D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Umbran]

Well, it would be weird for characters to demonstrate, via the special relativity thought experiments, that it is impossible for your vessel to accelerate to light speed, while at the same time being on a vessel that (everyone authoring the fiction agrees) has accelerated to, and beyond, light speed.

Oh, I forgot to note this:

This all comes down less to the issue of, "Isn't it weird when characters show the setting conceits don't work by real-world science" and more of, "the authors of those characters are talking about stuff they don't really understand, and stumble."

Basically, this is a "write what you know" issue.

 

[Maxperson]

I would also repeat yet again that the "DM has absolute power" is a (all powerful?) strawman. If I don't provide a style of game my players want I won't have players for long. A couple of times over the years players have left my game because I wasn't the right DM for them, for them it was their choice to take the highway. I took no offense, they didn't leave in a huff. Meanwhile except for moving or other life changes my players stick with me in part because I adjust the game for what they enjoy within limits of what I'll also enjoy. On the other hand if you want to play an evil vampire that drinks the blood of your compatriots because you thought Astarion of BG3 fame was cool my game isn't going to be the one for you.

As DM I'm a player as well. I also have to take into consideration what the rest of the people sitting at the table want. If that leaves an individual out a couple of times over decades of DMing? Then it is our way or the highway.

It's not really a Strawman, because the players leaving hasn't changed his world and his ruling. He can go get other players until he finds some that like/don't mind that ruling. Within the game, the DM does have absolute power, even though he almost never fully uses it and instead discusses with his group like people do when getting together to have fun.

In short, the only recourse players have from a jerk DM is to remove themselves FROM his power over the game. They can't reduce it.

 

[AlViking]

It's not really a Strawman, because the players leaving hasn't changed his world and his ruling. He can go get other players until he finds some that like/don't mind that ruling. Within the game, the DM does have absolute power, even though he almost never fully uses it and instead discusses with his group like people do when getting together to have fun.

In short, the only recourse players have from a jerk DM is to remove themselves FROM his power over the game. They can't reduce it.

A jerk DM will not retain players for long. Maybe it's a bit different because of online games but for most people it would only be an issue for a session or two. The strawman is that people will put up with truly awful DMing because they are forced to participate in a game they don't enjoy.

If a person can't ever find a DM that runs a game they enjoy and they try several? Perhaps it's not an issue with the DM.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

That is very much untrue. The reason you show your work on a math exam is because the answer is largely irrelevant. The point of the exam is to prove that you know the process for achieving that answer. The fact that your answer happened to be right could easily be a lucky guess. This is a problem teachers run into all the time when dealing with students and parents who completely misunderstand the point of testing. It's really frustrating.

Speaking as someone who has marked around 1600 exam papers this year alone. It's not that sophisticated, at least for public exams in England/Wales. If the correct answer is written on the answer line, full marks are awarded, irrespective of any working. The working is only reviewed if the answer on the line is missing or incorrect. In which case marks can be awarded for working.

You might query the educational value of marking in that way, but the markers are employed to apply the mark scheme as written. It's a matter for the Department of Education to decide the underlying philosophy, and given that that is run by politicians, and parents vote for them, it tends to be more in line with what parents want.

 

[Enrahim]

Star Trek uses an explanation that maybe, just possibly, might work. They don't accelerate in the same sense that we accelerate in our car when we press the accelerator, they warp the space-time continuum by expanding the area behind it and contracting the area in front. As far as light in the ship if you think that's a problem you really don't understand the theory of relativity.

There have been truly stupid sci-fi that ignore all sorts of the known laws of physics, and others just say our understanding of the laws of physics are incomplete. Star Trek uses technology that may be impossible but it does follow the laws of physics as we understand them.

Nah, it doesn't follow the laws of physics as we understand them. But it has a neat trick to avoid the popular special relativity issue, tough. It still require a causality chain that propagates information faster than the speed of light (the space contraction) - as their trajectory is not predetermined but is clearly decided on initiation. (I am here going to assume space command has not preemptively set up the required physical condition for thousands of possible warp paths in advance, and that the enterprise is simply selecting one of them to latch onto)

 

[pemerton]

I'm sure there were not problems in your game...just as there are no problems in most fantasy games.

What you're talking about is the risks of a constructed world not "computing", so to say, of having internal errors or contradictions. These errors can be in the physics or they can be the internal history.

I don't see why one seems weird to you and the other doesn't.

Because one is inherent - it's a necessary consequence of (i) breaking known physical law in the imagined world while (ii) maintaining features whose explanation is known physical law. The only solution is to deliberately not attend to aspects of the fiction that will manifest the contradiction.

The other is like the problem of forgetting the name of a NPC, using a different name, and having the players notice. It's quite avoidable with a bit of care.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Edit: This was a side issue I probably shouldn't insert myself in.

 

[The Firebird]

Because one is inherent - it's a necessary consequence of (i) breaking known physical law in the imagined world while (ii) maintaining features whose explanation is known physical law. The only solution is to deliberately not attend to aspects of the fiction that will manifest the contradiction.

The other is like the problem of forgetting the name of a NPC, using a different name, and having the players notice. It's quite avoidable with a bit of care.

I don't think the difference is so profound. Imagine a scenario like you outlined for the runes:

"As a GM, I decided to place hyperspace travel in the game. I didn't think about it too much, I just thought it would be interesting. When it become important, because the players were trying to escape some imperial star destroyers, the player declared their PC's hope that they could jump instantly. They rolled a 7-9, and so it turned out they could jump but it would take some time. We justified that by adding the color that hyperspace calculations have to be performed carefully, else we could fly through a star or bounce too close to a supernova."

I don't see important differences between the two.

--

Another way to look at it: in constructing a fictional world, we create both fictional laws (this spell requires a more skilled wizard than that spell) and fictional history (Melvaunt lies along the Moonsea). Both of these have opportunities for contradictions; e.g., the previously established climate of the Moonsea may not support the population of Melvaunt. In that case, the only solution for the players is to not look too closely about the details--to not worry about things like "how many people can this farmland support". That is a similar suspension of disbelief to not worrying about "how exactly does hyperspace work".

 

[Enrahim]

Speaking as someone who has marked around 1600 exam papers this year alone. It's not that sophisticated, at least for public exams in England/Wales. If the correct answer is written on the answer line, full marks are awarded, irrespective of any working. The working is only reviewed if the answer on the line is missing or incorrect. In which case marks can be awarded for working.

You might query the educational value of marking in that way, but the markers are employed to apply the mark scheme as written. It's a matter for the Department of Education to decide the underlying philosophy, and given that that is run by politicians, and parents vote for them, it tends to be more in line with what parents want.

There might be a distinction between exam and tests performed in class though. Different country, but at secondary scool I got deducted in class test for not showing working (I think it only happened once tough, I tend to be a quick learner). As an upper secondary teacher I would also have had words with a student if they had not shown working, but that never happened. Workings are essential for providing good pedagogical feedback. That is not a concern with exams, but very much is as part of the continuous assessment work in class.

When marking IB papers based on old exams I wouldn't have dreamt of deviating from the instructions that worked the way you describe. There was no problem related to this, as those students would not risk missing out on those workings point if they did some mistake toward the end.

 

[pemerton]

It does so by shrinking space in front of the ship, and expanding it behind the ship. So, locally, the ship never violates the prohibition on moving faster than light, but it manages to reach its destination faster by effectively making the distance to it shorter than you measured it from your inertial frame of reference.

Referring to @AlViking's link: 'Warp drives' may actually be possible someday, new study suggests:

In 1994, Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre published a groundbreaking paper that laid out how a real-life warp drive could work. This exciting development came with a major caveat, however: The proposed "Alcubierre drive" required negative energy, an exotic substance that may or may not exist (or, perhaps, the harnessing of dark energy, The proposed "Alcubierre drive" required negative energy, an exotic substance that may or may not exist (or, perhaps, the harnessing of dark energy, the mysterious force that seems to be causing the universe's accelerated expansion). . . .

Now, a new paper in the same journal suggests that a warp drive may not require exotic negative energy after all. . . .

The proposed engine could not achieve faster-than-light travel, though it could come close; the statement mentions "high but subluminal speeds."​

So before 1994, there was no postulated answer to the character on the Enterprise explaining how the drive works. After 1994 there is a postulate

Basically, this is a "write what you know" issue.

If we take it to be the case that A knows that p entails p - and this is a generally accepted truth - then write what you know entails that no one can write confidently about FTL travel. I think it's more like write what your audience knows (or doesn't). This is the principle that Doyle followed in writing about the climbing snake, as per @clearstream's post upthread. And it is the principle that most FRPG settings rely on for their history and sociology.

A variant on my suggested principle, in RPGing, is to pool what the group knows and to work within that - I posted a couple of examples upthread. As one of those examples illustrated, this can still require a player with expertise to set aside their qualms and just concede the inconsistent fiction.

There are cases of deliberate departure from the principle. JRRT, in LotR, deliberately writes a history and sociology that he (given his academic training) would have known makes no sense. He had artistic reasons for doing that. But it does mean that it really makes no sense, in playing a LotR/MERP-y game, for any character in the fiction to try and understand the society they live in, or its history. We could perhaps put flying dragons etc in this category, too, and the same limitation would then apply: no science of biomechanics in this imagined world.

I think this still works best cooperatively, rather than via GM assertions of authorial right. The players need to be on board that some parts of the fiction are not amenable to explanation.