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Message: <blockquote data-quote="LurkAway" data-source="post: 5761809" data-attributes="member: 6685059">The comments under that article include counterpoints like "The reason it makes sense for the other things to be given a pass and  not the lava is that the those other things are intended to be  fantastical. The lava is supposed to merely be lava, or maybe especially  hot lava".I mentioned upthread about reference points. The more "realistic" the campaign, the more common reference points the group can share.However, as reference points fall away in high fantasy, how do you know  which reference points to hold onto and which to let go? How do you know  to treat that as "realistic" lava or "fantasy" lava? Do you hold onto some reference points -- at the risk of people poking fun at you for "overthinking" or criticizing you for being arbitrary -- or do you let go of almost ALL reference points -- at the risk of losing immersion and suspension of disbelief?(It's probably why games like Call of Cthulhu are so immersive, everyone  can more or less fall naturally into a 1920's "realism" and focus on  being in the game.)Not that the viscous lava thing ever occured to me as a problem, but it's not one of my subjectively important reference points. That a snowman should have difficulty eating hot soup probably wouldn't occur to me until I saw in a movie the hot steaming soup contact snow lips.Now that it's conscious to me, I think it would interesting to have a story about a snowman that can't eat hot food -- converting a potential implausibility into a compelling story element. Which leads to this thought...Usually for me, always saying "Yes" can be less interesting to the story than saying "no" via nodding to realism. Saying that bards can't insult skeletons to death is more interesting than saying they can. Lots of drama and tension and good stories (in real life as well as fantasy) is between what the character ideally wants to do vs a contrarion environment.</blockquote>

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