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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 1980501" data-attributes="member: 7240">Many scholars continue to debate that very question -- many have taken note and offer different theoretical frameworks to explain this. I think you're doing some whole-part rhetorical sleight of hand here, though. Relative to other physical/philosophical systems, Aristotelianism emphasized the importance of observation far more than any other system did in its rhetoric and its practice. My claim that the general spirit of Aristotelian physics was one that endorsed observation as the main way one learns about the universe is not invalidated by your observation that Aristotelians often got things wrong. But the fact is that Aristotelian physics saw itself and was seen by advocates of other physical systems as the most observation-based, common sense physics on the market. That's not to say that theory played no role and never messed up empirical observations but rather to say that generally Aristotelianism was an ideology that valued observation -- in sharp contrast to Platonism and other philosophies.  Okay, three examples:1. Characters have obtained Shocking weapons or cast Lightning Bolt from time to time and attempted to take advantage of possible secondary effects from the electricity being grounded through water, metal or the like. Aristotelian physics allows me to rule that lightning/electricity is a type of fire mixed with air and that therefore such things as electrical conduction are non-issues.2. People have fired arrows down long, narrow hallways underground with low ceilings. They hit their targets without be ever having to do a single kinematics equation to determine how far the arrow falls as it travels through the air.3. Inflation isn't real. I don't have to fiddle with item creation rules if the characters accidentally glut the local economy with gold. Having a coherent framework that explains why the values of things don't change regardless of the money available eliminates a bunch of disputes and eliminates the need to adapt the rules to post-medieval economics. But really, the main impacts on the game are the fact that things make sense. Fire elementals only make sense if fire is an element. In Newtonian-Einsteinian physics, fire isn't. Alchemy, as distinguished from chemistry, makes sense. Most importantly, it gives me a shorthand for the assumptions the characters should have about the world. If the world is generally Aristotelian, one can have a rough idea of the basic political, scientific and theological premises of a society. The last time I ran a D&D that didn't use Aristotelian physics, I had to produce 65 pages of background material and even then it wasn't enough. Designing societies that are not modern, from the ground up, is a huge undertaking for me. People have different premises about how things work in every conceivable facet of human life; the fact that D&D is so amenable to importing the Aristotelian framework is one of the reasons I keep it around. If D&D weren't compatible with any pre-existing worldview, I would be less likely to use the game because I would then have to create a worldview that actually fit with the D&D rules. Agreed. But an RPG run by H P Lovecraft wouldn't involve any predictable or consistent system of physics at all. The whole spirit of the Lovecraftian universe was one of chaos and arbitrariness which makes for good storytelling and bad gaming -- this is why Chaosium had to change the principles of his magic system in order to adapt Cthulu to gaming. If I were to hazard a guess as to the underlying system of physics Lovecraft's worlds were based on, it appears to have been a version of Renaissance demonic magic: a magic of true names and celestial powers. But true-name magic is very problematic in an RPG setting so I can see why it was dropped. Anyway, I'm not sure I can answer your questions to your satisfaction. For the kind of play I like to do to work, I need to build worlds in a particular way and present them in a particular way. I recognize that it is not the way most people can play D&D; but it is a way that some people can play D&D without doing violence to the core system.</blockquote>

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