I can certainly imagine such a world. Maybe it's the Star Trek influence, but alternate dimensions don't really phase me much. A world with periodic elements isn't necessarily inconsistent with elemental planes, as long as those elemental planes are far-removed from the material plane and only accessible through magic.
In typical D&D settings, these elemental planes are assumed to be the origin of the material plane. Despite having no other causal connection, unless you’re playing Monte Cook’s Midgard setting in which the elemental planes literally cause the weather.
In my experience, planes are more trouble than they’re worth. Unless the setting is about exploring the planes, there’s no reason to have them. They introduce unnecessary complexity for little comparative gain. And most of the time they’re boring expanses of nothing interesting or redundant, especially the inner and transitive planes. That’s why I never use any cosmology more complex than the omniverse or world axis models if I can help it. I prefer to treat the planes as energy channels a la Wayfarers, not places you can actually visit.
I don't disagree. The difference is that I have zero interest in playing out mythology or folklore. I find mythology and folklore to be inherently silly, except as an odd cultural note.
"What if mythology X was real?" is not an interesting question that I want to explore. Mythology X was poorly-conceived, by people who had no idea of how things actually worked. Give me an internally-consistent world that operates on believable scientific principles, and I'll happily explore that instead.
Edit: One way to make mythology less silly is to take one or two elements from that mythology and transplant them into a believable setting. "What if greek mythology was all true?" is a silly question, because if it was true, then nothing in the world would make any sense. A much more interesting question is, "what if the greek gods and monsters actually existed, in a way that's consistent with the real world?" That way, you can address those fantastic elements within a context that actually makes sense, and the basis in reality makes the exploration of those elements much more meaningful.
Well, I love myths, folk tales and fairy tales. I love games like Mazes & Minotaurs. I think modern fantasy, particularly that based on D&D, sucks the fun out of fantasy. It’s not like the D&D ecology has ever made much sense to begin with, what with the wilderness being an ecologically impossible death trap and mind flayers having zero population growth.
Part of my reasoning for magic physics is that typical D&D settings typically make less sense with real physics because the background assumes myth tropes like young earth creationism are true, even to the point of dinosaurs coexisting with humans.
The spelljammer rules in particular, which are still canon to D&D, pretty much kill any illusion that D&D uses real physics. It arbitrarily divides magic from nature, when it isn’t even based on real world nature. That’s sillier than any real mythology.
And planescape outright says the world works because we believe it should. It isn’t objective like the real world.
As always, your mileage may vary.
I think people largely overestimate the value of "fantastical physics", from a DM perspective, it can be fun and engaging to try to think of how everything could work, but after a while, you start to realize that a lot of how the world could work is pretty much how the world does work.
Disease caused by spirits? When it is one or two diseases that are relevant to the story, this is creative an interesting. Perhaps the Great City was once ruled by another people, who were besieged by the current rulers. The current rulers uleashed a magical plague upon the denizens and they all died, thus why the current rulers are well, the rulers. Now the vengeful spirits are back, bringing with them the magical plague to infest the descendants of their conquerors. THAT is interesting, fun and creative, but when you start analyzing a world-wide concept of disease caused by spirits, it starts to become mundane.
At first, it's the Big Diseases, that's still kinda interesting. But suddenly the flu, or the sniffles, or the common cold are all now spirits, and functionally you haven't really changed anything. "Germs" are replaced by "spirits" and instead of being cured by medicine, they're cured by spells (though lets be honest even germ-based disease is cured by magic in most parties). Maybe the "big deal" of this approach is that you can reason with a spirit, but then really the outcome is the doctors are replaced by spirit-speakers and "Medicine" checks are replaced by "Diplomacy" checks.
People aren't inherently stupid. Most of the historical stupidity we European-descended folks who make RPGs was perpetuated by historical authorities through suppression of education, destruction of literature and execution of the intelligent. The problem we in the West here have is that we don't have a recent or ancestral tribal history to draw upon for an alternative approach to things. We apply a regression back to about the dark ages and then kind of generally assume people got dumber from thereon back. Even in highly animist cultures where "a spirit did it" may very well be the answer to a question, it wasn't left there. There was an answer for how you could go about dealing with that spirit and many of those approached involved basically primitive medicine. Without an overarching authority to reinforce the idea that you are helpless and removing those who would counter that idea, even "primitive" people are capable of understanding problems and developing measures to counter them.
What I find, even in reading this thread, is that it doesn't really sound like these "mytholog" DMs are "letting players in" on the secret that this world works different...until the players attempt to resolve a situation using their common sense, only to discover the world is incredibly nonsensical. Which strikes me a silly because the characters would know this already. It's sort of like a gaming jump scare. HA HA! Oh I got you good! Oh wait you tried the thing it doesn't work like that! Haha! Got you again! A player may not know which spirit is causing this disease in question (unless they're trained in Heal, then I'd say they might) but they would have a general understanding that spirits cause disease.
Ultimately, you end up with two types of players:
A: Players who just say "screw it" and stop caring about the world. Their approach becomes jaded and cynical, they assume they cannot understand the world because it is designed in a way to impede their attempts at understanding. So when a situation comes up they stop caring.
B: You get players who try to be scientific about the world, attempting to understand ever element, but you've designed a world that belies understanding. Sure, a giant may throw the sun into the sky every day but when either of them get asked "why" the whole system breaks down. EX: who held up the sky before Atlas? Anyone? Anyone? That's right: there's no answer. Why? Because Atlas was a story designed to teach a lesson. If you start to analyze the situation it breaks down. It doesn't operate on a logical basis.
-You may say: why is that a problem? Because we do. And when Player B can't sit down and start to figure things out, they eventually become Player A.
That’s a solid complaint. There’s really no single answer I can think of, given that we’re dealing with fiction.
I’ve never seen roleplaying games (or other media) that use fantastical physics run into this problem. Nephilim, Glorantha, and Exalted, for example, didn’t break down into angry complaints over how they made no sense. Tons of fiction uses fantastical concepts like holiday characters, the sandman, etc without falling apart.
Even in the modern day, a lot of people still take superstitions for granted. Probably the most universal is our tendency to anthropomorphize inanimate objects. Otherwise, a lot of people in developed countries still believe in clearly impossible things like the paranormal. I think it’s easier to explain this by analogy to childhood understanding of the world rather than pre-modern understanding, as the latter arose from the former. When you were a child, how often did you believe something happened because you wished it? That’s magical thinking!
If the world works outwardly the same as the real world as subjectively experienced by us, aside from superstitions like tarot and house elves being true, then I don’t see how players would start to go mad. The rules read by players should already account for any mechanical divergences (like RuneQuest’s spirit combat rules, or D&D 5e’s poison damage). Any excessive divergences from reality, like trying to find a new rain god or sky pillar, would be a matter of adventure plots and fluff. For example, I’ve never seen rules for the water cycle or photosynthesis (and rarely sleep deprivation), so it makes no difference if morning dew is painted by tiny dew fairies, frost on windows painted by jack frost, or the sandman causes dreams with magic sand.
As I said above, D&D for example already operates on nonsensical physics that only emulate reality in a limited and arbitrary manner. If you try to examine it logically, like I have, it falls apart under its own contradictions unless you invoke the meta-fictional explanation that it only works because we’ve been conned into believing that’s the only way things ought to work (Planescape even points this out by stating the world literally works because of our belief that it should work that way, and everyone knows that belief systems are full of holes).
At least with a magical world building, I don’t have to pretend the world building is anything more than an arbitrary construct (literally, if it was made by gods) with any number of inconsistencies. And That’s why I devise a pantheon composed of gods of the gaps, specifically to address these sorts of complaints if they come up. It may be silly, sure, but at least I acknowledge it is so.
Really, I’m more interesting in the adventure opportunities (and storytelling opportunities for prose). For example, That’s what makes the world building of netflix’s Hilda so fun. The characters just take all the fantastical situations they encounter for granted rather than getting bogged down in the science.
As always your mileage may vary.
