Critiquing the "Guy At The Gym" Fallacy

[Mechalich]

But most people don't train it to that extend because that is timeconsuming and bothersome.

This justification method is difficult to balance correctly. After all, if the time-consuming and burdensome magical practice produced outcomes inferior to the conventional practice, for example if forging a sword with magic produces a worse sword than the typical hammer+anvil approach, then no one would bother to learn it at all, because it would be useless. On the other hand, if the time-consuming and bothersome method produces superior outcomes, the level of burden has to be immense to prevent widespread adoption. This is difficult to configure without either requiring all potential magic-users to be fanatically obsessive, in which case your world is one in which all wizards are insane, which obviously have rather significant consequences. Or demanding a time investment such that only the rich can undertake magical study because everyone else is too busy working to avoid starving. This has significant consequences too, and it is tied to a socially elitist system wherein, if the magic is actually real (as opposed to BS that Chinese scholar-gentry thought would make them immortal) provides a tangible reinforcement behind a supernatural-powers caste system.

That's not to say that this can't work. In fact it can work well when the powers that result from such prolonged and extensive study are limited to esoteric endeavors that have no real world equivalent and aren't easily adapted to replace and known form of labor. Settings wherein anyone can study to hunt ghosts, for instance. This also can work if the esoteric powers provide an outcome that is functionally equal to the conventional method, for instance if martial zen makes you just as good as a veteran soldier, but not better than one, which allows a game to utilize aesthetics that wouldn't actually work in the real world (in which an unarmed guy in a smock is no match whatsoever for one in plate armor with a halberd) while not imposing a major world-building burden.

Don't generalize "player characters in RPGs" from D&D. A character in Shadowrun is hardly more skilled than an earth-human with a lifetime of practice and training and also stops to be faster and stronger or more resiliant if you take his equippment and implants away. An investigator in Call of Cthuluh is also not faster, stronger and more skilled than your average human, not even with experience.

And that is actually the more common way human PCs are modelled. As well within the bounds of humanity.

Quite. And, equally important, even if the PCs are 'special' for some reason and get to bypass human boundaries, this doesn't eliminate human boundaries as a measure in the setting because NPCs bound by those limitations will continue to exist and the rules need to be able to represent them just as effectively as they do the PCs. If human characters without any form of phlebotinum appear in a setting at the character level (meaning the players aren't representing gods or something) and interact with PCs directly it is important to know what the limits to their abilities are. Vampire: the Masquerade games are not intended to ever have human PCs, but the vampires make tests against fully human NPCs all the time and GMs may even need to build dozens of such NPC stat blocks during a campaign.

its a my way or the highway, "super soldier or aliens" mentality. you think that just because its not this supersoldiers it has to be aliens and there is no other explanation. the training could be secret and kept secret so that random kids don't go becoming super-strong and crushing boulders irresponsibly, people might simply not care about being super-strong superman despite a logician proclaiming the contrary there is more important things in life than power after all, and you'd be surprised by what people don't care about. lots of this fiction involving such physical training just make the fighter community a separate one that exists right alongside normal society and normal people being afraid of fighting just don't go near places with fighters, considering them a different class of people that is dangerous to associate with.

your assuming every single human is a knowledge- hungry person obsessed with power and that society will inevitably grab for all secrets and share them to the world in an inexorable march of "knowledge wants to be free" and determined to spread all improvements everywhere just like our own. that is not human nature. its quite easy to make a culture that won't automatically upend what it means to be human with new knowledge, real humans had successfully been doing that for thousands of years until what, a couple centuries ago?

its a common worldbuilders fallacy: "any change to the world must automatically be universal and affect everyone on every level". with no thought on how the change can be limited or controlled so that society can continue to function as it always has without being irrecoverably radically changed forever.

Any new method that is economically superior in the aggregate to the existing method for producing its intended outcome has extremely strong pressures in favor of its adoption and eventually complete erasure of the old method as anything other than a curiosity. This is a natural process, namely evolution. It's also something that we've seen happen countless times in human history - changes in agricultural practices following the 'discovery' of the Americas by Columbus, for example. Yes, existing processes, through a position of a priori advantage can use accumulated assets to prevent the adoption of a new one. However, this depends on some sort of barrier being in place to prevent a change from triggering a evolutionary cascade and it tends to eventually fail (it took Europe a while to adopt potatoes, but eventually, they were everywhere, even in France, they were just too useful to discard).

If a person can 'just train' to unlock new abilities then there's no barrier. The argument from myself, and I believe from Satinavian as well, is that 'learning to manipulate ki' or 'learning to cast spells' or any other sort of pre-requisite breakthrough serves to produce exactly the sort of barrier you intend. And generally that barrier needs to be pretty substantial. Humans are willing to dedicate vast amounts of energy on a personal and societal level in the completely futile search for supernatural powers. In a scenario where those powers actually exist and can provide demonstrable results, the level of effort that would be input should increase exponentially.

Super-strength, by the way, is probably the best candidate for an ability to inevitably spread as far as possible, because it has vast utility in almost every field of manual labor. In fact an overwhelming fraction of the tools humans have invented throughout history from the lever to the front-end-loader have been for the purpose of providing mechanical advantage to increase available strength. If a method to reliably train humans to utilize super-human strength, even something modest like doubling the generalized strength based athletic tests of a person, that ability would be massively game-changing today in the 21st century and every country on the planet would be forced to adopt the technique in industry and military applications or face destruction within a generation.

Exactly. This whole discussion of world-building ignores that this is about empowering the PCs, not about screwing up their worlds. they can keep their worlds however they want as long as I can keep my unique PC, and if I or any other person wants their unique PC to be batman or saitama solar exalted-esque guys, one has a right to play them no matter what other people complain about it, they don't want to play with that, thats just not their preference. its not my preference that the optimizers play god wizard, but its not right for me to stop them from playing that. its only fair the people who want god fighter get that as well, is all I'm saying.

Yes, all supported concepts within the framework of a specific game should be able to reach equal levels of power within the game framework. Of course that's true. However the game design is under no obligation at all to support an specific maximum power level or any particular concept. It is perfectly acceptable to make a fantasy world with traditional wizards who wield nearly cosmic power and warriors who are utterly ordinary humans who no ability to exceed natural limits at all - it's just that in the game built around that world all PC characters will perforce have to be wizards. This isn't even unusual - that's the framework for Harry freaking Potter.

If you bring a concept to a game scenario that the setting does not support the GM is under no obligation to allow concept and has in fact very good reasons to forbid it as it will likely be destabilizing.