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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6284874" data-attributes="member: 4937">To some extent I agree with you.  But, to the extent that you mean that the game world works as a result of real physics, which you evidently do from the rest of your post, I completely disagree.Not at all.  You are working on the assumption that all the rules of physics are in effect, and so that if you change one, perforce it will have great consequences for how the rest behave.  That assumption does not have to be true.  Recall first that in the real world, for many thousands of years perceptions of the physics of the world held by mankind were false.  Yet these perceptions withstood casual or even intence scrutiny.  To the observers, the world very well could have been operating under the rules they thought it operated under, as they had no evidence to the contrary.  So it's entirely possible that the game world has completely different and novel physics from the real world, and yet produces a result that on a superficial level resembles our own.  Secondly, recall that in general we know that there are aspects of the world which entirely violate the physics of our own world.   For example, in D&D it is generally held to be true that the fundamental chemistry of the world is based on the existance of 4 elements - fire, water, earth, and air.  This literally makes no sense at all in terms of real world chemistry, as we now know that fire is not a particle element at all, but an exothermic release of energy.  Yet, in the game world we are suggesting that since fire is an element, perhaps if you carefully grind a cannon at some point it stops releasing additional heat and becomes cold.  Or perhaps not.  Perhaps things heat up when you grind them because it opens up point sized diminsional gateways to the elemental plane of fire, resulting in the passing of more heat into the system and the eventual conjoining of earth and fire elements to form lava paraelements.  In which case, we now live in a world that on inspection violates conservation of energy.As such, if you alter the force of gravity there is no way to predict how it is going to effect any of the physics of the game world.  For example, perhaps gravity isn't the result of an attraction between objects having mass, but rather the result of angry earth spirits pulling down to the earth those that though they are of the earth defy the earth by trying to depart from its embrace.  One example of such a change that I've already decided on, is that if you dropped stone balls into clay, you'd discover that kinetic energy was linear with velocity in my world.  That is a private joke with myself on why PC's are often capable of surviving falls from great heights.  It's practical effect on the game is nothing.In short, its highly likely that we don't need to work out the physics of the game world in any great detail and perhaps never could, since in fact those physics would be at least as complicated as the physics of our own world in which many questions are still unresolved despite the work of 1000's or millions brilliant men and women for 1000's of years.  We aren't of sufficiently high sophont class to derive a working set of physics for our game world, but fortunately we do not need to.  We need only have a set of game rules that provide for resolutions to the situations that come up in the game that are plausible for the setting.  These rules don't need to and shouldn't resemble a physics textbook.The key is simply to make it plausible for the players and perhaps yourself.</blockquote>

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