When you say “innate supernatural power,” you are describing ways in which the fictional world differs from the real one. These things don’t work in real-life physics, but they are still ordinary within the context of the fiction. The fictional world is governed by different rules than the real world is, but dragons flying or giants not collapsing doesn’t break the rules of the fictional world. Magic does bend or break the rules of the fictional world. An agent such as a god, monster, or magic user uses some supernatural means to alter reality according to their will, to create some effect that would not otherwise happen on its own (or, one might say, “naturally”). In D&D, that is typically done by altering the field called “the weave,” or by entreating another agent to do so on your behalf.
Emphasis mine
The square cube law does not say that giant organisms cannot exist. It says that if you take something of size X and scale it up, things will stop working/get complicated/etc.
John Henry was a folk hero who performed feats beyond what a normal man can do. Hence, he had supernatural abilities. That's what supernatural means.
No. Cutting a mountain in half, though, is the most anime thing I can imagine. And that's not a dig.
Folk heroes/stories are also explicitly stories that lack verisimilitude - they aren't meant to be realistic. Hence getting back to my earlier point about the two camps and their fundamental disagreement.
Well, if real life physics allow the existence of giants, then by that metric they aren't supernatural. They are still an alien species by modern definitions of course, just like every other sentient being in D&D that isn't human.
Yes. This. Magic is nothing more and nothing less than what we choose to define as magic. Just because something isn’t possible in real life, doesn’t mean it can’t be possible without magic in fiction. That’s why it’s fiction.
This is a terrible misuse of that quote.
Suuure... but what would be the explanation? Typically, this is going to require drastically different physical laws that would impact lots of other areas. (Some) people really care about internal consistency in their fictional worlds.
