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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2419353" data-attributes="member: 7240">Joe, I think you misunderstand what a scientific law is. A scientific law has no physical existence. All scientific laws are are human-created predictive systems, half math, half metaphor. A scientific law is nothing more or less than a predictive system. It is an idea not an object. Newton's laws of gravitation don't cease to be true just because we know that action at a distance does not take place. The law remains predictive even as our understanding of why it is predictive continues to evolve. So, D&D is governed by empirically observable scientitic laws.But laws only come into being when we observe, catalogue and predict phenomena. All that exists in the universe are phenomena. Scientific laws are human constructs. What we know about D&D magic is that we can predict it. These predictions characters record/comprehend as scientific laws -- expectations about how things will go in future based on empirical evidence about how things have gone in the past. As long as there is empirically-grounded predictability, people make scientific laws.So, why, then, can we predict what it will do with such accuracy? What is going on in the universe that makes this seemingly randomly caused thing act the same way every time it operates? Whatever that thing may be, telos, divine intervention, fortune, you name it, that's the thing that the scientific law is attempting to track. RPGs can only be set in predictable worlds. Otherwise the players have no power. Play arises out of choosing a course of action because you believe that it will succeed. All rational play arises from players comprehending or internalizing predictive models for the universe their characters inhabit. If D&D magic worked entirely by DM fiat, people would not play spellcasters because they would have no sense that their own choices and actions had meaning. I'm not. I'm saying that the scientific laws that are relevant here are the ones measuring the effects. In real world science, predictive models routinely outlive the mechanistic explanations for the phenomena they predict. Evolution was designed based on gemules, not genes. Modern kinematics was premised on action at a distance. The list goes on.</blockquote>

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