General RPG DiscussionDiscussion of all RPGs and non-system-specific topics. DM/GM/player issues, settings, etc. Rules discussion belongs in one the forums below.
I don't think that's a safe assumption. It may be true in some cases, but I think most posters here are self-aware enough to know what they really want.
I dunno. I've read enough posts in which people complain about some perceived flaw in realism while lauding another wacky system to have some skepticism on this front. Healing all damage overnight versus healing all damage in three days bed rest? Spells as an almost tangible *thing* inside your brain versus spells as descriptions of magical effects you can create? These all have their partisans who insist that the other is unrealistic. To an outsider, I doubt there's a difference.
I think that the general assumption that your opponent knows what he wants and says what he means is one of politeness, not reality. Ditto the rule that I can say this about people in general, but never about any specific person.
I dunno. I've read enough posts in which people complain about some perceived flaw in realism while lauding another wacky system to have some skepticism on this front.
I think this is indicative of people mistaking genre (and game) conventions for realism (not that they're unsure of what they actually want).
__________________ "We're pimps and killers, but in a philanthropic way." -- Boyd, Dollhouse.
I generally assume that calls for realism in RPGs are covers for other, underlying sources of dissatisfaction. Usually a dislike of change. We tend to internalize the abstractions that are part of games we like, while not understanding how those abstractions might appear to an outsider. Then, when we play a game we don't like, we take on the role of the outsider and are highly critical.
I personally like consistency. I demand realism and versimilitude so that a context exists, not because I have some nebulous problem with a game system.
I am self aware enough to know what my problems are with a system, and a complaint of no realism is just that... a complaint of no realism.
I dunno. I've read enough posts in which people complain about some perceived flaw in realism while lauding another wacky system to have some skepticism on this front. Healing all damage overnight versus healing all damage in three days bed rest? Spells as an almost tangible *thing* inside your brain versus spells as descriptions of magical effects you can create? These all have their partisans who insist that the other is unrealistic. To an outsider, I doubt there's a difference.
I think that the general assumption that your opponent knows what he wants and says what he means is one of politeness, not reality. Ditto the rule that I can say this about people in general, but never about any specific person.
It seems to me that you're ignoring whether or not someone might disagree with the degree of departure from reality. When it comes to the exceptions the rules introduce from reality, there may well be a threshold of departure in which a player can no longer accept the rule. In the case of recovering overnight vs 3 days, one is clearly closer to reality (even if not much). But if the downstream effects on the pacing of the game those 3 days require compared to overnight is more agreeable (you do have to pull up stakes out of the dungeon and all that implies, for example, rather than just catch 6 hours of rest), then it's fair to consider the overnight healing as too unrealistic.
__________________ Bill D
"There's a fine line between a superpower and a chronic medical condition."
- Doctor Impossible
I think, as can be seen from the responses here, that "realism" is defined differently by different people.
There is, for example, "rules realism". This seems to be generally based on the notion that rules follow from each other -- if A1 is possible then A2 should be possible. This is something that i tend to look for in games quite a bit. Ultimately this falls under the purview of the rules designers. They are under an obligation to take such consistencies into account.
There is also "world realism" which is a very confused notion. A large part of the problem with this concept is essentially the reversal of my core axiom: match the rules to the world rather than the world to the rules. If there is a disconnect between what is perceived as "possible in the setting" and "possible under the rules set" many people get annoyed. This is particularly important with already established settings and places.
Take these two examples. One poster earlier mentioned Toon, a wonderful game. In Toon you would expect, given the world-rules, that if a character runs off a cliff, that character may continue running ... until the character looks down; at this point the character looks chagrined/worried and then plummets downwards towards pain, perhaps giving a little wave along the way. In Ars Magica, another wonderful game, there are assumptions about 13th century Europe and the social mores of the time -- peasants have no influence, dukes may raise vast armies, religion is vastly important, there are no gunpowder weapons, etc. If a peasant spits on a bishop, the peasant will be, at a minimum, severely roughed up and probably killed. These are two rather different takes on "world realities".
Another take on "world realism" is a level of consistency. I A begets B one time, but A begets aardarks another, people get to get worried. This becomes important in an otherwise unknown fantasy or science fiction setting, one where fewer of the "ground rules" are known. If, for example, giving a nah-flower to a priest of Floogey grants a peasant the ability to fly, that should always be the case. If the next time a peasant hands a nah-flower to a priest of Floogey the peasant is torn limb from limb, there needs to be a reason for this - perhaps the third moon is in the wrong phase or suchlike. If a spaceship can travel at faster-then-light speeds with a single pilot in one instance, then this should always be true for that ship; if there is an alteration to this situation, again there needs to be an explanation.
Much of the "world realism" falls on the shoulders of the GM -- this mighty individual may seem to have a lot of power, but also a horde of strange responsibilities.
A few people use "realism" to mean "I didn't get what I want"; in this case the problem is between the player and the group as a whole and there is no pat answer.
Again, "realism" is a variable term.
__________________ Jack, you have debauched my sloth.
I believe we are mistaking "realism" for "suspension of disbelief."
We don't want realism. We want flying dragons that can breath fire.
We do want our disbelief of flying dragons than can breath fire, suspended.
But we also want it to behave with some semblance of realism or have its effect on the environment reflected realistically. It moves through the air like a large winged creature, it needs accessways large enough in its lair, its breath can light things on fire, etc.
The elements of the dragon's presence that conform to our understanding of reality (or at least fit in with them) help in the suspension of disbelief.
__________________ Bill D
"There's a fine line between a superpower and a chronic medical condition."
- Doctor Impossible
"Realism" is one of those lightning rod terms which cause very angry debates in the RPG world. This is because it's broad enough and subjective enough that it can be percieved in different ways, it's important to many if not most RPGs (depending on how you define it of course ), and due to these two reasons alone, people willfully misinterpret what is meant by the term (as so often happens in any discussion of gaming theory) and discussions of the concept consist of people talking past each other.
Another major problem with realism is that many more or less sincere interpretations of "realistic" games in the early days of RPGs went off on rather odd, and notoriously unsuccessful tangents, which were subsequently internalized by many gamers as the meaning of realism (i.e. complexity). So as a result it has a really bad name in role playing gaming, people think realism in combat rules means things like fatigue points or hit locations, and that realism in terms of a setting means something from Monty Python's Holy Grail.
Realism is important in gaming for the reasons a lot of people cited here upthread, in practical terms it essentially means internal consistency which contributes to verisimilitude, immersion, and other things quite a few gamers really like (though many hate the term). And contributes to non-gamers being able to get into RPGs without too much investment in learning entirely new ways of thinking.
But it is usually conflated for detail or complexity, due to games like Rolemaster or even GURPS. Somehow we lost the concept from wargames that a realistic game can also be abstract and simple. As a result, the explicit rejection of realism by many game designers including Gary Gygax, leaving AD&D a wierd amalgum of fairly well researched (but flawed) medieval background with high fantasy, low fantasy, and comic book themes.
In 3.5 we had the mixed blessing of returning to an idea of balance, but by then the 'realistic' basis was so far astray that a largely artificial system was created which was highly complex while having very little relation to reality. This actually makes it harder for non gamers to get into it, since the shared reality of real people is useless, instead you have to speak the made up "klingon" language of this entirely artificial world. I think this contributed to shrinking the RPG demographic even more than it was, which in turn increased the 'drift' of basing game world physics (in things like combat rules or historical settings) further into "klingon" land, alienating non gamers from the genre still further. Which I think some gamers actually really like. Now we have the further complication that some of the strange ideas of early RPGs have been successfully introduced to a much wider audience by MMORPG's, and we are now seeing a second retrenching of these themes.
But one of the biggest problems with rejecting realism utterly is that you do lose this common ground, and unless you have already bought into the strange ideas of RPG gaming (like the notion that a 10" knife is essentially a nuisance weapon, or falling off a cliff sort of tickles) then many of the fundamental notions of the game strike newcomers as absurd, and are a turn-off. (assuming they aren't already MMORPG gamers of course!)
Another major problem which we saw in 3.5 was that trying to make logical sense (or 'balance') of a fundamentally unrealistic system causes the same kind of complexity creep that the early misguided attempts to apply "realism" did.
Historically, things like weapons and armor, fighting styles and techniques balanced each other out in a rather elegant way. Trying to reinvent that from scratch leaves you down a road paved with with double bladed swords and spiked chains that eventually leads you into a level of geekdom most people find a little off-putting.
Of course dragons and flying carpets are unrealistic, but they exist in fairy tales, films, and novels which are a lot more broadly popular than RPG's are. It is the underlying fabric of interneal consistency which makes them stand out and seem magical in literature. In RPG's, if everything is magical, nothing is. Conversely, making the underlying reality convincing can really make the strange and magical seem strange and magic, such as in such widely popular games as Call of Cthulhu.
Genre based games like TOON, or Paranoia, or SpellJammer are perfectly sound, even "realistic" in their own way, since they are internally consistent and match expectations people in the broader culture (everyone who watched a cartoon, say) can predict at least to some extent. Much of the mush-mash of particularly fantasy RPGs suffers from a distinct lack of grounding in realism, and the urge to just throw it out the window entirely won't solve these problems.
Realism is just a tool, a means toward the end of having a fun game. Some games may not require it at all, but you shouldn't make "unrealistic" assumptions about what it actually is and throw the baby out with the bathwater as a result
G.
__________________
Check out the historically-based combat system that has gamers talking around the world: The Codex Martialis, your gateway to the elegant, lethal Martial Arts of ancient Europe and Japan. Fast-paced, cinematic combat is available for your OGL game today. Find out why all the reviewers raved over this system. Make combat exciting again!
Discuss the Codex Martialis system with other players and game designers, learn about new ideas and beta test upcoming releases at www.codexmartialis.com
Last edited by Galloglaich; 3rd April 2009 at 08:08 PM..
I believe we are mistaking "realism" for "suspension of disbelief."
We don't want realism. We want flying dragons that can breath fire.
We do want our disbelief of flying dragons than can breath fire, suspended.
Which is an interesting thing because I find that my disbelief is suspended by the very existence of anything made to be realistic.
Really, I find that any attempt to build something in a game (such as a setting/world), especially if it's called out as being done that way, in a "realistic"/"versimilitudinous"/"internally consistent" way to be very jarring. It sits there and proclaims that everything around it isn't real.
I think one aspect that needs to be addressed especially when it concerns mechanics is simply; "do you view mechanics as a in-game property." In which I mean, when a mechanic says "resting overnight causes 100 HP", do you view that as meaning in-world this is what happens. Or do you view it simply as a gameplay element and that in-world something different is occurring, ie; "they are still injured but able to perform as they would normally."
This I think can play a strong role in one's Suspension of Disbelief. Do they view the rules as a element of the actual game-world, or simply a means to interact with this game world. Myself I view it as simply a way to interact and thus I think my ability to Suspend Disbelief is probably somewhat higher then others.
__________________ Secret Member of... *blink, blink* Damn you amnesia!
But we also want it to behave with some semblance of realism or have its effect on the environment reflected realistically. It moves through the air like a large winged creature, it needs accessways large enough in its lair, its breath can light things on fire, etc.
The elements of the dragon's presence that conform to our understanding of reality (or at least fit in with them) help in the suspension of disbelief.
bingo! We don't have to justify how a dragon exists. The player can accept that (suspension of disbelief). The player should not accept that 20' wide dragons can squeeze through 3' doors. That's not realistic.
If we open the door of unrealistic, we end up playing in a cartoon universe where the kings lives in a burrito hammock smoking albatrosses. It makes no sense. It is unimaginable (well at least not consistently). A non-reality is one in which quite literally, anything can happen. There is no cause and effect. Things can go from being, to non-being, to being something else willy-nilly, and do not make sense in doing so. It's like playing in a world where the characters randomly appear in different squares each round, regardless of their action. And they randomly transform from thing to thing (one minute you're a toaster, the next, you're a human fighter, the next every one is salmon, swimming in tomato soup).
This is the extreme interpretation of "non-realism". Picaso.
Realism is to take the fantasy, and fit it into our known and shared conception of reality. It is, as others have said, to take how things work in our world, and change only a few elements.
That sets every player's expectation. We know how our world works. If you tell me, we're playing in a world, much like our own, set in medieval times, I know what you're talking about. I take our own knowledge of medieval times, and I apply that to your game. When you tell me, "and there's orcs, elves, and magic." I start fitting them in.
That's a whole lot easier than telling me we're playing in a world where nothing is like the real world, and you mean it.
You could call this interpretation, the Macro Realism View. It applies to the game world in general. I suspect most people work this way, and that "realism" arguments are really about this.
Seperate from that is the Micro Realism View. It would cover how the game approaches realism to individual aspects, like combat, movement, eating/sleeping/fatigue, falling damage, drowning, etc. For the most part, we all know there's a trade-off in how closely real-life activities are simulated in a game. Usually it's a matter of game balance, fun, and speed.
If somebody's complaining about "realism" in relation to Micro, it's usually a matter of it wasn't realistic enough (usually in that the player didn't like the result), or it was too realistic (usually in that the player didn't like the result).
Which is an interesting thing because I find that my disbelief is suspended by the very existence of anything made to be realistic.
Really, I find that any attempt to build something in a game (such as a setting/world), especially if it's called out as being done that way, in a "realistic"/"versimilitudinous"/"internally consistent" way to be very jarring. It sits there and proclaims that everything around it isn't real.
But delicious meat pies and ale are realistic. How cruel to demand a fantasy world without them!
__________________ -------
Ethan Skemp
CCP NA/White Wolf Publishing
bingo! We don't have to justify how a dragon exists. The player can accept that (suspension of disbelief). The player should not accept that 20' wide dragons can squeeze through 3' doors. That's not realistic.
If we open the door of unrealistic, we end up playing in a cartoon universe where the kings lives in a burrito hammock smoking albatrosses. It makes no sense. It is unimaginable (well at least not consistently). A non-reality is one in which quite literally, anything can happen. There is no cause and effect. Things can go from being, to non-being, to being something else willy-nilly, and do not make sense in doing so. It's like playing in a world where the characters randomly appear in different squares each round, regardless of their action. And they randomly transform from thing to thing (one minute you're a toaster, the next, you're a human fighter, the next every one is salmon, swimming in tomato soup).
This is the extreme interpretation of "non-realism". Picaso.
Realism is to take the fantasy, and fit it into our known and shared conception of reality. It is, as others have said, to take how things work in our world, and change only a few elements.
That sets every player's expectation. We know how our world works. If you tell me, we're playing in a world, much like our own, set in medieval times, I know what you're talking about. I take our own knowledge of medieval times, and I apply that to your game. When you tell me, "and there's orcs, elves, and magic." I start fitting them in.
That's a whole lot easier than telling me we're playing in a world where nothing is like the real world, and you mean it.
You could call this interpretation, the Macro Realism View. It applies to the game world in general. I suspect most people work this way, and that "realism" arguments are really about this.
Seperate from that is the Micro Realism View. It would cover how the game approaches realism to individual aspects, like combat, movement, eating/sleeping/fatigue, falling damage, drowning, etc. For the most part, we all know there's a trade-off in how closely real-life activities are simulated in a game. Usually it's a matter of game balance, fun, and speed.
If somebody's complaining about "realism" in relation to Micro, it's usually a matter of it wasn't realistic enough (usually in that the player didn't like the result), or it was too realistic (usually in that the player didn't like the result).
Really good points. One issue with the Micro realism is that people always assume a particular level of abstraction
I think another reason people tend to reject "Macro" realistic settings is due to a really distorted, simplified view of history, and the conflation in some cases of their own limted reality with the actual reality of the world. In other words they think Medieval Europe (the most common assumed genre for FRPGs like DnD) is a simplistic wasteland similar to a Renaissance Faire except 90% of the people are peasants with Leprosy, and that ordinary people are nearly all weak and ineffectual compared to say, Wolverine or Conan.
Which is why I created this thread about what I called the "Dilbert in the Dungeon" syndrome.
__________________
Check out the historically-based combat system that has gamers talking around the world: The Codex Martialis, your gateway to the elegant, lethal Martial Arts of ancient Europe and Japan. Fast-paced, cinematic combat is available for your OGL game today. Find out why all the reviewers raved over this system. Make combat exciting again!
Discuss the Codex Martialis system with other players and game designers, learn about new ideas and beta test upcoming releases at www.codexmartialis.com
Many stories strive for internal consistency to permit greater suspension of disbelief, which allows for a pleasing sense of immersion from its audience. I agree that "realism" is a spectacularly poor word choice when describing a high fantasy world, when consistency and plausibility is what is actually meant.
Edit: in the example you cite, there's a different dynamic in play. Basically, the player seems to feel that the DM is altering the rules of the game arbitrarily, which makes all of the player's decision-making invalid and unfun for that player. If DnD is about choices and the DM's decisions make the world in which the player's choices invulnerable to player agency, then the player has a right to be upset. Games are defined by rules; theater need not be. The player signed up to play a game, not to be a DM's sock puppet. Unless the player was told ahead of time that the game would be like the one described, he's the victim of the DM's bad faith.
I agree. In the example given, the player was not complaining about the realism of fighting in a room full of lava (although I think he thought he was). He was actually complaining about a bad DM who arbitrarily said "no" to his suggestions, in order to railroad the player through some predetermined chain of events. The player then associated the lava with the bad DMing and came out against the former by presenting the latter.
Had that been a fun-filled encounter in which his character was able to do a bunch of awesome stuff and risk his life to accomplish his goals in a fair and compelling manner, I'm sure he'd be singing a different tune with respect to the believability of a lava-proximate encounter.
__________________ Formerly known as Dr. Awkward
When you get to be a certain age, everything that is cool seems to be a lot of nonsensical, idiotic jibberish. The music that blares from the pimp rides makes no sense; it all sounds like a man with severe autism halfheartedly explaining human sexuality to a parrot, while in the background a dangerously unqualified Caribbean contractor rhythmically installs an automatic garage door opener. Bollocks.
--Jeffery Rowland
wigu.com
The D20 NPC Wiki needs YOU to post your characters! Try my non-asian, non-hocus-pocus martial artist class, the bruiser! While you're at it, also try my vitality/wound point system, intended to eliminate the "15 minute adventuring day." Number of posters so far added to my ignore list due to the enormity of their spelling and grammar: 6
Had that been a fun-filled encounter in which his character was able to do a bunch of awesome stuff and risk his life to accomplish his goals in a fair and compelling manner, I'm sure he'd be singing a different tune with respect to the believability of a lava-proximate encounter.
The problem is, if you see lava, and it behaves in a manner differently than you expect, i.e. more like lukewarm marmelade (it doesn't burn you unless you touch it.. you can relatively safely crawl over it etc.) and everything else in the room does as well, you really don't know where to stand (not on the cannons apparently) because your normal assumptions of how the physics works, how the room is shaped, how cannons and walls work etc. are all useless.
Now to me what you are arguing is basically that if you really trust the DM, you have a good rapport, maybe you can riff off of each other and have a fun time in an essentially nonsensical world. Which is certainly a valid way to play.
But if you are a new player coming into a game, you are likely to be confused by this. "There is lava pouring into the room? I run away. I can't run away? I guess I'm dead, right?" The assumption that lava works in this particular nonsensical way is quite an intuitive leap to make unless you do have that close rapport with your DM already and are used to making things up on the fly together (or you just happen to know their gaming style real well) or are a really hard core gamer long used to playing this particular sort of game (I've played RPGs for 20 years and I never played a game where lava worked like that)
I think gamers tend to assume that notions they have in their head essentially from say, memorizing several entire rule books, playing for years with certain friends or spending tens of thousands of hours playing fantasy computer games, are universal, when in fact they are anything but.
These are the only ways you could really predict the "reality" you get in a lot of contemporary RPGs, which as I said before, tends to enforce the demographic isolation of gamers, which a lot of gamers complain about but I expect quite a few have grown very comfortable with.
Not everybody understands even a little bit of real world physics let alone history but the fact that it shapes and touches our entire lives, means that it does tend to match our expectations, and sometimes even our education. Unless you have a specific reason to deviate from it (to highlight drama say), I don't personally understand the point of the general drift away from realism into some really wierd types of cartoon worlds we see increasingly in RPGs, unless you are intentionally trying to isolate the game and make it unnecessarily complicated and baroque.
G.
__________________
Check out the historically-based combat system that has gamers talking around the world: The Codex Martialis, your gateway to the elegant, lethal Martial Arts of ancient Europe and Japan. Fast-paced, cinematic combat is available for your OGL game today. Find out why all the reviewers raved over this system. Make combat exciting again!
Discuss the Codex Martialis system with other players and game designers, learn about new ideas and beta test upcoming releases at www.codexmartialis.com
Last edited by Galloglaich; 3rd April 2009 at 09:19 PM..
I agree. In the example given, the player was not complaining about the realism of fighting in a room full of lava (although I think he thought he was). He was actually complaining about a bad DM who arbitrarily said "no" to his suggestions, in order to railroad the player through some predetermined chain of events. The player then associated the lava with the bad DMing and came out against the former by presenting the latter.
Had that been a fun-filled encounter in which his character was able to do a bunch of awesome stuff and risk his life to accomplish his goals in a fair and compelling manner, I'm sure he'd be singing a different tune with respect to the believability of a lava-proximate encounter.
Nope, not even remotely. As I mentioned in the other thread, I can't watch volcano movies either for this very reason. Wouldn't have mattered if it had been a puzzle full of 'Yes, go ahead, you *can* do that, good eye spotting that'. The lava still would have bothered the hell out of me. (Nor was it the last appearance of lava. Later 'challenges' involving lava had it coming within inches of us. Again, no effect. Again, me facepalming.)
It's a pet peeve of mine, a longstanding one I've had for many, many years since before I even knew what D&D was. Same thing with earthquake movies and really any natural disaster movie. I'm sitting there trying not to scream at the screen that that isn't how it frakking works, dang it.
Stuff like that I tend to see mostly as an insult to the intelligence of both myself and the other players. Doesn't matter how well-done the puzzle is. If it's magic non-hot lava, I'm automatically taken out of it.
Even with the shutting down and 'no you can't do that', I would have liked that puzzle if it had just been *water* instead of lava. One simple change, and it's a logically consistent puzzle that is believeable as something that has been used before and will be again, is still perfectly dangerous and potentially deadly, and doesn't leave me going 'what no not the damned lava thing from movies it doesn't work that way'. I was annoyed with that puzzle before it started, heh.
But then I'm That Guy who gets annoyed when space battles have sound effects.
When you get to be a certain age, everything that is cool seems to be a lot of nonsensical, idiotic jibberish. The music that blares from the pimp rides makes no sense; it all sounds like a man with severe autism halfheartedly explaining human sexuality to a parrot, while in the background a dangerously unqualified Caribbean contractor rhythmically installs an automatic garage door opener. Bollocks.
--Jeffery Rowland
wigu.com
The D20 NPC Wiki needs YOU to post your characters! Try my non-asian, non-hocus-pocus martial artist class, the bruiser! While you're at it, also try my vitality/wound point system, intended to eliminate the "15 minute adventuring day." Number of posters so far added to my ignore list due to the enormity of their spelling and grammar: 6
Not everybody understands even a little bit of real world physics let alone history but the fact that it shapes and touches our entire lives, means that it does tend to match our expectations, and sometimes even our education. Unless you have a specific reason to deviate from it (to highlight drama say), I don't personally understand the point of the general drift away from realism into some really wierd types of cartoon worlds we see increasingly in RPGs, unless you are intentionally trying to isolate the game and make it unnecessarily complicated and baroque..
Because the non rationality of it is the part we find fun? It's only "unnecessarily complicated and baraoque" when you insist on trying to put it into some sort of rational assumption. It's just a different way of looking at things.
It's like a magic trick. When I see the trick, it's cool because of the fact that it seems to break the assumptions I have about the world around me. When I learn how to do the trick, it's still cool, but in a different way. (Now I can use it to break other people's assumptions about the world around them.)
Realism and verisimilitude are two completely different things.
You can make things unrealistic and maintain verisimilitude. When you break verisimilitude is when things get silly.
For example, in the golden age of comics, Superman might have been seen holding an entire building above his head. It's perfectly fine to assume that Superman had the strength to hold that much weight, but it's silly to think that the building would remain structurally intact when in essence all of its weight is being compressed down in two teeny, tiny points (Superman's hands). Superman's arm would simply punch through the building, not hold it up.
), and due to these two reasons alone, people willfully misinterpret what is meant by the term (as so often happens in any discussion of gaming theory) and discussions of the concept consist of people talking past each other.
As I mentioned in the other thread, I can't watch volcano movies either for this very reason. Wouldn't have mattered if it had been a puzzle full of 'Yes, go ahead, you *can* do that, good eye spotting that'. The lava still would have bothered the hell out of me. (Nor was it the last appearance of lava. Later 'challenges' involving lava had it coming within inches of us. Again, no effect. Again, me facepalming.)
Linear Mode
And yet another word from our sponsors
