D&D General Science in D&D

generic · Jul 13, 2019

Xaelvaen said:
Depends entirely on the campaign we're playing at the time. Currently, we're playing in a world that was incredibly high magic - where the stuff of the unseen wove through the very fabric of existence, from indoor waste disposal (disintegration) and plumbing, to lights and horseless carriages, and teleportation booths on city streets to help you get around town, or even from city to city, faster. Then the magic started to change, and a chaotic semi-liquid magic began to ooze from the Earth, corrupting everything it touched.

The people of this world scrambled to create a great magic and science hybrid innovation to stave off the magical blight, and failed. Now, they live in a society where magic is innately wild and difficult to control, and science has reigned supreme - obviously in this case, science is a very important structure to not only observe, but draw upon in the day to day lives of adventurers.

I've had creatures with statically-charged bodily fluids, and snake-like constructs that would technically wield poison as opposed to venom. If this is a reference to something specific, however, I'm afraid I don't get it.

In the campaign mentioned above, magic was treated like a science, abused, and now is the most anti-scientific thing on the planet. The magical origins, however, were non-scientific to begin with - people just treated it as something more quantifiable, because they were an advanced society and believed everything should be quantified.

My worlds are indeed planets, and there is often a theme of astrological entities involved in some way, shape, or form. They are not always accurate by the comparison of real-world orbits and gravitational pull, but they are precise enough as to give the characters in the world realism. This implies, of course, a character cares about such things at some point in the campaign - for if something is not asked, it is never to be answered.

This may be my blasphemy moment. Most of my favorite worlds aren't 'planar' in your typical sense. I've never enjoyed the plane-hopping aspects of Dungeons and Dragons, perhaps a reason I never got into the lore of M:tG. This is not a statement that these are bad, or wrong things, merely that they've never been my cup of tea. In that vein, I usually keep a mystery about the planes and their workings, and make magic to transverse these planes ancient and equally mysterious. In the science-heavy world mentioned above, the planes are tangible places that can actually be walked to, if you know the right paths to take. Fiends live beneath the surface of the earth, accessible only by a cave deep within the Glacial Peaks of the north - and so forth.

Surprisingly, it has never come up. I have plenty of scientific-minded players, and their characters are often skilled in the same manners, but the table itself and all its components has just never come up in 20+ years of this group being together.

In summary, if we have the desire to play in a world where science matters, we do all the work to maintain our verisimilitude. Otherwise, it's a 'when we need it' nature.

All very interesting.

I have one question, how is science drawn upon in your campaign?

Do the players use firearms, lasers, and such.

Is there a Bose-Einstein Condensate version of Ice Storm?

How does this work?

generic · Jul 13, 2019

Umbran said:
As a physicist, my advice: don't go there.

One of the big points we get to when we look at the fundamental constants is not just that "Hey, the physical constants are exactly what they are", but "Hey, if the physical constants change even a small bit, life (and even matter) as we know it ceases to exist." This is one answer to the question of "Why is the Universe exactly the way it is?" called the Anthropic Principle - if the Universe were much different, we couldn't exist in it to see it." What *sound* like small changes usually have large impacts.

If you cut the speed of light down to, say, 500 km/sec, is that relativistic effects become much, much stronger, to the point of likely being noticeable to normal people. When some player raises that point, you're forced to shuck and jive, and if they know physics better than you, you end up with your player quickly proving your world cannot exist as stated, as matter likely collapses in on itself or fails to become matter at all.

It is better to say, "Light... travels? What nonsense are you speaking now?" and thus avoid the whole question.

Once you start implying that atoms are molecules in your world, Strong Nuclear forces are different, and all of these things, it becomes increasingly difficult to explain how anything exists at all.

Good point.

Xaelvaen · Jul 13, 2019

Aebir-Toril said:
All very interesting.

I have one question, how is science drawn upon in your campaign?

Firearms are certainly there, but they take on a heavy magical-technology feel. Form, afterall, is inspired by what we perceive - so even as they bend toward technology, the history is apparent in their structures and weaponry. Of course, firearms aren't the only weaponry - there's been a very solid blend of melee and firearms (and even archaic ranged warfare) being relatively well-balanced.

Magic is still just magic - just the practitioners of it are all Wild Mages, in one way or another. So Ice Storm is still Ice Storm, but it may bring down shards of Razor Hail (Gears of War) and do considerably more damage - or come down like snow and do nothing but entertain everyone. It's taxing, and lethal, and the reason technology became so dominant in the first place.

That being said, there is a great deal of technology trying to emulate magic, to bring people back to their same way of life as before. Large Tesla coils sit atop of city walls like giant weapons that blast enemies with jolts of electricity, some enemies will wear backpacks that are massive shielded batteries and use electrical discharge 'like magic' - very super-hero and super-villain style science.

My favorite aspect, that the players just recently discovered, is magical remedies versus pharmaceutical. Magical remedies, as presented by typical D&D, just make bad things go away. Remove Disease and Poison, Remove Curse, and similar spells are miracles. These remedies are still created, if you're willing to risk the chaos - and in a pinch, who wouldn't be? Scientific medicine, however, absolutely loathes these solutions and makes a large push for 'traditional' medicine. They obviously aren't so much as 'cures' as treatments for symptoms - they work, just not as directly, though the efficiency is similar due to the chaos inherent in magical cures. It has created an interesting source of intrigue for the players, thus far.

Celebrim · Jul 13, 2019

One of the big points we get to when we look at the fundamental constants is not just that "Hey, the physical constants are exactly what they are", but "Hey, if the physical constants change even a small bit, life (and even matter) as we know it ceases to exist."

You mean like Martin Rees "Just Six Numbers"? Yes, I've read that.

Umbran said:
As a physicist, my advice: don't go there.

My advice as a game master is never let a physicist assume anything about a fantasy universe works the way that they expect.

If you cut the speed of light down to, say, 500 km/sec, is that relativistic effects become much, much stronger, to the point of likely being noticeable to normal people.

Which assumes that the imagined universe even has relativity. I mean, I've already asserted that kinetic energy in this universe increases linearly rather than with the square of velocity, so not only are the fundamental constants probably different, the equations are likely different as well.

Even so, maybe if we were talking 5 km/sec, you'd have a point about relativistic effects being normal. 500 km/sec is not a speed which anyone encounters much in ordinary life. Do the math on a falcon diving at 200mph in this hypothetical world and I think you'll find the relativistic effects are still fairly trivial even for the falcon.

My general point is not that I'm an advanced AI in control of a giant starship that spends my spare time actually working out the physics of the imagined universe. My point is that D&D magic clearly is practical engineering in the science of the imagined universe. That is to say, magic works and is clearly knowable and repeatable within the universe. So what is called 'magic' is just a sort of science for a very different set of physical laws. A physicists understanding of this universe is clearly of little practical use in one that magic actually works, just as a wizard would find his knowledge of no practical use in this one.

This has the additional advantage of keeping high IQ physicists from trying to explain to you how the game universe works.

Umbran · Jul 14, 2019

Celebrim said:
My advice as a game master is never let a physicist assume anything about a fantasy universe works the way that they expect.

Yes. I agree. That's exactly the point. But when you tell them the speed of light, or how gravity scales, you are telling them how the fantasy universe works! They don't have to assume it when you tell them.

I meant that a GM shouldn't use the language of real-world physics to express how real-world physics doesn't work. Because when the GM says these things, they are Truth. And players should be able to rely on that truth, and work with it... and as we will see in a bit, that gets ugly.

Which assumes that the imagined universe even has relativity. I mean, I've already asserted that kinetic energy in this universe increases linearly rather than with the square of velocity, so not only are the fundamental constants probably different, the equations are likely different as well.

Do you know the phrase, "not even wrong"?

The thing about the laws of physics is that they are self-consistent, and interconnected. The thing about a fiction in which you change essentially random elements of physics at need to make your magic and game mechanics work is that the result is almost guaranteed *not* to be self-consistent.

Even so, maybe if we were talking 5 km/sec, you'd have a point about relativistic effects being normal. 500 km/sec is not a speed which anyone encounters much in ordinary life. Do the math on a falcon diving at 200mph in this hypothetical world and I think you'll find the relativistic effects are still fairly trivial even for the falcon.

You don't have to be going at almost the speed of light to see relativistic effects. They start becoming easily notable when you are moving at 5% to 10% of the speed of light. If your speed of light is 500km/s, you know what moves 5% to 10% the speed of light? Planets. If you have something like a solar system, people looking up at night will see the effects.

More important, if you have a planet the size of the Earth, with a rotational period of about 24 hours... the equator is moving at about 460 m/s - about 0.1% of the speed of your light. The poles will not be. Relativistic effects mean that means that as you move things from the equator to the poles, they will have to rise in mass, and that tmass will have to come from some energy input. How much mass?

Doing some quick number crunching, if I have my powers of ten right... for a 1 kg weight, taking it from 0 to 0.1% of the speed of light increases its rest mass energy by about 45000 megajoules, which is 10.7 million kilocalories. Burning 1 gallon of gasoline will release 11 kilocalories. So, to move a thing from the pole to the equator will take... 970,000 gallons of gas above what it does on our world.

So, you just created a world in which nothing ever moves north-south! We'd have to question how such a planet could form. You could say, "Well, it isn't even a planet, it is a flat disk on the back of a turtle - the fundamental point has been established anyway, and it'll show up in some way for anything large enough to call a world, whatever geometry you try to dodge with.

Well, then you say, we just get rid of relativity! But... that's going to be difficult. Because, you see, that the speed of light is constant is not a *result* of relativity. Relativity is the result of the speed of light being a constant and the laws of physics being the same in all inertial reference frames. And those things are *all* you need for Special Relativity to hold.

Oh, so you say, the laws of physics aren't the same in all inertial reference frames!

Fine, I say. But, that means perpetual motion machines are possible, which is a violation of the laws of thermodynamics - we have just lost conservation of energy. Which is fine, in a way, as it makes those fireballs easier to swallow. But it does beg the question of why anyone in this world does any manual labor at all - we aren't going to need magic to extract nigh infinite simple mechanical energy out of this...

And it is all downhill from there. It would have been better to say that the speed of light isn't constant, or to not name it. Or just don't worry about the speed of light at all!

You can have awesome great stories, never mentioning the laws of physics of the world in any detail. I suggest folks do so.

VelvetViolet · Jul 15, 2019

Celebrim said:
I do it occasionally already, and had a concept in place for a very robust system well before this article was written. Were it not for the whole thing about gamabiilty I mentioned which is based on experience, I'd do it far more than I do.

The way the system works is that spells have keyed descriptors like 'Fire' or 'Good' or whatever, and locations have descriptors as well that effect the caster level of the spell. So for example, an underwater cave might have Fire -3 and Water +3. A water spell cast in that environment would have +3 caster level, while a fire spell would have -3 caster level. If the caster level of the spell goes below the caster level required to cast the spell, you have to make a caster level check to avoid fizzle. If the caster level goes below 0, then it automatically fizzles. If the caster level of the spell is enhanced, then you can be risking a spell fumble (and I have spell fumble tables) for casting magic more powerful than you are able of controlling.

The problem is that you need to not only decide ahead of time where these modifiers apply but then also remember that they are in play. And what I've learned after trying to implement numinous magic through this and other similar methodology is that the amount of head space this takes up in a DM's brain is more than they can handle, because the cost of hiding information about how a player character's abilities work from the player is very high. And so far I've found that except in limited circumstances where you are trying to achieve some special effect the cost is too high for the gains that you get.

The decision to generalize the system to phases of the moon, times of the year, and other modifiers was immediately put on hold once I realized just how demanding it is to do this for geographical location. In short, I've been down the paths that the author is talking about. The core of the system dates back to ideas from the early 90's and I attempted an implementation of it nearly a decade ago.

Exalted is IMO an objectively terrible system.

Again, tried to do that as well by giving magic items a system of quirks. And while that does work for something like Excalibur if you try to do that as a general system that applies to all magic items and not just a few you are trying to make special, the amount of information hidden from the player that you as a DM have to remember and keep track of is just too high for the gains in atmosphere. I dropped the system largely after the players hit 4th level or so and all started to have multiple magic items on their person. It was just too much. I now do it only for a few items that are notable enough that they have a status comparable to an NPC.

One problem that I've discovered in this is the sheer amount of rules you have to smith out. I have a lot of how I want the system to work in my head, but my guess is that it's 900 pages of 10 point font single spaced type written pages to get it all down on paper and therefore accessible to both me and where applicable the players. As aggressive as I can be about creating house rules, that's proven to be too daunting of a challenge even for me to create. The writing is difficult, my standards are high, and I know now that as cool as it would be you might not be able to actually run the system once it was finished.

Further, just imagine what this system would be like were it finished. The amount of rules on scholarly magic alone would tend to mean that the vast majority of the gaming system was ultimately being devoted mostly to concerns specific to a single class - wizard - and to a lesser extent to spellcasting classes generally. We're already in a situation where most D&D rule books are half spell-descriptions. In this situation I envision needing 3 books devoted entirely to Wizards each twice the size of the supplement specific to other classes, as well as the 300 page book on crafting objects itself devoting a lot of subject matter to item creation which is mostly or at least most easily accessible to wizards.

I feel like you may be trying too hard. The article even points out that it is easy to go overboard. Why does the system need to be that complicated? Is there a simpler way to handle those sorts of things? The point is to have fun by giving a sense of mystery to investigate, not simulate a living world.

You could decide hidden variables by writing a short list of the descriptors for a location on an index card.

Trying to calculate astrology is a fool's errand unless your campaign keeps strict track of time in general. This is the case for the vast majority of fiction in general. It's even a trope called "writers cannot do math."

When I was discussing items, I was referring to the second section of the article "Magic is a force separate from Nature." The examples included spells like detect magic and antimagic field, magical healing versus a mundane heal skill, magic items being normal items with magic glued on, and speaking with animals being the result of a short-lived spell rather than being a language option.

Celebrim · Jul 15, 2019

BoxCrayonTales said:
Is there a simpler way to handle those sorts of things?

No.

The problem with an idea that isn't an implementation is that it can hide its complexity behind vagueness. It can make reasonable sounding suggestions which, when you unpack them, have a ton of complexity. "Speak With Animals" is a lesser version of the Tongues spells that just let's you speak in the languages of animals, and you could learn animal languages in a non-magical manner (as say Tarzan does) or as a result of magical gifts (as in the fairy tale "The White Snake). Fine, I'm way ahead of that.

But I'm also way ahead of that on realistic languages as well and one thing I've discovered is that realistic language is bad for gaming, because realistic languages create communication barriers that limit RP - and ultimately RP is good for an RPG. In the real world you have thousands of languages occurring in a pathwork quilt. In a fantasy world you tend to have a few dozen languages and most people (and most beings) speak some sort of Common tongue. Turns out that the fantasy world however implausible it is (and I admit you can make a back story for it) is better for the game. (See also magic like 'universal translators' in sci-fi settings.)

So now throw into this the languages of animals. Now you are throwing into the game yet more languages for characters to spend their limited resources on. Well, to begin with, to even make this enticing you probably need to make this 'The Language of Birds' rather than 'The Language of Ravens', 'The Languages of Pigeons', etc. So now you need to define which animals speak what. In short, just implementing this one small idea involves a lot of rules needing to be outlined and still probably means that investment in 'Speak with Languages' as a spell is better than investing in multiple animal languages to gain fluency. And critically, overturning that to make the two approaches more balanced, tends to limit the ability to speak with animals which turns out to be bad for the game by again limiting RP ability.

And that's just a tiny example. If you want, I can extend this to every thing he's talking about and show that its much more complex than the idea presents.

The point is to have fun by giving a sense of mystery to investigate, not simulate a living world.

With apologies, according to the foremost scholar of RPGs Jon Peterson, the original impetus of an RPG was exactly to simulate a living world - that is 'to play at the world'. I'd argue that the further you depart from the goal of 'playing at the world', the more you are departing from a classic RPG and the more you are creating something subtly but importantly differently.

Trying to calculate astrology is a fool's errand unless your campaign keeps strict track of time in general.

Well, we do keep strict track of time. Or at least, I try. Remember to check of the dates consistently is something I need to do better, probably by printing out a calendar and remembering to check off the days. Writers ought to do math. Tolkien for example kept very strict track of time and distance in his stories so that movement around the map would be plausible, for example. But RPG GMs should definitely do math.

Anyway, the ultimate problem is trying to make magic feel magical. We would like magic to be more numinous. And the problem with that goal is that runs contrary to the games goal of playability. Numinous magic requires magic to not be understood. But one of the things D&D does is protagonize magic users, taking them out of the background as mentors and plot devices and making them protagonists. Indeed, I think that magic as something other than incomprehensible plot device is one of D&D's enduring contributions to fantasy fiction. I'm not sure that you can have a Brandon Sanderson story without that underlying idea that no matter how numinous magic seems at first, it's grounded in some sort of set of knowable laws that could be revealed over the course of the fiction.

D&D magic feels like science because it operates in a predictable manner and is readily accessible and transferable. In effect the D&D universe makes magic science by default. A wizard player can read a spell description and then confidently invoke a spell with a predictable effect on the game universe. This is packetized narrative force - the PC gets to assert some truth about the game fiction.

Turns out that tampering with that while maintaining balance, playability, and spotlight is difficult.

I've seen several simpler attempts to fix the problem by making magic weird and random but I can tell by reading the rules that they weren't well playtested and will never work in the long run. One thing some designers fail to understand is having weird and dangerous negative drawbacks on magic use even if it could be balanced by one definition (equal chance of success in solving a problem like an adventure) fails a test of balance by another definition - "Is spotlight equally distributed among all players?" The problem with magic that goes spectacularly wrong is whether or not the magic user is solving the problem or not, the game is still inherently revolving around the actions of the magic user. If even the magic users failures create campaign or adventure defining problems, then its still all about the magic user.

VelvetViolet · Jul 17, 2019

Celebrim said:
No.

The problem with an idea that isn't an implementation is that it can hide its complexity behind vagueness. It can make reasonable sounding suggestions which, when you unpack them, have a ton of complexity. "Speak With Animals" is a lesser version of the Tongues spells that just let's you speak in the languages of animals, and you could learn animal languages in a non-magical manner (as say Tarzan does) or as a result of magical gifts (as in the fairy tale "The White Snake). Fine, I'm way ahead of that.

But I'm also way ahead of that on realistic languages as well and one thing I've discovered is that realistic language is bad for gaming, because realistic languages create communication barriers that limit RP - and ultimately RP is good for an RPG. In the real world you have thousands of languages occurring in a pathwork quilt. In a fantasy world you tend to have a few dozen languages and most people (and most beings) speak some sort of Common tongue. Turns out that the fantasy world however implausible it is (and I admit you can make a back story for it) is better for the game. (See also magic like 'universal translators' in sci-fi settings.)

So now throw into this the languages of animals. Now you are throwing into the game yet more languages for characters to spend their limited resources on. Well, to begin with, to even make this enticing you probably need to make this 'The Language of Birds' rather than 'The Language of Ravens', 'The Languages of Pigeons', etc. So now you need to define which animals speak what. In short, just implementing this one small idea involves a lot of rules needing to be outlined and still probably means that investment in 'Speak with Languages' as a spell is better than investing in multiple animal languages to gain fluency. And critically, overturning that to make the two approaches more balanced, tends to limit the ability to speak with animals which turns out to be bad for the game by again limiting RP ability.

And that's just a tiny example. If you want, I can extend this to every thing he's talking about and show that its much more complex than the idea presents.

With apologies, according to the foremost scholar of RPGs Jon Peterson, the original impetus of an RPG was exactly to simulate a living world - that is 'to play at the world'. I'd argue that the further you depart from the goal of 'playing at the world', the more you are departing from a classic RPG and the more you are creating something subtly but importantly differently.

Well, we do keep strict track of time. Or at least, I try. Remember to check of the dates consistently is something I need to do better, probably by printing out a calendar and remembering to check off the days. Writers ought to do math. Tolkien for example kept very strict track of time and distance in his stories so that movement around the map would be plausible, for example. But RPG GMs should definitely do math.

Anyway, the ultimate problem is trying to make magic feel magical. We would like magic to be more numinous. And the problem with that goal is that runs contrary to the games goal of playability. Numinous magic requires magic to not be understood. But one of the things D&D does is protagonize magic users, taking them out of the background as mentors and plot devices and making them protagonists. Indeed, I think that magic as something other than incomprehensible plot device is one of D&D's enduring contributions to fantasy fiction. I'm not sure that you can have a Brandon Sanderson story without that underlying idea that no matter how numinous magic seems at first, it's grounded in some sort of set of knowable laws that could be revealed over the course of the fiction.

D&D magic feels like science because it operates in a predictable manner and is readily accessible and transferable. In effect the D&D universe makes magic science by default. A wizard player can read a spell description and then confidently invoke a spell with a predictable effect on the game universe. This is packetized narrative force - the PC gets to assert some truth about the game fiction.

Turns out that tampering with that while maintaining balance, playability, and spotlight is difficult.

I've seen several simpler attempts to fix the problem by making magic weird and random but I can tell by reading the rules that they weren't well playtested and will never work in the long run. One thing some designers fail to understand is having weird and dangerous negative drawbacks on magic use even if it could be balanced by one definition (equal chance of success in solving a problem like an adventure) fails a test of balance by another definition - "Is spotlight equally distributed among all players?" The problem with magic that goes spectacularly wrong is whether or not the magic user is solving the problem or not, the game is still inherently revolving around the actions of the magic user. If even the magic users failures create campaign or adventure defining problems, then its still all about the magic user.

How many examples do we have of pre-modern magic systems, much less ones that fail and show us how not to do it? Fantasy gaming almost never tries to defy the modern mechanistic model, so I don't have much context for your complaints beyond those that apply outside of magic like the abstraction over realism. We can't say pre-modern magic is inferior when there's such a paucity of examples to compare. Off the top of my head, the only one I can think of is the magic system in Nephillim, which is literally called "occult science."

I prefer pre-modern magic because it simply feels more interesting, logical, rational, and ironically more scientific compared to D&D magic. D&D magic feels fake and tacked-on, not holistic or believable at all. D&D magic doesn't feel like part of a living world, it feels obviously like a gaming convention. Simulating a genuinely living world would logically involve pre-modern magic, not D&D magic.

Take the example of tongues spell and derivatives. I can't think of any logical reason that it would work differently from the standard language rules other than because the magic rules say so. The use of limited duration feels random in D&D, when fairy tales and even fantasy fiction generally have symbolic or logical justifications. Star Trek's universal translators don't have that limitation, for example.

If you're going to argue that we should be simulating living worlds, then that opens a whole can of worms. The mundane vs magical healing example is pertinent here. If you have distinct magical healing, then that's going to result in people becoming dependent on it and forgetting to learn mundane healing. This is a key plot point in the Chronicles of Everfall novel series.

I could list numerous examples like the Tippyverse and so forth, but my point is that the excessively mechanistic D&D magic introduces just as much if not more problems with world building and so forth as pre-modern magic does. That's probably why D&D magic is only used by fiction directly inspired by D&D.

Paul Farquhar · Jul 17, 2019

Umbran said:
As a physicist, my advice: don't go there.

One of the big points we get to when we look at the fundamental constants is not just that "Hey, the physical constants are exactly what they are", but "Hey, if the physical constants change even a small bit, life (and even matter) as we know it ceases to exist." This is one answer to the question of "Why is the Universe exactly the way it is?" called the Anthropic Principle - if the Universe were much different, we couldn't exist in it to see it." What *sound* like small changes usually have large impacts.

If you cut the speed of light down to, say, 500 km/sec, is that relativistic effects become much, much stronger, to the point of likely being noticeable to normal people. When some player raises that point, you're forced to shuck and jive, and if they know physics better than you, you end up with your player quickly proving your world cannot exist as stated, as matter likely collapses in on itself or fails to become matter at all.

It is better to say, "Light... travels? What nonsense are you speaking now?" and thus avoid the whole question.

Also a professional physicist, and I support this statement.

If you think you understand how science works in this world you really, really don't. So it would be silly to try and apply it to a fantasy world.

Celebrim · Jul 17, 2019

BoxCrayonTales said:
How many examples do we have of pre-modern magic systems, much less ones that fail and show us how not to do it? Fantasy gaming almost never tries to defy the modern mechanistic model, so I don't have much context for your complaints beyond those that apply outside of magic like the abstraction over realism. We can't say pre-modern magic is inferior when there's such a paucity of examples to compare.

I'm not sure I understand the terms you've defined here. What do you mean by "pre-modern magic systems"?

I prefer pre-modern magic because it simply feels more interesting, logical, rational, and ironically more scientific compared to D&D magic. D&D magic feels fake and tacked-on, not holistic or believable at all. D&D magic doesn't feel like part of a living world, it feels obviously like a gaming convention. Simulating a genuinely living world would logically involve pre-modern magic, not D&D magic.

I feel like that involves a lot of feelings and that feelings are highly subjective things. I don't understand how you go from something feeling interesting to logically requiring something, and I'm still not sure how you define "pre-modern magic". Is that different from "pre-modern magic systems"? What are the characteristics of "pre-modern magic"?

Take the example of tonguesspell and derivatives. I can't think of any logical reason that it would work differently from the standard language rules other than because the magic rules say so.

I have no idea what you mean here. What would a tongues spell that worked like standard language rules look like in your opinion and why is it logical that the tongues spell would work like standard language?

In it's background, "Tongues" is like most spells in D&D based off Biblical miracles which Gygax owing it his background was very familiar with. So in this case Tongues in some sense emulates the logic of receiving the ability to speak in and understand tongues which you do not know as a temporary divine revelation.

The use of limited duration feels random in D&D, when fairy tales and even fantasy fiction generally have symbolic or logical justifications.

I don't understand. What do you mean by "symbolic or logical justifications"? And when you mention fairy tales and fantasy fiction, which ones in particular are you thinking of?

Star Trek's universal translators don't have that limitation, for example.

Yes, but Star Trek's universal translator is meant to be scientific and not a divine revelation. On the other hand, Star Trek's universal translator is from one perspective probably more fantastic than a divine revelation, something that Douglas Adams lampshades with his 'Babel Fish' jokes. Based on what we know of current science, the existence of what would essentially be an instantaneous universal decryption device is less probable than divine revelation. And for that matter, Star Trek isn't as clear cut science fiction as you might think, and might be a classic case of Science Fantasy - elven wizards (Spock and his mind probes) and space orcs (Klingons). All the technobabble merely provides a setting veneer behind which is often just magic and fantasy.

The mundane vs magical healing example is pertinent here. If you have distinct magical healing, then that's going to result in people becoming dependent on it and forgetting to learn mundane healing. This is a key plot point in the Chronicles of Everfall novel series.

Based on my play experiences in systems that have both mundane healing skill and magical healing, this doesn't seem to be true. If players chose to totally forgo mundane healing in favor of magical healing, then you might have a point. But in every game system where both are available, players learn both mundane healing skill and magical healing ability. Further, since we can assume players probably have greater than normal access to magical healing, we can presume that for the rest of the community as a whole mundane healing ability is even more important. So I don't think this objection holds in a general case, although of course you could create a setting where magical healing was so pervasive that healing skill of a more mundane sort had withered.

I could list numerous examples like the Tippyverse and so forth, but my point is that the excessively mechanistic D&D magic introduces just as much if not more problems with world building and so forth as pre-modern magic does. That's probably why D&D magic is only used by fiction directly inspired by D&D.

I'm not familiar with the details of the arguments around the Tippyverse, but in general I tend to think the issue that the Tippyverse is addressing, namely, "If the postulates of the setting were true, then would the setting actually exist as described?" is not one remotely unique to D&D but is pretty much universal to all speculative fiction. "Star Trek" is a case in point of a setting that tends to introduce a stand alone "problem of the week" which is then resolved by some methodology but then the neither the problem nor the cure tends to ever be referenced again. The full implications of the postulated world and its technology, economics, politics and so forth are never really reconciled together. I don't think this is a problem that would go away if the D&D magic system was less "mechanistic" (though I don't really know what that means to you) and if anything a less mechanistic system would just make it harder to imagine how the setting ought to be were the implications of its parts brought to their logical conclusions.

IMO, D&D magic is in one way or the other the most influential magical thought in the entire history of fantasy. Virtually all modern fantasy fiction is in one fashion or the other inspired by D&D.