D&D General Playstyle vs Mechanics

In D&D?

In D&D magic is both extremely structured and extremely consistent.

Practitioner does X and Y happens - every time.
without much of an explanation as far as the underlying 'physics' are concerned.... you move your hands this way and say these words and X happens, you do something slightly different and a very different Y happens
 

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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.

Have you ever seen a godzilla movie where there are alterations to the world because godzilla couldn't exist in the real world? Pacific Rim? Reign of Fire that had dragons being attacked with modern weapons, planes still flying, radios still functioning normally? Of course it's all a bit silly but we don't care because it's entertaining.

In DnD I accept that dragons fly because the world has mythical creatures that defy the laws of physics that normal animals and humans abide by. If you feel the need to screw around with the physics of the mythical universe do so. I just assume dragons fly because they're inherently magical and magic overrides real world reality. Personally I don't need any further explanation and I've never played with a group that did.
 

I believe that Godzilla films* are fundamentally not concerned with realism or how things work but with depicting a monstrous representation of the horrors of atomic warfare. We are meant to suspend our belief and better judgment simply to take in the spectacle of it all as a form of visual media.

* Excluding the era of more family friendly Godzilla between roughly 1964-1984. But those even more so didn't care about reality.

Like I would also say that there are a LOT of science fiction books out there, particularly among the classics, that aren't particularly concerned about depicting reality or things working like they do in the real world. Many of these books are more interested in exploring speculative themes, ideas, issues, questions, and the human condition. The premises of many of these books would absolutely fall apart at the seams if you critically evaluated them in terms of their physics or notions of realism or believability.

I'm not overly concerned about any detailed realism in game because magic overrides our reality. Also, because I want to do what's fun.
 

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.
A distinction I was drawing above was between expectations of consistency, even as to being inconsistent. So one view put in this thread is that if there are world elements incompatible with what we know of the real world, the more consistent attitude would be a global suspension of expectations grounded in science.

What I pointed out is a well known category of thought -- broadly "dualism" -- which expects inconsistency. One with a dualistic attitude can accept magical elements while accepting that everything other than those elements can be explained scientifically. Perversely, they need draw no concrete boundaries around which is which.

One may point out that this seems irrational, which is accurate. A common step in games is to slip magic into the rational... ignoring that "magical thinking" in our real world is to some extent a rejection of rationalisation.

Returning to your thought, say that both dragons and birds can fly, there are a few models that can be predicated upon

A. Whatever accounts for flight in this world, it does so for both birds and dragons (this goes in the direction of your thought)​
B. Whatever accounts for the flight of birds, something else accounts for the flight of dragons (here I bin Occams Razor and help myself to as much complexity as needed, which I take to be one of @pemerton's objections; I do not deny that it's unreasonable, yet it's harder than it looks to say what exactly requires a dualistic thinker to meet "rational" standards of reasonableness?)*​
C. Nothing accounts for either. My objection to this is similar to @AlViking's i.e. that, barring dragons, if birds figure significantly in our play we may well base what we go on to say about them on our real world... and that will include any scientific knowledge we have about them. Just because dragons fly, doesn't mean that we will cease to say that birds lay eggs and instead come up with random other descriptions for them. The imaginative effort would be overwhelming! Rather, this sort of working from common experience happens again and again until we meet deliberate exceptions (so we may say that birds don't lay eggs and in doing so everyone will see that we are calling out an exception, not working from a presumed tabula rasa!)​
So this was a long winded way of saying that assuming magic to be rational -- to become scientific -- if it worked, should lead one to agree with @pemerton. Because once A is excluded by a world containing elements that cannot be reconciled, a "magical" thinker may choose B, but a "rational" thinker ought to prefer C! And that is especially true of a fictional world whose explanations need bear only the weight of all that which comes into play, but nothing else.


*To give a real example, the Catholic church upholds that miracles have occurred and that they cannot be explained by science. God accounts for miracles. But many Catholics do not denounce science: they accept that the Universe can be explained scientifically. I suppose a Catholic would say that God accounts ultimately for physics and miracles! But my dualist need not make that move.
 
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I didn't realise until this thread that when it comes to fictional worlds, I am a dualist.

With apologies to @Crimson Longinus who I now think was right in seeking a metaphysical construct up thread, I find no discomfort in allowing disparate elements in fictional worlds categorically different explanations (including no explanation.)

Possibly what motivates my dualism is that to our fictional worlds we are as gods. I can choose to say the world follows science (even including systematically explicable features that our real world lacks, as @Pedantic suggested) and even having done so I can still insert elements that are not consistent with the rest.

It's still reasonable to say it's all a gloss given how much will go unexamined anyway. I'm not arguing against that. And there is a pragmatism to saying that seeing as any element could turn out to be one I make into an exception, it may be best not to assume that any element works as it does in the real world (a sort of "recognition of contingency" to counter my "overwhelming imaginative burden" argument above.)
 

Returning to your thought, say that both dragons and birds can fly, there are a few models that can be predicated upon

A. Whatever accounts for flight in this world, it does so for both birds and dragons (this goes in the direction of your thought)​
B. Whatever accounts for the flight of birds, something else accounts for the flight of dragons (here I bin Occams Razor and help myself to as much complexity as needed, which I take to be one of @pemerton's objections; I do not deny that it's unreasonable, yet it's harder than it looks to say what exactly requires a dualistic thinker to meet "rational" standards of reasonableness?)*​
C. Nothing accounts for either. My objection to this is similar to @AlViking's i.e. that, barring dragons, if birds figure significantly in our play we may well base what we go on to say about them on our real world... and that will include any scientific knowledge we have about them. Just because dragons fly, doesn't mean that we will cease to say that birds lay eggs and instead come up with random other descriptions for them. The imaginative effort would be overwhelming! Rather, this sort of working from common experience happens again and again until we meet deliberate exceptions (so we may say that birds don't lay eggs and in doing so everyone will see that we are calling out an exception, not working from a presumed tabula rasa!)​
Nothing in any D&D book ever - at least that I'm aware of - suggests that dragon flight is to be explained differently from bird flight.

Brining in whether or not birds lay eggs seems to me to be a complete red herring - the fact that birds lay eggs is a banal, common sense fact about them, known to all humans since human began. It has nothing to with assumptions about scientific truth.

But nothing in the play of D&D is ever going to require applying Bernoulli's equation to understand bird flight. Nor biochemistry to understand how gestation of a chick within an egg takes place.

So this was a long winded way of saying that assuming magic to be rational -- to become scientific -- if it worked, should lead one to agree with @pemerton. Because once A is excluded by a world containing elements that cannot be reconciled, a "magical" thinker may choose B, but a "rational" thinker ought to prefer C! And that is especially true of a fictional world whose explanations need bear only the weight of all that which comes into play, but nothing else.
Well, I do agree with me. But I don't see this as rational vs magical. Rather, there is nothing in any D&D book I'm aware of that suggests that dragon flight is magical. For instance, anti-magic shells can stop dragon breath, but have never stopped dragon flight.

the Catholic church upholds that miracles have occurred and that they cannot be explained by science. God accounts for miracles. But many Catholics do not denounce science: they accept that the Universe can be explained scientifically. I suppose a Catholic would say that God accounts ultimately for physics and miracles! But my dualist need not make that move.
To the best of my understanding, no mainstream contemporary Catholic philosopher or theologian takes the view that some everyday, commonplace event - like a dragon or a wyvern or a chimera flying, or a giant scorpion respiring, in the world of D&D - is a continuous series of miracles. And philosopher who have appealed to miraculous intervention to explain things like motion, or the coherent correlation of mind and matter, have not done so to explain departures from what otherwise would be the operation of natural law.
 

I think these are the sort of things most people gloss over in D&D, thought they're interesting to me. I certainly have thought about metaphysics of Artra, even though it obviously is not super detailed. But I have at least a rough framework I can extrapolate from.

And whilst, normal laws of physics + rare magical exceptions framework might work if the exceptions truly were rare, I don't think it is a good fit for a blatantly magical world where those exceptions are everywhere. This is not to say that nothing needs to work according to our real world physics, but at least I would expect "magic" to be intertined into the working of the world on rather fundamental level.

Settings where I feel things like these thing actually tend to come up in play, are urban fantasy, where supernatural elements are placed in th real world. That I find, tends to often sort of invite trying to explain the supernatural scientifically, and usually sort of has to assume that most of our real world science actually works like we thingk it does. So then we have discussions about what aspect of sunlight actuallly hurts vampires and can we replicate it with an UV lamp etc.
 
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All I've been trying to say is that from a practical standpoint I don't think it matters why dragons fly unless you've decided that you need to reinvent everything about how the world works in your fiction. It is also generally easier for most people to visualize a world where everything works like normal and we just suspend disbelief a little bit when it comes to impossible monsters.

Writers do the impossible in fiction all the time. For example in World War Z the book is a set of linked stories. In the first story it explains that how zombies worked that they were like a virus, moved fast, could only be killed by being shot in the head. How did zombies exist when it defies our understanding of living creatures? Nobody had a clue and the author didn't try to explain it past that. They shouldn't exist, what would happen if they did. I don't really care why dragons fly or breath fire. They do, so how do they try to make breakfast out of the characters.
 

My test is usually just repeatability, not plausibility. It's fine if the ultimate explanation is "creatures with fly speeds can fly" so long as there is then a model of how flying works, and heuristics can still be developed, like "wings generally indicate flying ability."

Eventually you tend to run into a rules construct that doesn't holds up, and it's there you end up offering a metaphysic and/or a homebrew explanation. See any hit point discussion and you'll find someone doing this in real time.

On the other hand, I've also found that sometimes you end up substituting genre standard instead. Non-lethal damage and unconsciousness are routinely treated this way.
 

I think these are the sort of things most people gloss over in D&D, thought they're interesting to me. I certainly have thought about metaphysics of Artra, even though it obviously is not super detailed. But I have at least a rough framework I can extrapolate from.

And whilst, normal laws of physics + rare magical exceptions framework might work if the exceptions truly were rare, I don't think it is a good fir for a balatanly magical world where those exceptions are everywhere. This is not to say that nothing needs to work according to our real world physics, but at least I would expect "magic" to be intertined into the working of the world on rather fundamental level.

Settings where I feel things like these thing actually tend to come up in play, are urban fantasy, where supernatural elements are placed in th real world. That I find, tends to often sort of invite trying to explain the supernatural scientifically, and usually sort of has to assume that most of our real world science actually works like we thingk it does. So then we have discussions about what aspect of sunlight actuallly hurts vampires and can we replicate it with an UV lamp etc.
I think that's the issue. I tend to think of all fantasy like urban fantasy in that regard; it's just more comfortable for me to see magic and the supernatural as exceptions to an otherwise Earth-like environment. Feels more grounded. I guess I'm a duelist too.
 

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