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"Tell me,” the great twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once asked a friend, “why do people always say it was natural for man to assume that the sun went around the Earth rather than that the Earth was rotating?” His friend replied, “Well, obviously because it just looks as though...

In 1e it was explicit how a magic-user gained his spells. He memorised each one individually and basically put it in his brain. You even had rules for how long it took him to memorise each individual spell. It seemed pretty clear that the forgettiing that took place was an explicitly magical...

I don't really get why it's an issue with the concept of dissociated mechanics that it tends to favour magic (in practice, not in theory). It's just a matter of competing priorities. If we believe balanced characters is a higher priority than associated mechanics, then that's fine. But for...

I think magic sort of gets around the whole dissociated thing to some extent because anything can be associated if it corresponds to something in the setting. (Although if you compare 1e to 5e you can see the mechanics of magic are now dissociated when at one point they weren't - although many...

I don't think Dissociated mechanics is a completely useless term, but it's not a terribly precise one either. I also think over the years a lot of people have got caught up in arguing about hit points as if it matters. As already stated they're so abstract that the distinction falls apart. In...

Yes. This all makes sense, and I said pretty much the same thing earlier in the thread. It's not an answer to my question. In fact you're demonstrating my point that it doesn't make any sense at all to treat realism as a binary state. I was calling for conceptual clarity. At worst realism...

Yeah it was sometimes a struggle to get someone to play a cleric. Wizards were very weak at low levels and keeping two alive in a party could be a liability. As well as kind of sucking, two thieves could kind of get in each other's way and you could always use another Fighter. Rangers and...

I just don't understand how we can treat realism as a binary state and as a continuum simultaneously. How is it possible to state that D&D is not realistic but also that it needs to be somewhat ground in reality? The first clause implies a binary while the second requires that there not be...

Doesn't this seem contradictory to you?

That actually seems to me fairly typically balanced for the time.

There is also, in Dragonlance, notably only one kind of arcane magic. Sorcerer's and bards with high amounts of magic don't really fit.

The backgrounds look like class write-ups that's all. Plus I was trying to work out why the Squire of Solamnia feat was really bad, and under the current rules most appealing to those characters that don't get medium armour and martial weapons - like say Wizards.

So if, as it seems on reading, backgrounds give proficiencies instead of class, and the Squire of Solamnia only grants medium armour how is the Knight of Solamna/Fighter meant to gain Heavy Armour Proficiency?

100ft fall = 1d4+1d6 Exhaustion Damage. That gives you around about 42% survival rate, but the survivors will probably be in a mess for a while.

Well supposedly you interpret hit points as not necessarily reflecting actual damage but near misses etc. Hard to do that when you fall 100ft and hit the ground which is why it bothers people. And yes, the fall may not kill you, but you probably won't be getting up and getting on with the day...

I think we also need to be careful with the argument that because something is conventional and doesn't break verisimiltude due to convention we should be willing to ignore reality breaking in other contexts. Eg. It's completely ridiculous that a human sized fighter can fight a giant, but...

There's this weird thing that happens when people want to say the fighter can do magical things but that those things are actually mundane. I'm all for giving the fighter some kind of magical physical abilities, but if the fighter can just jump onto the roofs of buildings I want some...

This debate puzzles me, hence my jokes earlier. Surely there is simply no way to reasonably think about it except in regards to more or less realistic in respect to particular areas. It's inherently comparative not binary. It's also inherently selective being more realistic in some areas and...

Good point! Just because the DM describes an NPC as having poor teeth doesn't mean we should assume that's related to dental hygeine in any way. D&D is a fantasy game, so it's just as likely they're suffering from some magical curse. It may be worth spending and hour or two of game time...

Because D&D is completely indifferent to any concerns of realism you really should check with your GM about whether certain things apply. For example, does your character need to eat and drink? Do they need warm clothing in a cold environment? Do they need a boat to travel across the ocean or...