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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8673675" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, to answer this, and addressing [USER=467]@Reynard[/USER]'s questioning the good faith of my original post, I think it is a genuinely more rewarding way of looking at things. Instead of filling our minds with some odd notion that there's some 'right way' for the physical behavior of a dragon to be portrayed, we are acknowledging that the very idea of the physical behavior of a dragon is absurd, as it could not exist. Then we become free to talk about what is really interesting about dragons, which is our IDEAS of them and how we want our FRPG play to work! What are we actually after? What questions and issues might we run into? Frankly I got really tired of all the people telling me that my D&amp;D fighter could only do thus or such and not some other thing 'because realism', when there was nothing realistic whatsoever about the situation. The whole thing seemed to be nothing but a thin facade of words pasted over what the real situation was, which is what people saying these things like &quot;you cannot jump 30 feet&quot; were actually doing in their brains. It wasn't an objection based on physical reality, it was an objection based on their mental model of GENRE EXPECTATION. The trouble was a DIFFERENCE in genre expectation. I read the 1e PHB and it said I could be Beowulf, but when I tried to act like Beowulf, someone told me that wasn't 'realistic'. lol. Obviously we had different genre expectations! If I could talk about that, in plain words, as what it is, instead of being stonewalled by this nonsensical talk of realism and simulation in a mental activity where neither has any meaning beyond &quot;what my taste is&quot; I'd be much happier.So there's no bad faith, nothing like that. Quite the contrary, I want open discussion of the actual issues in plain words that connect reasonably with their dictionary definitions! I think that's a reasonable goal, myself.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 8673675, member: 82106"] Well, to answer this, and addressing [USER=467]@Reynard[/USER]'s questioning the good faith of my original post, I think it is a genuinely more rewarding way of looking at things. Instead of filling our minds with some odd notion that there's some 'right way' for the physical behavior of a dragon to be portrayed, we are acknowledging that the very idea of the physical behavior of a dragon is absurd, as it could not exist. Then we become free to talk about what is really interesting about dragons, which is our IDEAS of them and how we want our FRPG play to work! What are we actually after? What questions and issues might we run into? Frankly I got really tired of all the people telling me that my D&D fighter could only do thus or such and not some other thing 'because realism', when there was nothing realistic whatsoever about the situation. The whole thing seemed to be nothing but a thin facade of words pasted over what the real situation was, which is what people saying these things like "you cannot jump 30 feet" were actually doing in their brains. It wasn't an objection based on physical reality, it was an objection based on their mental model of GENRE EXPECTATION. The trouble was a DIFFERENCE in genre expectation. I read the 1e PHB and it said I could be Beowulf, but when I tried to act like Beowulf, someone told me that wasn't 'realistic'. lol. Obviously we had different genre expectations! If I could talk about that, in plain words, as what it is, instead of being stonewalled by this nonsensical talk of realism and simulation in a mental activity where neither has any meaning beyond "what my taste is" I'd be much happier. So there's no bad faith, nothing like that. Quite the contrary, I want open discussion of the actual issues in plain words that connect reasonably with their dictionary definitions! I think that's a reasonable goal, myself. [/QUOTE]

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