deanruel87 wrote: I feel completely comfortable in saying that the Monster Manual Orc is less powerful than a Nightwalker. Because essentially what I'm saying there is that in a featureless gray plane consisting of only the Orc and the Nightwalker measured only against each other one would be able to beat the other in combat. What I would not be comfortable saying is that an adventure where you killed a Nightwalker would have been more difficult to accomplish than an adventure where you killed an Orc.
See, at first when I read that my impression was that your stated position was
so obviously stupid that you didn't really believe it and were just trolling the thread in the name of being an asshole. My first inclination thus was to simply call you a bunch of rude names and post an image macro.
But on reflection, it occurred to me that actually your position is a relatively common fallacy of unscientific reasoning, and that it was probably your actual position. I mean, you're still
obviously wrong, but I feel I should refute your points logically rather than
just telling you to go fuck yourself.
Your position is actually the Fallacy of Possible Proof: the idea that if something is
theoretically possible that it must be
true, or at the very least
plausible. This is nonsense. Valid empirical statements must be
plausible, not merely
possible. And the latter in no way establishes the former.
While it is
possible for an encounter with a Nightwalker to be no more difficult than an encounter with a basic Orc warrior, this is not remotely
plausible. Similarly, it is
possible that unicorns exist in the real world but we just haven't found them yet, but that is not
plausible.
deanrule wrote: It is a game where literally anything is possible
Sure. But not everything is
plausible. Claiming that because something and its negation are both
possible that you can't make value judgments about its likely truth value is a fallacy. It's the Fallacy of Possible Proof, and you cannot appeal to it without blowing smoke up everyone's ass.
Stop it. Stop having opinions that are based on historically known and well defined errors in reasoning.
-Username17