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Edena, I would be happy to take you up on your challenge if you could do what you have been asked to do at least five times on this thread: tell us precisely which rules (complete with book and page numbers) you feel define elvish societies. The only stuff I can find that is descriptive of...

Look: whether people like it or not, game rules are the physics of the world they are playing. Because all "physics" are are the rules of cause and effect in a world. That's what game rules are -- they define how cause and effect work in the universe. I don't know what your definition of physics...

I can get behind that. As I said, it's about consistency for me. Any world consistent with itself makes me happy. So I'm not even sure we have different styles. I currently play in a game set in 19th century earth and I enjoy it for its internal consistency just much as I do an internally...

But given that this thread was posted in the General RPG Discussion forum rather than the Fantasy and Sci-Fi forum, I have interpreted it as asking questions about game worlds. All I disagree with in this paragraph is your terminology. “Physically reasonable,” and “default physical reality”...

The Northeastern woodlands cultures, like the cultures of the Southeast, engaged in similar agricultural and clearing practices to the Maya along just the lines you describe. But the Californian and Northwest Coast cultures were very different; while they cleared for settlements, they did not...

For most of the past 4000 years, people believed that the universe was composed of 4 or 5 elements. Yet they still expected water to run downhill, apples to fall from trees and swords to cut people. In many respects, our expectations of the natural world are actually closer to the 4/5 element...

This is a very clear articulation of my position. I evaluate maps based on how logically consistent they are with the fantasy world they depict not on their resemblance to the world in which I live.

Uh... okay. Are you suggesting that the worlds described in Runequest, Exalted, LOTR, etc. are somehow significantly more consistent with the physical laws of this world than D&D is? Because I'm just not seeing it. What you guys seem totally unable to grasp is that I do too. I'm just working...

How does that follow? Some worlds have magic that is inexplicable. Some world have magic that is clearly systematic, explicable and predictable. Most D&D worlds fall into the latter category not the former. Otherwise, skills like Spellcraft and spells like Analyze Dweomer would not produce...

Have you read the Silmarillion? It explains a lot about why the geography of Middle Earth is the way it is. And the reasons it offers are radically different than anything I have read about our world. For one thing, Middle Earth is located on a flat disc; at least one of the stars is actually a...

As I mentioned in my longer response above, I find it really weird that people conflate "realistic" with resembling the world in which we live. Why is it "realistic" for a world with widespread magic, an Elemental Plane of Earth, interventionist gods and only four elements to look like a world...

Thanks. It's good to see you too. You should spend some time of CircvsMaximvs; that's mostly where I've taken my show these days.

FIFY.

So how do you explain all the elves winning and surviving things all over the place in D&D settings and adventures? You mean cliche. And I would say that it was harder and shorter than it is in the industrialized world today. I'm not sure it was any harder or shorter than life in rural Ethiopia...

I agree that "it's magic" is a lame excuse. But invoking that excuse is not identical to acknowledging that game worlds have different physical laws than our world does. A systematic interpretation of these laws, while it would likely produce different geology than our own, is not simply an...

That's true. In fact, labeling anything exaggerates how different it is from things similar to it. That's a problem embedded in the very nature of language. Now, we could decide never to label anything again. But we wouldn't be able to keep having this conversation, or any other, for that...

Try looking at the Rocky Mountains in Alberta for continent-cutting rivers. Check out the proximity of the sources of the Columbia, Fraser, Nelson and Mackenzie systems. Continental divides are so-called for good reason. Now, that stated, I'd also be inclined to evaluate what we can infer of...

For me, it depends on how similar the physics of the fantasy world are to those of our own. Obviously, the more similar the world's physical laws are to our own, the more important real world geology is to me.

That's what you're doing now. But it's a pretty hard sell for you to suggest that this is what you were doing earlier in the thread in the post to which people were reacting. It depends what you mean by this. One can absolutely make statements about how people categorized and conceptualized...

Here's the thing: D&D is part of a long literary tradition dating back to the Middle Ages. Arthurian romances and epics from whence the fantasy literary genre ultimately sprang was never about telling historical stories. It was about re-imagining past events, personages and stories in the...