Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6991092" data-attributes="member: 4937">I guess that depends on what you mean by a 'physics approximation' or how you imagine magic overrides it.  If by 'physics approximation', you mean that the world has all the physical laws that this world has, then those physical laws preclude magic (no action at a distance, physical quantities like mass, energy, and momentum have to be conserved, etc.).  It's worth noting that even in the real world, when 'magic' was believed to be a thing, the believers in magic were not so stupid as to believe in or theorize world that D&D superficially supports, namely - one were things happen just because a mortal wills them to happen.  The sort of magic D&D takes for granted, isn't even a prominent feature of the superstitions of this world.  The 'sorcerer' with his supernatural background - see for example Merlin's supposed parentage - makes sense in real world magical tradition.  Nothing is more obvious than that mortals lack the power to command the world to behave as they wish, but if you aren't truly human, well then maybe anything is possible.  But the 'wizard' of D&D just doesn't really have precedence outside of D&D.  D&D's wizard is really much more of a scientist, but a scientist of a world were such 'physics' as they have allows for magic.As such, we know that the reality of the setting precludes physics as we know it.  However the physics of the D&D setting work, they allow a person with a disciplined mind and arcane knowledge to simply think or will into being changes in their external reality - changes which violate physics as we know it in multiple ways.  Real world physics are difficult or impossible to entangle.  One aspect of them tends to imply other aspects of them.  All the disparate 'laws' we observe are actually specific manifestations of deeper underlying truths about the composition of matter and energy and the structure of space and time.   To fundamentally alter one portion if it would force us to fundamentally alter the whole thing.  The more you think about the D&D universe, the more you realize that the ultimate truths about how the world is arranged, what the world is made of, and how things behave have been fundamentally changed.   We should not expect physics as we know them to survive.  All we can definitely say is that at a very broad level, the world superficially appears to be the same.  This offers a very good explanation for why the game's rules as physics sometimes produce different results than what we'd expect if those physics were actually the physics of this world.   If falling is generally less dangerous in the D&D world than this world, it could be that it isn't that the falling rules are bad, but that is precisely how gravity differs in the D&D world compared to our expectations set in this one.</blockquote>

Verification