A discussion of metagame concepts in game design

[heretic888]

Except that they are incredibly obviously not just scaled up humans. They predate humans, being almost as old as dragons. They have innate magic and resistances, such as immunity to cold and fire. These things make it crystal clear that they are giants, a unique race, not just jumped up humans. It's far more of an assumption to view their internal structure as human, than it is to view it as unique and supportive of their size.

Excellent point, I can concede that. My larger issue is more of the claim that giant humans are a biological possibility. They're not without some serious caveats.

 

[Shasarak]

I'm talking about the real world. Are you asserting that D&D giants are biomechanically possible in the real world? If you are, that's interesting because I thought the general opinion was that, with the possible exception of fire giants, they are not.

If you are talking about DnD creatures in the "Real World" that are just big versions of normal creatures then I can not really help you. It just seems like a faulty premise.

Likewise with respect to arthropods - as per the webpage I linked to in my earlier reply to you, my understanding is that an arthropod the size of a D&D giant scorpion would (in the real world) not be able to respirate and would also have serious exoskeleton problems. Are you saying that the website is wrong?

I would say that you could not really apply the web site to DnD creatures at all, so it is not so much that it is wrong more not relevant.

So what - giants in D&D have bones made of steel?

And they don't have lungs or other organst like humans do?

Not necessarily steel. There is evidence that bone can support a bipedal creature that weighs 18,000kg but what kind of bones would a Fire Giant have? Would it be logical to assume they were just "big human" bones? I would not draw that conclusion.

At what point do you accept the proposition that the physical, biological etc traits of the D&D world don't correspond to those in the real world? What do you think is at stake in saying "The physics is indistinguishable, it's just that the materials are different?" As if the nature of materials (biological and otherwise) in the real world was not itself a manifestation of physical properties.

If the best we have is to look at a picture or description and say, well it looks like a big human therefore it must be a big human, then you would expect that all the traits in the DnD world would correspond to the real world. Afterall Fire Giants are Red and they have Fire Resistance therefore being Red must give humans Fire Resistance.

In any event, the "Giant" entry in the AD&D MM opens with these words (p 44): "Giants are huge humanoids." As a feature of D&D, giants are inspired by fairy stories, myths etc about giants (eg this is why we have Cloud Giants). The person who first wrote down the story of Jack the Giant-Killer wasn't envisaging that the giants Jack was described as killing were, in reality, biologically feasible but radically non-human creatures who just happened to take human form!

So are you saying that imaginary creatures do not have to be the same as humans? That sounds more like my definition of Giant as opposed to your claim that Giants could not even support their own weight.

Treating D&D as a sci-fi game seems ridiculous to me. I don't get it at all.

I dont know what your definition of a sci-fi game would even mean.

 

[Maxperson]

(2) That is inlcuded in my (iii): it doesn't really make sense to think of the world of D&D using such scientific categories as gravity and fluid mechanics. A world in which beings have "innate magic" that combines with their muscualture to let them fly is not a world in which scientific categories such as gravity and fluid mechanics have application. (Whichi was [MENTION=205]TwoSix[/MENTION]'s point some way upthread.)

It does make sense to view D&D as having such scientific categories as gravity and fluid mechanics. It just ALSO has magic, which when applied to the former, supersedes them. The point you two are making not logical. If the world didn't have gravity like we know it, dragons wouldn't NEED that magic to fly.

So what - giants in D&D have bones made of steel?

Nope. Doesn't require steel.

And they don't have lungs or other organst like humans do?

Sure they do. Just not built like ours.

At what point do you accept the proposition that the physical, biological etc traits of the D&D world don't correspond to those in the real world? What do you think is at stake in saying "The physics is indistinguishable, it's just that the materials are different?" As if the nature of materials (biological and otherwise) in the real world was not itself a manifestation of physical properties.

When they differ from the real world of course. Giants in D&D are not human, so they wouldn't be built like humans inside. Humans in D&D are human, so humans are built like humans inside.

In any event, the "Giant" entry in the AD&D MM opens with these words (p 44): "Giants are huge humanoids." As a feature of D&D, giants are inspired by fairy stories, myths etc about giants (eg this is why we have Cloud Giants). The person who first wrote down the story of Jack the Giant-Killer wasn't envisaging that the giants Jack was described as killing were, in reality, biologically feasible but radically non-human creatures who just happened to take human form!

All humanoid has ever really meant in D&D was a mortal creature with two arms, two legs, a torso and a head in roughly the same spot as a human. There are exceptions of course, but humanoid has never equated to human.

 

[pemerton]

I dont know what your definition of a sci-fi game would even mean.

A sci-fi game tends to treat the physical reality of the world as more-or-less obtaining, but then tweaks things with speculative technological developments, permitting FTL travel, or something similar.

But in a sci-fi game we are generally expected to think of biological things as having evolved through some combination of natural selection and biochemical processes; to think of stars and solar systems as having formed thorugh some combination of nuclear and gravitational processes; etc.

In my Classic Traveller game, the PCs have used medical laboratories to undertake biochemical examination of various living things from an alien world, to try and identify which ones evolved on that world and which ones came from elsewhere. (Traveller posits a world with a fairly high degree of interstellar colonisation by humans and other sentient beings.) That depends upon an assumption that the fictional world - although it is, in fact, most likely physically impossible because including FTL travel via "jump" drives and "gravitic field" generators - correlates to a high degree to the scientific reality of our world. There is also a broader underlying assumption that the world is a mechanistic one amenable to natural explanation via scientific means.

None of these assumptions is true of the D&D world. Lifeforms in D&D are created, not evolved. The elements are air, earth, fire and water - plus (in some schemes) positive (life) and negative (death) energy. The performance of magical spells is commonplace.

This world seems obviously not amenable to any sort of explanation of the sort that would be recongisably scientific. It is not a mechanistic world; not a world in which the best explanations are naturalistic; not a world of processes amenable to mathematical modelling.

So are you saying that imaginary creatures do not have to be the same as humans? That sounds more like my definition of Giant as opposed to your claim that Giants could not even support their own weight.

I'm saying that once we start talking about human-like beings who can nevertheless support their own weight, we're talking about a world which has very different biomecanical proceses from our own. And once we toss in magic, there's no point in even trying to conceive of it as having natural processes in the scientific sense at all.

It does make sense to view D&D as having such scientific categories as gravity and fluid mechanics. It just ALSO has magic, which when applied to the former, supersedes them. The point you two are making not logical. If the world didn't have gravity like we know it, dragons wouldn't NEED that magic to fly.

Gravity as we know it - or, at least, as I know it - is a univeral force that all masses exert upon all other masses. (Yes, my knowledge of gravity reflects Newtonian conceptions - my general relativity is weak to the point of non-existence. But I'll plough on.)

Aristotle, and Aristotle's toga-maker, both knew that dropped or otherwise unsupported objects fall to the ground, and that bats and birds need to flap their wings to take off. But they didn't think the world had gravity as I know it. The idea of universal gravitation was still about 2000 years ahead of them.

In other words, envisaging a world in which dragons need to flap their wings to fly is not the same thing as envisaging a world in which gravitation as I know it operates. And given that the only treatment of planetary motion in an official D&D sourcde that I'm aware of is Spelljammer, and it's account of planetary motion has nothing to do with gravity at all, there is good reason to think that there is no universal gravitation in the D&D world.

What happens in the D&D world if a person tries to measure the density of their world by means of a torsion balance (a la Cavendish)? I think the rulebooks leave this a completely open question - or, rather, they assume that this won't happen.

Just the same as, in Traveller, the game just assumes that no one will actually ask what a jump drive is or how one works, because (of course) there is no coherent answer to that.

In any event, to return to the logic of the point that I am making (and that [MENTION=205]TwoSix[/MENTION] has made):

It does make sense to view D&D as having such scientific categories as gravity and fluid mechanics. It just ALSO has magic, which when applied to the former, supersedes them.

It's of the nature of scientific categories that they describe natural phenomena or natural processes that are not arbitrarily "superseded". That's what makes it science.

Consider this, from p 58 of Gygax's DMG, under the heading "Travel in the Known Planes of Existence":

uppose that you decide that there is a breathable atmosphere which extends from the earth to the moon, and that any winged steed capable of flying fast and far can carry its rider to that orb. Furthermore, once beyond the normal limits of earth's atmosphere, gravity and resistance are such that speed increases dramatically, and the whole journey will take but a few days. You must then decide what will be encountered during the course of the trip - perhaps a few new creatures in addition to the standard ones which you deem likely to be between earth and moon.

Then comes what conditions will be like upon Luna, and what will be found there, why, and so on. Perhaps here is where you place the gateways to yet other worlds. In short, you devise the whole schema just as you did the campaign, beginning from the dungeon and environs outward into the broad world - in this case the universe, and then the multiverse.​

The foundations of that are Edgar Rice Burroughs and co; not Newton, Einstein and Maxwell! There are tropes, but there is no default assumption that the world is one that resemble the real world in respect of gravity or fluid mechanics (given that he is positing that a flying horse can fly from the earth to the moon!).

That seems to me to be the whole point of the fantasy genre.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

A little tangential here, but as a math teacher I wanted to address this point real quick...

Actually, "the physics" says precisely the opposite: http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.edu/lectures/scaling.html

A giant with 3 times the proportional height, width, and length of a human being would not weigh 3 times as much. He or she would weigh 27 times as much (all other things being equal, volume is height cubed) as the human. The moment said giant stood up, most of the bones in his or her leg would collapse under the immense weight.

In other words, if a "human" averages 6 feet, 200 lbs then an 18 foot "giant" would weigh around 5400 lbs. You can't support that amount of weight without a deep structural change in the anatomical proportions of the organism: the result wouldn't be anything that remotely resembles a gigantic human, at least not in terms of musculature and skeletal structure.

An elephant is not a bipedal primate, nor is a tyrannosaur. Their musculature, bone structure, and anatomical proportions are totally different from ours.

There's a lot of stuff in D&D style games that is like this (dragons being able to fly with their listed weights and wingspans being an oft-cited example). D&D's world only obeys the laws of physics if by "physics" we mean, as pemerton suggested earlier, common sense tropes and not actual mathematics.

Or it follows real world physics except where it doesn’t.

The most common answer is, you know, magic. There’s certainly no reason to throw out the physics that still work while introducing semi-magical beings that break those rules.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

or maybe, they were just targeting the 70% of the market that lies within 1 stdev of their market center and you were in the other 30%?

Sometimes the simplest answer isn't deception, it's perception.

Oh, certainly! I would have nothing against them, if they simply chose to make a game for a different audience. They did it with 4E, and I dropped it after a year, and I held them no animus for it. I found a different game that worked better for me.

The deception is that they specifically said that they were making a game for everyone, which could be played by fans of 3E or 4E. Setting aside how the 4E fans feel about that, for now, they clearly failed to make it functional for serious fans of 3E; there are all these glaring issues, which could have been easily patched around, but which were nevertheless implemented directly into the core material. It's like they didn't even have a 3E-fan on staff, to give the material a once-over.

Boy did you ever take swig of that Marketing Cool-Aid back there in 2012/13.... What'd you do? Roll in the negatives on your Wisdom save?

I'm not going to fault myself for believing their lies. I'm one of the victims here. They are the ones who lied, and so the fault lies entirely with them.

That said, it's not the designers fault if you can't persuade the other people at the table to change some rule...

It's not necessarily the fault of these designers, if I can't persuade a prospective player to accept one or more house rules. Throughout all of 3E and 4E, though, the intended design goal was to move away from house rules and toward a more universal experience. Regardless of the cause, the current batch of prospective players is highly-resistant to house rules. Again, I'm not going to blame myself for that; I'm not the one who changed the environment.

 

[Lanefan]

At that point, though, we're just speculating. From every appearance, giants are just scaled up humans.

As almost universally depicted, this is indeed the case...with a few exceptions e.g. cloud giants, astral giants, etc. that kind of aren't entirely made of the same stuff we are.

The quite reasonable assumption we all make is that what's under the skin roughly mirrors what's under a human's skin. To make them thusly and have them still be functional there has to be something else going on, and my educated guess would be magic.

Either that, or what's under a giant's skin differs quite significantly from what's under a human's skin. Maybe there's an...well, not exactly an exoskeleton as it's not on the outside, but an internal framework skeleton a foot or so beneath the skin of the torso and legs that holds it all together...? That, or their flesh is somehow less dense than ours?

Lan-"me, I'm going with the magic-based answer on this one"-efan

 

[Lanefan]

It does make sense to view D&D as having such scientific categories as gravity and fluid mechanics. It just ALSO has magic, which when applied to the former, supersedes them.

Or works together with them to produce the in-game results we expect.

The point you two are making not logical. If the world didn't have gravity like we know it, dragons wouldn't NEED that magic to fly.

Though lots of other creatures would need some magic in order to stay on the ground...

All humanoid has ever really meant in D&D was a mortal creature with two arms, two legs, a torso and a head in roughly the same spot as a human. There are exceptions of course, but humanoid has never equated to human.

More specifically, in D&D the term generally applies to "monstrous" 2-armed bipedal single-headed races as opposed to "kindred" races i.e. those available to be played as PCs.

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

What happens in the D&D world if a person tries to measure the density of their world by means of a torsion balance (a la Cavendish)? I think the rulebooks leave this a completely open question - or, rather, they assume that this won't happen.

Beleive it or not, in my first year or two of playing this game - so, a long time ago - my character did almost exactly this!

Not with intent of measuring the density of the world, mind you. We'd just gone through an odd teleporter and were wondering if we were even still on the same world - I did a few experiments with pendulums etc. on each side of the gate and showed the "new" world had about 80% of the gravity of our home world, which told us we were in fact jumping worlds or planes through that teleporter (gate).

Fortunately the DM had a degree in astronomy/physics and could easily keep up with what I was trying to do.

Just the same as, in Traveller, the game just assumes that no one will actually ask what a jump drive is or how one works, because (of course) there is no coherent answer to that.

Which is odd, because a constantly-recurring trope of travel-based adventuring is that your transportation needs repair or needs a whole new propulsion unit built out of whatever spare parts you have on hand.

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

It's not necessarily the fault of these designers, if I can't persuade a prospective player to accept one or more house rules. Throughout all of 3E and 4E, though, the intended design goal was to move away from house rules and toward a more universal experience. Regardless of the cause, the current batch of prospective players is highly-resistant to house rules.

And as it took 15-odd years to get things to this sad point, it'll probably take another 15 to get 'em back. 5e is merely a worthy start in that direction.