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

[Don Durito]

Isn't the bigger issue with FTL settings that even if you have something like an Alcubierre drive that is powered by some kind of negative energy unobtainium it's then also a time machine with significant implications for causality?

Which touches on something of the nature of rpgs - that in a work of fiction you can make things function through a selective process of overlooking and avoidance, but in a rpg this is more difficult unless the players are on board with that also.

I mean, in a space opera, you're probably safe - FTL is such a genre cliche that you probably don't have to worry about players trying to fly their space ship to last week, but there are other situations in which this kind of thing can be an issue.

(Eg you give your players a decanter of endless water which is supposed to be a useful and wondrous magic item and the players realise that it's an infinite source of energy.)

 

[pemerton]

The question one needs to ask oneself is there, "If I cannot write confidently about this... am I sure I should address it?" Is the narrative really better for having the technical discussion in it? It is a pretty basic risk vs reward question.

And, I'm being broad in my application of "technical" - f'rex, sociology is technical, to a sociologist.

When I had plenty of spare time 30+ years ago, I spent a lot of time coming up with "realistic" patterns of social and intellectual development for my version of Greyhawk and its religions and wizard guilds, based on my own knowledge of the history of philosophy and theology (which was and is reasonably good). Later on, when one of the players was playing a PC with legal training, I also did a bit of work on legal codes, based on my own knowledge of Roman law (which was and is middling).

These efforts really didn't have much effect on play. I don't know if anyone but me, as GM, noticed much of the work I had done. I did refer to it from time to time, though, to explain certain features of the setting - mostly its pre-modern ones, and especially the absence of free choice of occupation (especially wizardly occupation) and the absence of a free market in productive activities more generally. The players would sometimes find those things frustrating (in the context of their desired action declarations) or irrational (if just judging the setting by their own standards for rational social organisation), and having an explanation grounded in plausible history and sociology helped a bit.

These days I tend to prefer to just expressly affirm certain tropes. I think it's just as effective in building table consensus, and less work.

 

[pemerton]

Which touches on something of the nature of rpgs - that in a work of fiction you can make things function through a selective process of overlooking and avoidance, but in a rpg this is more difficult unless the players are on board with that also.

Right. I posted something very similar not too far upthread, I think in reply to @clearstream.

And the Decanter of Endless Water example that you mention is a notorious one. Likewise discussions of the economic impact of the Wall of Iron spell.

 

[pemerton]

I think most also would feel pretty annoyed by a GM seeking consultation on every little decission point. "What do you guys and galls think what should be behind this door?" "I'm not sure what would be an aproperiate DC for this lock, what do you think?" "Who want to be crushed by the ogre this round?".

These are different, and understanding how they're different can be helpful in analysing RPG play - which can in turn help RPG design and RPG play.

What is behind the door? That's about revelation - and how revelations are handled is one important aspect of RPGing. Having players just decide is often not satisfying, if the revelation is meant to matter. Whether the revelation should be established independently of player concerns and conjectures, or rather by having regard for those, is a further difference in procedure that will affect the play experience.

Who wants to be crushed by the ogre this round? That's about adversity or (perhaps) consequence. In some RPG play, especially that focuses on combat, part of what the players are trying to do is manage adversity and consequence; so asking the players how to distribute it might be a bit deflating. On the other hand, whose rations do you cross off? asked in the context of adjudicating a difficult or lengthy trek would be pretty unremarkable. A combat system that works similarly to the rations example wouldn't be obviously bad.

What is the appropriate DC? is about expressing fictional states of affairs in mechanical terms. Having players input into this doesn't seem especially problematic for me, unless the DC is meant to reflect information known to the GM but not the players, in which case asking the players seems like an error.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

How exactly do you think it will work?

Well, firstly, relativistic aberration would distort the direction that light seemed to come toward you. Second, the relativistic Doppler effect would apply--which is distinct from the ordinary, Newtonian Doppler effect in specific and (importantly) observable ways.

Finally, as you accelerated to "almost-but-never-quite" c, assuming you wanted to accelerate to that speed in less than "several years", you would also observe the Unruh effect, which cannot be observed by an inertial observer. Indeed, you have to be accelerating extremely fast to observe it at all, such that it's still debated whether any experiments have ever detected it (though the consensus is that the effect does occur, it's just too small to observe at most accelerations human-made detectors can achieve.)

So no. There are several physical observations one could make--some known to science since Einstein's heyday--which would very much mean the world did not look perfectly normal around you.

Can you point to one reputable source that contradicts it?

There are, for example, simulations of what it would look like if the speed of light were (say) only 100 m/s rather than ~2.99x10^8 m/s. The numbers might be different for any given actual example, but the general concept remains.

The fact is, things would not look normal. The internals of your near-c rocketship would look normal, because everything is locally at the same velocity. But anything not actually accelerating like that? Would look profoundly different.

As for how actual FTL-travel could work? It works by basically dodging the question. We know the Alcubierre drive is a theoretically consistent solution to Einstein's equations, which averts the problems by cheating, more or less. The spacecraft doesn't "accelerate" in the sense of gaining kinetic energy. But it does change locations, because it distorts spacetime itself. This results in changing location....without technically undergoing "motion" as it is properly defined.

I could go into the technobabble explanation from Star Trek, but to not bore you with the details, it's basically "we cheat by trapping the ship inside a bubble of Reality Energy that technically puts it in its own separate universe". That's what the "warp field" is, and why higher warp field factors result in greater speed. You aren't "moving" in space; you're having a micro-universe-bubble slide around relative to the universe at large. Within the bubble, the ship actually isn't moving at all, and thus never violates relativity.

 

[pemerton]

As for how actual FTL-travel could work? It works by basically dodging the question. We know the Alcubierre drive is a theoretically consistent solution to Einstein's equations, which averts the problems by cheating, more or less. The spacecraft doesn't "accelerate" in the sense of gaining kinetic energy. But it does change locations, because it distorts spacetime itself. This results in changing location....without technically undergoing "motion" as it is properly defined.

I could go into the technobabble explanation from Star Trek, but to not bore you with the details, it's basically "we cheat by trapping the ship inside a bubble of Reality Energy that technically puts it in its own separate universe". That's what the "warp field" is, and why higher warp field factors result in greater speed. You aren't "moving" in space; you're having a micro-universe-bubble slide around relative to the universe at large. Within the bubble, the ship actually isn't moving at all, and thus never violates relativity.

To me, as a casual watcher of some Star Trek films, the Enterprise appears to be in motion when it accelerates to warp speed. The fact that it is called warp speed also connotes motion.

Classic Traveller, by way of contrast, uses "jump space" that doesn't - in its vocabulary or depiction - involve acceleration or the vessel itself being in motion.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Well, D&D 2024 tells the DM that they should ensure changes are fun for the table and discussed with the players. So you know, that’s a nice step towards formalizing the idea of “consider what and why you’re doing things and what your players think.”

And also something that had several people on this very forum up in arms, horrendously offended at the game telling them what to do.

It's part of why I'm so skeptical about many of the answers given around here. Doing something even that weak and ambiguous has, in fact, been seen as an utterly unacceptable affront to GM freedom and power, by real people I've actually seen (digitally, but still, this wasn't just "the broadest possible swathe of humanity", it was ENWorld users.)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

To me, as a casual watcher of some Star Trek films, the Enterprise appears to be in motion when it accelerates to warp speed. The fact that it is called warp speed also connotes motion.

Classic Traveller, by way of contrast, uses "jump space" that doesn't - in its vocabulary or depiction - involve acceleration or the vessel itself being in motion.

oh, they absolutely play incredibly fast-and-loose with it. Like almost everything even vaguely scientific in Trek.

This is, after all, the setting where they invented as an explanation for why all bipedal sapients are genetically compatible is "our worlds were seeded with DNA by a common ancestor"...even though that's a blatantly ridiculous non-answer.

 

[Lanefan]

"Advisor" implies courtly position. Delegated authority. No ability to defy (because, again, absolute power), but having subsidiary authority underneath. No such arrangement exists between an "absolute power" GM and her players. The players are subject to the GM's will in anything relating to the game. Whatever they think or feel is completely secondary to the GM implementing her will. Should the GM deign to listen, nothing prevents them from doing so, but nothing whatsoever requires it either. Because that's what exerting absolute power (within a particular domain) means.

Think of it as the difference between a President-and-CEO with her VPs, and a mother with her children. Or the difference between a whole army's general with the officers who directly report to him, and a primary school teacher with his students. In both former cases (Pres-CEO and army-leading general), the secondary parties are still under total requirement to obey their superior, but they still hold personal authority of some kind. Children and grade-school students hold no authority within the associated structure, not even subsidiary authority. (Of course, with all of these cases, there is a higher superseding authority--the law--which could intervene, but I trust you'll allow for the sake of argument that we ignore this.)

And yet in all four of those examples the "underlings" can suggest ideas or courses of action that the "leader" can then choose to accept.

--- a VP can suggest to a CEO that maybe this isn't the best time to be buying out Company ZZZ due to [reasons], and the CEO is persuaded and agrees
--- a kid can suggest going down to the park to play; mother agrees and takes the family for a day in the park
--- a colonel can suggest a different strategy and the general, on realizing it's in fact better than what they had, can agree to it
--- a grade-school student might volunteer to do some in-class task, the teacher - who was about to choose someone else - chooses the volunteer instead.

In all these cases the leader has the final decision, sure, but is also able to accept input into that decision before making it. An "absolute" rules neither accepts nor acts on such input; and that's the difference people are getting at, I think.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

When it comes to not showing my work and not always knowing how I do what I do (largely because I can't be bothered to think about it in any real depth): yes.

Okay. So...given I had only recently been talking to others about how one goes about building an environment (or "atmosphere" but I think we can let terminology slide? Maybe? Please?) of understanding and trust, how could one do that if all of one's worldbuilding and GM decisions are hidden behind a veil of "I literally can't answer that question because I cannot explain my thought processes."?

The result - a fun, fair, sometimes challenging game, run honestly in a consistent setting on a consistent basis - is the only thing that matters in the end.

What more do I need?

The players to actually believe that it is, in fact, the second, fourth, fifth, and sixth things: fair, run honestly, in a consistent setting, on a consistent basis.

It's really hard to determine that someone is being fair if they do things that look unfair, and when you ask for an explanation, they tell you either "You just have to trust me for the next several months that this was the right thing to do", or "I literally can't explain my thought process to you, even if I wanted to do so I'm incapable of doing so."

Such answers would guaranteed come across as evidence that it wasn't a fair, honestly-run, consistent-setting, consistent-basis world. Not necessarily smoking gun...it would depend on the severity of the initial concern. But I would, without doubt, come away significantly more concerned than I was beforehand.