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Message: <blockquote data-quote="VelvetViolet" data-source="post: 7575440" data-attributes="member: 6686357">In typical D&D settings, these elemental planes are assumed to be the origin of the material plane. Despite having no other causal connection, unless you’re playing Monte Cook’s Midgard setting in which the elemental planes literally cause the weather. In my experience, planes are more trouble than they’re worth. Unless the setting is about exploring the planes, there’s no reason to have them. They introduce unnecessary complexity for little comparative gain. And most of the time they’re boring expanses of nothing interesting or redundant, especially the inner and transitive planes. That’s why I never use any cosmology more complex than the omniverse or world axis models if I can help it. I prefer to treat the planes as energy channels a la Wayfarers, not places you can actually visit.Well, I love myths, folk tales and fairy tales. I love games like Mazes & Minotaurs. I think modern fantasy, particularly that based on D&D, sucks the fun out of fantasy. It’s not like the D&D ecology has ever made much sense to begin with, what with the wilderness being an ecologically impossible death trap and mind flayers having zero population growth.Part of my reasoning for magic physics is that typical D&D settings typically make less sense with real physics because the background assumes myth tropes like young earth creationism are true, even to the point of dinosaurs coexisting with humans.The spelljammer rules in particular, which are still canon to D&D, pretty much kill any illusion that D&D uses real physics. It arbitrarily divides magic from nature, when it isn’t even based on real world nature. That’s sillier than any real mythology.And planescape outright says the world works because we believe it should. It isn’t objective like the real world.As always, your mileage may vary.That’s a solid complaint. There’s really no single answer I can think of, given that we’re dealing with fiction.I’ve never seen roleplaying games (or other media) that use fantastical physics run into this problem. Nephilim, Glorantha, and Exalted, for example, didn’t break down into angry complaints over how they made no sense. Tons of fiction uses fantastical concepts like holiday characters, the sandman, etc without falling apart.Even in the modern day, a lot of people still take superstitions for granted. Probably the most universal is our tendency to anthropomorphize inanimate objects. Otherwise, a lot of people in developed countries still believe in clearly impossible things like the paranormal. I think it’s easier to explain this by analogy to childhood understanding of the world rather than pre-modern understanding, as the latter arose from the former. When you were a child, how often did you believe something happened because you wished it? That’s magical thinking!If the world works outwardly the same as the real world as subjectively experienced by us, aside from superstitions like tarot and house elves being true, then I don’t see how players would start to go mad. The rules read by players should already account for any mechanical divergences (like RuneQuest’s spirit combat rules, or D&D 5e’s poison damage). Any excessive divergences from reality, like trying to find a new rain god or sky pillar, would be a matter of adventure plots and fluff. For example, I’ve never seen rules for the water cycle or photosynthesis (and rarely sleep deprivation), so it makes no difference if morning dew is painted by tiny dew fairies, frost on windows painted by jack frost, or the sandman causes dreams with magic sand.As I said above, D&D for example already operates on nonsensical physics that only emulate reality in a limited and arbitrary manner. If you try to examine it logically, like I have, it falls apart under its own contradictions unless you invoke the meta-fictional explanation that it only works because we’ve been conned into believing that’s the only way things ought to work (Planescape even points this out by stating the world literally works because of our belief that it should work that way, and everyone knows that belief systems are full of holes). At least with a magical world building, I don’t have to pretend the world building is anything more than an arbitrary construct (literally, if it was made by gods) with any number of inconsistencies. And That’s why I devise a pantheon composed of gods of the gaps, specifically to address these sorts of complaints if they come up. It may be silly, sure, but at least I acknowledge it is so.Really, I’m more interesting in the adventure opportunities (and storytelling opportunities for prose). For example, That’s what makes the world building of netflix’s Hilda so fun. The characters just take all the fantastical situations they encounter for granted rather than getting bogged down in the science.As always your mileage may vary.</blockquote>

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