Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Also, the question of how many people in the setting actually do a lot of flying is always there.
D&D General Playstyle vs Mechanics
- Thread starter Emerikol
- Start date
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
Common sense says that having your every wish granted will work!definitely leaving the common sense argument behind now
No, you don't. You can notice curvature at sea level, by watching a tall ship come up over the horizon sails first.
mamba
Legend
true, you can notice it, you cannot see it however. Should have written ‘to make out’ or something.
This was in response to ‘with flight that is easy to figure out’
With my point being that flight does not make it all that easy
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clearstream
(He, Him)
I want to modify what you say here, to strengthen the apprehension implied in your second sentence, by proposing that the default of D&D is whatever seeming of physics the group sustains in virtue of their
Knowledge of physics
Interest in narrating physics
Deliberate and potentially systematic exceptions
As others have suggested, their knowledge and interests may mean that what they narrate can be best described as a folksy common sense. That fits my suggested principle of "least difference", because what I am referring to is least difference from group norms of beliefs about the real world. It is obvious, but also crucial to observe, that fictional worlds lack physics. Nothing obeys physics in fiction beyond what authors know and choose to narrate.As to what authors know and choose to relate, they may make intended and potentially systematic exceptions to their norms. Picture a group who normally believe in magic. For that group it could be that what others call magical is just what they'd ordinarily expect. Spells, for them, may be grounded in normal beliefs just as making a cup of tea is for me. For them my proposed "magic" descriptor does no particular work. I contend that nothing prevents them from using other descriptors demarking exceptions... from their normal beliefs about the world.
A related group is that which has familiarised with and adopted some set of world beliefs that is supposed to be imaginary. Such as for a genre or a shared fantasy world. They would be able to say what should normally happen in a given circumstances and reject that unfitting to their adopted genre or imagined world.
Group baselines are probably whichever they hold most easily in common; and may be blended with and overwritten by other sets. There can always be accompanying sets of exceptions: what falls into normal and what into exceptional can (and evidently does) vary per group.
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The only reason I mentioned flying is that if you have ever flown in a small plane, hot air balloon or even gone to the top of a tall building is that you quickly realize the the higher up you are the farther you can see.
You don't need to experience something yourself for it to be commonly accepted. If your fictional world isn't flat or any other shape other than a sphere you should think about what that means and how it affects things like the horizon. Have a good enough spyglass? You could see a ship hundreds of miles away while at sea, there would be no reason for a person in a crows nest of that sailing ship to be a lookout and on and on.
Maybe most people don't think about stuff like the fact that someone on the deck of a ship and someone in the crow's nest can see the same distance on a flat earth. But if you start messing around with things like the shape of the planet in your fiction it quickly leads to inconsistencies.
You don't need to experience something yourself for it to be commonly accepted. If your fictional world isn't flat or any other shape other than a sphere you should think about what that means and how it affects things like the horizon. Have a good enough spyglass? You could see a ship hundreds of miles away while at sea, there would be no reason for a person in a crows nest of that sailing ship to be a lookout and on and on.
Maybe most people don't think about stuff like the fact that someone on the deck of a ship and someone in the crow's nest can see the same distance on a flat earth. But if you start messing around with things like the shape of the planet in your fiction it quickly leads to inconsistencies.
mamba
Legend
that is true on a flat plane too, at least as far as things not blocking your view are concerned
The only difference is that on a sphere the curvature is one of the things blocking your view, but that goes back to what @Umbran said, you can notice this just standing at sea level.
Guess I misunderstood why you brought it up…
I grew up in Midwest farm country, outside of the occasional hill there was never really anything blocking the view. But I've also been on mountains and an elevator something like the picture below and the extra distance you could see was obvious. At least it was to me.
Okay, but even still...
This is still false. Commercial airlines typically cruise at 30,000 to 42,000 feet.
At about 35,000 feet if you have a clear field of view (few clouds, and ability to see a 60 degree arc of the ground) the curvature at the horizon becomes visible to the naked eye. You may not notice it from your little cabin window, because the arc you can see may be too small. But the pilots can. Someone magically flying at that altitude would have an even better view.
That's assuming a world that is the same size as the Earth, of course.
But honestly, all that about flight is moot. Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the Earth back in third century BC, a couple thousand years before the airplane was invented. Being able to fly really isn't relevant to the discovery.
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The idea that most people believed the earth was flat during the middle ages was not true. It was just one of the many things that people pushed to say that people were ignorant back then.
