prosfilaes said:
A simulation of the Earth's weather
How fortunate D&D doesn't take place on earth, what with its Tempests, Air Elementals, etc.
the simulation is of a world where the first approximation of falling is 9.8 m/s^2, no matter what the rules we're using to simulate it.
So the rules of
Toon simulate our falling physics? The spell
Feather Fall is part of a simulation of our falling physics?
Actually, you said above that a physicist in Masque of the Red Death will take Victorian physics into account, not PHB rules. To change the physics of the world is to change the world itself to be non-Victorian, which is not desirable.
I haven't followed this part of the argument closely. But I will say that
Masque of the Red Death has some of the crappiest post-2000 rules I have seen for anything.
If your character runs into a war veteran who lost an arm in a battle, how is he going to respond?
In my games, it never happens. It doesn't make sense for certain kinds of injuries to be inflictable only if the characters are not looking. It is flat-out impossible to have non-fatal limb loss in D&D. The rules don't support it. If you like limb loss as a plot point, run Runequest.
But in my games, limbs only fly when somebody strikes a killing blow. I don't tell my players "it's impossible to lose limbs in this world," but if I'm using D&D damage mechanics, I'm going to portray every single limb loss the characters witness as fatal. And that's not unreasonable because a large portion of limb losses in our world are fatal; all I'm doing is upping that number to 100% in order to reinforce (rather than undermine) suspension of disbelief.
I hate games in which NPCs can suffer or inflict injuries the PCs are incapable of inflicting or suffering. So, when I DM, if a blow takes somebody's HP below -10, I describe their head flying off or a clean cut all the way through the abdomen or some other colourful event. But, unless I want to use a different damage mechanic (as I sometimes do for exactly this reason), I do not describe combat outcomes that the rules can neither cause nor advise the players on how to deal with.
There is no way in the PHB to sever an arm, especially not in battle, so going by the RAW, your character has every right to call this person a liar, or insane, since no sane person would try and claim that they lost an arm in battle. Is that how you would respond?
No. I wouldn't put the scene in the game. Because it would deliberately undermine my players' suspension of disbelief and my job, as GM, is to reinforce it.
My cripples are Blinded or Deafened or permanently Sickened or Fatigued -- there are plenty of canonical ways to depict cripples in game. So I use those.