NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 6284709" data-attributes="member: 29398">Yet the background to that drama-genre-story has to be some sort of reality; and by far the simplest option for presenting this is to simply say "it's the same as the real world except where the game mechanics and-or the setting being played make it different".  Which is to say, a rock in the game world behaves much like a rock on Earth; rivers flow downhill; light and sound behave like we're used to except when magic messes with them, etc.And once there's some sort of reality backing everything up questions like "how heavy is this?" are inevitable - as they should be.I mean, if a DM wants to have a world where gravity is only half as strong as Earth that's fine, but she has to then re-jig all the other bits of reality that would normally be affected by that change...either that, or throw believability out the window.  I know this from experience: the first world I designed was twice as large as Earth but intentionally much less dense so gravity would be about the same as we're used to.  But what does this do to other things?  Ocean currents and weather go crazy, for one thing, as the Coriolis force is so much greater; this would also affect plate tectonics as the underground currents in the molten core would work differently  The atmosphere density isn't the same at higher altitudes (I think it would get thinner quicker, but I'm not physicist enough to know for sure).  The magnetic field would be stronger - probably way stronger - with who-knows-what ramifications.  And so on.  During play I handwaved a lot of this away (except the setting did have crazy weather), but as time went on the more I looked at it the less pleased I was, and when the campaign finally ended I chucked that world with no real regret at all.Lan-"the key is to know just enough about geology, physics and geography to be able to believably make the rest of it up"-efan</blockquote>

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