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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8746498" data-attributes="member: 4937">Or, alternatively, they just stick to their surface because of their spidery-ness.  Yes, we both want falls to cause damage and we both want the observed universe of D&D to casually approximate lived in real world experience, because that makes it more approachable to the players and easier to run.  But saying that doesn't contradict anything I said.None of that proves me wrong about what I just said.  You aren't in fact demonstrating that the physics of D&D are identical to the physics of the real world.  You are only demonstrating that on the level of casual observation they look similar enough.  But things get weirder the closer you look.Yes, but not because fire is heat energy from the agitation of molecules at a sub-microscopic level, but because fire is an element and it's nature is to burn.  When fire burns in D&D, it's not chemical combustion with oxygen being bound to some other element with an exothermic release of energy causing the fire to continue.  We know that because there is a whole plane where fire comes from that isn't made of air and things to burn at all, but yet burns.  Fire is in D&D a physical element, like the ancient belief in phlogiston.Does it?  Things fall, but that doesn't prove gravity exists.  Things fall in a way that is sort of similar to what we would casually observe in the real world, but the mechanism for that is undisclosed and probably not gravity as we know it.Yes, but they almost certainly aren't microscopic living organisms because the universe of D&D is the universe as imagined before germ theory.  Diseases in D&D are curses and evil spirits that shamans can do battle with to drive off and heal through chirugic magic.  You aren't giving enough thought to what the existence of magic implies about the world.  If magic happens, it's not this world. Here's the thing.  The ancient people of the world weren't stupid.  They didn't generally believe that the sun rose and set because they were idiots, but because casual observation of the world matched the theories that they concocted about it quite closely.  Those theories sufficiently explained the surrounding universe that those theories were believable.  It took considerable observation to realize that the sun doesn't rise and set but rather the Earth rolls its shoulder over to cover or uncover the sun.  And if you don't believe that, why do you say "the sun rose" when it didn't?  So we can have very much casual realism and yet still have a universe that doesn't run on the physics that we know, but instead is a universe we would think of as "supernatural".  Supernatural though is just a word for things that don't happen.  If you really saw a ghost, it wouldn't be supernatural.  Your definition of natural would just have to expand to include things you previously didn't think were.All of that is true but none of that contradicts what I'm saying.  How?  Sympathetic magic doesn't work in the real world, but does work in the D&D world.  Why?  Because in the real world a spider's ability to climb is based on those tiny hairs and it's surface area to body weight and the fact that it's center of gravity is close to the glass, and so forth - none of which is conferred by the spell 'spider climb'.  It's works in D&D because it's sympathetic magic, in that it steals the aforementioned spiritual spidery-ness of the spider that let's it climb and not because it gives you tiny hairs and a miniature body.Absolutely that's what I'm saying.  Why is that hard to believe?  I'm not the one here that is actually in conflict with the world of D&D as written.  You are the one asserting that the designers just didn't get it, that gargantuan spiders shouldn't be able to climb shear surfaces because the physics are against it and therefore they should act more like tarantulas and be basically land bound.  Never mind that a spider much bigger than a St. Bernard shouldn't be able to support it's body weight in a world that worked on physics as you know them or that even if it could using magical exoskeletons and musculature it couldn't pump enough oxygen through its skin via diffusion to power itself.  It's that selective blindness that I'm talking about where you want to apply some physics but only when it suits you.  You aren't really accepting the implications of a world where magic works.You are the one trying to have it both ways. What does that even mean?  Yes.  Because fire burns.  Not because of the laws of physics as you know them, but because of whatever physics makes the D&D world go.</blockquote>

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