Roleplay doing expirements or science!

[Spriteless]

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

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

[farothel]

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

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


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

[Martin Greywolf]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Jay R]

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

The introduction to my last campaign included the following:

A warning about meta-knowledge. In a game in which stone gargoyles can fly and people can cast magic spells, modern rules of physics and chemistry simply don’t apply. There aren’t 92 natural elements, lightning is not caused by an imbalance of electrical potential, and stars are not gigantic gaseous bodies undergoing nuclear fusion. Cute stunts involving clever use of the laws of thermodynamics simply won’t work. Note that cute stunts involving the gross effects thereof very likely will work. Roll a stone down a mountain, and you could cause an avalanche. But in a world with teleportation, levitation, and fireball spells, Newton’s three laws of motion do not apply, and energy and momentum are not conserved. Accordingly, modern scientific meta-knowledge will do you more harm than good. On the other hand, knowledge of Aristotle, Ptolemy, medieval alchemy, or medieval and classical legends might be useful occasionally.

[Spriteless]

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

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

[JNAProductions]

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

In theory? Awesome.

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

[Mastikator]

In theory? Awesome.

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

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

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

[Lord Torath]

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

This reminds me of the scene in Labyrinth where Sarah uses her lipstick to mark tiles in the ground as she passes. Once she's moved on, little critters underneath them lift up those tiles, and either flip them over, or rotate them.

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

[PhoenixPhyre]

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

The introduction to my last campaign included the following:

A warning about meta-knowledge. In a game in which stone gargoyles can fly and people can cast magic spells, modern rules of physics and chemistry simply don’t apply. There aren’t 92 natural elements, lightning is not caused by an imbalance of electrical potential, and stars are not gigantic gaseous bodies undergoing nuclear fusion. Cute stunts involving clever use of the laws of thermodynamics simply won’t work. Note that cute stunts involving the gross effects thereof very likely will work. Roll a stone down a mountain, and you could cause an avalanche. But in a world with teleportation, levitation, and fireball spells, Newton’s three laws of motion do not apply, and energy and momentum are not conserved. Accordingly, modern scientific meta-knowledge will do you more harm than good. On the other hand, knowledge of Aristotle, Ptolemy, medieval alchemy, or medieval and classical legends might be useful occasionally.

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

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

[Spriteless]

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

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

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

[Mastikator]

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

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

[NichG]

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

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

[PhoenixPhyre]

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

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

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

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

[Ettina]

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

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

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

[Jay R]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[NichG]

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

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

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

[PhoenixPhyre]

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

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

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

[LordCdrMilitant]

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

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

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

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

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

[PhoenixPhyre]

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

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

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

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

[Mechalich]

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

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

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

[PhoenixPhyre]

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

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

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

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

[Jay R]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[NichG]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Spriteless]

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

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

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

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

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

[PhoenixPhyre]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Spriteless]

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

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

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

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

[Brother Oni]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Jay R]

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

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

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

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

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

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

As I said earlier in the thread,

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

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

[Roger_Druid]

Hi all!

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

Roger Druid

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

[Bohandas]

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

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

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