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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5036983" data-attributes="member: 4937">Yeah, I think that is fair.When the D&D cosmology asserts that fire, earth, water, and air are elements, I take that as to literally mean that the fundamental chemistry of the world is based on 4 elements: fire, earth, water, and air.  Everything is therefore made of 'molecules' of those things.   When the D&D cosmology asserts the reality of nature spirits like nymphs and dryads, I take that to mean that the world is animated not by the familiar fundamental forces of gravity, electromagnetics, and so forth, but that literally things fall because earth spirits drag them down, a fire flickers because it is in some sense a living thing, the wind moves because the wind spirits will it, stones are hard mostly because earth spirits resist change, water flows down to the sea mostly because water spirits desire it to happen, and trees grow because some life giving spirit empowers them to do so.  I therefore get a big kick out of a player trying to do physics in my games.  One that has come up on several occassions is some player trying to create gunpowder.   It should be clear from the above that 'potasium nitrate' doesn't even exist in my universe. Neither potasium nor nitrogen exist where known to the ancients, and as such they have no mythic value.  As things with no mythic value, they aren't found in my myth driven universe.  And while sulpher and carbon exist, the aren't in their substance anything like sulpher and carbon from this universe (neither is an element!).  So there is no reason to suppose that if you tried to make gunpowder, that the resulting mess of salt, sulfpher, and ash would be explosive.  An alchemist would look at your concotion and laugh much as a chemist might laugh at the random work of a 6 year old.  There is no reason to assume any of the laws of aerodynamics or really any part of physics, biology, or chemistry in an animistic world of four elements and where under the right conditions virtually any living thing can interbreed with virtually anything else.   There is relatively good reason to assume that on casual observation, the universe works much like our own, but the ancients theories about how the universe worked were also based on casual observation.  One could reasonably presume that if you preformed some of the classic experiments of physics in such a different universe, you'd get very different results than this one.</blockquote>

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