Prosthetic Limbs in Fantasy Settings

No, it is not. It's retarded. It's the most fucking boring thing in the universe.

Speculation is fun because it allows us to play around with meaningful, relevant ideas from our world. That is what makes hard sci-fi or dystopia literature fun: they tackle subjects relevant to our world, our lives, our knowledge.

Fantasy is fun because it allows us to play around with non-scientific intuitions about the world, they symbolic, the mythological.

If you however mash together the two because you are too fucking moronic to understand the purpose behind each exercise, it's boring: neither speaking to our symbolic perceptions, nor actually making relevant and relatable statements about physical and scientific reality. It's nothing but a vapid masturbation of meaningless terminology.

It's a product of generation of kids who can't be bothered to actually learn and understand what makes genre fiction interesting to begin with. People who are too dumb to do actual scientific speculations, but also too narrow-minded to realize that our current normal secular, scientific way of looking at world is not actually necessary and can be transcended. The result is universally bad fucking fiction.

"Crystals translating dwarve nerve impulses" means nothing to anyone. It is, to quote Carnap, "empty sound that just so happens to resemble human language".

No. It does not. End of any discussion. Nerves don't have to be a relevant concern at fucking all. How many fucking mythological stories have you read that concerned themselves about fucking nerves you idiot?!

If you're so adamant about it, explain how it just being magic works in making it do something as simple as going up and down or waving the hand.

It does not need speculative explanation to begin with you retard. This is really painful. You can't fucking comprehend that magic is a SYMBOL. It represents something else: psychological fear or desire, will or hope, sum of forces that we don't understand, laws we wish to see or fear to them to exist.

A great wizard and god of wisdom created a prosthetic dick of the god Osiris out of a ivory, and Osiris proceeded to impregnate his wife and sister, Isis with it.
How?
Because it's a complex multilayered symbolic narrative, birth from destruction, denaturalization of a body, simple assertion of superiority of gods over the physical domain: all of that at the same time and likely thousand more meaningful notions on top of that.

You don't need to on a bullshit explanation of how Thoft managed to somehow connect the ivory dick to the testicles and equiped it with little pumps to shoot it out - especially because Osiris also DIED, was torn into pieces for decades, and then stitched together and then brought ALIVE AGAIN.

Why do you fucking need to suddenly fucking impose pseudoscientific bullshit on any of this?
DO.
MAGIC.
Do sense of awe. Of wonder. Of symbolic meanings. Of the world seen through the eyes of a child, open to all possibilities, not restricted by scientific limitations for fuck sake.

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I'm not saying it has to be restricted by science. I am using Nerve Signals as an example of how the limb receives orders on what to do. You can say the prosthetic limbs use blood runes that attune it to your body's soul or some shit.

Sure, we may be overthinking it, but some of us LIKE to flesh out every single fucking detail of how something works.

The issue with that is that you are dealing with the difference between a story and a game. A story doesn't need to explain that, it's not relevent. A game though? A game needs to give the details for players to make informed, in character decisions about the world.

No. First of all your fucking characters in fucking medieval fantasy world should NOT BE INFORMED ABOUT THE EXISTENCE OF NERVES in the first place.
Second of all: your players need to know exact rules of INTERACTION with the worlds, but there is no reason why they should have exact knowledge of the inner workings of the world. Most people don't understand the inner workings of our world, and we are equipped with fucking science here.

Why should the characters fucking care about how does the limb translate nerve signals, or even know or fucking care what nerves are in the first place.
Your players need to know if lost limb can be replaced, and they need to know conditions under which such thing could happen. But that does not mean they should fucking know the mechanics of the limb - or that the mechanics even need to be knowable. Remember - real-life logic and knowledge does not have to translate into in-game logic and knowledge: that is what we call metagaming.
If your character starts asking about nerves in fantasy world full of magic, he is fucking bad at roleplaying, that is all.

golden microcircuits and magic

It makes things much easier

"It translates nerve signals"
You immediately know what it does. It's magic with purpose. You know it's nothing other than a prosthetic limb + whatever you utility you can think of regarding the material.

"It's mysterious magic"
Great, have fun with the owner not knowing what its limits are and constantl asking thr DM "can I shoot lasers like dragon ball??? Can i use the force with the magic???"

If you want that sure go ahead in your game, but this thread is specifically about prosthetic limbs in a fantasy setting, not, not magic limbs. In this case, the magic is an addition in the explanation, not the base and core of the concept. The concept is a prosthetic fucking limb.

Honestly if you think "small background detail that helps players familiarize themselves with the world since, you know, they act as a character IN that world = sci-fi", then I don't want to participate in your games and worlds if your only explanation is "it's magic". It works with some things, not with everything.

Exactly this

>No. First of all your fucking characters in fucking medieval fantasy world should NOT BE INFORMED ABOUT THE EXISTENCE OF NERVES in the first place.

Aristotle and Galen knew about nerves. To quote Galen, in ancient Rome:

>"I have shown in my book On the Teachings of Hippocrates and Plato that the source of the nerves, of all sensation, and of voluntary motion is the encephalon [the brain] and that the source of the arteries and of the innate heat is the heart."

>Galen saw the spinal cord as an extension of the brain which carried sensation to the limbs. He believed that the nerves controlled the actions of muscles in the limbs, and that the two principal functions of the nervous system, sensation and motion, were governed by two different types of nerves: respectively soft and hard. He further insisted on a curious anatomical feature of the nerves, imagining them to be hollow tubes. Quite logically, he reasoned that this must be so in order for the animal spiritus, the body's principal source of vitality in his system, to circulate throughout the body. As the Renaissance illustration here indicates, the investigation of the nerves after Galen also became an inquiry into the effect of the brain on the body.

Nerves are one of those things we have known about for a long, long time. Someone playing a physician of any sort (And there tends to be one in most fantasy games) would likely know about nerves.

A surgeon-magician asks the person who's getting a prosthetic to wiggle his non-existent thumb while moving nothing else. He scryes the specific nerve bundles that activate, and use magic to inscribe them with a rune. He does this for as many joints/muscle groups as his skill and time allows for. The runeslates (magic circuit boards) in the prosthetic have corresponding runes inscribed in the right places, processing the signal and amplifying it with power from a replaceable thaumic cell before translating it to mechanical movement in prosthetic

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Stop talking about shit you don't understand, kid.

Aristotle postulated something like nerves running through the body, but he also thought brains only function was to cool bodily fluids, and did not recognize it's importance for cognition.
Galen did believe sensations run through limbs to spinal cord and then to brain, but he ALSO BELIEVED IN PLATONIC IDEALS for fuck sake.

Even fucking Descartes actually explained motion of a body through divine intervention - back in days where basic mechanics of body were long since explained, because and this might blow your mind:
PEOPLE BELIEVED IN SPIRITUAL WORLD ASIDE FROM PHYSICAL ONE YOU IDIOT. And as a result, their understanding of nerves and the role they played in our existence was COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from ours today. Galen still believed in souls - literal spirits doing the actual fucking work. For fuck sake, how fucking ignorant are you? Do you not understand that just because they describe similar concepts that we use today, it means they THINK OF THEM THE SAME?

Did it never fucking occur to you that physics to a greek philosopher means something else than physics to a modern one? Jesus you people are fucking uneducated.

>Stop talking about shit you don't understand, kid.

That's the pot calling the kettle black considering you are rambling about how no one in a fantasy setting should actually understand how their own magic works. There are entire fantasy settings built on that, like Ebberon and I can't think of too many where people don't have a decent understanding of the magic.

Jesus christ you are angry about people wanting information to make in-character decisions.

>That's the pot calling the kettle black considering you are rambling about how no one in a fantasy setting should actually understand how their own magic works.
I'm not saying any of that you mongoloid. Learn to fucking read. Seriously, re-read everything I've posted so far and try again.

>I'm not saying any of that you mongoloid. Learn to fucking read. Seriously, re-read everything I've posted so far and try again.

I don't speak autistic screeching about how it's magic, you shouldn't need to explain shit Quesada.

Like in the picture, basically. A prosthetic limb doesn't have to be articulate after all.

He just wants to say that its magic and leave it at that for this entire fucking thread, an entire FUCKING THREAD that was made to discuss this shit.

Hit the nerve, I see

I agree, but were exploring all the options here in this thread.

It doesn't, but it might be.

>about people wanting information to make in-character decisions.
I'm mad about people applying real-world scientific knowledge not currently available to majority of REAL WORLD people both to make decision of their completely scientifically unequipped characters, and forcing that logic into fantastic world-building (thus completely ruining any potential fantasy in your fucking fantasy world) to accommodate such meta-gaming fucks.
But you are not really doing it because your player require something like that. You are doing it because - as I stress out in the previous thread, you are incredibly arrogant and poorly educated CUNT. That literally does not want even for a second think outside of the basic modern secular scientific but poorly educated categories.

>I'm mad about people applying real-world scientific knowledge not currently available to majority of REAL WORLD people both to make decision of their completely scientifically unequipped characters, and forcing that logic into fantastic world-building (thus completely ruining any potential fantasy in your fucking fantasy world) to accommodate such meta-gaming fucks.

People in this thread were literally talking about using symbolism and runes to connect the limb. You also seem to assume that because something is magic it must be purely magically based. A magic sword still uses metallurgy to forge it and it's design to be a good weapon. There is nothing saying that a magical prosthetic limb has no scientific basis in it at all.

I mean, D&D had a literal ATOM BOMB invented at one point. A completely scientific one, in one of D&D's main 3 settings (Dragonlance). Saying that modern scientific knowledge shouldn't apply at all is nonsense.

Dude, just fucking leave if you are going to be like this. Have you also forgot that Wizards and Witches are the scientists of the Fantasy world. Sure they have magic and all but they question the world around them and they write this knowledge down so all future wizards can further expand on their work.

I mean Potion making is a good example of chemistry, what is to say a Wizard can't map all the nerves by using his magic to make every single one of them glow?

>People in this thread were literally talking about using symbolism and runes to connect the limb.
That is why I'm specifically adressing this to people who think along the categories of nerves. If you can come up with a reasoning that is not retarded and has symbolic rather than causal dimension, all power to you. That is my point: focus on the symbolic relationship, and don't waste time making up nonsense bullshit explanations of things that not only don't need this kind of explanation, but that actively remove any appeal of your settings and betray how clueless you are about creating compelling fiction.

>I mean, D&D had a literal ATOM BOMB invented at one point.
And it is fucking awful settings. God damn shit. And it's precisely the example of bad fucking habits that keep consistently dragging the whole fucking genre down that I am urging people to avoid.

>And it is fucking awful settings. God damn shit. And it's precisely the example of bad fucking habits that keep consistently dragging the whole fucking genre down that I am urging people to avoid.

That's very subjective. Science and Magic are not inherently opposed and can often be together as part of a good setting. Not every game is Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura.

>Have you also forgot that Wizards and Witches are the scientists of the Fantasy world.
I have not forgotten that: I say that is fucking idiotic way to approach fantasy. It's exactly this attitude that makes 90% of all fantasy pure GARBAGE.

>I mean Potion making is a good example of chemistry,
Dude, do you not know the most FUNDAMENTAL difference between alchemy and chemistry?! Do you also think astrology is the same as astronomy, just because both are concerned with stars? What the fuck?
This is PRECISELY my fucking problem. You are so fucking dumb and arrogant that you actually can't even begin comprehending that somebody may had actually seen the world around them very differently than you are trained to do today. And that is why most fantasy sucks: it completely abandons the one thing that the fucking genre has to offer: shift of perspective, revisiting and viewing the world DIFFERENTLY than modern secular scientific people do. It's incredibly lazy. You are taking all these fascinating, strange, yet somehow functional perspectives: the ideas of alchemy, of magic, of mythological tales and understandings: and you are literally taking out what makes them unique and worth exploring besides our real world.

You are going in just denying all that makes them interesting: "magic is just science", "alchemy is just chemistry", "astrology is just a astronomy".

Why the EVER LIVING FUCK do you even bother having alchemy, magic or astrology in your world then? What is the fucking point?

>Science and Magic are not inherently opposed
They LITERALLY ARE. That is in fact the definition of magic.
Science: causality without observer - that is no symbolic reading involved, description of the world as it would happen without observers.

Magic: symblical relationships ENTIRELY BASED on observers assumptions and his mental and cognitive states.

They are. THE. FUCKING. OPPOSITE.

I am just gonna say it again if you are going to get your ass so riled up about it, then leave and make a thread why they Science and Magic can't be used in harmony.

Where did you get that definition? As my dictionary defines it very differently.

Science: the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.

Magic: the power of apparently influencing events by using mysterious or supernatural forces.

You are flinging about a lot of opinion as fact there.

Get a better dictionary or better yet, do basic studies on philosophy of science and anthropology of magic. If you want sources, for science look up authors such as Popper or aformentioned Carnap, for magic you can start with all-famous Frazer who came with first modern academic understanding of magic practices, then consult authors such as Levi-Strauss, Evans-Pritchard, Randal or Greenwood.

A general tip: don't trust common-use dictionaries at all, and if possible, don't trust dictionaries in general. Absolute majority of dictionaries are orientational and usually very poorly worded, not descriptive and even fewer are prescriptive.
No one ever understood a complex social phenomenon by looking it up in a public-access general dictionary.

How educated on this subject are you? Care to list sources, authors, schools of thoughts you are familiar with to make such claims?

Yeah but real life (Such as it is) 'magic' doesn't line up with RPG magic...basically ever. They are two very different beasts with the same name.

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>Yeah but real life (Such as it is) 'magic' doesn't line up with RPG magic...basically ever.
Not really. One is completely bastardized point of the other, usually utterly missing the point in the end. RPG magic is trying to be like real-world notion of magic, but it fails most of the time, and frankly, right now we are discussing EXACTLY why. What I'm trying to do here is to explain how to avoid doing the same mistake most RPG magic approaches made, ending up being dull as fuck and making the whole genre a laughing stock of the world.

I'm... confused. What exactly is "bait" about that. Of all the posts I've made so far, many of which have been extremely inflammatory and insulting, dismissing entire franchises and so on - this one is the one you'd identify as bait?
Why? How? It's literally the most reasonable, least insulting and least controversial post I've made so far in this discussion.

I would not bat an eye if you accused me of baiting with literally any other post I've made except this one?
What is your logic there? I'm genuinely curious.

>Not really. One is completely bastardized point of the other, usually utterly missing the point in the end. RPG magic is trying to be like real-world notion of magic, but it fails most of the time, and frankly, right now we are discussing EXACTLY why. What I'm trying to do here is to explain how to avoid doing the same mistake most RPG magic approaches made, ending up being dull as fuck and making the whole genre a laughing stock of the world.

Yes and a bastardisation of one thing often ends up with something good. You may not think so and you are fine to have that opinion but that doesn't make you objectively right. RPG magic has diverged so much it's become an entirely different thing.

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My Logic is that you are trying to fight everyone else's reasoning's for it, not to mention you have derailed the original topic from how Fantasy Prosthetics can work to Magic and Science can't work together because you are being an absolute pissy asshole who can't accept the idea that some people LIKE to have Science and Magic in their Fantasy Settings regardless of being for DnD or an actual story setting.

Right now YOU are the only fucking crybaby who tries to argue that they can't work because you consider it to be metagaming and that real world logic can't hold true in a fantasy setting.

And to be honest, I posted the bait picture hoping you get tired and fucking leave.

Go make your own thread arguing this and just leave us be.

This actually might be (for the first time in this thread) a purely semantic problem, but "bastardization" literally means "reducing something of value to something of a lesser or no value". So no: bastardization never yields great things: if a process of transformation leads to results comparable in worth to the original, it's not bastardization.

But the problem here is that you are claiming that RPG magic has diverged from real-world notion of magic.
I just do not believe that is true. Doing something but poorly is not the same as doing something else. Real life magic notions are still the only point of reference, the only concept that makes fantasy games and books magic somehow relevant and thus interesting to us. If it wasn't fundamentally trying to re-create the real-life notion of magic, it would literally have no meaning (and thus hold absolutely no interest) to us.

You see it as "widely diverging" because you yourself recognized how much it fucked up, but that does not mean it actually started doing something different, and that we should give up on improving it.

In the end, what I hear in your post as the strongest argument is "but this is how it has been done in the genre for long time".
And I don't think that is an argument. It is, I'm sorry to say, cowardice and laziness. Just because the genre has been doing it wrong for long time does not mean we should give up on any ambitions to improve it.

Jesus you are fucking pathetic. Is this how you react every time someobody dares to say something you don't like? Fuck me that is sad.

Well not everyone is happy to say it's magic' and leave it at that. There is also the fact you are unwilling to believe scientists can't exist in a Fantasy setting because newsflash, they can.

I had a magical gauntlet affixed to my arm in my first game of DnD ever.

Treated it as though I had my forearm back and a modifier to dexterity and strength for actions involving that arm.

I want the old-blood mini so bad. But I do not want to pay for the saur he's riding on too.

>And I don't think that is an argument. It is, I'm sorry to say, cowardice and laziness. Just because the genre has been doing it wrong for long time does not mean we should give up on any ambitions to improve it.

And I don't think 'This isn't how it's done in an original root, so it's shit' is a good argument either. Fantasy magic has become self perpetuating, a creature that gives birth to itself like the modern ideas of elves which bear only the slightest resemblance to Tolkien's idea of them. It has become a different creature through endless Chinese whispers and repetition but that does not make it lesser for it.

A story with understood and scientific magic isn't any worse than one without. You claim it to be 'improvement' but offer no examples of how it makes it any better other than calling the alternative shit.

This is what a $50,000 humanities degree gets you

Bionic prosthetics. Basically, you magically wire an animal limb (preferrably an insectoid one) to your stump.

>bitches about someone being upset about someone having opposing views

>posts 2000+ word weak arguments, personal preferences, claiming to know what’s best for the entire RPG community when someone dares to lean towards a more scientific description of prosthetic limbs, likely for immersion/description purposes for real life players rather than “hurr durr it is done” and the limb in question just fully functioning
How can you be this dysfunctional? Let people play in settings they like. Let people have fun, and if you don’t agree with them, do your own thing.

History did it better.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Götz_von_Berlichingen

ITT: If anything in your fantasy setting is similar to the real world, it's not fantasy.

>"Okay, so the guard opens the door..."
>"Wait, your cuck setting has doors?

Your bait sucks.

This. Always thought it was cool that he had to manually adjust the fingers, that's how a fantasy prosthetic should be. It looked rather pretty too, instead of being some crazy metal skeleton claw like most fantasy depicts.

I agree with this guy.

Also this has probably been brought up already but why the fuck would you need prosthetic limbs in a universe where it would probably be cheaper to have someone cast Heal on the damaged limb to completely regrow it?

This game is made by over thinkers for over thinkers.

>WHAT KIND OF LIBERAL SOY BOY SHIT IS THIS?!!? STOP TRYING TO COME UP WITH SOM FANCY STUPID SOUNDING PSUDO SCIENCE ITS MAGIC REEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Depends on the setting but I've always liked having 'healing magic' mostly just being 'reduce swelling' charms. Real, put-the-compound-fracture-back-into-place shit is harder and rarer.

Mechanically, it means PCs don't lose limbs or anything until they hit negatives, but if they do then it takes a regimen of 'regeneration' spells to replace it.

It sounds to me as if this would lead to a entire "magical cyborg" type of thing, perhaps even full body replacement or something akin to 40k dreadnoughts

Came in the thread specifically to post this

I like you

If there is enchantment and plate gloves its possible

You're an ass bandit and should drink some bleach and ammonia

>implying the soul doesn't play a part in the human experience
Hur dur they can't be right if they have faith.

The only thing pushing people away from the genre is faggots like you shitting on any discourse because you don't like it. Fuck off cockgobblar

I had a warlock/assassin hybrid baddie as a villain in a campaign use a robot arm very much in the vein of etherium from MtG. It acted as both a prosthetic and an arcane focus, and basically ended up turning into Mega Man's arm cannon. His fate was not a happy one.

Magic.

hahaha wow. holy shit. its subjective fiction, related to a group oriented activity.

If they find it engaging, and their group finds it engaging thats all that matters.

The goal of rpg's is ultimately enjoyment of the hobby. Telling someone they are having bad-wrong-fun is fool-hearty, and just makes you seem like one more person bringing toxicity into the hobby.

Beyond even that, they are thinking creatively in a way that creates a pleasant fiction for them. All you've done is insult folks. Its the cardinal sin of improv. You said no to a relatively novel idea for no reason other than your own arrogance in believing you have the objectively correct opinion.

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Dave?

Cool shit. Did he channel spells through it or did it give him an alternate ranged attack?

There's an artifact prosthetic arm in the latest exalted book, and a whole sidebar on other types of artifacts of similar nature. It works better there since it's meant to emulate high end mythology stuff, see the silver hand from that one Irish god

Bruce makes me bothered

So... Has anyone else noticed that there seem to be more "objectively right" opinionated people as of late?

Dickhead user was a fine example of this but I dunno if its the hobby, people in general, or if I'm just noticing them more.

I hope its the latter.

I think people just got bad at biting bait

It's unfortunate that he was such a cunt because he wasn't entirely wrong. All too often we forget the purpose, the why, and we just do stuff like this without meaning. It does have entertainment value though.

He was actually right about his magic stuff but he demonstrates really bad temper. Personally I don't think people who state their opinions loudly are any worse than the ones who hold to their own opinions quietly against all evidence to the contrary.

Well thats the issue isnt it? Acting like a right cunt effectively had him shouted down until he left the thread.

I figure that, as RPG's are usually about entertainment, it has value to the individuals cobbling it together. Would have been nice to have a calm pleasant debate about it.

Problem is, you rarely have to deal with the quiet ones, even if they may be just as intractable when confronted.

In regards to his magic stuff, it was too absolute. He made some good points in the muck he was spouting but magic, being fictional, can work how we want? Why badwrongfun some folks if they are enjoying the theoretical discussion of how their magic works?

Sorry for the rhetoricals. I enjoy talking about the wherewithal of magic in the same way I enjoy star-trek technobabble. Its awfully silly, but it makes me smile nonetheless.

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I had an idea for a character with a prosthetic limb. An arm made of magically enhance wood with doll-like joints. The way I pictured it working was something like having artificial nerves grown inside of it with magic, then connected to his real nerves so he could control it easily. Just stick the arm nub in the fitted slot. The wood would be really hard to burn and would be very durable while not having any sensory nerves, so he could use it to block a weapon or reach into a fire or whatever, and it would be fine.

I agree with this post 110%. I can't stand magic being treated like just another science.

any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
-Arthur C. Clarke

>Not a single berserk reference.
Wow. Am I that old?

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Nice meme quote, reddit.

more a proposition, but w/e

No, you just aren't on the board for Japanese cartoons and comics.

Iscrolled down the 1st page and found 3 threads with anime picture in opening post.

>can work how we want?
He pointed out the core of magic which many people miss completely.
>ENTIRELY BASED on observers assumptions and his mental and cognitive states
When reminded of it for some reason they often decide to double-down on the mistake instead of correcting it. If you don't use magic why do you insist on calling it so? Don't confuse yourself and other people, use proper names or invent new ones. Instead we have what we have.

I often encounter the same problem with alchemy which people call 'magical chemistry'. I don't burst out at people but explaining it every time gets tiresome very quickly.

What's this, my dude?

Because in the fictional world people consider magic to be a broad array of relatively different technologies and its easier for a laymen to use in-game existing terminology for what they are doing?

Most folks dont have a detailed understanding of what alchemy was, which means they infer what they see in the books which is more or less magical chemistry.

I believe I understand your complaints but it is coming off as a bit condescending. Work with the language you have, and understand it evolves as you go along. Ultimately, it is designed to convey information and like it or not its meaning can and will change with popular usage.