Fantasy Immersion and the Things that Ruin it.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

mostly to it's complete lack of logic or reason-- excels at making magic feel like magic in a way that HERO just can't do with it's brick-by-brick Lego-style approach to building "powers."

 

Yeah part of what makes D*D magic feel special is the fire and forget and chaotic spell listing.  However, I think you can simulate that with Hero by hiding most of the guts, the build behind a wall where the players only see the effects and how to make it work, and not the sausage-making part.

[Rich McGee]

For those familiar with the game, do you think Ars Magica's magic rules feel "magical" however you personally define the term?  More or less magical than D&D (of whatever edition you favor, including cousins like Pathfinder or the countless OGL options)?  Or compared to HERO?

 

Mostly just curious how a game whose primary focus is on being "realistic" pseudo-historical European mages feels to other folks relative to the other main rules being discussed here. 

[Lord Liaden]

Whoah. I just spent 45 minutes reading this thread and rediscovering all the permutations it explored. Very impressive, and fascinating. Also a little humbling to see what I contributed back when I had time and energy to devote to a topic.

[Duke Bushido]

Holy cats do I love your seasonal avatar, LL!

 

Got a link to the larger image?  I wanna see more!

 

 

[Lord Liaden]

I don't want to clutter this thread with items that aren't germaine, Duke. But please see the Supers Image Game thread.

 

 

Edited December 3, 2023 by Lord Liaden

[Ninja-Bear]

On 11/30/2023 at 6:27 PM, Christopher R Taylor said:

 

Yeah part of what makes D*D magic feel special is the fire and forget and chaotic spell listing.  However, I think you can simulate that with Hero by hiding most of the guts, the build behind a wall where the players only see the effects and how to make it work, and not the sausage-making part.

What if you gave out small bonuses to the Spell based on how well your Magic Roll made it? Just like a good Acrobatics Roll can increase DCV? (I think that’s the rule). 

[pawsplay]

Playing in an imaginary world, you have a choice: either all-imaginary names (which requires a certain level of creativity and means you can't use certain evocative choices) or borrowing from the real world (which can have connotations you don't want). I'm generally fine with anachronistic or atopic names popping up in pure fantasy, but one particular thing I find jarring: Biblical names in a world that doesn't have Christianity or anything like it. To me names like Miriam or James or Jericho have a very specific connotation to specific Biblical characters and mythology which I find distracting. I don't struggle as much with old Celtic names, or with Latin names (which of course have been used, reused, and abused all over Europe anyway).

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

On 2/17/2020 at 7:19 PM, PhilFleischmann said:

What are the immersion disruptors for you?  Anachronistic ones, or otherwise.  What things spoil the "fantasy feel"?

Plausibility and groundedness.  I like my fantasy to feel obviously made-up and at least semi-impossible.  Otherwise I get a feeling of uncanny valley.

[Cancer]

Blundered across this a few minutes ago.

 

Calendars and their history

 

This is a discussion of real-world calendars in present use, and discussions of what they try to do (in an astronomical sense) and something about their history.  Used to be there were several places on the Web where you could get this stuff, but all those have vanished in the last ten years or so.   Reading this might give you some ideas about a custom calendar for your fantasy world, which can add flavor if you use it carefully.  Originally, it's a cut-down version of a chapter in a technical reference book.

 

As far as we are able to tell now, the seven-day week is not astronomical in origin, and that cycle has been maintained at least from the Babylonians, and perhaps before.  Years and months are attempts to reckon time (in terms of counting days) in terms of observable astronomical cycles.  These get messy because none of the various kinds of year or month are nice integer numbers of days, and in general the cycles have long-term drift in terms of their lengths, and those drifts include both long-term (much longer than the human lifetime) cycles and nonperiodic evolutionary changes.

 

If your world has multiple moons, or a moon that's importantly different from our real one, then that will impact your timekeeping.  You could spend a lot of time thinking about that and working it up for your world, though I'm not sure I've seen an instance where someone did that.

[DShomshak]

In the Exalted game setting, the calendar was pretty simple but integrated with the cosmology. Fifteen months, each 28 days long, matching the lunar phases exactly. Four seven-day weeks, each day named for one of the 7 Celestial Incarnae (Sun, Moon, and the Five Maidens, matching the planets of RL antiquity). Five seasons keyed to the five elements of Creation: Air, Water, Earth, Wood, and Fire, one month each for Ascending, Resplendent, and Descending, as each element's influence waxes and wanes. Plus the five ill-omened days of Calibration, when the night sky is blank because the pattern spiders are running the yearly diagnostic on the Loom of Fate. Some things become possible during Calibration that canot be done at any other time.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Doc Democracy]

The best thing about a fantasy world and cosmos is that it has no need to deal with messy real world astronomy etc.  🙂

 

Most commonly experienced by me in playing in Glorantha.  The myth influences the physical astronomy rather than vice versa.

 

[Christopher R Taylor]

One of the things I like most about my setting is the lack of a moon.  Its so omnipresent in every single setting multiple moons, moons you can live on, etc.  The moon affects tides in our world and in a fantasy setting impacts werewolves, nature magic, witchcraft etc.  Delete that and things are all different in a subtle but interesting way.  And there's no great light at night to show the way.

[Lord Liaden]

Earth's Moon also has great cultural significance. It's a major component in our mythologies and pre-scientific cosmology. It was supposed to have influence on the state of our minds, from romance to madness, and be crucial to astrology. It stimulated our imagination and inquiries into the true nature of our universe, and incentivized our exploration of space.

 

In the Hero Universe there's a world called Vayathura, whose inhabitants are at roughly the same level of social and technological development as us. Vayathura is actually a moon of a gas giant planet, and the light reflected from that planet has always completely drowned out any other celestial light source in the night sky. Until the Vayathurans launched their first orbital spacecraft, they didn't know such things as stars even existed. That's kind of the opposite of what Christopher proposes, and now I'm wondering how that would have shaped their culture.

[DShomshak]

15 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

In the Hero Universe there's a world called Vayathura, whose inhabitants are at roughly the same level of social and technological development as us. Vayathura is actually a moon of a gas giant planet, and the light reflected from that planet has always completely drowned out any other celestial light source in the night sky. Until the Vayathurans launched their first orbital spacecraft, they didn't know such things as stars even existed. That's kind of the opposite of what Christopher proposes, and now I'm wondering how that would have shaped their culture.

Hm, which book is this from?

 

Astrographically, it's very difficult to get an arrangement in which either the sun or the jovian are always in the sky, everywhere in Vayathura, so there is never any full dark. Now, if Vayathura is tide-locked to the jovian (plausible), but its orbital period exactly matches the jovian's year soVayathura is always exactly between the sun and jovian... I'm not sure, but I think this requires a retrograde orbit as well. Or Vayathura is actually at the Lagrange point between sun and jovian, though this is less stable than the L4 and L5 points so it probably wouldn't work over geological time.

 

Atmospheric refraction could complicate this, too. If Earth's atmosphere were denser, or its radius a bit less, light could refract all the way around the planet. As the Sun set it would seem to smear out along the western horizon until it formed a dim, ruddy glow all around the horizon at midnight, then slowly condense in the east until sunrise. No full night, only a long twilight. This could spread the light from both Vayathura's sun and the jovian.

 

It doesn't quite work because there will still be times when the jovian is directly between Vayathura and its star. That eclipse will give Vayathura a period -- maybe not long, maybe not often -- of true darkness. But if the atmosphere is dense enough to produce the twilight ring effect, it will also be dense enough that stars will likely be blurred to invisibility, too. Though other moons of the jovian are likely still visible, so the Vayathurans would know there was more to the universe than their world, the sun, and the jovian, giving an incentive to develop space flight.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Lord Liaden]

41 minutes ago, DShomshak said:

Hm, which book is this from?

 

 

It's from Champions Beyond, the book describing the space/cosmic side of the CU. Here's Vayathura's description from p. 39:

 

"Vayathura is not actually a planet, but the planet-sized moon of a gas giant the Vayathurans call Mogar. Vayathura is "locked" so that it always remains between the F3V star Pem and Mogar, but still revolves so that it has a night and day. Actually, "night" is something of a misnomer in Human terms, since Mogar virtually fills the sky, and its pinkish-brown glow softly lights the world. It wasn't until they developed space travel in recent years that the Vayathurans could actually see the stars."

 

"Between sunlight, Mogarlight, and tidal action, Vayathura is a warm and balmy world with a large tropical zone (but fearsome hurricanes). Similarly, the pull of Mogar has prevented the development of any large continents such as Asia on Earth; instead, Vayathura has a handful of small continents (none much larger than India) and numerous islands. The warm climate creates a long and fruitful growing season; the relative tectonic instability leads to lots of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. The Vayathurans have developed an extensive and intricate geologic science as a result, making them skilled prospectors."

 

Vayathura made peaceful contact with Earth in 1999 through a Vayathuran called Far-Strider (English translation), one of their superheroes with the power of interstellar-level teleportation. The planet's leaders asked Far-Strider to try to find other worlds with intelligent life, and Earth was the first he encountered. He's made several trips to Earth since, bringing and taking back all the information he could carry in electronic storage media. Vayathura is thus one of the alien worlds about which Humanity has the most knowledge.

[Cancer]

10 hours ago, DShomshak said:

Astrographically, it's very difficult to get an arrangement in which either the sun or the jovian are always in the sky, everywhere in Vayathura, so there is never any full dark. Now, if Vayathura is tide-locked to the jovian (plausible), but its orbital period exactly matches the jovian's year soVayathura is always exactly between the sun and jovian... I'm not sure, but I think this requires a retrograde orbit as well. Or Vayathura is actually at the Lagrange point between sun and jovian, though this is less stable than the L4 and L5 points so it probably wouldn't work over geological time.

 

(Cancer fails his save against astro-geeking out.)

 

Yeah, I am inclined to think that this arrangement can't exist for any appreciable length of time, and it's physically impossible to have that planet "filling the sky" for the near side of the tidally locked moon.  Newton's extension of Kepler's 3rd Law gives you a relationship between the primary mass, orbit size, and orbit period (assuming the orbiting body's mass is small compared to the center object): (mass of central body) * (orbital period)^2 = (orbit size)^3, where mass is in units of the solar mass, period is in Earth years, and orbit size is in Astronomical Units = size of Earth's orbit around the Sun.

 

If you plug in Jupiter's mass (1/1047 solar mass), and orbital period for the moon equal to the orbital period of Jupiter (11.86 earth years), then you get an orbital radius of a bit more than 0.5 AU.  But seen at a distance half an AU, the Sun would be only about a degree across, and Jupiter's physical radius is about a tenth of that of the Sun.  So it'd be roughly the same apparent size as one of the smaller maria as seen on Earth's Moon from Earth's surface, now.

 

To have the host planet fill the sky as seen from the moon, the moon has to be in close.  This forces difficulties with two serious problems.  First, pushing the moon close means its orbit period is MUCH shorter, assuming you keep the host planet constant.  You can lengthen the orbit period by reducing the host planet mass, but to reduce it by that much puts you well below what we think is the minimum mass for jovian-class planets, so you can never get to the "fill the sky" situation.  The stable L4/L5 points for a "moon' are 60 degrees ahead/behind of the planet in the planet's orbit around the star, so the points Sun, planet, and L-point make an equilateral triangle: the Sun is the same distance from the L-point as the planet is, so the only way the planet can be as bright as the Sun to an observer at one of those L-points is ... it's not a planet, it's another star.  The other Lagrange points are unstable on timescales of years (NOT millions of years or even thousands of years) so the idea of "having a moon there" simply does not make sense.

 

The second serious problem is the Roche limit: pushing a moon closer to its host planet increases the tidal stresses on the moon, and when you get too close the tides will destroy the moon and turn the resulting rubble into a ring system instead.  Frankly, I think this Roche limit problem fundamentally makes the "fill the sky" situation impossible for any moon bigger than few tens of meters across (and yes, that's meters, not kilometers).

 

If you appeal to a light-scattering atmosphere around the moon that never gives you a clear view of any part of the sky, well, we have that situation in the real Solar System: that's Venus's atmosphere, and Venus rotates very slowly retrograde, so its day/night cycle is bizarre but quite long compared to Earth or Mars ... but it has a day/night cycle.

 

Of conventional moons in our Solar System orbiting planets, with only a single exception, literally every one we can observe well enough to determine its rotation period ... rotates synchronously.  They are all tidally locked.  The exception is Hyperion in the Saturn system, which rotates chaotically due to tidal tugs from the other moons.  (The small moons of Pluto also rotate chaotically, and there's enough weird stuff out there in the Kuiper Belt that I'm certain only that there's a lot of things out there in the "stranger than we can imagine" bin.)

 

Now, that's real physics, and this being a Fantasy Hero thread you are free to disregard whatever you want.

[Lord Liaden]

8 hours ago, Cancer said:

 

Now, that's real physics, and this being a Fantasy Hero thread you are free to disregard whatever you want.

 

I very much appreciate and bow to my boardmates' astrophysical expertise.   But yes, given a universe with magic and super-science, gods and cosmic beings, there's leeway for bending a lot of what are constants in our own universe for the sake of what makes a good story. Good enough for government work, and all.

 

 

 

Edited June 29 by Lord Liaden

[DShomshak]

Incidentally, the set-up I suggested with synchronized moon and planetary orbits only becomes even remotely feasible with a red dwarf star, so the jovian's year is, like, two weeks, which lets the moon's orbit still be relatively close to the planet. Vayathura's sun, though, is an F3 -- considerably brighter than Sol, with a correspondingly distant habitable zone, meaning a longer orbital period that makes the whole setup untenable as Cancer points out.

 

But this is drifting far from the subject of Fantasy immersion. If someone wants to start a thread about radically un-Earthly Fantasy worlds, though, go to it.

 

Vayathura is also an example of why I think it's better to keep one's SF and superhero settings separate. Vayathura's impossible orbital mechanics are no big deal for a classic comic-book setting, but I prefer more astronomical and planetological rigor in an SF setting. Though worlds can still get pretty wild! (I occasionally enjoy designing bizarre but physically possible planetary systems.)

 

Dean Shomshak

[Cancer]

I have put in "custom" moons into fantasy worlds, for my own nefarious purposes.  A moon that is in geosynchronous orbit and whose orbital plane is the same as the planet's equatorial plane makes cross-ocean navigation MUCH simpler (for the half of the planet which can see the moon, anyway) because observing that moon can give you your longitude; not quite a simply as measuring a pole star gives you your latitude, but almost.  Now, if you're using divination magic of some sort for navigation, then this doesn't matter to you; absent that magic, though, it gives you a reason why one hemisphere might be culturally/socially homogenized, while the other hemisphere has much greater fragmentation (or diversity) in their histories and civilization development.

 

At one point I thought about putting in a moon with a highly inclined, highly eccentric orbit (like Nereid, moon of Neptune), but getting that worked into a calendar in a usable way ended up being more work than I was willing to do. 

 

Long long ago (bakc in my undergrad days) I thought about imposing a set of rules so that astrology actually worked and player characters (and others) could access information that way, but again that was much more work than I was willing, no able, to do.  (OTOH, that was more than a decade before personal computing was a thing and LOTS of computational libraries had been created, so the labor involved might not be so absolutely prohibitive now.)

[Duke Bushido]

On 6/27/2024 at 11:52 PM, Lord Liaden said:

Earth's Moon also has great cultural significance. It's a major component in our mythologies and pre-scientific cosmology.

 

More so than any other moon.  In fact, while it may be entirely due to its unusual characteristics compared to other moons, no other culture in our solar system takes their moon as seriously as do the humans of earth.

 

 

 

seriously, though:

 

 

On 6/27/2024 at 11:52 PM, Lord Liaden said:

It was supposed to have influence on the state of our minds, from romance to madness,

 

If you ever worked as a first responder, ER or other medical staff, or any sort of crisis management, even though you can never explain it, you'd come to accept that it certainly seems to have; I promise. 

 

 

 

On 6/29/2024 at 2:57 AM, Cancer said:

 

(Cancer fails his save against astro-geeking out.)

 

 

 

Keep going!

 

I _love_ it when Cancer geeks out on astrophysics!

 

My education has been primarily mechanical, electrical, and construction, with medical education added in as I pushed out of my thirties and into my forties, preceded in my early twenties by a very brief dabble into law enforcement (I bailed out quickly because, well... Politely put, the rumors seem to generally be true, and I didn't and still don't care to be a part of that) though neither of the last two get used as much as the rest.

 

My education is _incredibly_ lacking in astrophysics, and every time you go into an info dump, I eat it up!

 

so, as a favor, I would ask you to _always_ give in to the urge!

 

 

Edited Tuesday at 12:54 AM by Duke Bushido

[Lord Liaden]

3 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

 

More so than any other moon.  In fact, whike it may be entirely due to its unusual characteristics compared to other moons, no other culture in our solar system takes their moon as seriously as so the humans of earth.

 

 

 

I have not ruled out finding some methane-breathing civilizations in the Jovian or Saturnian systems. And they got a lotta moons.

[Grailknight]

On 7/7/2024 at 7:03 PM, Lord Liaden said:

 

I have not ruled out finding some methane-breathing civilizations in the Jovian or Saturnian systems. And they got a lotta moons.

 

Which they probably can't see. Either Asimov or Clarke once wrote a story about Earth making contact with a Jovian civilization that turned out to be violent xenophobes because their religion didn't allow the existence of other life forms due to them not being able to see the stars.

[Spence]

On 11/30/2023 at 3:13 PM, Duke Bushido said:

 

 

Careful with that, Sir.

 

 

Was it a year or so ago I got well-run across the coals for saying that as much as I detest it, D and D-- owing, I am sure, mostly to it'a complete lack of logic or reason-- excels at making magic feel like magic in a way that HERO just can't do with it's brick-by-brick Lego-style approach to building "powers."

 

I mean spells.

 

Sorry.  

Arise O post of ages past 😜

 

I don't really consider that as a Hero Rules issue.  Hero, be it 4th, 5th or 6th edition. Or any addition for that matter is more of an SRD guide than a playable set of rules and a setting. 

 

Don't give a list of modifiers/limitations/advantages with which ones are required and which ones are options.  Build the spell "list" and then tell them what they have or give them the option to pick the spells they want.  Do it just like D&D or PF if you want.  For the spells do not include any "game mechanics notation". Just the name, the effect and the cost per cast. Mana, End, times per day, whatever. 

 

Make the magic just as mysterious as any other game.  You are the only person that needs to know how you balanced it. 

 

 

[GDShore]

I suppose you could do so, Spence, but that would eliminate one of the game aspects I loved when playing as a character. Research, creating a spell that nobody else was using or could use unless I taught it to them. I have never thought that Hero's magic system was clunky or interfered with the mystic of the play, or was inferior to the imbecilic, arbitrary and just plain dumb D&D system. I played D&D from it's inception, actualy from before it was, I played chainmail. I was never happy with it, and jumped ship to Hero system as soon as it appeared. I have never regretted it.

[Ninja-Bear]

Like I mentioned in another thread, having monsters attack and then a player wants to have at least a five minute discussion on tactics on how to approach the fight. Especially because we weren’t a “team” yet.Now if our backstory was that we were a team before hand ok. If we discuss as a group in non-combat time how we should approach a fight ok. But not in the first battle ever.