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<blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 3041064" data-attributes="member: 7240"><p>Fortunately, the rules cover most of it. Most things the PCs want to do are covered by the rules. And I find that the best way to approximate D&D is to use pre-modern European physics. There is a pre-existing four-element system that it is very easy to predict. The great thing about roughly Aristotelian physics is that the answer to how things work is usually the intuitive answer. A rock falls faster than a feather because the rock is heavier; things fall down because heavy things fall towards the centre of the earth; etc. </p><p></p><p>I concede that it's a little inconvenient but it seems way way more convenient than the alternative. Instead of constantly wrestling with major inconsistencies, you just do a little figuring of stuff, bookmark a couple of web pages and you're ready to go.First of all, you only have to give answers to within the nearest round. Fantasy characters do not think in seconds and have no way of measuring them. And this isn't really an inevitable question. Once you've established that heavy things fall faster than light things, there's not really much opportunity for characters to get detail finer than that.So, really, you're not doing what you said you were doing. You have started to define your own system of physics ad hoc. It's not a route I would have gone, myself, given how hard-wired the 4-element system is but I could see how you might make this work.</p><p></p><p>The one advantage of this approach is that it replicates how people think about magic <em>now</em>; my games try to give the feeling of how premodern people thought about magic. As a result, I tend to work it as an extension of natural law, not an exception to it.How, exactly? It sounds to me like you don't have any room for molecules or atoms in your world. In fact, you've got an elemental system that is more at odds with modern physics than the standard D&D one is. If you make magic an element and fire an element and make modern physics true, how do you explain fire-based evocations, for instance?</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="fusangite, post: 3041064, member: 7240"] Fortunately, the rules cover most of it. Most things the PCs want to do are covered by the rules. And I find that the best way to approximate D&D is to use pre-modern European physics. There is a pre-existing four-element system that it is very easy to predict. The great thing about roughly Aristotelian physics is that the answer to how things work is usually the intuitive answer. A rock falls faster than a feather because the rock is heavier; things fall down because heavy things fall towards the centre of the earth; etc. I concede that it's a little inconvenient but it seems way way more convenient than the alternative. Instead of constantly wrestling with major inconsistencies, you just do a little figuring of stuff, bookmark a couple of web pages and you're ready to go.First of all, you only have to give answers to within the nearest round. Fantasy characters do not think in seconds and have no way of measuring them. And this isn't really an inevitable question. Once you've established that heavy things fall faster than light things, there's not really much opportunity for characters to get detail finer than that.So, really, you're not doing what you said you were doing. You have started to define your own system of physics ad hoc. It's not a route I would have gone, myself, given how hard-wired the 4-element system is but I could see how you might make this work. The one advantage of this approach is that it replicates how people think about magic [i]now[/i]; my games try to give the feeling of how premodern people thought about magic. As a result, I tend to work it as an extension of natural law, not an exception to it.How, exactly? It sounds to me like you don't have any room for molecules or atoms in your world. In fact, you've got an elemental system that is more at odds with modern physics than the standard D&D one is. If you make magic an element and fire an element and make modern physics true, how do you explain fire-based evocations, for instance? [/QUOTE]
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