NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9705409" data-attributes="member: 6790260">While I think that that is a laudable goal...a frank evaluation of every edition of D&D that has ever been published makes it quite clear where the mechanical design priorities lie.Social things are given almost no attention, with barely more than spackle. Combat, in every edition--even Gygax's, where conflict really was meant to be a sometimes food!--has far more extensive and engaging rules. The distinction you're laying out, and on which different editions of D&D differ quite strongly, is whether combat is punished (and how harshly), rewarded (and how richly), or left ambiguous (and to what degree).But that's the problem. It isn't "Earth with extras". It never is. That's the whole point. We exploit a lot of tricks so people won't notice it, but that's the fundamental gap.But this is simply not possible. Not without blatant, flagrant, ahem, extraction from one's gluteal cleft. It's a lovely idea. It simply does not, cannot, happen. The handwaving is not just always there, it is an essential, irreducible part of the process.This is why I emphasize "groundedness" rather than "realism". Because it isn't about being true to anything. It isn't about anything actually in our reality. It is about truthiness: the feeling of being truth-like, utterly without regard to facts. Hence why, as I've said before, the way D&D players, even extremely strongly simulationist ones (which I would say you are not quite that simulationist, but you're closer to it than to any other preference; in its neighborhood, one might say), have a completely and utterly false idea of how lockpicking actually works. An idea that someone fails to pick a lock, not because they lacked the time to do it, not because they were too inefficient, but because they genuinely lack the understanding to pick the lock; that the lock theoretically could have been picked by them, with the tools they have, but they're simply too ignorant of the necessary skills. That is simply, flatly, not how lockpicking works, here on Earth--especially because nearly all locks that admit a given tool are pickable in exactly the same ways, it's just a matter of how efficient a person is at picking it. If you have the tools and the fundamental knowledge to try, success is functionally inevitable....if you have enough time. Time is, essentially always, the deciding factor--not ability, presuming that it was at least theoretically possible to pick in the first place (which had been stated repeatedly to be the case).Or, as I referenced in my previous reply to Enrahim, the problem of Aristotelian physics being how people think the world works. Experts in both psychology and pedagogy have studied this extensively (this was part of my education courses I took for my tutor certifications), and clearly demonstrated that the average person, who lacks direct specific STEM education, holds something either identical or almost identical to the Aristotelian model of physics, and that model is dead wrong on almost all counts, and even when it's right, it's usually wrong about why something is the case. E.g. "objects slow down naturally" is false. Objects in motion stay in motion until acted on by an outside force; it just so happens that in most Earthly environments, those forces are air resistance and contact friction. Heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects; this is false, objects experience equal acceleration (=same falling speed for same amount of time falling) regardless of their mass, because all that matters is how much the Earth pulls on them. Hence, most people believe reality works in ways that it objectively, provably doesn't, and may respond rather poorly to works which insist on using the actually-correct ideas, thinking them "unrealistic" when the fact is they are realistic, and the reader's beliefs are not.I mean, I guess? Not really what makes them appeal to me. I don't need the United Federation of Planets or Conan or Barsoom or lightsabers to be "really real" in some way out there in the universe for them to matter to me. What matters to me is whether the contents of these worlds are worthy of my attention, and whether they produce situations where either the outcome is unknown and I would like to find out what it is, or the outcome is known, and I would like to learn the specific details it will take. (E.g., if the plot of a book is understood to be "will they save the world?" the answer is almost always yes, because ending the world is far too costly for the author to really threaten it at all seriously; instead, such stories should be understood as "what will it take for these people to save the world?" That's a question that can have many, many different answers--and finding out which one is the correct answer stands a good chance of being interesting.)</blockquote>

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