D&D General Playstyle vs Mechanics


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one is created by a wizard, the other by an engineer
Science isn't a power source, it's a method for understanding things. You can make an argument for like "mad scientist super tech" but that's just artificers barely rethemed. Magical thinking is only not scientific thinking because it doesn't work. As soon as sympathy manifests real effects, you're just doing new science.
 
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In a world where magic works, magic is simply a part of science.

Science is the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained.

If magic works, it would be studied and applied just like anything else.
Sure, but that doesn't mean that scientific principles don't apply to anything, or even to a majority. Magic becomes just another force exerting influence. When it does, the results are different from what science as we know it would suggest, but sometimes, maybe most of the time, things play out like they do in the real world.
 

What do you mean "work the same as the real world"?

Fictions that involve departures from what is possible in the real world necessarily entail that, in those fictional worlds, the rules that govern our real world don't apply. Whether there are other possible rules that explain the fictional world is a further question. Generally, I don't expect the fiction to offer such rules - rather, I expect it to gloss over the inconsistencies and impossibilities.

Thus, if a movie has Godzilla in it, then I would expect it not to also include an elephant falling a couple of metres and breaking a limb as a result - because that would draw the audience's attention to Godzilla's impossible biodynamics.

More generally, I would expect the movie to handwave any biochemistry or physiology - again, to avoid drawing the audience's attention to the nonsense that is Godzilla.

To come back to D&D, it is full of impossible animals doing impossible things. That is enough to show that it does not treat actual biochemistry, biodynamics, physiology and fluid mechanics of flight, etc as default assumptions.

Or to put it more simply: in D&D, both birds and dragons fly. That's an obvious truth of the gameworld. Bernoulli's equation can't explain the dragon's flight, and so it makes no sense to suppose that it is nevertheless the default explanation for the bird's flight. The worlds of D&D have not scientific explanation of how animals fly - they just do, in the same way that mortals just have souls that can survive their bodies, contain their thoughts and memories, etc.
That is one interpretation of events. Not the only one.
 



Or an artificer... who is a magical engineer.

The thing is, I think that in a magical world wizards and artificers are the scientists. They learn and study the "physics" of the world, and then utilise that knowledge to produce items and effects.
True, but I wouldn't rule out actual scientists either. Or "natural philosophers" if you prefer.
 

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