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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 4865317" data-attributes="member: 40961">Right, right... I just don't think those examples help much.  I'm pretty sure that pretty much everyone plays in games where water is wet and fire is hot and hiking through the rain makes you cold and damp.  If that's all realism is, then everyone's on board from the simulation fans (assuming they actually exist...) to the wildest high action superhero/fantasy gamers. Problems crop up when you get to things that are actually contentious.  How far can a person fall off of a building and expect to get up and keep fighting?  Just how close can you get to lava and still be alive?  If I want to knock down a cottage in which a brawl has broken out by chopping a support beam with an axe, how fast does the beam break, would the cottage actually fall, and if it did, how much would it hurt? Few of us have personal experience or a meaningful frame of reference for questions like these.  And complicating matters is the fact that many of us falsely believe that because these are questions of "realism," we not only have meaningful contributions to make to determining the answers, we, unlike those around us, in fact KNOW the objectively correct answer.  And some of us continue believing this in spite of evidence to the contrary in the form of dozens of people, similarly certain of themselves, holding fast to contradictory ideas. And then you get to the fantasy/realism issues.  If its been previously established that Durok the Dwarven Legionaire is an immovable rock in battle, and he's charged by a raging bull that's sprinting at top speed right at him, does he get knocked over or pushed back or trampled?  Or does he block the animal dead on with his shield?  Well, there are no dwarves in real life, or at least no the D&D kind.  Dwarven Legionaires, similarly thin on the ground.  Real life people can't stop a charging bull by sheer force no matter how tough they are because of issues like conservation of momentum and basic physics.  But this is NOT a real life person, its a heroic fantasy character with many non-real attributes, so who knows? This is a question that touches on realism, but which is fundamentally unanswerable if you just use logic.  Any attempt at logically answering the question is either going to begin with some shaky premises (like trying to objectively determine the characteristics of fantastical tunnel dwelling nonhumans), or its going to lead to more questions than it solves (if the answer is no, because its not logical for someone a dwarf's size to accomplish this, what about the dwarf's other abilities?). I'm not taking aim at realism as a whole, because as far as it goes its great.  But it only goes so far.  And once you've gone there you look around and realize that you've got a lot more ground to cover.  You're going to need some other kind of tool to continue onwards.</blockquote>

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