Removing "Friction" In-Game?

[Wolfpack48]

Inception, the RPG!

 

[pawsplay]

Your body would separate into atoms.

 

[Umbran]

Your body would separate into atoms.

Nope. Your body, tissues, and cells are not held together by friction. There are stronger intermolecular forces at play there.

 

[Umbran]

What I'm asking you ... what would this look like? I don't want to get the science completely wrong in front of my science-minded players.

So, what would that look like?
Well, animals with legs cannot walk without friction.
Most other forms of animal locomotion will also fail.
It becomes very difficult to pick up or hold objects.
Trees cannot stay rooted in the ground without friction.
Objects on any surface that is not concave or perfectly flat will begin to slide until they hit a vertical barrier.

Nails won't hold buildings together without friction. Neither will screws or bolts. Welds and rivets will continue to hold.
Knots will not hold.
Most clothing will fall apart - even if you'd sewn the seams with polyester or nylon, and melted the knots of the seams, the very fibers in the threads will slip past each other, and the fabric disintegrate.

Most traditional ways to light a fire will not work without friction.

You cannot swallow solid food without friction.
Come to think of it, you can't chew solid food without friction either.
You cannot speak without friction - air passing by vocal cords will not cause them to vibrate if there is no air friction.

So, what sorts of things happen?

Most constructed items (those nailed, screwed, tied, or bolted together) fall apart.

The various soils of the world basically become fluids, and will flow like water. Dirt runs off the underlying stone surface, largely heading into the basins currently filled with water.

Almost all the tension in most of the geologic faults around the world releases at once...

 

[pawsplay]

Nope. Your body, tissues, and cells are not held together by friction. There are stronger intermolecular forces at play there.

Friction is not a fundamental force. It results from things like kinetic energy turning to heat, and from asperities (surface roughness). If those properties don't exist, your body doesn't convert kinetic energy to heat, and particles don't resist the movement of other particles. So you would just disperse.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

And you thought it was bad when Coily the Spring Sprite showed us what a world without springs would be like.

 

[Spectral Anomaly]

All bodies, all buildings, and all landforms just collapse like they were made of water and flow across the surface like a fluid.

This. For demonstration, drop a few gummi bears in a glass of water and let them sit for a few days. Then show your players what happens the moment any of those gummis are disturbed by something passing through them.

 

[Umbran]

Friction is not a fundamental force. It results from things like kinetic energy turning to heat, and from asperities (surface roughness). If those properties don't exist, your body doesn't convert kinetic energy to heat, and particles don't resist the movement of other particles. So you would just disperse.

Among other things, I am a physicist. To quote Wolfgang Pauli (of the quantum mechanical Pauli Exclusion Principle), "That is jot only not right, it is not even wrong."

At some point when I am not posting from my phone, maybe I will address some of the misapprehension of that... stuff.

 

[Richards]

I'm sure your local library has a book with the specifics to the answer you're seeking.

Go check in the non-friction section.

(I'll let myself out.)

Johnathan

 

[Stalker0]

It comes down to how much removal there is here.

For example imagine picking up a shirt, there are a few forces at work:

• The physical "rubbing" of your hands and the shirt. This is the interaction of the atoms just moving around and past each other and is often associated with the "roughness" of a surface. That is what I would consider "friction" for this example.
• Any electrical attractive forces. For example the classic "static cling" you feel after shirts come out of the laundry. There is going to be some of that still in any interaction with the shirt just a lot weaker.

So you will still have some ability to manipulate things through chemical and electrical attractive forces, but at the end of the day probably not enough to allow for any kind of world we know today. The world would be like everything was covered in the super most slick oil you can think of (which might be the way to present it in game just to make it easier for the non-physicists).

Definitely Armageddon.