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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rechan" data-source="post: 4865275" data-attributes="member: 54846">Except that fire doesn't burn and gravity doesn't work in the same way, given rules. Let's take a simple example: water isn't wet based on rules. If a man in full plate walks into water, and then walks back out, he has to deal with things like rust and the leather straps rotting. He should weight more because all his equipment and clothing are wet. Etc etc. But there's just no rules to reflect that; water doesn't operate the same way on things. Instead, we just handwave the minutia because it's not interesting and would slow things down. I have multiple problems with things too close to the real world, not just in game terms, but in just assuming that things Just Are Like Our Reality. For instance, you have a player who says, "Making gunpowder is easy. I'll just make gunpowder. Now I have a bomb.. What do you mean I can't have a bomb? That's how chemistry works!" The issue is using real world knowledge in order to "beat" a situation. Then there's the fact that real world knowledge differs from person to person, so making assumptions based on knowledge can get you into trouble. We're not talking about Gravity not working. But, let me give an example:I was running a game where the party were in a Nevada/New Mexico like desert. They are going through a town. One of the players senses something Underground, beneath a building. The next player says, "Ooh! There must be a sinister reason for there being something underground; cellars are just not made in this sort of climate/environment!" I just stared at the player, dumbfounded. I've always been around basements. I thought they were pretty universal. But apparently they're very regional. The player was making assumptions based on the Real World, which were wrong because I didn't know better. Add the above point to things like genre conventions and levels of taste. Using the old example of the Fight over a River of Lava. Either the DM is ignorant to the real physics of lava and heat convection, or he's purposefully ignoring it because having a Fight over a River of Lava is cool, a convention of the genre, and he wants to capture that. So in this case the players assuming that going into the room with the lava = death, they are wrong.</blockquote>

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