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Do you design worlds according to fantastical physics?
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<blockquote data-quote="VelvetViolet" data-source="post: 7576603" data-attributes="member: 6686357"><p>I feel I’ve been misunderstood. This is essentially what I have been trying to say. Characters would experience the world the same way that we do, even if the underlying physics aren’t those of our real world.</p><p></p><p>My reasoning for this is that I see, for lack of a better term, D&Disms as being nonsensical compared to adopting a genuinely classical cosmology. The “breaking out of scientific magic systems” article I linked articulates this better than I can.</p><p></p><p>EDIT: Let me try and quantify this with concrete specific examples of physical world building I dislike. </p><p></p><p>The series Avatar: The Last Airbender has an elemental magic system and animism as part of its premise. The series doesn’t really get into the nitty-gritty of how bending works, although fans have speculated. Problems only arise if as part of speculation you try to quantify bending in terms of periodic elements. Fire bending outright defies the laws of physics by manipulating fire in ways are simply impossible due to fire’s nature as a process and not an actual substance. In fact, fire bending is implied to manipulate life force in some way since fire benders produce their own fire (and electricity) and with proper training can read auras. With the other elements, you run into the problem that defining them in terms of periodic elements means that any bender should be trivially able to kill another human being by ripping out their water, carbon, or oxygen. (This even applies without periodic elements: what are all things made of if not a combination of the four classical elements? That’s what the classical elements were in classical thought: the substances that made up everything in the world.)</p><p></p><p></p><p>The anime No Game No Life includes a sequence whereby a character exploits a wizard’s ignorance of real physics, chemistry and geology to win a game of materialization word chain. It has to be seen to be believed, but it neatly illustrates my problem with trying to use both real physics and magic systems that don’t take real physics into account. Logically speaking, magic is a type of science/technology and therefore should independently confirm the same things that real science does if the world operates that way. Gods explicitly exist in this setting, and it doesn’t make sense that they would design two different sets of physics to govern nature and magic. It doesn’t make sense that whatever non-god responsible for creating reality would do that.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="VelvetViolet, post: 7576603, member: 6686357"] I feel I’ve been misunderstood. This is essentially what I have been trying to say. Characters would experience the world the same way that we do, even if the underlying physics aren’t those of our real world. My reasoning for this is that I see, for lack of a better term, D&Disms as being nonsensical compared to adopting a genuinely classical cosmology. The “breaking out of scientific magic systems” article I linked articulates this better than I can. EDIT: Let me try and quantify this with concrete specific examples of physical world building I dislike. The series Avatar: The Last Airbender has an elemental magic system and animism as part of its premise. The series doesn’t really get into the nitty-gritty of how bending works, although fans have speculated. Problems only arise if as part of speculation you try to quantify bending in terms of periodic elements. Fire bending outright defies the laws of physics by manipulating fire in ways are simply impossible due to fire’s nature as a process and not an actual substance. In fact, fire bending is implied to manipulate life force in some way since fire benders produce their own fire (and electricity) and with proper training can read auras. With the other elements, you run into the problem that defining them in terms of periodic elements means that any bender should be trivially able to kill another human being by ripping out their water, carbon, or oxygen. (This even applies without periodic elements: what are all things made of if not a combination of the four classical elements? That’s what the classical elements were in classical thought: the substances that made up everything in the world.) The anime No Game No Life includes a sequence whereby a character exploits a wizard’s ignorance of real physics, chemistry and geology to win a game of materialization word chain. It has to be seen to be believed, but it neatly illustrates my problem with trying to use both real physics and magic systems that don’t take real physics into account. Logically speaking, magic is a type of science/technology and therefore should independently confirm the same things that real science does if the world operates that way. Gods explicitly exist in this setting, and it doesn’t make sense that they would design two different sets of physics to govern nature and magic. It doesn’t make sense that whatever non-god responsible for creating reality would do that. [/QUOTE]
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