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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8624966" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I mean, the single biggest problem with the Reality Assumption is that it WILL lead you astray. Not even in an accidental sense; authors will exploit it against readers for shock value, subverted expectations, or plot twists.For D&D specifically, the major issue isn't so much the Reality Assumption, but rather several unreality assumptions, coupled with some carte blanche attitudes regarding the realism of specific things.1. The vast majority of D&D players have extremely unrealistic, and indeed completely counterfactual, understandings of what is physically possible for human beings in the real world to achieve. This is less a "reality" assumption and more a projection-of-self assumption. D&D characters are often expected to be limited, not by the potential limits of actual human beings, but by what the player personally can achieve. This is of course patently ridiculous, because the player isn't anywhere near an Olympic athlete, which is a much better standard for what reality actually permits in terms of human physical fitness.2. A significant number of D&D players (not quite as many as the previous, since some of them are actual enthusiasts of medieval history) have completely backwards concepts of several verifiable historical or physical things. E.g., how much weapons and armor should weigh, or whether it is appropriate for there to be gunpowder weapons in a D&D context, since most people don't know that matchlock guns appeared in the 1400s, meaning essentially exactly the same time as what we call "full plate armor" today.3. People are really, really bad at physics and statistics. The vast majority of people, even those who have taken introductory physics courses, will default to an Aristotelian model of how the world works. E.g., heavier objects fall measurably faster than lighter objects (they do not; they experience exactly the same amount of acceleration if dropped from the same height), objects naturally slow down until they stop (they do not; they only do so in the presence of friction forces), etc. Likewise, humans have very finely-tuned intuitions only for specific kinds of probability, and those intuitions produce garbage results outside of those specific questions (this is why simply changing how a probability question is asked can increase the rate at which people answer it correctly, even though the information content is unchanged.) As a result, they will presume many entirely unreal things, and then get confused, even angry, when those unreal things are proved unreal (consider the Monty Hall problem).4. The aforementioned carte blanche comes in the form of magic. What can magic, or magical things/creatures, do? Who knows! There are essentially no limits prescribed on what "magic" can do in D&D, just call it "magic" and most people instantly accept whatever you describe without comment. This punctures the Reality Assumption argument from the opposite direction: works often need to do damn near nothing to (so-called) justify entities or behaviors that aren't grounded in real-world things. Dragons, for example, are so deeply embedded in human culture (seriously, there's something dragon-like in nearly all cultures on Earth), that their presence in fiction (D&D or otherwise) often doesn't even get any explicit justification at all, they're just present and merely assumed to work because we see them doing the things dragons are supposed to do (fly, breathe fire, usually live a long time, sometimes talk, sometimes use magic, maintain stable populations despite completely insane mating practices and lifespans, etc.)It's these things that are the real problem with calls for "realism" in D&D. They reflect that there IS a gap between "semblance to our physical Earth" and "groundedness in a set of cognizable rules." It's just sometimes they'll create a gap where there shouldn't be one, and other times they literally need nothing more than two words--"it's magic"--to cross a gap as wide as Valles Marinaris!I've taken a handful in my life. If I'm allowed to round, technically speaking, my most recent (which was...a long time ago) would give me a whopping 19 INT. (I'm pretty sure that score was a fluke. I'm smart, but I am fairly sure I am not THAT smart.)</blockquote>

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