the Earth orbited the sun, not vice-versa (something which it took a very long time for people to accept).

Sure, Leonardo Da Vinci was a rediculous genius - he came up with designs for tanks, flying machines, and parachutes, but apart from the parachutes, a lot of his "futuristic" technologies simply weren't implementable. His aircraft, for instance, could fly, but it required materials far stronger and lighter than were available in midieval europe. And even being a rediculous genius, most of his ideas weren't implemented.

In the history of mankind there have been a few great engineers who have come up with things in advance of their time, but just a high intelligence doesn't really make up for it - it is more than sheer intelligence which leads to these things.

So, what does this all mean?

1) High intelligence should not be used as an excuse to advance technology hundreds of years; no one in the history of mankind has pushed the forefront of knowledge more than a decade or two ahead. A few Greek philosophers, Da Vinci, Galeleo, Newton, Einstein (well, really, a lot of early 20th century scientists), Bacon, and a handful of others have pushed the forefront of what was possible, but even they didn't push it all THAT far ahead.
2) High intelligence is not even as high as it seems to indicate; an IQ of 180 back then is not the equivalent of an IQ of 180 today.
3) Saying "real world people are not high level" is silly; in D&D, to have the ranks in knowledges I have, I'd have to have rediculous numbers of HP and the like - the average PhD has at least a +15 bonus to their primary skill check, for instance. Clearly, D&D does not model this aspect of reality well; Einstein, Da Vinci, and similar people would have been practically epic, if not actually so.

I think those are reasonable rules of thumb; basically, you're limited to the technology of the time plus twenty years if you're an absolute blindingly driven genius. If you aren't, then it is unlikely you'll even do that much; there are tons of smart people who don't push the forefront, and most likely, the smartest people who ever lived did not really accomplish much of note.

Chemistry was not at all understood back then; it took a very long time before the elements were discovered, and while achemy, a protoscience, did exist, it was quite primitive.

Fundamentally, if someone wants to be a dork and invent gunpowder, then make them figure out how to make the stuff from raw materials. If the player is too lazy, then the character clearly isn't driven enough to care. Of course, this somewhat breaks down if you have someone like me at your table, but hopefully people with a great knowledge of chemistry and an interest in the history thereof aren't going to try and get their character to invent things the DM probably doesn't know how they work or understand the full consequences of.

It would require a lot of effort on the part of the player to look up such things to your satisfaction, and you just say no to anything too rediculous.

It is also worth noting that guns and gunpowder weren't actually all that good - it has been noted that Longbows were probably far more effective weapons up until the 18th century, and possibly later than that; what really drove the adoption of the gun was its ease of use. Its a complete pain to train someone in the use of a longbow, but teaching someone how to use a gun is much easier, even if the gun is an inferior weapon. Heck, if you use the rules in the DMG for guns, they're terrible - why would someone bother inventing them? They suck, and that's probably fairly reaslistic for primitive firearms.

People have this mental image of gunpowder really changing the world, but ultimately, gunpowder really isn't all that special. The chinese invented it long before the europeans - centuries, even. And yet, somehow, the Chinese didn't take over the entire world the way the Europeans did, and even lost to invaders well after the invention of gunpowder.


You fail to take into account things like fabricate. So long as the character can come up with the idea of a computer and has the skills to make it then 1 spell later and he has the computer.

Beyond the fact that you lack the craft skill to make a computer, a computer would be a crafting check of about DC 1000. And that's probably being generous. You simply couldn't make a computer with a crafting check, because you lack the tools to make it. Even magic doesn't do things so fine. And, honestly, I don't think a human can even hold the image of a microelectronics board in their head; I know what one looks like and how it works, but assembling a trillion transistors would take an absurdly long period of time by hand, and even magic is not going to fix that.

As a rule of thumb, I'd apply the following:

1) Require them to take the "Inventor" feat. This allows them to use knowledge/crafting/profession skills to create new knowledge, as appropriate.
2) They need to do the research on this themselves and convince you, OOC, that it is possible using the tools of this time period to do whatever.
3) This takes 1 week of work for each 1 gp value of the final product.
4) Each week of progress costs 100 gp.
5) At the end of your work, you make a DC 50 check. If you succeed, you have invented what you are trying to invent. This check may be modified by magical items as normal, but if you want a temporary magical bonus to apply to the skill check, you need for that magical bonus to have applied for all of the time spent working on the invention. If you fail, all the gold and time you spent was wasted and you cannot try again until you gain another level. You may not take 10 on this check.

If you were feeling generous you could lower the DC to 40 (which is defined by the PHB as "nearly impossible") but I chose 50 as I consider it beyond that difficulty. Not to mention...

1) Skill bonuses are rediculous. You can get an item which gives you +10 to your skill modifier for 10,000 gp. This, already, puts it to 40.
2) Ability bonuses can be quite high. At level 10, its not unreasonable to expect a +7 ability modifier off a character trying to pull this. 33.
3) At 10th level, they've invested 13 ranks into that skill. Now its down to 20, which is rollable.
4) Skill focus brings it down to 17.

And that's ignoring all the other random stuff which can be stuck in in various ways; synergy bonuses, racial bonuses, and feats which give +2 rather than +3. If a character devoted themselves to doing this, it is not unreasonable for them to be able to succeed, but if you feel people are likely to abuse it, do something like this to make it more difficult while seemingly reasonable.

Basically, figure out at what point you want to make this reasonable; if you wanted a character devoted to it to be able to succeed at 10th level, you'd want something like DC 50. If you wanted it to be more epicish, you'd need to raise the DC by at least 10; I know swimming up a waterfall is DC 80. Feel free to say no if you consider it more difficult than that. Or you could just assign such arbitrarily high numbers.

After all, Leonardo Da Vinci didn't spend HIS bonus feats on Exotic Weapon Proficiency. :P

Roderick_BR
2008-03-06, 06:56 AM
You fail to take into account things like fabricate. So long as the character can come up with the idea of a computer and has the skills to make it then 1 spell later and he has the computer.
But doesn't the character need knowledge of what he's doing for fabricate to work at all? I don't think someone can just cast fabricate and make up a working computer with it's own power suply and everything.
A curious example? There was a Hawk & Dove story where they go to some other world. Getting there, they find out the natives use a "magical metal" that can be shapped by thoughts. They use it for adaptable weapons, armors, and vehicles. When Hawk gets a hold of some, first he makes a uzi by mentally detailing all the parts of a uzi, and then he starts making helicopters and short distance radios. He had the knowledge for it, but the natives, despite having said metal for mileniuns, never thought about using it for complex machines, let alone fire arms and flying machines. Even if they had the idea, they wouldn't know HOW to make it work. A metal bird that flaps metal wings? A crossbow that shots metal pieces at nearly the speed of sound? They don't have the know-how for it, despite having sages with lots of intelect(Int) and knowledge(Wis) gathered for ages (books, tools, and skills taught to others).
Similarly, one could use the Tech Levels from GURPS. The further the Tech Level between the character's knowledge, and the wanted device, the harder it is to operate or create. It was something like this: Medieval (pre-steam engines) was level 3, and post-steam engines was 4. Moderm computers are something like 6 or 7. You get a -4 or something on related skills, if the device doesn't already exists and is common knowledge. If your wizard want to create a steam engine, he just takes a -4. To make a car, he would take somewhere between -12 and -16. Only a high level character would came up with such concept, but the again, high level characters are almost gods.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but it would be harder to make a gas-powered engine than a steam-powered one for a medieval character, because he lacks tools (that need to be invented and created), and all the small details.

So, yeah, you can be awfully smart, use magic (or magic tools), and have enough knowledge, but without a basis for your hypothesis, you won't go far. Even if you do start, that start will mostly be used as a basis for others. Developing a whole new type of device can take a lifetime.
Another example: In Megaman Battle Network 5, there's a VR video thing that shows a group of scientists wraping up their findings, saying that all their breakthroughs would be better used by future generations with access to better technology. They just admited that they hit a cap that they wouldn't be able to bypass so easily, and probably would spend the rest of their researchs trying to improve on their tech, not working directly on their main projects. They knew they couldn't advance more, so they were preparing things for the new generations to come. That's an interesting view, even for a game where their scientists could create virtual reality places, and real artifical inteligence.

Good points on the rest, though I'd point that accidental research could be considered "acts of god".

FLAvatar
2008-03-06, 08:07 AM
I highly recommend the Guardians of the Flame series by Joel Rosenberg which - in addition to being a heck of a fun read - deals with exactly these kind of problems.

In short, a college gaming group gets transported into their campaign world by magic. One of these players is an engineer and another, by virtue of never being able to settle on a major, has a very eclectic breadth of knowledge on everything from animal husbandry and farming innovations to city planning. Real world physics worked just fine, and the engineer got to invent flush toilets and showers and concrete and steam engines and gunpowder while the dilletante accelerated the rest of the world through a few centuries of innovation.

The story managed to keep suspension of disbelief due to the most real constraint of all - time. It only took the engineer a year to find good enough sources of sulfur and saltpeter to make his first batch of gunpowder, but it was several years until he produced a workable gun. Other disciplines had to advance to make things possible, for instance he got lucky and found a few dwarves that were competent enough metallurgists to make a gun barrel that was strong enough not to explode. Development was also slowed, because they realized they had to keep their techniques secret. Their arch-enemies weren't happy at all about the good guys having guns, so our heroes faced raids, theft, extortion, blackmail, assassination, sabotage, and ... well I've spoiled the book enough, but hopefully you get the picture.

The world was about average on the prevalence-of-magic scale, which had to help too. If magic is everywhere, invention takes a back seat - no matter how good your lightbulb is, it ain't Continual Light.

Capt'n Ironbrow
2008-03-06, 08:31 AM
In WFRP ed 1 (wich I play), the "Academic Class" has several careers of renaissance/medieval scientists who can "invent" something, there's also the advanced career of the Scholar.
For inventing, we test on Intelligence and add a bonus for the Skill "engineering". Constructing features Dex and engineering again, but basically, it's actually only dedicated Engineers who decide to invent something entirely new. There are several more skills that can help your character build or create like: Carpentry, Smithing, Metalurgy, Mining (can be used in Architecture) and boatbuilding.

Basically our group allows inventions, especially from people who have a career as engineer. The current Dwarf Engineer of our group is quite a passionate inventor, but is so good to keep things practical and relevant. Most of his work is just improving on known designs and "pimping" chariots, warships and the like. His one original invention thus far is the "Zwinkel-Stick", which is a pole on which you can attach different tools and blades. The tools/blades are attached by a screw mechanism. This invention required the use of Smithing and Metallurgy for the proto-type. If I recall, he uses it as a 2-handed axe at the moment but can turn it into a mallet, pick axe, rake or spear in half a minute (screw loose, get new tool/blade, screw on). It does help that of the 3 guys in our group whose characters have the skill, one is a student industrial design and the other a constructionworker who has a passion for carpenting, so we usually keep things realistic and don't go to extreme Da Vinci-like genius.

Inventors in RPG's can be difficult though, especially when they want to make irrelevant things just for their (role-played) intellectual fulfillment. However, when will they get time to do that in their lives of quests and adventures?

In my opinion, as long as the invention is practical and relevant and the inventor has the abilities to draft a design and make a proto-type it's a nice (short) assignment for the character during the session. If characters lack any technical or craftsmanship skills, it would be difficult for them to come up with usefull inventions their players come up with. Involve a test for both the chance the characters can actually think of it... also, these inventions could be very unstable due to a lack of technical skill...:smallamused:

Cool! how delightfully relevant, go ahead inventions:
- Utility tools
- Relevant improvements on existing things (pimping a chariot before a race, a better mechanism for artillery like stone throwers in war)
- Some animal-inspired mechanism (jaws, claws and wings... requires skills related to anatomy too.)

Let me think about it inventions:
- Totally revolutionary devices unlike anything other in the "known world"
- Nice idea, but irrelevant to the situation (i.e. you don't need to do that right now and don't have the time to)

Burley
2008-03-06, 09:52 AM
I'm playing a character now who is all about inventing stuff (working up to Effigy Master). I'm in the midst of creating the first bicycle, or at least working on the designs. I know it isn't as revolutionary as steam power and all that, but it's the first.
However, after declaring that my character is doing so, it dawned on me that there are no paved roads, and I must therefore also invent shocks, and shifting gears.
If your player wants to invent something, force them to do it step by step. Taking two things that exist and putting them together is one thing, but creating something all on it's own is something else, entirely.
Also, many players think they're being really clever when they want to make things like gun powder or walkie-talkies (heard D&D planning of how much it'd cost and stuff), but they're really just wasting a lot of time trying to create something that can be done for half the cost by a wizard. (Grenades can be made with 6th level spell, and two devices that allow communication between each other if you're within 200 yards of each other, without wind and no thick walls between you...hell, walkie-talkies usually suck so bad, I'd sell them for the cost of a Feather Token...)
Inventing does take time. If your players have any sort of quest/adventure, they wouldn't have time to stop and study and work for months and years. If there is downtime, you have the right to cause the next great evil to arise a few months before they finish their work, forcing the player to either postpone his gamebreaking activity, or roll up a new character and forget about the old one anyways.

Blanks
2008-03-06, 09:58 AM
Its like drugs - Just say no ;)

The way i handle this is
1)
Tell the players that they are ruining the game. If they really want to play with guns, why are you playing a fantasy game in the middle ages?

2)
If someone persists, or tries to "spring it on you" like suddenly combining the elements of gunpowder, there is a simple solution as have been mentioned by others:
It just doesn't work.
Gunpowder won't burn, you can't summon antimatter, steam doesn't move stuff and so on.



I would also argue against "giving them a chance but making probablities small". It works wonder untill someone actually succeds that one in a million roll. Suddenly your players have gunpowder and they rightly feel they have earned it so you can't just take it away.

just my 2 cents.



EDIT:
just thought i would add:
My group usually also limit ourselves regarding "modern feel" magic effects. The idea that spawned this rule was:
Crossbow with a small cylinder and a continual light inside - perhaps even with a red prism at the end. Easy to make and very cheap, but it breaks the versimilitude.

Timmit
2008-03-06, 09:59 AM
Gunpowder might simply not explode, just burn (like in the Zorro movies when they spread it on the ground to make a fuse).
Gunpowder DOES behave like that in our world...

JBento
2008-03-06, 10:02 AM
Indeed. Only when in a tightly-enclosed space do you have, shall we say, a bang for your buck

Solo
2008-03-06, 10:20 AM
Its like drugs - Just say no ;)

The way i handle this is
1)
Tell the players that they are ruining the game. If they really want to play with guns, why are you playing a fantasy game in the middle ages?

2)
If someone persists, or tries to "spring it on you" like suddenly combining the elements of gunpowder, there is a simple solution as have been mentioned by others:
It just doesn't work.
Gunpowder won't burn, you can't summon antimatter, steam doesn't move stuff and so on.

Having steam not be able to move things creates many logical problems. Shall i list a few for you, or can you figure it out for yourself?

if you eliminate too many physicl laws things become rediculous.

"What's that you say? I can't use magical lighting to improve crop yields? Do plants not use photosynthesis? Hey, that means I can grow plants in the dark!"

"What you say? Cells don't exist? ATP doesn't function? That must mean people don't need to eath to get energy! Hey guys, don't waste your money buying rations, you'll be fine." (Note: supported by RAW. You don't die if you fail to eat for months, though you will go comatose eventually. But you never die)

"What you say? Steam doesn't move stuff? But that means that heat doesn't cause air to expand. Hey, that means wind shouldn't exist!"

Which would lead to

"Hey, there must be some device for making wind! We should set up wind mills around it and get free power!"

Burley
2008-03-06, 11:01 AM
Solo's Above Comment

I think you're implying that all D&D campaigns are set on Earth. It is a scientific fact that Physics are based on our planet's standards. Steam doesn't work the same way at different altitudes, either. Air Pressure has to be within certain parameters to make steam solid enough to move something, but gaseous enough to rise. It's perfectly within a DMs right to say, "Sorry, but gravity is just a little different here, as is the air pressure." Heck, there is not rule that says that D&D characters survive off of Oxygen. From what I've read, you have Air and you have Water. If you can make fireballs out of guano and sulfer, you can make breathable air out of the same, for all I care. :smalltongue:

Photosynthesis doesn't work off of light, it works of off radiation given by the Sun. Plants grow in sunlight, and the only spell I've ever seen that acts as sunlight is Daylight. If you want to constatly have bright sunlight on your crops, you'll just have to watch them whither from the heat. (If you want your plants to grow, use Plant Growth...)

Building a windmill with endless wind would be just as usefull as forgetting about the entire windmill, and having a set of Mage Hands pedal the bike from Gilligan's Island. The Windmill can turn corn into meal, but the Bike can power the radio!

Kyace
2008-03-06, 11:07 AM
Beyond the fact that you lack the craft skill to make a computer, a computer would be a crafting check of about DC 1000. And that's probably being generous. You simply couldn't make a computer with a crafting check, because you lack the tools to make it. Even magic doesn't do things so fine. And, honestly, I don't think a human can even hold the image of a microelectronics board in their head; I know what one looks like and how it works, but assembling a trillion transistors would take an absurdly long period of time by hand, and even magic is not going to fix that.

*sigh* (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3) Computer does not equal Integrated Circuit.

valadil
2008-03-06, 11:24 AM
I haven't dealt with this particular type of player too often in game. Usually inventor players will come up to me during other games and start babbling about what their gnome invented this week, once again reminding me why I don't game with that type of player.

Inventions are much easier to come up with in hindsight. Yes, we all know how a channeled explosion from gunpowder can launch projectiles. Yes we even know what gunpowder is made of. But do you really think your character will just happen upon it when there are so many other materials available to work with?

Magic shunts technology. When a spell like fireball is so readily available, who needs dynamite? The thing about technology is that it stems from other technology. You need gunpowder before guns. But if already available magic is so prevalent, gunpowder won't turn any heads. It's weaker than a fireball so who is going to bother investing time in it?

On a more philosophical note, technology beyond one's grasp often is referred to as magic. If somebody brought a small pistol into the Forgotten Realms, that pistol would be considered magic by the locals. It may as well be magic because it functions based on powers they do not comprehend. We accept that a mage casting fireball understands what goes into casting the spell, just as a marine understands how his flamethrow works. What this boils down to is that if a player really wants to invent something, let him do it in a way that mimics magic very closely. A pistol could be magic missile. A flamethrower is fireball. It doesn't alter the game that much in the grand scheme of things. An inventor could be played as a wizard with very different flavor. (Alternatively an actual wizard who believes he's an inventor and is always coming up for mechanical explanations for the spells he casts could be fun too.)

Roderick_BR
2008-03-06, 11:39 AM
The story managed to keep suspension of disbelief due to the most real constraint of all - time. It only took the engineer a year to find good enough sources of sulfur and saltpeter to make his first batch of gunpowder, but it was several years until he produced a workable gun. Other disciplines had to advance to make things possible, for instance he got lucky and found a few dwarves that were competent enough metallurgists to make a gun barrel that was strong enough not to explode.
I guess this explains better what I meant by a inventor not being able to create things by himself. The rest of the technology available for him needs to support creation of new things.
If you are in a prehistoric setting, you can't start building armors and swords if metalurgy itself was not created yet, for example.

vanyell
2008-03-06, 11:43 AM
usually when I deal with inventions etc. that may break my game world, I just substitute the desired energy, for magical energy.

example.

"you mix the sulfur, charcoal and salpeter in an enclosed area, compress it, and add a spark to it. suddenly nearby, lanterns are snuffed out all around you, and you feel a gust of wind. you open your chamber, and find the gunpowder gone"

mixes a lot of problems, though, you need to come up with some kind of table to get enough random magical actions. (rod of wonder works, I guess)

Yakk
2008-03-06, 12:01 PM
Mythic reality is a simple to involve D&D.

Why is there wind? Because spirits of the air cause it.

Why does the water flow? Because water spirits cause it. Rapids are where there is an angry water spirit.

Earthquakes -- earth spirits.

Why do plants need the sun? Because the sun-spirit (or sun-god) makes the plants grow. Your artificial light is light, but unless it has the power of the sun-god, the plants won't grow.

On the other hand, if you can get an Earth-god on your side, you can have an entire ecosystem growing in darkness.

At the level that D&D is played at, you don't need all of the laws of physics of today for the world to work. Neither do you have to follow the rules of the game exactly as written (ie, the instant-gnome-message-network).

Naive physics can work as it does in our world without having the same underlying deep physics and chemistry and biology that our world does.

Frosty
2008-03-06, 12:05 PM
So, what does this all mean?

3) Saying "real world people are not high level" is silly; in D&D, to have the ranks in knowledges I have, I'd have to have rediculous numbers of HP and the like - the average PhD has at least a +15 bonus to their primary skill check, for instance. Clearly, D&D does not model this aspect of reality well; Einstein, Da Vinci, and similar people would have been practically epic, if not actually so.

Einstein can have a +15 bonus to Physics by level 5. Possibly less if he started out Venerable.

8 ranks + 4 Int bonus + Skill Focus (Physics) = +15 to Physics.

Rutee
2008-03-06, 12:16 PM
The real problem comes with players who want to combine magic and tech in perfectly logical ways. Or apply magic to the world at large.

Take the Decanter of Endless Water and a Water Wheel. Thats unlimited energy.
Or a Windmill and some permanent gust's of wind.

I like how Arcanum: Of Magick and Steamworks Obscura handled that. Magic utterly suspends the laws of physics. Setting a magickal sword down next to a fulcrum and lever will cause the lever to behave in ways that it's not supposed to. Science and Magick just don't work together.

And no, I don't need to know the specifics on why a Magus is going to cause a train to explode if they ride it. It's sufficient for me as GM to know they /do/, so I can make up the reason /why/ myself in some way that's appropriate.

Azerian Kelimon
2008-03-06, 12:20 PM
Rutee, I sentence you to cause Epic Wins in threads you visit. Anyone who has played and enjoyed Arcanum is Epic Winsauce.

Though Disintegrate still wins anything, even supposedly immunes. Guess it's the Pun-Pun of Arcanum.

Tengu
2008-03-06, 12:44 PM
What about playing Arcanum and finding it a very mediocre game with a huge, but lost potential?

Azerian Kelimon
2008-03-06, 12:48 PM
What about the humour, the spectacular subversion of the Chosen One, being based on the goddanged Fallout, and having clocks acting as indicators of magic?

Oh, and the followers. Right up there with BGII's, methinks.

Tengu
2008-03-06, 12:55 PM
Very tedious and imbalanced gameplay, and a horrible gap between magic users and everyone else didn't allow me to experience what you just mentioned - maybe it changes much later in the game as the furthest I ever reached was late Tarant, but the NPCs I met so far were pretty generic and there wasn't a lot of humour.

This game is worse in every aspect (apart from the setting) than Fallout despite being released later and by mostly the same people.

Rutee
2008-03-06, 12:58 PM
I considered Technology to be more powerful, but Technologists to be weaker. The most optimal route in general is to have a balance between Magic and Tech, while loading out magick as much as possible. High Technology was fun, but unnecessary; Almost anything you could want made with Tech, you will find for free.

Storm Bringer
2008-03-06, 01:02 PM
possible methord of preventing it: get him bogged down in specifics.

for mixing gunpowder: "what are you mixing? Where did you get them form? In what quanties? where are you mixing it? How? when you've mixed it, what then? Where are you keeping it?...." etc. chances are they'll forget some element of the process. getting them to state how they got these chemicals (the nitrate in particular is hard to come by).

if they DO go though all the reshearch, give them the big, bulky weapon that needs a stand to be sighted properly, takes about 10 rounds to reload, and is relient on a powder that needs to be kept dry in field condictions, which (due to the hand made nature) has a very unpredictable power output, and has a barrel that is prone to explosive failure.

oh, and requires that you carry a lit match around your gunpowder covered self as well.:smallbiggrin:

Azerian Kelimon
2008-03-06, 01:05 PM
Except the automaton and electro armor, which were absolutely borkened, and WAY too good if you were lucky and took the trouble to get the skills.

I'll admit the combat system could have been loads better, but the rest I disagree with. Only Disintegrate was broken, and while magic users had that, I was picking targets with an always critical looking glass rifle, or devastating the big guys with a Tesla gun, all the while enjoying going first because of Charged rings.

And generic NPC's? Get the patch and go all the way with Virgil, pick Raven, and King Thunderstone. The game gets amazingly better with high CHA and persuasion.

That and, if you didn't find the stillwater giant fun, that's being pretty deadpan.

Rutee
2008-03-06, 01:08 PM
possible methord of preventing it: get him bogged down in specifics.

for mixing gunpowder: "what are you mixing? Where did you get them form? In what quanties? where are you mixing it? How? when you've mixed it, what then? Where are you keeping it?...." etc. chances are they'll forget some element of the process. getting them to state how they got these chemicals (the nitrate in particular is hard to come by).
THis is the correct answer to the OP's trouble. Or just the statement "Why in Gods name is your character doing this?"

Person_Man
2008-03-06, 01:09 PM
Have you considered Amber, Mage, or one of the other Epic-ish systems where you can basically be a demi-gods? That way they can invent anything they want, but it won't be useful to them as PCs, because they're already so powerful it wouldn't matter. But for society and/or their followers it would matter a great deal. But the world isn't static - the world spins and progresses on its own, and other demi-god like beings have followers as well. Enemies could develop their own technologies, or steal anything invented by the PCs. "Real" battles of consequence would only be those rare occasions when the PCs directly confronted the leaders of enemy factions. The rest of the time things could be fought by proxy, through sociological, technological, and strategic influence.

Having said that, D&D does a remarkably poor job of modeling large scale anything (combat, economics, technology, culture, etc). It does a very good job of modeling small scale combat broken up with roleplaying and puzzles, which has pretty much been the core of D&D since Chainmail. So if you want to play something involving "inventing" or something similar, D&D probably isn't the system for you.

Eran of Arcadia
2008-03-06, 01:14 PM
possible methord of preventing it: get him bogged down in specifics.

That seems fair. Unless the player can explain, step by step, how one goes about making gunpowder (and that includes obtaining the ingredients), then the character can't invent it.

(On a side note: you know the whole Connecticut Yankee plot device whereine someone goes back in time and ends up inventing a bunch of stuff? That always bugs me, because very few people know how to make anything elaborate with today's materials and processes, and even fewer can work it out based on the technoligy available in the past.)

Frosty
2008-03-06, 01:41 PM
Arcunum was kinda a fun game. Too bad I never finished it.

EDIT: If someone were to create an inventor character who can also adventure? What race would you go with? Dwarf for the bonus to anything metal-related? Human for extra feat for Skill focus? Gnomes for hilarity?

ashmanonar
2008-03-06, 02:43 PM
Mythic reality is a simple to involve D&D.

Why is there wind? Because spirits of the air cause it.

Why does the water flow? Because water spirits cause it. Rapids are where there is an angry water spirit.

Earthquakes -- earth spirits.

Why do plants need the sun? Because the sun-spirit (or sun-god) makes the plants grow. Your artificial light is light, but unless it has the power of the sun-god, the plants won't grow.

On the other hand, if you can get an Earth-god on your side, you can have an entire ecosystem growing in darkness.

At the level that D&D is played at, you don't need all of the laws of physics of today for the world to work. Neither do you have to follow the rules of the game exactly as written (ie, the instant-gnome-message-network).

Naive physics can work as it does in our world without having the same underlying deep physics and chemistry and biology that our world does.

Of course, when it comes to plants growing, Light may not even be involved. A nymph or Fae could just walk by, and the natural magic of their existence could overflow into making that flower bloom, without any light touching it at all.

ashmanonar
2008-03-06, 02:46 PM
That seems fair. Unless the player can explain, step by step, how one goes about making gunpowder (and that includes obtaining the ingredients), then the character can't invent it.

(On a side note: you know the whole Connecticut Yankee plot device whereine someone goes back in time and ends up inventing a bunch of stuff? That always bugs me, because very few people know how to make anything elaborate with today's materials and processes, and even fewer can work it out based on the technoligy available in the past.)

This is a really good point. Most people just don't have the know-how to make the most simple mechanical objects; if there isn't a Menard's or Wal-mart to buy it at, how is this person gonna just make modern items?

Blanks
2008-03-06, 02:48 PM
Having steam not be able to move things creates many logical problems. Shall i list a few for you, or can you figure it out for yourself?
Please do, i look forward to refuting them :smalltongue:


"What's that you say? I can't use magical lighting to improve crop yields? Do plants not use photosynthesis? Hey, that means I can grow plants in the dark!"
As Burley pointed out, firstly light isn't just light. Photosynthesis depends on the correct wavelength, which sunlight have.
But more importantly, the players don't know the laws of physics. When they grow plants outside it works. When they try to use magic light is fails. When they grow them in the dark it fails. Why? nobody knows! Maybe its the sunspirit that is missing, maybe the wavelength of the light is wrong or maybe Chantua (FR god of naturestuff) doesn't like your experiment.
All your character knows is that plants require sunlight :smallsmile:


"What you say? Cells don't exist? ATP doesn't function? That must mean people don't need to eath to get energy! Hey guys, don't waste your money buying rations, you'll be fine." (Note: supported by RAW. You don't die if you fail to eat for months, though you will go comatose eventually. But you never die)
No, what is said was, how does your character know about cells? Better give a good answer or the XP deduction your character is about to recieve will knock him all the way back to 1st ed. !!:smallfurious:
Oh yeah, and if you test the theory - there are no cells, and people who don't eat dies... Again, nobody knows why, thats just how it is.


"What you say? Steam doesn't move stuff? But that means that heat doesn't cause air to expand. Hey, that means wind shouldn't exist!"
And yet it does. Cool aint it :smallbiggrin:

Sorry for the sarcastic reply, but you started it :smalltongue:

Blanks
2008-03-06, 02:51 PM
Btw if I could, I would steal Yakks post.
We share views completely, and you mentioned everything i forgot or was to lazy to do in my first post.

Very good post :)

GoC
2008-03-06, 03:02 PM
Basically, a character can't make up new invents without support from the local available technology. For example, mixing up a dust that explodes when you apply fire, or a real hard impact is easy. Find out how to actually use it in a useful way is not. He'll be, at first, able to create cannons, like the ones used in ships, but to refine it into handguns would take decades to develop, and probably many more people to work on it.

You can just say that a character doesn't have enough support from the currently technology. For instance, where the character will even get the idea of passing steam through pipes to move wheels to begin with? What he'll do with a liquid that explodes when applied sparks? He can make up small inventions, but can't create the whole thing. It takes years of study, and a lot of people to think about several things, and how to apply it on day-to-day life, or even military use.
The problem is that the PC isn't really human anymore. He's got a +17 on knowledge based skill checks compared to the +8 of a physics professor. He's as much better than them at physics as they are better than an ordinary 16 year old! With mega-genius, totaly-out-of-this-world intellect (the 30 int wizard) thinking of using gunpowder in a weapon is child's play! As is laying the foundations of physics. This guy is Leonard da Vinci, Newton, Thomas Edison and Einstien all at once.


Or you could have the inventor repeat many modern day inventor mistakes and:
Fail to have repeatable experiments.
- Yay you invented a Ballista! Twang! Here comes shot number 2! Snap... What do you mean that was the only shot! Argh!

Unstable experiments.
- Yay you invented the steam engine, and it's going strong, steady outpour of steam, turning and all that jazz. (hooks it up to something expensive and important) Wait the steam output is getting slow... The table is shaking some... Boom! Bit's of metal all over the place.

Lack of monetary flow due to the above.
- Can't make an omlette with out breaking eggs. Unless they are impossible to scramble, then I guess they can't be beat!

Elbow Grease.
- Inventing takes alot of time, effort, and (as mentioned above) money.

Theft of ideas
- It sucks when you put alot into an invention and fail, only for some strange commoner to glance over and through random chance realize where you are screwing up. Whip up the invention by himself and take all the credit. Wow, I guess thats why they came up with patents and the Patent Office.

Lack of foresight
- Wow, what do you call that? The 'Paper Clip'? Sounds stupid! I'll take it off your hands for $5. No? How bout $10? (Hand shake, transfer of funds, and the grinning BBEG departs with his shiny revolutionary device).

1. An indestructable rope.
2. An adamantine box.
3. Money? Since when do Tippy-type wizards not have an infinite supply of such?
4. Uber Int and Knowledge(everything)+Elan and a demi-plane with a slower time frame! Problem solved.
5. Demiplane.
6. Again, why would a wizard (or artificer) need money?

Yakk
2008-03-06, 03:20 PM
Of course, when it comes to plants growing, Light may not even be involved. A nymph or Fae could just walk by, and the natural magic of their existence could overflow into making that flower bloom, without any light touching it at all.

*nod*

Don't approach D&D from "physics, with magic that breaks the rules" -- instead, it is about a world where magic is the rules. You can give someone the evil eye -- but if you aren't skilled, you suffer as much misfortune! Breaking the bonds of hospitality does curse you. Life comes from Divine power. Learn enough about the world, and your very thought can manipulate reality: but this drains you.

The laws of contagion clearly work: to create a fireball, you need a pinch of rocks that smell like lava, and the right words, right will and right gestures.

Remember: the world made sense to people before science existed. They where able to make it work. So you can create a world in which these mythic beliefs about the nature of the world is actually how the world works!

Person_Man
2008-03-06, 03:22 PM
(On a side note: you know the whole Connecticut Yankee plot device whereine someone goes back in time and ends up inventing a bunch of stuff? That always bugs me, because very few people know how to make anything elaborate with today's materials and processes, and even fewer can work it out based on the technoligy available in the past.)

In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the main character runs a large firearms manufacturing company for a living before being transported back in time. So in the context of the story, it makes perfect sense that a professional gun maker would know how to make guns.

But I agree with the general point. The plot device has been copied many times, usually quite poorly. Unless you're an engineer, you probably can't "invent" gunpowder or similar technology, even if you can envision exactly how they work. And even if you are an engineer, without large scale industrial support it would be impossible to mass produce such technologies.

For example, even if you could mine massive amounts of coal, sulfur, and saltpeter without modern equipment, you'd still have to grind each of them to a precise level, combine them in a precise fashion, and have highly refined metals which could be formed into precision shapes (barrels, trigger mechanisms) to shoot them out of. So you not only have to invent gunpowder, you have to invent entire industries upon which gunpowder rely on. (Unless you just want small quantities of very low grade, ancient Chinese fireworks level gunpowder, which was never suitable for serious weaponry).

Burley
2008-03-06, 03:35 PM
1. An indestructable rope.
2. An adamantine box.
3. Money? Since when do Tippy-type wizards not have an infinite supply of such?
4. Uber Int and Knowledge(everything)+Elan and a demi-plane with a slower time frame! Problem solved.
5. Demiplane.
6. Again, why would a wizard (or artificer) need money?

Just one question: Are you a DM who would allow one of your players to have an Indestructable Rope (understandable), an Adamantine Box (strong, but still destructable, by the way), an infinite supply of money (ruining the economy of your entire campaign world), Epic levels wasted on item research and crafting, safe (uninterupted craft checks) access to a demi-plane, and a immortal race?
The question isn't about whether it is possible for some ridiculous Uber-Wiz-God-Thullu to be able to do it, but how to deal with a player that wants to do it.

Titanium Dragon
2008-03-06, 03:40 PM
"What's that you say? I can't use magical lighting to improve crop yields? Do plants not use photosynthesis? Hey, that means I can grow plants in the dark!"

Outside of the Sunlight spell, that isn't all that unreasonable necessarily; grow lights are not quite the same thing as normal lights.


*sigh* Computer does not equal Integrated Circuit.

If that car has computers in it (and it does) they are in the form of integrated circuits; they certainly aren't just raw transistors or (lord forbit) vacuum tubes. And a car, like a computer, would be far too complex to manufacture with such spells; I mean you could try, but the craft DC would be astronomical.


Einstein can have a +15 bonus to Physics by level 5. Possibly less if he started out Venerable.

He had higher than a +15 bonus, though; the average PHD has a +15, and he was clearly well above average.

...

Incidentally, there ARE systems which have better rules for such; I know Alternity, for instance, actually has invention as a named specific skill (there are also the "creativity" skills). But D&D is not the system for it, really, especially with its focus.

Yakk
2008-03-06, 04:17 PM
In case you travel in time: 15 3 2!

Chinese-firework grade is enough to make a big boom, which can be used to make undermining fortifications go much faster.

But yes, much of getting high quality stuff is craft: and you don't know enough to craft it, even if you know vaguely how it works.

alexi
2008-03-06, 04:21 PM
"However, after declaring that my character is doing so, it dawned on me that there are no paved roads, and I must therefore also invent shocks, and shifting gears."

just wanted to point out no you don't

http://www.kolumbus.fi/antti.brax/images/BIKE/SURLY_1X1_2004_SINGLE_SPEED.jpg

Venatius
2008-03-06, 04:34 PM
Thanks for the great replies, everyone! However, a few things have come up that I feel I need to address, in terms of my problems in specific and also in terms of the subject in general.

#1: Bogging them down in specifics.
The first problem is, even if they get something outright wrong, there's a good chance I won't notice anyway. My only strong suit in the sciences is biology, and then more at the level of someone who is just a tremendous "fan" of it rather than someone who has much formal education on the topic. But perhaps more importantly, why do that for invention but not other things? If I tried to bog down a Wizard player into explaining his spells down to the most minute mechanisms, it would only end in tears. I realize the difference is that magic is supported in the rules, but is that a reason to grill a player on one topic and not another?

#2: Why do what magic can already do?
Not everyone is a magic user. And not every world is chock full of magic anyway. The problem most recently came up for me in an Iron Heroes game, and in that setting, just a +1 sword is a rare, powerful item.

#3: Science does not advance in a "tree".
I know it's a slightly tangential point, but if you can think of a way to invent fighter jets before even inventing steel, I'd love to hear it. Technological developments build off previous ones. Not in a clear, linear fashion, so "tree" is a misleading term. But you can't usually put the cart before the horse unless your "invention" is a pure fluke.

#4: Just say no. It's not balanced.
This is a fine reason, but ultimately, it comes down to some serious relativity. For instance, for balance, I could make the argument that just an explosive improvised bomb should work like a tweaked alchemist fire (maybe 2d6 damage with reflex for half, instead of 1d6 and then 1d6 next round). But someone could argue for more damage and assert things like "Well, it takes more time and costs more money to produce, so it's balanced!" And while I think that's horse-puckey, there's nothing in the book I can point to and establish their wrongness with, and "because I said so" has too many times been used as a cop-out by GMs who can't prove their point for me to use it in good conscience.

Ultimately, I think my final resolution on this is twofold.
#1: The innately slow process of invention.
As was mentioned previously, I think "'flavor' era plus twenty years" is probably an okay cap. As it's been mentioned, very very very few (if any) things were just casually invented by one person and one person only and worked consistently from the get-go. Within a character's natural lifespan (one of the ONLY sources of mortality in D&D that actually matters), they can really only get so far.

#2: Era consistency.
Obviously, some players WANT to play inventors. It may be their primary goal, the concept they really want to build a character around. But ultimately, if I want to play a cyberpunk game, I'm NOT going to use Forgotten Realms. A character working 'ahead of their time' isn't an innately bad concept, but it punches a hole in the overall solidity of the 'flavor' of the tech level you're going for.

In light of both these, if a player DOES want to come up with something revolutionary, it should be a variation on, NOT an improvement upon, what exists. My justification for the latter is very simple; the Augmented Alchemy epic feat. Just doubling the effectiveness of existing alchemical items is an epic feat. I think that says quite a bit about how the game is meant to handle such things. In the above example of the bomb, you do more damage at once than an item like alchemist's fire, but they can save for half. Alchemist's fire makes what is more or less a save for half, but requires them to burn an action. One gums up the works. The other does a HAIR more damage. And should the burning alchemist's fire victim not opt to extinguish themselves, both end up doing the same damage to the same end result, just at a slightly different pace. But if someone wants to make it deal 4d6 damage, I'll just have to silently point at the epic feat. "That's what it takes. Can you do that yet?"

Tobrian
2008-03-06, 04:57 PM
Most D&D games, and many games of other systems, are set in some sort of previous world. Maybe something as (relatively) recent as a Rennaissance type era, or more typically the middle ages. Possibly something a bit earlier, with a Roman Empire, Greek, Babylonian, even prehistoric feel is possible. But a lot of players in my experience, be it out of pure or impure motivation, want to be the ones to move history forward. I'm talking about players whose characters want to invent something.
This in of itself isn't all that horrid at first, not at all. If you're in some primitive-ish society, a character inventing the ballista might be the only way to turn the tide of a war that no combined party action could on its own affect. Unfortunately, the power of a good idea is also its greatest peril. Where does it stop? (snip)

Why does it have to stop? On the other hand, no invention ever worked perfectly overnight, and few PCs are immortal. Ask the players if they would have fun in a game that is centered around their characters inventing things and spending years of their lives dealing with all the myriad problems on the stony path their inventor characters have chosen... or if they simply want to have the equivalent of a railgun in a medieval setting. Ask them to be honest.

I can't see a problem in itself with a player who wants his character to become famous for inventing something instead of becoming famous for being a 20th level wizard or the warrior who singlehandedly wiped out the 13th level of Baator.


Many characters in games are startlingly brilliant. In D&D, it's entirely possible to start the game right off the bat with a rough ballpark IQ of 180 (using the game FAQ rule of 10 IQ per Int). Such a character has a level of brilliance that would grant them incredible levels of insight, logic, etc. Then it's entirely possible to take relevant craft skills to back things up. As brilliant as many real-world scientists have been, to use D&D as the template again, it's hard to make the case for many real life people being more than maybe level 3 NPC classes. A 12th level Int 20 prodigy should theoretically be an intellect beyond most known to our history.

See, that's why I think the whole idea of mapping game INT to a real IQ is misguided. You're creating a problem where no problem has to be. You're shooting yourself in the leg if you cling too tightly to that idea that real-world people must be represented by low-level NPCs. That's frankly bull****. Above a certain level, those stats (especially when buffed by magic items) cease to be relevant to roleplaying and merely matter in regard to modifiers on die rolls.

"Normal" D&D levels go up to 20. Epic starts at 21. Which should tell us that people who in the real world are considered inspired geniuses or top athletes should be the equivalent of lvel 15+ characters, NOT level 3 characters. Get rid of that idea. Just because no-one in real life can jump 100 feet or cast spells doesn't mean there are no exceptional individuums. Why shouldn't Craig Venter be a 20th level biochemist with an INT of 22? What is "intelligence" in the game? In GURPS, it's not just IQ, it's things like education, quickness of thinking, things like that.


The problem is twofold. For one, how DO you really know what ideas such a character, however brilliant, really would or wouldn't come up with?

On the other hand, why wouldn't he? Maybe you're overthinking things.


Furthermore, how do you neccessarily rationalize such ideas? Obviously, technologies lead into each other. But the "trees" of technological advancements required can be nearly impossible to trace. The invention of firearms required knowledge of metallurgy, of certain woodworking techniques, ballistics, a little bit of physics, chemistry, etc. etc. etc. The character obviously can't go and invent the musket when no one has even found a reliable way to handle metalworking or gunpowder.(snip)


Then of course, there's the storyline impact and possible power imbalance of such discoveries. The guy who invents gunpowder suddenly has a frightening material to weaponize, one he can dole out to anyone he pleases, and with no real objective way to determine how much he can produce without, again, going into undue levels of research. Particularly in a primitive and/or low magic setting, someone who can blow open walls, vault doors, dragons, etc. without so much as sacrificing a first level spell slot has gained a frightening asset.

You should pick up the supplement "Sorcery & Steam" from the Legends & Lairs series by Mongoose Publishing. It has some excellent discussion of the dynamic, pros and cons, of introducing steampunk tech into a fantasy setting. The first chapters especially deal with the differences between a "static" standard fantasy magic-driven world and one with a developing industrial revolution, the need for infrastructure, fuel, craftsmen, resources, etc. no matter if the technology is steampunk or magi-tech on an industrial scale.

Or alternatively, drop d20 for a bit and switch to White Wolf's "Mage: The Sorcerers Crusade" setting, and let the players play Daedaleans from the Order of Reason. What you describe above is practically the point of the whole setting: How does Enlightened science and steampunk/gearpunk, exploration into the Unknown, new philosophy and new inventions that anyone can use, impact with a world where magic and monsters exist and Church dogma and superstitious fear will threaten the lives of wizard and natural philosopher alike if they are too "flashy" with their awakened powers?
In a Mage setting, the PCs are supposed to be superior to the non-awakened people around them. Daedaleans are supposed to be geniuses, visionaries, charting strange new paths under strange new stars. Also, it got flying airships. Flying airships are always cool.

In my opinion the biggest difference between technology and magic items is not merely that technological advances, however small, quickly start permeating the whole day-today life of characters... because I feel that many D&D worlds are already similarly saturated with magic. For me, magic means you get something for nothing. Technology, alchemy/chemistry and engineering need energy sources, they need manpower, they create noise and waste and pollution, some of it toxic. Magic doesn't (unless you incorporate the optional rules from WotC's "Cityscape" about thaumaturgical pollution). Magic needs no power source. Magic never falters. Magic items never break from the strain like rods and gear can. Why invent a gun if magic is more reliable? Why invent a steam engine or water wheel to drive an endless belt if a golem can do it so much more reliably and never stops? Sure, a water wheel will most likely be cheaper to build than a golem, but a golem is more versatile, a golem needs no upkeep or repair, a golem can be given verbal commands to do anything that needs to be done.

If you don't yet read the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett, then do. His world started out a satire on the standard fantasy worlds by Gygax and Fritz Leiber, which wizard and thieves guilds, and developed into something much more complex. In the latest books, the Discworld has undergone a sort of rapid industrial revolution, radiating from the biggest city on the main continent (the one where most of the inventors and human and dwarven craftsmen live, the melting pot of different and new ideas). As Pratchett said in an interview, most of it, like the telegraph system or photography, is really made up of components that have existed for some time in everyday life of Discworld people, and all it needed was for someone to combine them in new ways in the pursuit of profit. Also, there's a thriving thaumaturgical industry of arcane "technology" by now, and these trigger other changes. And of course, Discworld has its share of lone inventors ahead of their time who build things that crop up and then become forgotten again, because like in real history, no-one else could understand the principles behind it. But the "industrial revolution" on Discworld does not follow real-world patterns.

The Discworld novel "Going Postal" dealt with the telegraph system (although it was first mentioned in "The Fifth Elephant" and already played an imporant role there), the sequel "Making Money" and an earlier novel "Feet of Clay" looked at the impact that availability of golems as industrial slave labour can have on a society. "The Truth" introduced the printing press to the city of Ankh-Morpork; although printing technology had already existed in some places on the Disc, the technology had been blocked by the Guild of Engravers and the wizards, for different reasons. (In the real world, a whole counterculture of underground printing by rogue printers existed in Elizabethan England, for those who fear printing will destroy the "historical" fantasy feel of a setting)
"Thud" introduced ancient arcane "devices" used by the dwarves which are practically indistinguishable from technology (although they run on magic, and they are very rare and even the dwarves don't know how they were created). The "modern" arcane technology turns up in several novels, going back as far as the first novel, but in recent novels, characters find out that these "imp-powered" gadgets can be used in ways that their enchanters probably never intended, especially in "Jingo", or can open up whole new plot possibilities, i.e. in "The Truth" and "Thud".


Yet they never really had to work for it. All it took was just declaring their character works on inventing it, and likely, just having to wait until you finally bit the bullet and told them they've had enough time to come up with it.

Isn't that exactly what any normal D&D character who crafts a magic item or alchemical item is doing? He spends some XP, gold and time, and at the end of it "ding" here's your magic item, Sir. You don't require the player to write an essay about theoretical magic or real-life alchemy in that case either. And let's be frank, many magic items in D&D already work exactly like modern technology or conveniences. The Magic Item Compendium is chock-full of these.


How DO you balance the story impact and power of an invention of tremendous potential that really requires no actual effort on the player's part? And how DO you deal with saying no to something that there is every reason they COULD come up with, but would simply be a grotesquely unfair advantage?

I can see the problem, because I've met players like that who are trying to get something for nothing. On the other hand, do you feel your player tries to "cheat"?

Let's say his character has invented and build a new kind of technology. Fine. Real world history is littered with the names of inventors who were ahead of their time. Some were derided as lunatics. Some toiled for decades and endured long periods of poverty. Others were brought low by bad luck or rivals destroying their reputation, or by money from patrons drying up. Even if they were successful for a time, after their death their ideas fell back into obscurity, sometimes for centuries, because no-one else could figure out their notes or their notes were lost or stolen. Kallinikos (inventor of Greek fire who sold it to the Emperor of Constantinople), Da Vinci, Cornelius Drebbel (Durch inventor and builder of the first working submarine, with chemical air regeneration - in 1620!) , Robert Hooke (who bad a bitter rival in Newton and the bad luck to die beofre Newton did), Charles Goodyear (inventor of vulcanization of rubber), Nikola Tesla, the list goes on...

Sometimes the men in power simply don't see the use of an invention and brush the inventor off. The Chinese had black powder long before Europe did, and also a type of Greek fire or napalm and flame throwers. Chinese armies they did use gunpowder bombs and manned or unmanned gliders and hot air balloon during wars, to drop bombs on enemy cities.

But if a general feels that he can accomplish the same result with 1,000 men on horseback instead of trusting in some invention by some crazy alchemist, because soldiers are cheap, the alchemy tends to blow up in your face from time to time, and really, honorable warfare means engaging the enemy with weapons and catapults instead of newfangled untested inventions, what is the inventor gonna do? Switch sides and sell his idea to the enemy? Some did.

And keep in mind, why should superstition be limited to our world? Perhaps an inventors workshop is burned down because his neighbors think he is using eldritch forbidden powers to make his gadgets move, or they are afraid of alchemy poisoning their well. Or worse, they fear the inventor because he doesn't use everyday magic. Magic in D&D worlds is mundane. It is something people know. Sending your voice of great distances or creating lightning without magic is against nature!


And can that be done fairly without outright stifling creative(-ish) thinking on the player's part? I leave it to you. The problem has come up for me often enough that I badly need some answers, and personally, I have few or none.

As I said above, pick up "Sorcery & Steam" by Mongoose Publishing. It sounds as if this book, if not answer your questions, can at least help you.

Perhaps switching to the Eberron D&D setting would help. It's pulp adventure, with magi-technology already part of the setting. Adapt the Artificer class, remake it as an inventor.


The real problem comes with players who want to combine magic and tech in perfectly logical ways. Or apply magic to the world at large.

Take the Decanter of Endless Water and a Water Wheel. Thats unlimited energy.
Or a Windmill and some permanent gust's of wind.

Look at permanent teleportation circles. The players can corner the world shipping market in a week or so. And with that control comes lots and lots of power. As in the players can rule the world easily.

I don't see the problem with that, considering that many large cities in the Forgotten Realms, places like the Underdark and the city of Sigil ion the Planescape setting already run on massive amounts of magic, portals for transportation, food and water that is magically created or brought in from another plane (for example via Decanter of Endless Water).

Water Wheels are old technology. If you power a water wheel with a magic decanter instead of a river, that in itself doesnt change anything. It merely means you can build water wheels in places that have no easy access to naturally occuring flowing water. So what? The Romans build aquaeducts. Heck, during the Mughal Empire period in India, emperor Akbar the Great (who historical source describe as a "Renaissance Man", an architect, artisan, artist, armorer, blacksmith, carpenter, construction worker, emperor, engineer, general, inventor, animal trainer, lacemaker, technologist and theologian) had his new capital built in the middle of a waterless region near Agra, a magnificent city hewn from red sandstone called Fatehpur Sikri. It had a complex system of lakes and cisterns to collect water, and water wheels to lift up water to higher elevations and distribute it through canals.

Will a sailing ship with permanent gusts of wind into the sails really change the setting much? Eberron introduced better transportation simply so that travelling times for characters could be cut short so that PCs could be more mobile.

On the other hand, if someone introduces a steam engine, does a world of magic even need steam? Can it replace magic? Where does the coal to power it come from if you want a low-magic setting? Buy it from the dwarves? If D&D worlds don't have RL plate tectonics and vulcanism, but instead everything runs on intersections of the material plane with elemental planes, does fossile coal even exist?

In the novels of the "Princes of Amber" setting by Roger Zelazny, Amber is the hub of many parallel realities, all slightly different from each other, of which 20th century Earth is but one. Some of these realities are very similar to Earth, some are vastly different, with differnet natural laws. Members of the noble family of Amber can travel through the various realities. The protagonist tries to introduce guns from Earth to Amber to give his troops a new weapon in a war against one of his brothers, but finds out that gunpowder simply does not work in Amber. You can make it, or "import" it, but it won't explode. But then quite by accident he finds a replacement, a substance used to clean blades in Amber, which violently explodes as he throws a stained rag into the fireplace. He adapts the guns, and they do work, but ultimately he and his allies lose the battle anyway.

Blanks
2008-03-06, 05:24 PM
Ask the players if they would have fun in a game that is centered around their characters inventing things and spending years of their lives dealing with all the myriad problems on the stony path their inventor characters have chosen... or if they simply want to have the equivalent of a railgun in a medieval setting. Ask them to be honest.
Thats a vital question - in my experience, most are in it for the railgun :(


You should pick up the supplement "Sorcery & Steam" from the Legends & Lairs series by Mongoose Publishing. It has some excellent discussion of the dynamic, pros and cons, of introducing steampunk tech into a fantasy setting.
No he shouldn't :smallcool:
The OP was about how to prevent inventions - the OP wanted help in stopping his players from doing this, not change the game to suit the inventor.

This sounds harsh (and thats not how its meant :smallsmile: ) but often the problem can be one player wanting to build a railgun and the others hoping to stomp some zombie butt in the good old fashioned way :)

And by golly, thats one seriously long post! :smalltongue:

Venatius
2008-03-06, 05:27 PM
My apologies, Tobrian, but I think you've missed the point. If I wanted inventions running amok, and all the players did, I don't think D&D in a slightly primitive, low-to-no magic setting would be the game of choice. The problem, for me, is that of ONE player wanting to to invent barrel upon barrel of high explosives, in that setting. Changing game venue to appease that one player solves the problem only by completely throwing out the window the desires of every other player, including myself. Same for "introducing" steampunk to a fantasy setting. That's the problem. If I want to play a steampunk game, and the rest of the group does, we'll play a steampunk game, and this wouldn't be as much an issue in that case because much of what the player wants to make already exists.

Solo
2008-03-06, 05:43 PM
As Burley pointed out, firstly light isn't just light. Photosynthesis depends on the correct wavelength, which sunlight have.
But more importantly, the players don't know the laws of physics.

Well, maybe not the ones at your table, but I tend to game with smart people.:smalltongue:



When they grow plants outside it works. When they try to use magic light is fails. When they grow them in the dark it fails. Why? nobody knows! Maybe its the sunspirit that is missing, maybe the wavelength of the light is wrong or maybe Chantua (FR god of naturestuff) doesn't like your experiment.
All your character knows is that plants require sunlight :smallsmile:
If NASA had your spirit, we'd never be growing plants with LED lighting. (It's how they planned to grow food during a manned mission to Mars, in growth chambers with red and green LED lighting of certain wavelengths)



No, what is said was, how does your character know about cells?
Better give a good answer or the XP deduction your character is about to recieve will knock him all the way back to 1st ed. !!:smallfurious:
A microscope? In a world where you can bring about a magical apocalypse down on the neighboring kingdom and have access to the most amazing divination magics, would it be impossible for a wizard or someone to create a device that magnifies things enormously?


Oh yeah, and if you test the theory - there are no cells, and people who don't eat dies... Again, nobody knows why, thats just how it is.

While I can accept that in a world of myth and magic, gods may do things like move continents and have a sun pulled by a chariot, I cannot see the reasoning behind having other stuff, like steam expanding, cut out of the world.



Sorry for the sarcastic reply, but you started it :smalltongue:

And, arguably, am better at it.


Of course, when it comes to plants growing, Light may not even be involved. A nymph or Fae could just walk by, and the natural magic of their existence could overflow into making that flower bloom, without any light touching it at all.

You have just inspired me to have a BBEG who feeds his Minions of Evil by caging nymphs and fae in gardens underneath his Fortress of Oppression to grow food in secure, underground conditions.

Azerian Kelimon
2008-03-06, 05:47 PM
And imagine using brachinas and lilitu's to generate some kind of hormone that invigorates the troops. Or using Tarrasque blood as immunity juice. Methinks it's best if we stick to standard physics when possible, and spare catgirls that will hunt us 'till our death in adoration when they conflict the gameworld.

Dan_Hemmens
2008-03-06, 06:01 PM
While I can accept that in a world of myth and magic, gods may do things like move continents and have a sun pulled by a chariot, I cannot see the reasoning behind having other stuff, like steam expanding, cut out of the world.


The reasoning I generally give is "because if you assume any of the actual laws of physics, the real laws of physics, that is, rather than the everyday observation laws of physics which are basically wrong, work then you simply can't have a fantasy setting at all."

Steam expands, great, but steam in D&D is a fundamentally different material to water: it's not a different phase of matter, it's a different elemental substance (hence you have Steam mephits and Ice mephits as well as Water mephits).

In D&D, cold isn't the absence of heat, it's a type of energy on its own. In D&D acid isn't a material substance, it's a kind of energy which you can somehow put in a bottle.

The laws of physics just don't mix with D&D.

Irreverent Fool
2008-03-06, 06:09 PM
You can just say that a character doesn't have enough support from the currently technology. For instance, where the character will even get the idea of passing steam through pipes to move wheels to begin with? What he'll do with a liquid that explodes when applied sparks? He can make up small inventions, but can't create the whole thing. It takes years of study, and a lot of people to think about several things, and how to apply it on day-to-day life, or even military use.

This is an excellent argument. Heronas invented a steam engine sometime in the first century BC. Nobody ever figured out any use for it. All he managed to make was a little metal ball mounted to a frame. It shot steam out and spun.

Dode
2008-03-06, 06:42 PM
Heh, guilty as charged.

But then again, I don't get too many complaints about it from the DM because I keep them as low-tech as possible.

Like my cleric's mace attached to a strap wrapped around my arm, so I can drop it, move, use my holy symbol to turn and wield a heavy shield. Or an overhead pulley-on-a-bar I can attach to my armor so I can swing down a rope into battle with my arms free.

Nothing like perpetual energy or crap like that, that's just pushing my luck.

Tobrian
2008-03-06, 06:48 PM
The reasoning I generally give is "because if you assume any of the actual laws of physics, the real laws of physics, that is, rather than the everyday observation laws of physics which are basically wrong, work then you simply can't have a fantasy setting at all."

Sorry, that is bull****.


Steam expands, great, but steam in D&D is a fundamentally different material to water: it's not a different phase of matter, it's a different elemental substance (hence you have Steam mephits and Ice mephits as well as Water mephits).

Correction: All those elemental substances and creatures come from other planes. Outer Planes, Inner Planes, Shadow Plane... That's kind of the point. The basic D&D world is part of the Material Plane, on the other hand, where life works basically as we know it. Yes, wizards will use arcane terms and concepts to explain and classify phenomenons of natural philosophy because that is a worldview they are familiar with, and because nature in D&D is based on a polytheistic/animalistic worldview, with nature spirits haunting trees, glades and lakes. But just because earth elementals exist doesnt mean every pebble has a spirit in it. Not every fire contains an elemental.

Now, from what I read 4E abolishes Planescape and its cosmology. But the elemental planes still seem to exist, and other planes, i.e. the Fey Wild, exist.


In D&D, cold isn't the absence of heat, it's a type of energy on its own.

....created by magic.


In D&D acid isn't a material substance, it's a kind of energy which you can somehow put in a bottle.

:smallconfused:
I can put acids in bottles just fine. When alchemists put acids in bottles and throw them, it splashes like a liquid. I don't see the problem.

Perhaps we should remind ourselves not to mix game rules and internal laws of the setting. Under game rules, there are five "energy types", fire, acid, cold, lightning, sonic, to keep the magic system streamlined. Resistance to things like fire or acid is called "energy resistance" under game rules to match it to the five energy attacks. It does not mean acid is energy by our definition of the world, if you think so you are mixing real-world physics terms with game terms.

That doesn't mean that inside the setting, acids arent a material substance.


The laws of physics just don't mix with D&D.

Why? Even a fantasy world needs consistent internal rules. I've seen nothing that implies that basic physics, biology, chemistry etc don't work normally in D&D unless you bring in magic. A character who falls off a cliff still falls. Magic is the 5th great power. If you start cutting out basic natural laws, what else will you implement in their stead for your players? It's so much easier for gameplay to assume most of what we know and expect instinctively still stands, and only add certain defined exceptions, like Pratchett did for Discworld, which has the normal set of natural laws, but also magic (which leads to light moving at the speed of sound in a magic field, and darkness being the opposite of light instead of just its absence) and things like "narrative causality". Other than that, hot smoke still rises from chimneys, which also means hot air balloons work, and a boiling pot will boil over.

It's just odd that WotC game designers go to ridiculous lengths of clinging to the idea that D&D is a "medieval" setting, albeit one operating in the heroic action adventure genre, but then people start cutting away at the basic laws.

I can understand if a D&D world has no plate tectonics and no molten core, because the Underdark is in the way, and volcanoes are caused by portals to the elemental plane of fire or magma. Ok. I can work with that. It means there probably are no fossiles, which is a shame because fossiles are pretty cool, but ok. But everytime a PCs finds a piece of jewelry made of amber with an ant in it, the GM has just confirmed that amber exists. Or flintstones... isn't it easier to say amber and flintstones formed in the same way as in the real world? Otherwise you have to invent a whole new cosmology and geo-history just to explain that damn piece of amber.

Dan_Hemmens
2008-03-06, 07:17 PM
Why? Even a fantasy world needs consistent internal rules. I've seen nothing that implies that basic physics, biology, chemistry etc don't work normally in D&D unless you bring in magic. A character who falls off a cliff still falls.

That's sort of my point. "Things fall down" isn't a law of physics, the law of physics is "between any two massive bodies, there exists a force of attraction proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them."

Most D&D worlds, for example, have earth normal gravity, but most of them aren't the same size as earth, and a fair few of them aren't the same density as earth (some, I believe, being largely hollow, particularly if you account for the underdark). In a lot of D&D settings the sun really is a small ball going around the planet and not the other way around.

The actual laws of physics would make most D&D world fall apart in seconds. Giants wouldn't be able to stand under their own weight, the gravity would be off, the seasons would be different lengths, the climate would be totally screwy. You can't take a planet, rearrange all of the nearby celestial bodies, squash it into a different shape, and then still have it work like earth and say that it follows the normal laws of physics.


Magic is the 5th great power. If you start cutting out basic natural laws, what else will you implement in their stead for your players? It's so much easier for gameplay to assume most of what we know and expect instinctively still stands, and only add certain defined exceptions, like Pratchett did for Discworld, which has the normal set of natural laws, but also magic (which leads to light moving at the speed of sound in a magic field, and darkness being the opposite of light instead of just its absence) and things like "narrative causality". Other than that, hot smoke still rises from chimneys, which also means hot air balloons work, and a boiling pot will boil over.

The point, though, is that "most of what we know and expect instinctively" has no actual basis in science.

Smoke rises from chimneys. Now you can explain that in terms of convection currents and densities, and that line of reasoning means that hot air balloons should work.

On the other hand, you could also explain it hundreds of other ways. You could say, for example, that smoke goes upwards because it contains small amounts of elemental fire, and fire goes upwards, and it falls back down when the fire leaves it. This theory has the advantage of explaining why dragons can fly (which they otherwise can't).


It's just odd that WotC game designers go to ridiculous lengths of clinging to the idea that D&D is a "medieval" setting, albeit one operating in the heroic action adventure genre, but then people start cutting away at the basic laws.

I can understand if a D&D world has no plate tectonics and no molten core, because the Underdark is in the way, and volcanoes are caused by portals to the elemental plane of fire or magma. Ok. I can work with that. It means there probably are no fossiles, which is a shame because fossiles are pretty cool, but ok. But everytime a PCs finds a piece of jewelry made of amber with an ant in it, the GM has just confirmed that amber exists. Or flintstones... isn't it easier to say amber and flintstones formed in the same way as in the real world? Otherwise you have to invent a whole new cosmology and geo-history just to explain that damn piece of amber.

You also need to invent whole new laws of gravitation, to explain how everybody stays on a hollow planet, how dragons can fly without using magic, how the planet even exists without being a ball of rock orbiting a star, and so on. Not to mention the ecology.

Once you accept that the world was created directly by gods, instead of thermodynamically by nuclear fusion, you wave bye bye to any pretense of real world physics. There's a world of difference between "a layman's casual observations about the world are similar" and "the laws of physics are the same."

To the casual observer, there's no difference between the Aristotelean and Copernican models of the solar system. To the casual observer, it doesn't matter whether gravity is an attractive force between massive bodies or just a force that pulls you down, but again it makes a huge difference in physics terms.

Tobrian
2008-03-06, 07:27 PM
Don't approach D&D from "physics, with magic that breaks the rules" -- instead, it is about a world where magic is the rules. You can give someone the evil eye -- but if you aren't skilled, you suffer as much misfortune! Breaking the bonds of hospitality does curse you. Life comes from Divine power. Learn enough about the world, and your very thought can manipulate reality: but this drains you.

The laws of contagion clearly work: to create a fireball, you need a pinch of rocks that smell like lava, and the right words, right will and right gestures.

You know, I like that approach a lot, and I use it myself in other systems, i.e. Changeling. But the point is, this is NOT how magic in basic D&D works. It's close to how things work in Ravenloft (with even commoners able to curse someone if the have the Evil Eye) and in Planescape (although the whole "your very thought can manipulate reality" idea was never really followed up in Planescape, at least not for your basic PC). Notice how the 3rd edition Ravenloft supplement was written by someone from White Wolf Inc., not WotC.

Magic in standard D&D Player's Handbook is mechanical and sanitized. It means spells, spells which work very much like chemistry: the whole methodology is similar. If you follow the recipe and do the exact handwaves and say the words properly, you get the same spell effect 100% of the time. Perfect repeatability. Your personal ethics don't feature into it. You don't need to ritually clease yourself prior to casting. There is no sympathetic magic following hermetic rules. Spell components are mostly based on lame puns. And unless your PC has levels in a spellcasting class, he or she can't cast anything. Nada. Zilch.

"Breaking the bonds of hospitality does curse you", no it doesnt. Show me one page where it says that in the core books.


Remember: the world made sense to people before science existed. They where able to make it work. So you can create a world in which these mythic beliefs about the nature of the world is actually how the world works!

Correction: In our world, the natural laws always existed, people simple tried to explain the phenomena they observed through the lens of their magical world view, and those explanations didn't always make sense. Otherwise no-one owuld have bothered with poking around and inventing natural philosophy.

-----

But, looking at the topic title, this is getting way off-topic.

If it's really only one single disruptive player, would ask the other players how they feel about it, and tell him to stop.

I still think that the idea that a professor would have only a +8 on his knowledge skill and therefore any PC with more ranks in skills is like Albert Einstein squared is silly, and should be dropped.

Edited to add:


That's sort of my point. "Things fall down" isn't a law of physics, the law of physics is "between any two massive bodies, there exists a force of attraction proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them."

Most D&D worlds, for example, have earth normal gravity, but most of them aren't the same size as earth, and a fair few of them aren't the same density as earth (some, I believe, being largely hollow, particularly if you account for the underdark). In a lot of D&D settings the sun really is a small ball going around the planet and not the other way around.

The actual laws of physics would make most D&D world fall apart in seconds. Giants wouldn't be able to stand under their own weight, the gravity would be off, the seasons would be different lengths, the climate would be totally screwy. You can't take a planet, rearrange all of the nearby celestial bodies, squash it into a different shape, and then still have it work like earth and say that it follows the normal laws of physics.
((snip excellent points))

Once you accept that the world was created directly by gods, instead of thermodynamically by nuclear fusion, you wave bye bye to any pretense of real world physics. (snip)

To the casual observer, there's no difference between the Aristotelean and Copernican models of the solar system. To the casual observer, it doesn't matter whether gravity is an attractive force between massive bodies or just a force that pulls you down, but again it makes a huge difference in physics terms.

Ok, Ok, I see what you mean. We've been talking past each other.
I meant the D&D worlds were set up to work in a way that to the players the "background scenery" should look like something accustomed to, to facilitate play. Gravity, smoke, light, seasons, snow in winter, sun rising in the east, etc. It's easier for players to just assume things work basically like Greek mythology with spells and monsters stuck in but basic natural laws intact (even if the fantasy world doesnt actually work by actual real physics), because as long as it doesn't matter in regard to the plot, it makes no difference. IF it makes a difference, like your example of tiny fire spirits in the smoke, then it needs to be spelled out at some point for the players.

Of course, if you have a player determined to exploit rules holes, a technology working by defined rules of magic is just as exploitable as one working by laws of physics. It makes it even easier, in a way, because now he only has to screw around with fictional magic spirits that govern everything.

I actually had the opposite problem with my players: I tried to insert certain metaphysical facts about positive and negative energy and how these interact in my campaign, as nformation they were given in-character. But I had to realize this was just boring most of my players. The paladin player only wanted me to spel lout black on white the legal laws of the game world; basically I was suppose to tell him how his paladin should deal with (non-evil) necromancers. Beyond that, other deeper implications didnt much interest him.

Solo
2008-03-06, 07:53 PM
In D&D acid isn't a material substance, it's a kind of energy which you can somehow put in a bottle.
So, does this mean that vinegar is in fact a form of energy? Fascinating.



The actual laws of physics would make most D&D world fall apart in seconds.
As far as I know, in DnD, the laws of physics work, but are superseded by the laws of magic. That is how Giants exist, because they were created by the Gods via magic or somesuch.

Meanwhile, force still equals pressure over area.

Neon Knight
2008-03-06, 08:02 PM
In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the main character runs a large firearms manufacturing company for a living before being transported back in time. So in the context of the story, it makes perfect sense that a professional gun maker would know how to make guns.




[nitpick of nitpick] The Yankee in Mark Twain's book brings about much more than simple firearms, including telegraphs, electricity (including an electrified fence and generators), the minting of coins, and much, much more that I can't recall. This one man is essentially able to shift almost every aspect of King Arthur's society to its modern equivalent. The intimate knowledge of concepts and processes alone he would require to create the devices and improvement credited to him in the book is incredibly massive, never mind the particulars. [/nitpick of nitpick]

Since the real point of the book is humor and social satire, however, this matters not.

Collin152
2008-03-06, 09:03 PM
Meanwhile, force still equals pressure over area.

Yes, force maintains its exact realworld definition.
Meanwhile, Force is a form of magical energy that interacts with Incorporeal creatures.
The Capital letter makes it differant, always remember.

Blanks
2008-03-07, 03:35 AM
If NASA had your spirit, we'd never be growing plants with LED lighting. (It's how they planned to grow food during a manned mission to Mars, in growth chambers with red and green LED lighting of certain wavelengths)
What do you know about my spirit? There is a huge difference between how i react and think about things in the real world and what i do as a DM! Of course i know that you can use artificial light to grow plants, but thats not the same as saying i want to allow that in my RPG...



A microscope? In a world where you can bring about a magical apocalypse down on the neighboring kingdom and have access to the most amazing divination magics, would it be impossible for a wizard or someone to create a device that magnifies things enormously?
Not impossible, but the key i think is to ask the player "why do you want to create a spell to look at your own arm?". If he answers that he wants to check wether or not he can see the cells, the spell research fails...
Its about preserving the "feel" of the game, for everyone, not just the inventor character.


While I can accept that in a world of myth and magic, gods may do things like move continents and have a sun pulled by a chariot, I cannot see the reasoning behind having other stuff, like steam expanding, cut out of the world.
To avoid players inventing. If the players never invent, this never becomes an issue because noone asks about the laws of physics, and you can keep them acting like earths laws of physics (allowing for Dan Hemmes great explanation in post #58).



And, arguably, am better at it.
Sigh. "My dad can beat up your dad!"

Khanderas
2008-03-07, 03:56 AM
Originally Posted by Khanderas
Gunpowder might simply not explode, just burn (like in the Zorro movies when they spread it on the ground to make a fuse).Gunpowder DOES behave like that in our world...
Well yes I know it does (used to take small firecrackers, break them open and get sparkly fountains instead), but I can get a tendency to ramble on, and I wante to keep it farily short with a good example.
What I apparantly missed to include, in the intrest of keeping it short, that gunpowder would (in a gameworld where the DM can't or won't let the players "accidently" invent gunpowder), when packed into a small semi-enclosed container, not explode but burn with sparks instead. Like it does when they make the gunpowder fuses in Zorro movies.
Edit: oh yeah, the barrel of gunpowder at the end of the gunpowder fuse does explode, even in Zorro movies :smallcool:

Dan_Hemmens
2008-03-07, 05:16 AM
So, does this mean that vinegar is in fact a form of energy? Fascinating.


As far as I know, in DnD, the laws of physics work, but are superseded by the laws of magic. That is how Giants exist, because they were created by the Gods via magic or somesuch.

Meanwhile, force still equals pressure over area.

It's interesting that you sould pick that specific example. The reason that Giants shouldn't be able to stand up under their own weight is because of exactly that law (or rather, pressure equals force over area, which I assume is what you meant). The *force* pushing down on their bones goes proportionally to their volume, so the *pressure* gets bigger, causing them to break.

Giants can walk, and Dragons can fly, even in an Antimagic Field, even in a Dead Magic zone. Saying "it's magic" directly contradicts the evidence of the setting.

If the laws of physics are obeyed "except when they aren't" then they aren't being obeyed.

JBento
2008-03-07, 06:16 AM
Also, Giant BugsTM, who, in reality, whould die of asphyxia (sp? I'm not a native speaker, er... typer)

Yakk
2008-03-07, 10:19 AM
Magic in standard D&D Player's Handbook is mechanical and sanitized. It means spells, spells which work very much like chemistry: the whole methodology is similar. If you follow the recipe and do the exact handwaves and say the words properly, you get the same spell effect 100% of the time. Perfect repeatability. Your personal ethics don't feature into it. You don't need to ritually clease yourself prior to casting. There is no sympathetic magic following hermetic rules. Spell components are mostly based on lame puns. And unless your PC has levels in a spellcasting class, he or she can't cast anything. Nada. Zilch.

Depending on the class, you need to do the above. And yes, you need the levels in your spellcasting class to pull off what you need.


"Breaking the bonds of hospitality does curse you", no it doesnt. Show me one page where it says that in the core books.

That was a riff off of the same idea. It does make you more evil, which has mechanical effects in core. In addition, we have dramatic logic operating within D&D because the world is controlled by the plot, rather than the plot being controlled by the world. :)


Correction: In our world, the natural laws always existed, people simple tried to explain the phenomena they observed through the lens of their magical world view, and those explanations didn't always make sense. Otherwise no-one owuld have bothered with poking around and inventing natural philosophy.

Sure, but they still worked in general. You don't need "earth-like" natural philosophy to run giant empires, have agriculture, cities, large economies, etc.


Ok, Ok, I see what you mean. We've been talking past each other.
I meant the D&D worlds were set up to work in a way that to the players the "background scenery" should look like something accustomed to, to facilitate play. Gravity, smoke, light, seasons, snow in winter, sun rising in the east, etc. It's easier for players to just assume things work basically like Greek mythology with spells and monsters stuck in but basic natural laws intact (even if the fantasy world doesnt actually work by actual real physics), because as long as it doesn't matter in regard to the plot, it makes no difference. IF it makes a difference, like your example of tiny fire spirits in the smoke, then it needs to be spelled out at some point for the players.

The players don't have to be told about the tiny fire spirits in the smoke until the characters experience the tiny fire spirits. If the players go and assume their characters have knowledge of physics beyond what an ancient non-scholar would have without Knowledge(Physics), they are screwing up. And if they have Knowledge(Physics), you can let them know that things do not work the same. :)

The basic natural laws in Greek Mythology don't line up to our own. The basic rules in D&D don't line up: giants can walk around without magic, yet you couldn't build a giant that wouldn't shatter it's bones every step in our world.

Nearly every (Ex) ability is an example of an ability that you couldn't pull off on Earth. And those abilities are not "magic" as in "does not work in an anti-magic field". If you put an elemental into an anti-magic field, it continues to exist.

That is why I said Mythic physics instead of Magic physics. :)

The idea is that in day-to-day interaction, those spirits behave much like the physics of our world at macroscopic levels. Sometimes using dramatic/plot logic they behave differently. Superstition, however, might work: appeasing the god of the sea before you set out on a journey might actually give you benefits, and failing to do so might result in the god of the sea getting pissed off at you and tossing you hither and yon.

This lines up with Greek Mythology. People get cursed by spirits or the gods for violating hospitality, omens work, and angering a spirit by any one of dozens of ways results in serious consequences.

Note that I'm not saying: this is the way it MUST be. I'm saying you can run D&D using Mythic Physics and it works, in my opinion better than if you run it with "standard physics, with magic tacked on". And think of how many cat girls you save!

Solo
2008-03-07, 10:53 AM
Not impossible, but the key i think is to ask the player "why do you want to create a spell to look at your own arm?". If he answers that he wants to check wether or not he can see the cells, the spell research fails...
Its about preserving the "feel" of the game, for everyone, not just the inventor character.

Historically, microscopes were invented in the 1600s on earth in order to investigate very, very small things. By accident, it was discovered that such things as micro-organisms existed.

I imagine that eventually, someone will be curious enough to want to investigate either small things, or things on a small scale.



To avoid players inventing. If the players never invent, this never becomes an issue because noone asks about the laws of physics, and you can keep them acting like earths laws of physics (allowing for Dan Hemmes great explanation in post #58).

Is it too hard to just ask them not to do it? Simply requesting your players act nice is better than forcing them in a straitjacket.

Or so I hear.



Sigh. "My dad can beat up your dad!"

"My dad can beat up your dad!" is a childish argument, yes, except in cases where it is infact true.



Giants can walk, and Dragons can fly, even in an Antimagic Field, even in a Dead Magic zone. Saying "it's magic" directly contradicts the evidence of the setting.

What evidence of the setting? The evidence that it's a magical setting?

I don't have a problem with magic superseding physics. I do have a problem with discarding physics for no good reason, simply to foil a group of players who could probably just be asked not to spend time inventing something and getting on with the campaign.

Blanks
2008-03-07, 02:24 PM
Original Poster said:

The problem, for me, is that of ONE player wanting to to invent barrel upon barrel of high explosives, in that setting. Changing game venue to appease that one player solves the problem only by completely throwing out the window the desires of every other player, including myself.


Is it too hard to just ask them not to do it? Simply requesting your players act nice is better than forcing them in a straitjacket.
Its better just to ask them nicely. I assume the OP has already done so, and we are looking at second best options.

This will also be the last post directed to you Solo. This is a great thread and I dont feel we are helping it.

Venatius
2008-03-07, 02:31 PM
Original Poster said:

Its better just to ask them nicely. I assume the OP has already done so, and we are looking at second best options.

This will also be the last post directed to you Solo. This is a great thread and I dont feel we are helping it.

Well, sort of. I plan to, but I'd like to have a more reasonable explanation to give them than just "I don't like it." I do think this thread has really helped me in that direction though. Part of my intention in asking about this subject was to verify I wasn't just hallucinating the potential problems, and to find ways to articulate why it could be a problem for the game. Obviously if the player already saw something wrong with it, they wouldn't be doing it. But I'd love some better understanding of how to address it regardless, so that a compromise can be reached if neccessary, and that's where you get into the complicated, murky territory on how to handle "inventions" outside of an outride ban.


Solo said:
"My dad can beat up your dad!" is a childish argument, yes, except in cases where it is infact true.

I mean you NO personal antagonism or offense whatsoever, but I feel an only partially explicable urge to respond to that; no, it is childish even then. The figurative strength of our figurative fathers has nothing to do with anything of consequence.

Blanks
2008-03-07, 02:57 PM
This lines up with Greek Mythology. People get cursed by spirits or the gods for violating hospitality, omens work, and angering a spirit by any one of dozens of ways results in serious consequences.

Note that I'm not saying: this is the way it MUST be. I'm saying you can run D&D using Mythic Physics and it works, in my opinion better than if you run it with "standard physics, with magic tacked on". And think of how many cat girls you save!
I really like this idea, about superstitions being "true". But can you make it work ingame? I have tried it with different levels of succes, but not quite the level i want (which is 100% succes ;) )
How do you let the players know it works, and do they attempt to abuse it?

Solo
2008-03-07, 03:11 PM
I mean you NO personal antagonism or offense whatsoever,
Offense taken.:smallyuk:

Yakk
2008-03-07, 04:13 PM
There are lots of ways. :)

General flavor: Run into river spirits. Have NPCs do rituals before traveling. NPCs should mention animistic beliefs in casual conversation. Bowls of milk left out behind houses should be standard.

You can even go further with spells. When someone casts a spell, describe it's effects animisticly (ie, as the actions of spirits, rather than some strange arbitrary magic) to the caster.

The trick is, the world is full of extremely powerful spirits who mostly ignore us, but can be appeased or offended by our actions (when they bother to notice them).

Casually toss this kind of animism out there -- as they pass by a forest, they see a Treant grooming some trees. Mention roadside shrines, and see people leaving offerings.

After a bit of background flavor, even include some ethical dilemmas -- at a roadside shrine, have there be something of some small value left there as an offering. Note if the players steal from the gods -- if so, adventure hook! :)

If the PCs see NPCs always acting in superstitious ways, they will either:
A> Follow along,
B> Explicitly reject it, or
C> Ignore it completely

PCs who follow path <B> and <C> can have NPCs react as if they are surprised at how brash they are. :) "What do you mean, you don't want to sacrifice to the goddess of travel before we set out on our trip?"

If the PCs start following superstition, so be it. You can even (OOC) encourage them to invent minor superstitions to follow, so it happens naturally. :)

Suppose they don't do the sacrifice. The NPC traveling with them will blame the random encounters on the lack of a sacrifice at the start of the journey!

Either way, the idea that the world is full of spirits to be appeased should slip into your player's minds. It doesn't have to be a huge part of the game all of the time -- but after multiple sessions where the PCs are explicitly following or breaking superstitions, when you use superstitions as a plot hook, it will have a good foundation!

Hospitality: Do no harm to those you break bread while you are under that same roof.

Greetings: Certain rituals of greeting produce a peace bond between people.

Travel: Travel is dangerous, and one sacrifices to the god or goddess whose domain you are entering for safer passage.

Nature: Nature has it's guardians, and wonton destruction of wilderness can bring down pain. There are rituals to make the local Nature spirits less pissed at you.

Wee Folk: Saucers of milk, rules about salt, and the like pacify the wee folk, who are nearly undetectable and live amongst human habitation.

Fey: The fey are strange -- maybe they are human-esque parts of Nature, or wild Wee Folk, or something else. Circles of mushrooms or stones, strange hills, changelings -- all are possible ways to touch with the Fey. They are old, they are alien, and they are cruel. They are possibly related to the Elves.

Elementals: Where there is Earth, Fire, Air or Water, there are Elementals. The spirit of substance, they usually do not pay attention to mortals. Some are pure in form, and some take humaniod shapes when interacting with mortals. Usually, however, they are part of the fabric of reality that produces the substance. Magic can be used to force the elemental to take separate form -- this can be used to talk to the material, enslave the elemental, or even bargain with it!

One could imagine an NPC class that specializes in Elemental communication and bargaining -- quite useful for many projects. :)

Devils and Angels: Those powers that are on the bottom of the wars of the gods may be barred from interacting as much with reality as they want. Such "Devils" might make deals with mortals -- access in exchange for minor trinkets of their power. The choice to make such deals is quite tempting, and searching for such corrupted souls and protecting reality from them is a large job.

Meanwhile, being a loyal servant of a God is sometimes rewarded. Most people sacrifice to deities not out of piety, but rather to give themselves a bargaining position: friends in high places are friends indeed! Having an Angel (servant of a deity) periodically visit blessed shrines to communicate with the local priest, and have that be an accepted standard event might be good flavor.

You don't have to use all of this -- it would be far too cumbersome -- but you can make it clear that reality isn't just "1000 AD with magic patched on". It should seem like a good idea to burn resources on superstitions.

Note: even if you do nothing in response to the players acting superstitiously, they will almost certainly notice a pattern even if none exists. :) Go go human pattern recognition systems! :)

Rhonstet
2008-03-07, 04:37 PM
OP: the easiest method I could use as a DM was claiming that the Scientific Method didn't exist, or at the very least is rarely taught. People don't experiment, don't research, and don't innovate much in such a world, because the people who would do those things have another outlet.

In a world of magic, people rely on Magical Thinking: people expect that things have power because of some inherent/mystical property. Imagine how much less credence people would give the hard sciences if Magical Thinking actually worked. Consistently.

Discovery and invention is supposed to be an exceedingly rare thing in that world, which is why races that live for hundreds of years somehow never learn anything new.

Venatius
2008-03-07, 04:42 PM
OP: the easiest method I could use as a DM was claiming that the Scientific Method didn't exist, or at the very least is rarely taught. People don't experiment, don't research, and don't innovate much in such a world, because the people who would do those things have another outlet.

In a world of magic, people rely on Magical Thinking: people expect that things have power because of some inherent/mystical property. Imagine how much less credence people would give the hard sciences if Magical Thinking actually worked. Consistently.

Discovery and invention is supposed to be an exceedingly rare thing in that world, which is why races that live for hundreds of years somehow never learn anything new.

And for a low magic world, how would you address this?

Yakk
2008-03-07, 05:07 PM
Pretty much the same? Even a low magic D&D world is much higher magic than this world, and for most of history people held to magical thinking. :-)

If someone wants to be an inventor, invent the Profession(Inventor) skill.

It, like other professions, can be used to generate gp.

Except with an Inventor, you can pick what you want to invent.

The GM assigns it a GP value.

You can burn money on a lab and equipment. Each 5,000 gp worth of lab equipment adds +1 to your weekly profession check.

You can also expend consumeables. Pick how many gp you want to burn in a week.

Now you get to roll! Roll d20+profession skill+modifiers from stats/labs/etc.

Up to that many gp spent is spent usefully, and grants you invention points.

Now take (Invention Points) divided by (Total value of item or trick), times 100%. Ie: 12.72222%

Use standard methods to give the player that percent change to succeed. Roll more than once if you have to (ie, 0.0001% chance means "roll 5d10 plus 1 red d10. Succeed if and only if you roll 5 0s and the red comes up 1").

You may also try a long-term research project, and accumulate your points over a month period before rolling. After each failed roll, your remaining points are halved however. You may accumulate up to your invention skill ranks weeks before being forced to roll.

...

If you are looking for a cheap way to do X, the GM has to rule of thumb the value of the invention. 10,000 to 100,000 gp times the reduction in the cost of making X seems like a reasonable approximation of how useful it is. :)

So suppose they wanted to make an explosive substance. You can make a "potion of fireball" for ~2000 gp (just making up numbers), but they want to be able to make it for 500 gp.

The invention of a mundane way to make this for Y gp might be worth 10,000 gp * (1500) = 15,000,000 gp.

Your character has an invention skill of 10, and modifiers of +50 from an extensive lab.

He burns 60 gp per week for 10 weeks on the subject, giving him 600 IPs.

This gives him a 0.004% chance of inventing this improved blasting powder.

It fails. He loses 300 IPs, and works on it for 10 more weeks.

Up to 900 IPs. 0.006% chance now!

(At that rate, it will take an average of 2403 years for this individual to invent his blasting powder. He will have spent an average of 7,500,000 gp on his research along the way. (the other half of the value of the item was from the accumulated profession skill checks along the way). But hey, he might get lucky!)

...

Why the above crunch:
Note that all of the above is just fancy window-dressing around the basic concept of "roll d20+profession skill, and get that much gp in a week".

The yield in my case is a chance to invent the item, which is given a gp value.

The "1/2 after every check" effect basically doubles the value of your investment. The "you need to both get a check result and spend gp" means that you are putting both gp and your profession check up -- so each "invention point" becomes worth 2 gp each. These two effects cancel out!

The 5000 gp per +1 modifier generates a return on investment of about 1% per year of checks. This seemed reasonable.

You can just reduce it to making profession checks and accumulating gp, but I find the idea of having labs, burning experimental equipment, and having a chance each period of time to be amusing. :)

You can toss in other stuff: like you can have up to your invention skill in unskilled helpers, each granting a +1 modifier to your skill. (which works out the average of an unskilled "aid another" check)

However, in the end, the result is: go ahead and invent. I have mechanics for you. But no, it probably isn't worth your bother -- you should instead go off and adventure!

Blanks
2008-03-07, 05:19 PM
@ Yakk

Thanks for the answer, i will attempt to incorporate it in my next campaign :)

Dan_Hemmens
2008-03-07, 06:39 PM
What evidence of the setting? The evidence that it's a magical setting?

The evidence that, in setting, magic works in a very very specific way. Magical effects require magic to sustain them, and they go away when the magic goes away. There exist, in the setting, ways to remove the effects of magic leaving (according to you) pure real-world physics.

But you can't knock a dragon out the sky with a Dispel Magic effect. Giants can still support their own bodyweight in a Dead Magic zone. The real-world laws of physics do not apply in the absence of magic.


I don't have a problem with magic superseding physics. I do have a problem with discarding physics for no good reason, simply to foil a group of players who could probably just be asked not to spend time inventing something and getting on with the campaign.

The point is that "it's magic" is a meaningless way of explaining something. "Magic" in D&D means something very, very specific. It works in a concrete, definable way, and there are a whole lot of things which are very explicitly not magic but also not physically possible.

You're pursuing a circular argument. You're taking the fact that some bits of D&D don't obey the laws of physics as evidence that there is "magic" involved in them, even if there's no reason to believe that. So "D&D obeys the laws of physics, except when magic is involved" really means "D&D obeys the laws of physics, except when it doesn't" which is functionally identical to saying "D&D doesn't obey the laws of physics." In D&D pressure provably is not force divided by area. If it was, giant creatures, of any variety, would be unable to exist unless actively sustained by a specific magical effect.

Solo
2008-03-07, 06:42 PM
But you can't knock a dragon out the sky with a Dispel Magic effect. Giants can still support their own bodyweight in a Dead Magic zone. The real-world laws of physics do not apply in the absence of magic.


Well, IMHO, Golems seem to be able to function in antimagic fields because "Imbued with magic" or something, so I imagine Giants could have something like that going for them.


If pressure does not equal force over area, then I have to wonder how sewing works, among other things.

Dan_Hemmens
2008-03-07, 06:45 PM
And for a low magic world, how would you address this?

People rely on magical thinking in low magic worlds too. People rely on magical thinking in the real world.

An example.

A few years ago, when mineral water first got popular, a lot of companies tried making their own, by combining the chemical salts present in natural spring water with distilled water.

What they got was something chemically identical to mineral water, but when people found out what they were doing there was a public outcry, because people want mineral water that has been "naturally filtered" through "volcanic rocks" for "hundreds of years" - preferably somewhere pretty. Chemically speaking, it makes no difference at all. It is literally impossible to tell the difference between "real" mineral water that comes from a real mountain stream and "fake" mineral water that comes out of a factory, but people invest in the idea of real mineral water. It's direct magical thinking (the law of contagion in fact, once together always together) that has no basis in reason or science.

Real science is actually kind of nonsensical and unintuitive to most people. That's why it took so long for most of it to get discovered. Magic makes a whole lot more sense.

Dan_Hemmens
2008-03-07, 06:51 PM
Well, IMHO, Golems seem to be able to function in antimagic fields because "Imbued with magic" or something, so I imagine Giants could have something like that going for them.

Except that a Golem is described explicitly in magical terms in the game, it's a magical construct, Wizards make them, with spells, it requires specific spells to create them, they don't exist naturally in the world.

Giants aren't magical at all. Nothing in the Giant description implies there is anything magical about them at all.

But let's say you're right. Let's assume that Giants are "infused with magic" or something, so the laws of physics don't apply to them, and so are dragons, and so are magical creatures, and presumably, since they're capable of performing superhuman feats at comparatively low levels, so are humans and elves and dwarves and half-orcs pretty soon everything winds up being "magic", so the laws of physics are suspended for everything.

At which point saying "the world obeys the laws of physics except when there's magic involved" becomes something very much like saying "I'm a vegetarian between meals."

Dan_Hemmens
2008-03-07, 06:54 PM
If pressure does not equal force over area, then I have to wonder how sewing works, among other things.

Sewing works by magic. Just like everything else.

Solo
2008-03-07, 07:00 PM
Well, that was an entirely convincing explanation that relied upon impeccable logic.

Hmm... if

Rutee
2008-03-07, 07:05 PM
You may find it interesting to know that the universe obeys Einstein's laws of Relativity except when it doesn't.

Does that mean that the world does not obey relativity?

It does in fact mean that the universe does not uniformly obey relativity. Welcome to why Science doesn't make Laws anymore.

Solo
2008-03-07, 07:06 PM
I think of it as "The world obeys relativity under certain conditions".

I don't have a problem with "Magic works under certain conditions, and physics in others."

It's kinda like how religions reconcile Physics and the existence of stuff in their religious texts that are physically impossible. Like giant ox demons or turtles.

Dan_Hemmens
2008-03-07, 07:09 PM
I think of it as "The world obeys relativity under certain conditions".


What conditions would those be, exactly?

GammaPaladin
2008-03-07, 07:10 PM
The real problem comes with players who want to combine magic and tech in perfectly logical ways. Or apply magic to the world at large.

Take the Decanter of Endless Water and a Water Wheel. Thats unlimited energy.
Or a Windmill and some permanent gust's of wind.
I don't really see the issue with either of those examples... Because the PCs would have to know how to use that rotational energy to create electricity... And they don't, nor do they have hundreds of years to figure it out.

If they want to use it grind grain... Or some other purely mechanical action, then more power to them.

The permanent teleportation circle thing... Well... Hey, there are other wizards out there that can do that too, once you give them the idea.

Solo
2008-03-07, 07:11 PM
What conditions would those be, exactly?

Existence on a large scale, I believe.

Dan_Hemmens
2008-03-07, 07:16 PM
Existence on a large scale, I believe.

Sorry, I thought you were talking about relativity only applying near the speed of light or something (which would be a bad example).

Solo
2008-03-07, 07:19 PM
I don't know if you're religious or not (I'm not really), but when religions have to reconcile Physics with religious texts that describe physically impossible things happening, they seem to do so by saying that whatever higher power they believe in set down laws for the universe to abide by, but, as the supreme power isn't necessarily bound by the laws, he can make exceptions to them as he so pleases.

This is roughly what I believe a DnD setting is like.

Collin152
2008-03-07, 07:24 PM
I don't know if you're religious or not (I'm not really), but when religions have to reconcile Physics with religious texts that describe physically impossible things happening, they seem to do so by saying that whatever higher power they believe in set down laws for the universe to abide by, but, as the supreme power isn't necessarily bound by the laws, he can make exceptions to them as he so pleases.

This is roughly what I believe a DnD setting is like.

All assuming we know the laws of physics exactly as they are.
And the odds of that are just so insane, it makes it all a moot point.
DnD uses our physics, with more exceptions.
No, wait- no exceptions, just more rules.

Solo
2008-03-07, 07:28 PM
Umm.... I'm not entirely sure what you're saying. I get a general idea, but I'm guessing on a few parts.

ps. I don't think anyone is saying we know everything about physics yet.

Dan_Hemmens
2008-03-07, 07:51 PM
I don't know if you're religious or not (I'm not really), but when religions have to reconcile Physics with religious texts that describe physically impossible things happening, they seem to do so by saying that whatever higher power they believe in set down laws for the universe to abide by, but, as the supreme power isn't necessarily bound by the laws, he can make exceptions to them as he so pleases.

This is roughly what I believe a DnD setting is like.

Thing is, very few things in religious texts actually break the laws of physics, and most of the things that do are generally accepted as metaphors. The parting of the red sea was physically possible, so was the flood, so are most things. There's one bit in the bible where God stops the sun in the sky and even that is physically possible if you're capable of exerting enough torque to stop the earth rotating.

What I don't buy is that the D&D gods built a world, and then made it run according to real-world physics, and then put a bunch of stuff in it that didn't run according to real world physics. That's not the same as God demonstrating his power by stopping the sun and raising the dead. Giants can walk around all the time. Why would any deity create a creature that took direct divine intervention just to keep it walking. Why wouldn't the Gods just set up the physical laws so that giants could walk around anyway?

Solo
2008-03-07, 08:01 PM
Thing is, very few things in religious texts actually break the laws of physics, and most of the things that do are generally accepted as metaphors.

Depends on who you're talking to, believe me. :smallannoyed:



There's one bit in the bible where God stops the sun in the sky and even that is physically possible if you're capable of exerting enough torque to stop the earth rotating.

Well, you'd have to stop everything on the earth from moving, then get it started up again.

Also, the energy needed to do so would wreck immense havoc on the earth.



What I don't buy is that the D&D gods built a world, and then made it run according to real-world physics, and then put a bunch of stuff in it that didn't run according to real world physics. That's not the same as God demonstrating his power by stopping the sun and raising the dead. Giants can walk around all the time. Why would any deity create a creature that took direct divine intervention just to keep it walking.

God's aren't exactly supposed to do things that make sense to people. Examples are innumerable.

For example, pi = 3.1415...... etc when there is no real reason for it to be so.


Why wouldn't the Gods just set up the physical laws so that giants could walk around anyway?

Could there be "physics like ours with differences put in place by the gods"?

Collin152
2008-03-07, 08:03 PM
Umm.... I'm not entirely sure what you're saying. I get a general idea, but I'm guessing on a few parts.

ps. I don't think anyone is saying we know everything about physics yet.

Forgiveness, please. I was pretty messed up by headache medication when I posted that.
Hell, even I'm not sure what I was saying!

Solo
2008-03-07, 08:04 PM
It made a nice poem though.

Yakk
2008-03-07, 09:21 PM
Pi is 3.14159... because that is what you get when you keep adding sides to a polygon, and divide the length of the sides by the diameter.

What else would it be?

;)

The point is, D&D makes as much sense using "mythic physics" as it does with "real world physics with a huge number of magical exceptions". The mythic physics has, as a bonus, a bunch of old fantasy stories you can use to generate plot points, and as another bonus the players can only make guns if you want them to.

Dan_Hemmens
2008-03-08, 07:04 AM
Well, you'd have to stop everything on the earth from moving, then get it started up again.

That, as we physicists say, is a engineering problem.


Also, the energy needed to do so would wreck immense havoc on the earth.

It really wouldn't actually. "Energy" seldom damages anything by itself.


God's aren't exactly supposed to do things that make sense to people. Examples are innumerable.

For example, pi = 3.1415...... etc when there is no real reason for it to be so.

There's nothing about that which doesn't make sense. It's not God's fault that we have a decimal number system instead of a pi-based one.


Could there be "physics like ours with differences put in place by the gods"?

This is sort of my point, if there are differences in the laws of physics then you are not following the laws of physics as they exist in the real world. That's exactly my point.

I think this is basically the same miscommunication I had with another poster upthread. I'm totally happy with having a world which looks, superficially, the same as our own, but I don't think you can go from that to saying "the laws of physics are the same", if they were, the world wouldn't look like a D&D world at all.

GoC
2008-03-08, 08:34 PM
"Normal" D&D levels go up to 20. Epic starts at 21. Which should tell us that people who in the real world are considered inspired geniuses or top athletes should be the equivalent of lvel 15+ characters, NOT level 3 characters. Get rid of that idea. Just because no-one in real life can jump 100 feet or cast spells doesn't mean there are no exceptional individuums. Why shouldn't Craig Venter be a 20th level biochemist with an INT of 22?

Apart from the fact that biochemist isn't 20 times more resistant to sword than the ordinary person?
Just switch the d20 to something else and call it a day.

technoextreme
2008-03-09, 01:58 PM
The reasoning I generally give is "because if you assume any of the actual laws of physics, the real laws of physics, that is, rather than the everyday observation laws of physics which are basically wrong, work then you simply can't have a fantasy setting at all."

Steam expands, great, but steam in D&D is a fundamentally different material to water: it's not a different phase of matter, it's a different elemental substance (hence you have Steam mephits and Ice mephits as well as Water mephits).

In D&D, cold isn't the absence of heat, it's a type of energy on its own. In D&D acid isn't a material substance, it's a kind of energy which you can somehow put in a bottle.

The laws of physics just don't mix with D&D.
The problem with that logic is that I can still have a whole myriad of siege weapons created and there is no possible way you could stop me without breaking everyone elses weapons.

Dan_Hemmens
2008-03-09, 04:18 PM
The problem with that logic is that I can still have a whole myriad of siege weapons created and there is no possible way you could stop me without breaking everyone elses weapons.

Would you be so kind as to tell me how, exactly?

Tobrian
2008-03-12, 04:01 PM
Apart from the fact that biochemist isn't 20 times more resistant to sword than the ordinary person?
Just switch the d20 to something else and call it a day.

In the real world, an elite soldier isn't 20 times more resistant to a point blank shot from a bazooka than a first-week recruit either. Who tells you that in a D&D world, a highlevel master "biochemist" (translate as: "transmutation wizard specialist" or "alchemist") would NOT be more resistant to poisoned arrows or necromancy than his 1st level apprentice?

Dan_Hemmens
2008-03-12, 04:03 PM
In the real world, an elite soldier isn't 20 times more resistant to a point blank shot from a bazooka than a first-week recruit either. Who tells you that in a D&D world, a highlevel master "biochemist" (translate as: "transmutation wizard specialist" or "alchemist") would NOT be more resistant to poisoned arrows or necromancy than his 1st level apprentice?

The point, I think, is that many of us don't want it to be necessitated by the system.

It's not about point blank shots, it's about the first-week marine recruit getting his arse handed to him by the expert biochemist.

Tobrian
2008-03-12, 05:55 PM
It's not about point blank shots, it's about the first-week marine recruit getting his arse handed to him by the expert biochemist.

That's why I keep saying: Get rid of the idea that real-world people are comparable to RPG characters. Step 1 is: Compare real-world people to other real-world people (like a renowned genius to a first-year student), THEN assume that said professor is also one of those few people who really stand out of a crowd... someone who is not only an accomplished scientist, but also plays piano and handball, is charismatic, knows 5 languages, and goes dancing and diving in his spare time. Because people like that exist.


Now, you will say in the real world, people like that are rare. Sure. But now let's go to step 2: Look at action movies. Look at any sort TV series or movies where the protagonists are supposed to be really good at what they do, even if they start out looking like normal people instead of demigods. Heroes, Stargate SG-1, CSI, 24, the Die Hard movies, take your pick. These protagonists are usually better in their chosen field than anyone else around, they are able to miraculously shrug off (or at least survive) massive injuries unless the plot dictates they die, and they gain more skills as the series progresses.

Example in case: Daniel Jackson on Stargate SG-1. Started out as a wimpy linguist and archaeologist with glasses and allergies. Then as the series progressed (let's assume he is a GURPS character :smallwink: ) you could almost see the character putting points into willpower, combat skills and toughness in addition to his normal fields of expertise, just to not get beaten up so much. He was becoming an Adventurer Archaeologist (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/MAin/AdventurerArchaeologist). By later seasons, he might not be able to win in melee against a fighter-type character of comparable power level, but the audience would readily accept Daniel winning a fistfight against a random low-level mook, quickly shrugging off pain and shock after having being tortured, or being a decent shot with a gun. Oh yes, and apparently he didn't need glasses anymore; because becoming badass improves your eye-sight (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheClarkKentEffect) :smallwink: as everyone knows.

D&D characters are like action movie heroes, and not just because they use the elite array for ability scores. They are able to do things that normal people can't because it's a fantasy setting, that's all. In a straight d20 Modern setting without magic, they would be the Badass Normal (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BadassNormal). Gordon Freeman (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BadassBookworm), anyone? :smallbiggrin:
__________________________________________________ ________

Edited to add:


This is sort of my point, if there are [I]differences in the laws of physics then you are not following the laws of physics as they exist in the real world. That's exactly my point.

I think this is basically the same miscommunication I had with another poster upthread. I'm totally happy with having a world which looks, superficially, the same as our own, but I don't think you can go from that to saying "the laws of physics are the same", if they were, the world wouldn't look like a D&D world at all.

I think the problem for many players (and many a game writer, too, more on that below) originates in the fact that neither the Core D&D books nor various supplements actually spell out black on white that D&D worlds cannot possibly work on normal physics, or look like normal planets, and what consequences this really has for the world the characters find themselves in. Planescape is the only setting that talks about "un-natural" laws and metaphysics of the planes, but Planescape is set in the Outer Planes. The Material Plane worlds are usually presented as being sort of like medieval Europe (or medieval Asia), with wizards, gods and mythic monsters stuck in. That was probably the idea back in 1st edition.

All the things we have discussed here make sense, the more I think about it. D&D worlds running on magic and elemental energies; the existance of the Underdark indicating that there can be no mantle or core or normal volcanism; disease being caused by an imbalance of negative energy instead of germs. We are left with a world which works in ways completely different from our own but where for some mysterious reason *cough cough* magic makes everything look like we're on an Earthlike planet.... because the game writers want to have seasons, gravity, clouds, shooting stars, they want rain to fall, volcanoes to erupt, rivers to flow down sloping terrain and into the sea, and aurora borealis to blaze in the arctic skies, because any location where things do not work that way is then automatically visibly "magical".

These are basic things about the setting that are never discussed right up front in the core books, where new players and gamemasters would see them. They're hidden as implications in the subtext. We had to come to these conclusions on our own.

It doesn't help that a lot of published material shows its authors were assuming some sort of real world cosmology, too. For example, an article in DRAGON magazine #340, "The Stars are right", about astronomy, astrologers, horoscopes and constellations and how to fit that into D&D game worlds. The authors talks at length about astronomy, precession, wobbling of the Earth axis, and then simply assumes that the heavens work the same in D&D too, throwing in some new constellations patterned on D&D-suitable monsters in place of the Western zodiac. He even mentions that Eberron already has its own constellations.

Under these circumstances, how is a player who wants his character to be an inventor to know what sorts of physics he can expect to work or not?