Also on a side note, I play with a GM who is a historian. When he gets nitpicky about historical details it encourages me to become nitpicky about physics.

I guess in short, I’d say one should be careful about the signs you give out in terms of nitpickiness as a GM, as well.

And I’ll try to refrain from being too nitpicky in the future.

I wanted to comment as a player. For me, I would mention the clothesline thing but I respect the GM as decsionmaker and so would not argue with their decision once they made it. I would remember it (these things stick in my craw), though and be annoyed by it. It would not be because I needed to be the center of attention at the moment but because of my simulationist/rules lawyering tendencies (I hope I am using this correctly). My character would probably want to go back after the scene and pick up this super strong line and use it in the future, just to illustrate the consequences of making a non-physical decision. And yes, I was a physics major in college.
I guess my point is that there are players that care about these things for reasons outside of the pathologies in the OP.

About the player above in the OP that claimed a clothesline shouldn’t be able to hold up a character, I would let the clothesline work…until it can to his character’s turn. >:)>

ME

And revolvers that can be silenced, and C4 that blows up when you shoot it. ; )

Fun is different for different people, and its really an expectation game you’re playing. Beforehand, I’ve been messing with assigning a rating to my games so the players know the relative level going in. (A 4 on the Gritty scale, a 2 on the Historical Accuracy O’ Meter–whatever’s fitting and relevant for that game). That can always change, as the group’s feel, composition, and attitude might change over the course of a game, but its a good starting baseline.

You see, she made this new landmass to hold our upcoming 4E game, and I was looking at the map, pointed to a nook in the mountains, and said “There’s a desert there”. She told me in a no-nonsense voice that it was a forrest. I told her that if the landmass was in the northern hemesphere, the wind currents and mountain range wouldn’t allow any rainfall there. Hence, a desert. She quickly told me the landmass was in the SOUTHERN hemisphere. So I grinned at here and said “So it’s a swamp?”

End of story, just bullshitting around, we ended up with a pretty awesome concept of an underground swamp which may or may not end up there.

My whole beef had nothing to do with whether there was a forrest, a desert, a swamp, or an artic ice flow there. It had to do with both the fact that it’s fun to tease someone about something like that, and that I was a little upset with her for trumping player input like the group had specifly discussed she wouldn’t.

Now, I wasn’t THAT upset, but a little good natured ribbing about her failure to consider airflow seemed about right.

Swordgleam – Now that is an awesome alternative solution.

Särkijärvi’s Law – As a discussion about realism in a fantasy setting grows longer, the probability of someone claiming the irrelevancy of realism in the presence of magic approaches one

http://nitessine.wordpress.com/2008/05/19/argumentum-ad-fireballum/

If the SUV were armored, I guess I’d say something like, “Make a [relevant skill] roll to see if your character notices that a shot there should have totaled the car.” It does give them a hint that something’s up, whether they make the roll or not, but it also reminds them that what they’re doing could easily turn into meta-gaming.

I guess, based on the examples, that I assumed we were talking about minor details – stuff that isn’t going to majorly change/ruin the story if it gets ‘corrected.’ I don’t like my games to be all about realism, but as said, I get a little twitchy when I see things that are obviously wrong for no good reason.

I just feel like “tell the player to stop it” isn’t really a solution. It works for some issues, but the more you do it, the less it works, and this seems like something that’s easy enough to find a compromise on.

Of course, you could go with something one of my old DMs did: give extra XP for not mentioning physics during the course of a session.

My objections are much tamer– though I think that Dog’s in the Vineyard has one of the best rules for setting the threshold of believability: “At any given moment in play, the most demanding player at the table has the power to decide if a proposed element becomes a part of the fiction or not”. It’s a high bar that requires that the whole group is on-board… but can be subject to hijacking.