A discussion of metagame concepts in game design

[pemerton]

Every item in the equipment list in the PH is given a weight. The unwritten assumption behind this is that gravity exists, otherwise "weight" would be a meaningless term and he'd instead use "mass".

This can't be true, because "weight' was a meaningful term even before the notion of mass as distinct from weight had been discovered. (According to the wikipedia page on the Cavendish experiment, in Cavendish's time the distincition between mass and weight wasn't made in the way it is made in contemporary physics.) Of course it's true, in the real world, that weight is a function of mass, and of the operation of universal gravitation. But those equipment lists could have been written, without change, in the seventeenth century! Are you really saying that a seventeenth person who talked about the weight of things was presupposing the operation of scientific laws that s/he didn't know about, and - given the state of knowledge and equipment - perhaps even couldn't know about.

Ditto for encumbrance rules...they're irrelevant in a gravity-free environment

Gravity cannot be reversed by the spell if it doesn't exist in the first place.

I can't believe we're still stuck on this.

Surely you can appreciate that it is possible to know that unsupported objects fall, and that objects have weight, without knowing about universal gravitation? Surely you aware that people have known that unsupported objects fall, and that objects have weight, for somewhere between 100,000 and 1 million or so years; but have know about universal gravitation for about 300 years?

Given that those people were able to thinks, and talk about their lives and world, and imagine things, and tell stories, iwithout implying anything about universal gravitation, fantasy authors today can do the same thing. And do.

He also lists real world gambling games.

If you can't see by now that Gygax drew from the real world as a baseline on top of which he built his fantasy components, I really don't know what else to tell you.

Of course Gygax drew on the real world. So did Aristotle. So did the author of Beowulf. But you can draw on the real world (what, upthread, I and others have called "common sense tropes") without assuming that the real world is as it is in virtue of the operation of scientific laws.

the list of herbs and such is incredibly detailed in real world herbs.

Yes. My point is that people can know things about the real world without knowing science; and that we can imagine those things without imagining them to be grounded in scientific reality. (Just as Aristotle did, given that he didn't know a great deal of scientific reality.)

He gives actual elements in the game. The elemental planes are not the actual elements that all things are made up from. He gives us gold, iron, platinum, copper, carbon, sulfur, phosphorus, chlorine, silver, zinc, mercury, and lead.

The Greeks, who posited that the elements were air, earth, fire and water, knew of these different metals. But that these metals are elements is a modern discovery.

If the elements of air, earth, fire and water are not in fact the elements from which matter is composed, then why are they called elements?

A horse(or anything else) can't fly to the moon. He gives that as an alternative that a DM can make up, which means that the baseline is that you can't do it.

I've highlighted a key word. Alternative to what?

He doesn't use the word alternative, does he? He refers (p 57) to "nearly endless possibilities". It is a possibility, not mandated - but no default is specified to which it is an alternative.

Another Red Herring?!?! A made up substance that is campaign specific does not prove you correct.

I'm not referring to Spelljammer, I'm referring to the phlogiston theory of combustion, which was extent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

If you're not familiar with the history of science and the development of human knowledge over 100,000+ years of human history, that would help explain why you seem to think that having beliefs about the world - which human beings have always had - entails knowing scientifc truth - which, in fact, people have known only for a few hundred years or so.

*******************************

Molecular Agitation explicitly says that it affects the molecules of an item.

Yes. The psionic rules deliberately evoke scientific notions.

They also invoke Freudian psychological notions - id, ego, super-ego. But I've yet to read the poster who says, therefore, that it is a game rule that D&D characters have , by the rulebook, the psychological strucutres and processes that Freud posits!

On that latter point, I think that's because most D&D players don't use Freud as part of their everyday framework of thought, but do use molecules.

On the broader point, psionics are presented in an optional Appendix, and so can't be treated as establishing a default. And in fact a frequent reason given by people who don't like psionics in D&D is that they introduce too much scientific flavour into a fantasy game.

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=16814]Ovinomancer[/MENTION], to the best of my knowledge Galileo actually saw some moons through his telescope; he didn't just conjure them up in imagination and thereby conclude that Jupiter had moons.

 

[pemerton]

Tell that to Albert Einstein.

I was waiting for that.

Einstein relied on observation. The Michelson-Morely experiement had shown that light had no velocity relative to the aether. And the constancy of the speed of light, whatever the motion of its source, is a key assumption in Einstein's thought experiments.

Plato thought that scientific knowledge was able to be generated by pure reflection on ideas. He was wrong.

Also, in checking the spelling of and attribution to Michelson-Morley I came across this interesting paper: Chasing a Beam of Light: Einstein's Most Famous Thought Experiment. In passing, it makes the following remark:

Maxwell's electrodynamics evolved over the course of half a century and built on a long series of experiments in electricity and magnetism. An emission theory must adjust the theory, but it cannot alter it too radically on pain of incompatibility with those experiments.​

Einstein was not proceeding in ignorance or disregard of experimental results and their theoretical implications!

 

[Maxperson]

Surely you can appreciate that it is possible to know that unsupported objects fall, and that objects have weight, without knowing about universal gravitation? Surely you aware that people have known that unsupported objects fall, and that objects have weight, for somewhere between 100,000 and 1 million or so years; but have know about universal gravitation for about 300 years?

Given that those people were able to thinks, and talk about their lives and world, and imagine things, and tell stories, iwithout implying anything about universal gravitation, fantasy authors today can do the same thing. And do.

Surely you can appreciate and are aware that nothing you just said is relevant to my argument. Gravity existed that entire time, whether the people realized it or not. Further, Reverse Gravity is the name of the spell in the game world, so regardless of when people figured out that gravity exists in the real world, people in the game world are aware of it.

Of course Gygax drew on the real world. So did Aristotle. So did the author of Beowulf. But you can draw on the real world (what, upthread, I and others have called "common sense tropes") without assuming that the real world is as it is in virtue of the operation of scientific laws.

Yes. My point is that people can know things about the real world without knowing science; and that we can imagine those things without imagining them to be grounded in scientific reality. (Just as Aristotle did, given that he didn't know a great deal of scientific reality.)

This right here is the problem. You seem to think we're talking about characters in the game. We're not. We're saying that the game world is designed by Gygax to include approximations of real world physics, chemistry, etc. You can have the people in your game know about it, or not know a thing about it. It's not relevant what they know. The game world has these approximations of physics and other sciences regardless of what the people in the game world are aware of.

I've highlighted a key word. Alternative to what?

He doesn't use the word alternative, does he? He refers (p 57) to "nearly endless possibilities". It is a possibility, not mandated - but no default is specified to which it is an alternative.

Context is your friend. The context of his statements is Gygax giving DMs ideas on how they might change the game.

Yes. The psionic rules deliberately evoke scientific notions.

They also invoke Freudian psychological notions - id, ego, super-ego. But I've yet to read the poster who says, therefore, that it is a game rule that D&D characters have , by the rulebook, the psychological strucutres and processes that Freud posits!

Sure, I suppose it makes sense for these characters to use terms and knowledge for their psionic powers that doesn't exist in the game world. I suppose.

On the broader point, psionics are presented in an optional Appendix, and so can't be treated as establishing a default. And in fact a frequent reason given by people who don't like psionics in D&D is that they introduce too much scientific flavour into a fantasy game.

Regardless of whether or not it's optional, it's a part of the game he designed and shows his thought process. And psionics introducing too much scientific flavor is an understandable objection. It's not one that I myself have, but I've had difficulty with other people I play with and since I'm the odd man out here, I just sort of gave up on using them in the game outside of mind flayers. For some reason everyone is okay with mind flayers having psionics.

 

[Shasarak]

It's a premise: to learn scientific truth you actually need to investigate stuff in the real world, not just imagine stuff. That's why Galileo's opinions about the nature of the planets are connected to truth, whereas the stuff CS Lewise wrote in his Out of the Silent Planet stories is not.

So you say that Mathematics can not be scientific truth? At least it is consistent with what humans believed for the majority of their existence I guess.

 

[Ovinomancer]

[MENTION=16814]Ovinomancer[/MENTION], to the best of my knowledge Galileo actually saw some moons through his telescope; he didn't just conjure them up in imagination and thereby conclude that Jupiter had moons.

Sure he did. But moons around Jupiter aren't the same as a non-Earth-centric cosmos, nor was that discovery contested at the time. Galileo saw moons and jumped to a conclusion which, for Galileo, was true because he thought of it not because there was evidence for it. Again, if the Earth went around the Sun, why didn't the stars show parallax? They observably did not, ergo, they revolved around Earth. There was much stronger observational evidence in favor of an Earth-centric cosmos at the time, even with Galilean moons. The apocryphal stories about the Church suppressing Galileo have added to this myth that Galileo was the first real scientist and that he discovered the Helio-centric nature of the solar system. But, as noted, that's largely bullhockey. Galileo actually had a great deal of favor in the Church - the Pope himself was a fan and patron of his model. However, they told Galileo that he couldn't publish his model as truth because he lacked evidence -- evidence that wouldn't exist for another 100 years upon which the Church adopted a helio-centric model. Instead they told him he had to publish it as a mathematical prediction model, not the true nature of the world. Galileo thought that everyone should just listen to him, so he wrote a book where a character that clearly favored Galileo explained how the theory was true to a dunce of a character clearly modeled after the Pope -- even with an extremely similar name! For this Galileo was punished, but even there his close ties to the Church got him a very lenient sentence of house arrest which would have been lifted if Galileo publicly stated his theory had no evidence (it did not) and was just a mathematical astrology model (it was).

Galileo has his myth enchanced by the fact he was otherwise widely published and he caused quite a scandal. Oh, and also that he had guessed a theory that was close to what turned out to be true. Helio-centrism wasn't new at the time, Gelileo just made it a huge news splash at that time and still couldn't prove a thing. Kepler, who independently developed a helio-centric model that was far better than Galileo's at about the same time is largely ignored by pop-culture because he didn't get in trouble with the Church for insulting the pontiff while self-aggrandizing. Kepler also had a huge advantage in publishing in that he was Lutheran, and so did not require Church approval of his theories.

The Church occupied an interesting position at the time. Contrary to popular belief, the Church did not have Earth-centrism as dogma, meaning it wasn't held as absolute religious truth. Instead, it was in the body of work that was held as truth that did not contradict dogma. Helio-centrism didn't contradict dogma, either, but the Church actually held a standard that proof was required prior to adjusting what the Church held out as understood truth (as opposed to dogma, which is mandated truth). At the time, the observable scientific proof was on the side of Earth-centrism. That's hard for people to swallow these days because the evidence we have now is so overwhelmingly in the other direction, but it's absolutely true that at the time it was nearly impossible to detect that evidence (as I said above, telescope tech was really poor due to the inability to grind lenses precisely enough). The evidence that could be detected strongly pointed to Earth-centrism or didn't point to helio-centrism. The Church was actually defending science at the time, not suppressing it. Funny how our myths get made, though -- it's easy to make the Church the villain and we like to champion the underdog. The truth is that Galileo, while brilliant, was a blowhard most of the time and a rather unpleasant fellow when thwarted and the Church was involved in good science. Weird, yeah?

 

[Shasarak]

The problem is, most depictions of basic Giants e.g. Hill Giants show them as pretty much looking like really big Humans; so it's an easy step from there to assume they just more or less are really big Humans.

Lan-"never mind an actual game-world Human who downs a Potion of Growth and suddenly becomes 15' tall"-efan

An Elf looks pretty much like a thin Human, a Dwarf like a short Human and a Halfling like a Human child. A Merman looks like a Human with a Fish tail, a Harpy like a Human with wings, a Centaur like a Human with a Horse body.

It is a very easy step to assume that they are more or less just Humans wearing a funny costume or rubber mask.

 

[Ovinomancer]

So you say that Mathematics can not be scientific truth? At least it is consistent with what humans believed for the majority of their existence I guess.

I think this. I'm an engineer, and rely on math daily to create. But, I also think that math cannot be proven by anything other than inference, and therefore a lot of our knowledge that is based on math is similarly based on inference. This means that it's possible that the math we trust is merely a good enough model for where we are, much like Newtonian physics is good enough for most daily needs but unreliable for things like space travel (GPS satellites don't work without a relativistic correction to time, frex). Maybe we're incapable of doing better, maybe one day we will, maybe what we have is right, but there's enough places where the math we now understand just fails to work that I can't really fully believe we have it right. Right enough for now, sure.

Example: the imaginary number. It's critical to many functions in our daily life -- AC power, communications, etc. However, it has no mathematical representation we can resolve. For those that don't know, the imaginary number is the representation of the square root of -1. There exists no number that, when multiplied by itself, equals -1. But we have math that generates square roots of negative numbers that we need to resolve, so we've invoked the imaginary number to do the work. And it does the work -- we get answers we can use to predict and operate on. However, we've had to break our fundamental understanding of numbers to do so and apply a patch. That's not a feature of a discovered truth, it's a feature of a theory that has a hole that can be patched with a few assumptions. Who knows, perhaps there's a number concept out there that handles the imaginary number naturally and also does everything else we need it to do, or maybe we have the whole thing wrong but it's still hella useful anyway (all models are wrong, some are useful), or maybe it really is unanswerable by our intellect or by the current state of physical laws.

 

[Lanefan]

This can't be true, because "weight' was a meaningful term even before the notion of mass as distinct from weight had been discovered. (According to the wikipedia page on the Cavendish experiment, in Cavendish's time the distincition between mass and weight wasn't made in the way it is made in contemporary physics.) Of course it's true, in the real world, that weight is a function of mass, and of the operation of universal gravitation. But those equipment lists could have been written, without change, in the seventeenth century! Are you really saying that a seventeenth person who talked about the weight of things was presupposing the operation of scientific laws that s/he didn't know about, and - given the state of knowledge and equipment - perhaps even couldn't know about.

I can't believe we're still stuck on this.

Surely you can appreciate that it is possible to know that unsupported objects fall, and that objects have weight, without knowing about universal gravitation? Surely you aware that people have known that unsupported objects fall, and that objects have weight, for somewhere between 100,000 and 1 million or so years; but have know about universal gravitation for about 300 years?

Given that those people were able to thinks, and talk about their lives and world, and imagine things, and tell stories, iwithout implying anything about universal gravitation, fantasy authors today can do the same thing. And do.

As I've said before, this is all fine and dandy for the typical inhabitant of the game world - even the typical average-intelligence PC, for all that.

But for the DM behind the scenes it's not enough, because to build a consistent world/universe she's better off if she thinks through at least the basics and how they will (or can) relate to both our real world and to magic...because sooner or later it's inevitable some of this stuff will somehow come up, and better she be able to have confident and consistent answers on hand than to risk making it up on the fly and causing grief for all involved when the made-up things don't agree with other tings already established.

And it's thinking a DM only has to do once, as it can then be applied to pretty much every fantasy campaign you ever run from there on.

If the elements of air, earth, fire and water are not in fact the elements from which matter is composed, then why are they called elements?

Because any of the following might be true:

1. The word "elements" has multiple meanings; or
2. The default meaning of the word "elements" has changed over time; or
3. The term is being mis-used, either in Aristotle's day or in ours.

I think most of us would agree it's #1 above.

 

[Emerikol]

Its just a giant D&D double standard. Either (i) allow martial heroes to do fantastical things (because they're origin is magical, the same as everything else...or because hand-waving all the things we hand-wave for magical creatures), (ii) disallow the fantastical things of D&D world (that is no fun and not going to happen), or (iii) just admit that their is no rational high ground for the double standard...it doesn't have a basis beyond aesthetic preference!

I don't think anyone is saying that fighters don't do things beyond what humans can do in this world. It is how it is presented. Do you use author/director style mechanics or mechanics that still fit within an actor stance?

Trust me, no human on earth is going to ever kill a dragon with a pointy metal sword. Fighters do that in D&D and have throughout the history of the game.

For me though, if you feel the necessity of those style mechanics then we can just agree to disagree because for me those mechanics you might suggest wouldn't be fun. I keep reiterating we don't all need to play in the same group or for that matter even the same game.