Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2419589" data-attributes="member: 7240">I understand what you are saying. I thought I had made that clear. Let's follow your argument through to show you what I mean. If you can replicate a phenomenon predictably, one of two things must be true:(a) there is an underlying cause and effect pattern between your actions and the phenomenon; or(b) the phenomenon is a completely random occurrence that is just happening to coincide with your actions despite the absence of any causal relationshipNow, approach (a) is my assumption. Approach (b) is, firstly, operationally indistinguishable from approach (a) and creates unfulfilling play. Either there is an underlying principle or pattern for the world continuing to produce the same phenomena or there isn't. Now maybe there isn't -- but how would you operationalize that awareness?What matters here is that every time the character performs action X, event Y happens. The details of how this is operationalized does not ultimately affect the 1:1 causal relationship. Okay. You can build a world like that. It still has physics. In fact, if one compares it to the situation in modern quantum physics, you're not even describing a world that dissimilar to the one in which we live. We only understand the top few layers. This has always been true in science. There is always that layer below that we can barely see whose rules we cannot figure out. Physics is just a coherent system for describing he subset of the universe that we comprehend. A physicist looking at the D&D world you posit would be interested in asking questions like "Why is it that no matter what chain of physical causation is initiated by the Fireball spell, the final result is always a 40' diameter ball of fire?" But that wouldn't stop the physicist from noting that every time you cast Fireball it produces an identical outcome.But if, in reality, there were no pattern, the "top level" awareness wouldn't register one unless every time a spell worked, it was just another random coincidence that had nothing to do with the actions of the caster.So, why do all these different events produce an identical outcome? You have only two possible answers for this question: total random chance or an incompletely comprehended pattern.All physics is is empirical evidence stitched together into a convenient and constantly revised explanatory framework. Furthermore, the princples of consistent, predictable action do apply to D&D magic. There is absolutely consistent, predictable action. Even if fireball #1 comes into being through the agency of an angel and fireball #2 comes into being through the opening of a planar rift, casting fireball consistently and predictable makes fireballs.But people understood metallurgy as science; through trial and error, they did develop adequate predictive models -- they found physical laws. They conceptualized these physicals in a framework we have abandoned but the laws themselves retain their predictive value. This is the point I was making with Darwin's gemules two posts ago.How, indeed whether the characters conceptualize the physics governing them is absolutely up for creative interpretation. However, as far as the players and the GM are concerned, both groups know that the rules are the physics of the world in which their characters are situated.</blockquote>

Verification