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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doug McCrae" data-source="post: 5262931" data-attributes="member: 21169">I think many aspects of the D&D world presented in the game texts are regarded by most readers as intended to be realistic, in the sense of operating the same way they do in our world, or our world's history.There's air and earth and water, plants and animals and men, time, gravity, weather, human psychology, civilization, politics, cities, warfare, castles, knights, ships. All of these seem to operate the same in D&D world as they do in ours. The laws of physics are the same, until magic comes into it, which it rarely does. Although the PCs do encounter magic all the time, the world itself seems to mostly get along as if magic were not present*.But are the laws of physics the same? Problems arise when the rules contradict this, when they tell us that a man who has acquired lots of wealth thereby gains the ability to survive a fall from a great height. When a feeble octagenarian is as quick as the most able twenty-year old, and has better eyesight and hearing.One solution to this inconsistency is to regard the rules as taking precedence. By this interpretation the rules are the correct laws of this world, and they are different than our own, even when magic isn't involved. Another way to resolve this is to say that the rules aren't intended to simulate a whole world, just to provide playable rules for a limited game of squad level monster bashing that touches briefly on a few other areas such as travel and human interaction.Extraordinary abilities in 3e - a troll's regeneration, a dragon's flight, a high level barbarian's damage reduction - are regarded as non-magical but only possible because the D&D world has different physics. It could be said that this supports the former view of rules but I think I'd regard them as being on the same level as magic, even tho technically they are not. Like magic, extraordinary abilities are of a fairly limited nature, possessed only by unusual (or even extraordinary) beings.*This in itself is a whole 'nother consistency issue, dependent upon how common magic is.</blockquote>

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