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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="robertliguori" data-source="post: 4152749" data-attributes="member: 47776">I think that this is the result of mixed-up terminology.  Physics is an interesting branch of science.  It has oodles of what and extremely little why.  But, and this is the thing about it that makes it used in the metaphorical case, the lack of why does not detract from the what.  The theory of gravitation speculates that objects move towards each other in predictable fashion.  The theory of gravitation could be true because of graviton interactions, or superstrings mating, or the Divine Will, or invisible falling elves pushing everything in the universe.  But, regardless of which (or any) of these 'why' answers are true, the 'what' is constant; objects fall in predictable ways.  Unlike in our world, the physics of D&D are not particularly granular; they do not say what happens on an extremely micro level.  But, they do exist, and they can be noticed.Now, it might be that the flavor of a Con-18 dwarf shrugging off a blow with his 30 hp is much different than the flavor of a highly-leveled 30-hp Con 10 nimble elf doing the same.  It is almost certain that the fluff of a 30-hp door experiencing the same hit will be different than both.  But if the rules are physics, then despite the difference in fluff, you will need to apply about the same amount of violence to each in order to break it.Here's the thing, though; you can't get around there being rules-as-physics.  If you adjucate everything on the fly, and events set no precedent and can un-happen as the story dictates, then the rules of physics are that reality is a giant quantum event.  You can't make that not the case without laying down and adhering to actual rules.  'Rules are the physics of the game world' is another way of saying 'The rules describe what happens in the game world'; if this isn't true, then you've got one unorthodox game.  Now, what happens when what the rules describe does not match what you expect or want? A rules-as-physics would suggest that D&D 3.XE was a very strange place where a trained fighter could unleash a deadly flurry of blows, but only if you could get a swarm of rats to run past him first.  The answer to this is not to suggest another 'real' layer of rules that prohibit the bag of rats exploit; it's to note that the rules imply this, then change them so that it is no longer true.  It is vital that all players share certain expectations about what the world is and how it behaves in certain circumstances; empirical evidence strongly suggests that when this is not the case, many games degenerate into "I shot him!" "No, you missed!"  The problem here is not a limited degree of editorial control over the story (that player A wanted the story to proceed where someone got shot and player B didn't); it's that Player A's expectations were that A's target's shooting was an inevitable consequence of the nature of the universe, and that B's expectations were otherwise.Now, if players want a universe in which causality and precedent aren't, and things happen simply because they think they should happen, then conflict-resolution makes sense.  If you have players that will be upset if their understanding of the world is egregiously violated, and others whose desire for certain types of events takes precedence over their desire for continuity, conflict resolution is not an ideal method of rules adjudication.</blockquote>

Verification