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Thread: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

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    Ettin in the Playground
    Join Date
    Jun 2015

    Default Re: Solving the "elf superiority problem"

    Quote Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy View Post
    None of those assertions about language are immutable physical laws, nor do they underpin anything fundamental about the real world.

    They're just largely untestable assertions about the workings of the mind, nothing more.

    Calling a setting "completely alien" because of some minute detail within one of those "theories" of language is hardly a fair criticism.
    Except I explained that this theory of language was caused by the way information itself works and it can not be invalidated without changing how information works.
    This theory I described would work even if we were not using real languages and instead giving zeroes and ones to each other or transmitting information under any form.
    You just did not think about the source of the theory I gave.

    To describe it: information is transmitted: the more you want the transmitted information to be exhaustive the more information must be transmitted or the more information the other needs to find and combine.
    That is what I described but in the context of human language even if human language itself was not needed.
    Now you want to make "you can make information transmitted unlimitedly exhaustive with finite amount of information transmitted or nothing (including combination of things) involve significant amounts of information"
    That is simply alien.
    The latter is incompatible with the rest of the setting since it already contains a lot of information.
    The former is incredibly hard to conceptualise: imagine saying or writing a few words then it created all the information pertaining to the subject needed to understand somehow.
    How would the gm simulate that at a table when the player gives a limited amount of information and now that the npc suddenly have to understand a whole bunch of things the player did not say?
    Now the player character says half truths by using the ambiguities of English.
    Should the gm say "in this setting they are not using English but instead using a language that is perfect in all the ways at once so you can not say half truths through the ambiguities of the language because when you say words the universe itself complete the information you did not make the effort to transmit" ?
    Last edited by noob; 2020-10-16 at 03:47 PM.