David:
"Why would anyone in their right mind put a candle, or a fish, into a jar,
and then seal it up?"
I'd put a candle in a jar because I was tired of it blowing out in the wind.
Then I'd find that the damn thing went out for no apparent reason. That
would
lead me to investigate further, and eventually find that a jar put the
candle out
but a chimney kept it going and protected it from wind. This is a simple
empirical observation that I would expect my players' characters to know.
They may not explain it in terms of oxygen deprivation but they know this is
how the world works.
As for the fish: I've caught a fresh fish, but I don't want to eat it today.
So I put
it in water to keep it for tomorrow. If I stick it in a basin it is okay,
but basins
spill so easily. So, one day I stick it in a covered jar instead, and the
next day
it is dead. If I happen to observe this pattern more than once, I may
be intrigued and try to find out more. Someone, at some time, will have been
intrigued. In my Glorantha, people are just as curious as people in the RW.
So, in my Glorantha, people are empirically aware of a lot of basic physics
and chemistry and biology. They have very weird theoretical explanations
for that empirical knowledge, and those theories may lead them to bad
predictions sometimes. (There's probably some good role-playing
possibilities
there. Get your characters to do something that the players know is stupid
because the characters' theories about the world say that it should work.)
Just
look at medieval medicine for examples.
Your example of a bad adventure scenario is frightening. Do your players
really try to get away with stuff like that? I'd suggest re-training your
players
and getting rid of those who won't learn. Maybe I'm spoiled, my players are
mostly pretty good about keeping separate the things they know from the
things that their characters know.
Our characters in your cave-in scenario could reasonably expect to know that
they were in danger of suffocation. They might also realize that they could
extend their time by putting out their torches and by minimizing their
physical activity. I'd probably negotiate with the players about whether
they
could just assume the characters knew this, or if they should make a World
Lore roll (probably with a favourable modifier). If they could think of
examples
of enclosed spaces and suffocation that their characters would have
encountered
then they get the knowledge as a freebie, otherwise they have to go for the
die roll. This encourages them to think about the world that their
characters
live in without bothering to make it bizarrely alien from Terra.
I find Glorantha weird and alien enough already without bothering to try to
rewrite basic day-to-day reality. And I don't believe that I could make
create
a rewrite that was up to my standards of consistency. So I don't try. I
leave
the mundane stuff the same as Terra. Gods, spirits, magic, chaos, etc. add
enough of an alien note to ensure that my players know they aren't in
Kansas any more.
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