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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 8471059" data-attributes="member: 6799660">So you want very rigorous controls surrounding the process of answering the question, but leave very open exactly what question people are answering? The survey research scientist in me is screaming. I hope you are aware that the end results of the survey won't be very meaningful (although they can still foster discussion, which I assume is the actual primary goal). I tend to hew to this notion for my games. If something works as it does in the real world, simply with different numbers (my fighter just doubled a world record in a long jump, for instance), it's 'fantastical' or 'power fantasy mundane' as opposed to magic. In particular because the numbers are usually pretty arbitrary in my game. Is the chasm really 10 meters across? Not really, it's 'an epic leap's distance across (as opposed to 'trivial,' 'challenging,' and 'no, don't even try, you know you can't jump this' which are the other categories), and that doesn't change based on me now googling the world record running long jump and finding out it is 8.95 meters (so I'm retroactively expecting that my mundane fighter is supernatural). Same with lifting and things to lift (how much does a stone gargoyle statue on the side of a cathedral weigh? I don't know and neither would my players. Can the party strongman lift one if it serves the story? Yes and I'm sure I'll be able to come up with a how-challenging-metric). As to the question more broadly, I think there needs to be middle grounds, if nothing else because there will be things which would be extraordinary in the game world, as well as things that would be mundane there, but impossible IRL. That of course is assuming that anything in the game world is extraordinary (maybe they have no concept of magic, or they do and it's things that no one can do in that world), but generally we want there to be wizards and genies and things in the game world which 'do magic' even as far as the denizens of said world are concerned.</blockquote>

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