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

[AlViking]

I absolutely want to have a fire extinguisher in my house. I absolutely hope to never have to use it.
...

I have had DMs use their authority to settle a dispute and I, and most of the other players at the table, appreciated the fact that they did. For that matter, there were a few times when the DM took time to look up something fairly inconsequential and I wish they hadn't bothered. That's true even when I was the one who would have run it differently in my game.

 

[Enrahim]

Ah, I meant inside the ship itself. Yes, you would see different wavelengths of light which would look weird. I doubt you'd see much zipping by after you left the solar system because even at the speed of light it would still take over 4 years to get to the nearest star.

Not 4 years from your point of view

 

[AlViking]

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.)

I don't see how it would be a time machine. It exploits a loophole, not travelling through normal space faster than the speed of light. There are also theories of how to do it without negative energy, but that's another topic. I don't personally think FTL drives are possible, I just don't see how it would be a time machine.

 

[AlViking]

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.


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.

As I said above I was talking about what you would see inside the spaceship, not out the windows.

 

[Hussar]

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.)

A good rule of thumb for writing SF is that you are allowed one "gimme" IOW, the writer is allowed to break science without having to jump through hoops to explain it on one thing. FTL travel is very often this one thing. Because once you have FTL, then you can have aliens and other worlds and all the stuff that goes with space opera. But, yeah, we're generally allowed one gimme in any SF story.

 

[Don Durito]

I don't see how it would be a time machine. It exploits a loophole, not travelling through normal space faster than the speed of light. There are also theories of how to do it without negative energy, but that's another topic. I don't personally think FTL drives are possible, I just don't see how it would be a time machine.

Here's an explanation.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Ok. The GM can still be wrong by:

1. Violating the social contract.

Did your objection make any difference to the statement expressed?

It wasn’t an objection. It was a clarification that you and @Maxperson were agreeing with my earlier comment:

Some posters seem to be arguing that the DM should only be bound by the social contract, despite the fact that mediocre DMs exist, and that because of the amount of power they have, they can be more disruptive than mediocre players.

 

[Moving Pictures]

This thread was inspired by a poster literally saying that they would give the current game a try if only it used the old art. Literally used the old art.

Who gives a royal fig about the art? The game isn't played by flipping through the monster manual for pictures... Egad, that's petty.

When official D&D wants to change in a big way, it does need to sell me on that change. And "because a designer though it would be a good idea," or "because D&D works better (for me) this way!" or "this is just an OBVIOUS (to me) improvement!" or "because it HAS to change with the times!" aren't really compelling for me on their own.

Couple of background comments:
I came to the game in the eighties, exposed to a heavy homebrew of 1e with 2e infusions. The game (RAW) has changed a lot.
I dunno how many of you folks read "order of the stick," cartoon but the very first panel [1 New Edition - Giant in the Playground Games] pokes fun at the challenges of implementing a complete system change.

When I came back to ttrpgs after the better chunk of 30 years, I was staggered at the scope of the changes. The game I knew (and the concepts I had remembered) were totally different. Staggeringly different.

It's like enjoying soccer in the 80s and the coming back to see the game has now changed to Rugby Sevens or something.

The reason for this is that OSR/WOTC is a commercial enterprise, and somewhere along the lines the philosophy shifted from "we can make money designing really good supplements (Oriental Adventures) or modules" to "let's run this like a car company, and as soon as we roll out this year's model, we're going to work hard to make it obsolete by designing a totally new model with the same name but entirely different parts."

THAT is why people are "conservative." They're tired of the needless rule changes, upgrades and silliness. OSR/WOTC lost the plot. They made too many changes in the name of the all-holy buck, and consumers/fans/players are smart enough to see all of that for what it is.

But at the same time, change is going to happen, and that's generally OK, and can be quite good. Expanding to new audiences is grand. But we can't just assume change yields improvement.

^^^^ THS

why is D&D so incredibly complex?

Youd think by the 8th (?) iteration the some designers might have stumbled upon simplicity.

And in my view, as a grognard, the whole combat mechanic turned into something too complicated. The simple one-action-per-round mechanic of the older versions lends to faster resolution. Heck, I saw some video online - one of the more popular feeds, I might add - where the DM was noting how a major conflict took four freaking hours to resolve. FOUR HOURS? I've seen (and DMed) mass battlefield encounters in half the time....

Modern D&D has become about the combat. Look at all the videos about how to create broken min/max characters and builds. It stopped being about the story, and that's why old farts like me are going "nope, nuh-uh." I want a palette to create a story, not an IKEA desk that takes forever to build.

 

[AlViking]

The speed of light is very much NOT relative to the observer. The speed of light is a universal constant. That's the POINT of the Theory of Relativity. The fact that you think that the speed of light is relative to the observer means that you really, really don't understand how the Theory of Relativity works.

From the point of view of the observer inside a spaceship (and not looking out the window) going at a significant percentage of the speed of light nothing would change. Time compresses for the person the faster they go and looking out the window you would see different wavelengths of light but nothing on the interior would look different.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

As I said above I was talking about what you would see inside the spaceship, not out the windows.

Are you being accelerated by the spaceship at relativistic accelerations? If so, you'll still have the Unruh effect (because you are accelerating), but as noted, it's exceedingly small unless you've got ridiculous acceleration.

If you're simply inside a spaceship that happens to currently be moving at .99999c (or whatever not-quite-1 fraction you prefer) relative to some other object, you won't notice anything for exactly the same reason that you don't notice yourself twirling through space despite the fact that the Earth rotates and revolves around the Sun. There's no need to invoke relativity for that.