Board Thread:The Last Sovereign Discussion/@comment-25941257-20170825174215/@comment-31808207-20170919091124

I realized we might not be disagreeing as much as I originally thought after I wrote that as well, haha. I think I mostly perceived you being on the other side since the laws of reality referred to in the post you quoted were from the lore post as opposed to just extrapolated from our world.

Though, I'm not sure I agree that you can't get a rational, self-consistent universe where magic exists. I'm a strong believer in internally consistent magics wherein the magic itself is bound by its own natural rules and laws, which is what TLS generally seems to be considering some of the theoretical discussions of magic's properties. Also, based on that Lore Post, everyone in the world of TLS has some degree of magic, even if they can't harnass it into spellcasting, and this has had historically significant consequences (less deaths to poison, for example). On the other hand, that might be playing the definition thing again since magic in this sense is much closer to in-world science as opposed to the "a wizard did it" explanation of things that otherwise don't make sense, which is I think how you meant it...

But just to play devil's advocate for a moment, we have no idea the biology of corrupted monsters or the general fauna of other continents. Who's to say that some of them didn't evolve similar reproductive mechanisms to succubi? Or, conversely, maybe the same factors that influenced succubi's development only existed in isolation--maybe there was an especially high level of ambient sexual magic to influence their development?--or were tied to drawbacks. For example, succubi have relatively short lifespans. Maybe this trait was interrelated to their form of reproduction and was more pronounced in similar species, leading to their failure. Alternatively, it's been suggested orcs were originally constructs in story. If that's the case, why couldn't succubi share a similar origin? Actually, Incubus Kings have been stated by Sierra to have the power to reshape those they sleep with (most pointedly demonstrated by the Unsuccubi), so who's to say that kind of alteration doesn't extend, in some cases, to the genetic level? In that case, succubi as a race could literally have been fucked into existence by a sufficiently determined Incubus King who was really turned on by the idea of an all-female race that could get pregnant from oral sex.

So, while I take your point about the fact that there are likely implicit contradictions in taking things as guidelines rather than as explicit natural laws, I also think in most cases there's enough wiggle room to allow for the potential of internally consistent explanations. Natural laws generally encapsulate the idea that "Every time we've seen X happen, it happened like this." In that sense, are they so essentially different from the guidelines you suggest that game world rules are instead? We don't have all the necessary information to turn either real-world natural laws or game world natural laws into actual absolutes--though of course we have a lot more data to back up the real-world ones.

No worries if you'd rather not continue the debate there though, haha. Definitely not something I ever thought I'd be writing about either for sure.