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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Galloglaich" data-source="post: 4738978" data-attributes="member: 77019">The problem is, if you see lava, and it behaves in a manner differently than you expect, i.e. more like lukewarm marmelade (it doesn't burn you unless you touch it.. you can relatively safely crawl over it etc.) and everything else in the room does as well, you really don't know where to stand (not on the cannons apparently) because your normal assumptions of how the physics works, how the room is shaped, how cannons and walls work etc. are all useless. Now to me what you are arguing is basically that if you really trust the DM, you have a good rapport, maybe you can riff off of each other and have a fun time in an essentially nonsensical world.  Which is certainly a valid way to play.    But if you are a new player coming into a game, you are likely to be confused by this. "There is lava pouring into the room? I run away. I can't run away? I guess I'm dead, right?" The assumption that lava works in this particular nonsensical way is quite an intuitive leap to make unless you do have that close rapport with your DM already and are used to making things up on the fly together (or you just happen to know their gaming style real well) or are a really hard core gamer long used to playing this particular sort of game (I've played RPGs for 20 years and I never played a game where lava worked like that)  I think gamers tend to assume that notions they have in their head essentially from say, memorizing several entire rule books, playing for years with certain friends or spending tens of thousands of hours playing fantasy computer games, are universal, when in fact they are anything but.  These are the only ways you could really predict the "reality" you get in a lot of contemporary RPGs, which as I said before, tends to enforce the demographic isolation of gamers, which a lot of gamers complain about but I expect quite a few have grown very comfortable with. Not everybody understands even a little bit of real world physics let alone history but the fact that it shapes and touches our entire lives, means that it does tend to match our expectations, and sometimes even our education. Unless you have a specific reason to deviate from it (to highlight drama say), I don't personally understand the point of the general drift away from realism into some really wierd types of cartoon worlds we see increasingly in RPGs, unless you are intentionally trying to isolate the game and make it unnecessarily complicated and baroque. G.</blockquote>

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