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(TFT) Re: TFT Digest V3 #1159



Jay wrote:

Molecules make up NON-living matter as well as LIVING matter.

Uh-oh...

How many "rule-books" and should they work together?

This got me thinking about the physics of metaphysics. Clearly the "rule-books" Jay writes about exist, in the form of Biochemistry, Chemistry and Quantum mechanics textbooks, and they "work together" at least to first approximation (ignoring the fundamental differences between general relativity and quantum mechanics, but there are people working on that...).

I foresee some difficulty when magic gets involved.

The only mechanism I can see for "magic" working is that it allows quantum mechanical "random" events to start happening in a very highly non-"random" manner when addressed as statistical ensembles. So (e.g.) although it's statistically way beyond impossible for water to spontaneously freeze into ice, beaming all the extra energy out as a collimated beam of IR or microwave radiation, it's not theoretically impossible. You just have to believe that for some reason *all* of the molecules of that puddle decide to somehow make their way to the bottom end of the Maxwellian energy distribution *at once*.

Likewise (but way more complicated) for the "Heal" spell, I think there's plenty of energy available for ruptured cells to re-integrate, splintered bones to re-knit, and similar entropy-reversal looking reactions to take place. It's just not going to happen under our existing statistical knowledge of how things happen.

And after all, I think the concept of "entropy" is a statistically *descriptive* and not basic-mechanics rule - it relies on the "statistics of large numbers" applying, and that's what I think magic would violate.

So there's one more "rulebook"/textbook/grimoire that will need to be written eventually, if you take all of this to the ultimate level of detail.

As to whether the result will end up playable, I don't think that's realistic. The trick, in writing game rules, is to come up with the best balance between realism and playability.
--
						- Mark     210-379-4635
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