Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 6571169" data-attributes="member: 6775031">The thing is, Newton's Laws weren't wrong, exactly; they're just a simplification, which holds extremely well for large-ish objects travelling at small-ish speeds. Likewise, Navier-Stokes simplifies down to Bernoulli when you're talking about incompressible flows with no viscosity. We don't need perfectly accurate equations in an RPG, because we're generally only dealing with a small subset of reality anyway. In a game like D&D, we don't bother with resolution any finer than five feet, or time increments smaller than six seconds. If you're talking about a sci-fi game, then the actual laws of physics might matter (for things like GPS), in addition to the simplifications we use to run normal interactions.And that's really much of the appeal of process sim, at least to me. The fact that you can take reality (our real world, or any imagined world), and model it with any degree of accuracy, using only math that we can do in our head. It's kind of like Mythbusters that way - the specifics of how you do it are less important than the principle that you can do it. And there are explosions.If you take two similar characters, and use different rules to model them, then any interaction between them is likely to resolve based on the differences in the models rather than the underlying reality of the (fictional) situation. As an extreme example, imagine if PCs had +20hp and +5 to all checks merely by virtue of being a PC. It's like the game is forcing its own agenda on you, to have you succeed because the game wants you to succeed, rather than being determined by your choices (and random chance).Where I'm okay with using different models is when it's a matter of detail, and you're just making a simplification so that the model runs more smoothly. Ideally, you should still recognize that the same principles are in play, and the outcome of any interaction shouldn't matter too much on the fact that you changed the model.</blockquote>

Verification