Legends and Lore - Nod To Realism

P1NBACK said:

He's also stuck on "realism" when he needs to be talking about "plausibility". There's a difference.

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Not necessarily. To you, there's a difference.

Yes, folks on EN World have had discussions on the minutiae of definitions in there. But while we are within his target audience, we are probably not the majority of his audience, much less the whole of it*. And you can write a whole article upon those fine details, and never get on why the differences might be relevant to your average gamer - he's got a few paragraphs to get his idea across.

Keeping the likely purpose of his piece, and the full audience, in mind, and that word use makes some sense to me.


*And, I wouldn't be surprised if on other forums they've had such discussions, and come to a habit of using different words - your plausibility might be their verisimilitude or "internal consistency". That would mean he's completley hosed, as there's no one word he could use that means the same thing to everyone.

It's pretty clear that the purpose of these "Legends and Lore" things is to test reactions from the community and float trial balloons, with the end goal of figuring out how to bring Pathfinder and retro-clone fans back into the fold. One of the major complaints about 4E, perhaps the single biggest complaint, was a lack of "realism." In this one, Monte is trying to figure out, "What exactly does that mean? What makes 3E 'realistic' and 4E not, given the patent absurdities in both games?"

Monte seems to be operating on the theory that the game needs to nod in the direction of realism more. Which is fine as far as it goes, and I would certainly like to see more of the sense that the game is taking place in a fleshed-out world where people eat and drink and sleep and crap and have sex and are born and die. But honestly, the last time I really had that feeling was 2E.

If the issue is tackling the "lack of realism" in 4E, then I think nodding to realism is not a sufficient solution. It's a good idea, but if 5E contents itself with nodding a little more, it won't solve the problem. The solution is to figure out how to keep the implausibilities submerged, as it were. Classic hit points are ludicrously unrealistic, but in the heat of play you can easily overlook that fact, as the DM narrates grisly wounds and splattering gore. Healing surges are not much worse than classic hit points* in terms of realism, but the way they are presented really jolts people out of the narrative, and that's what provokes cries of "unrealistic!"

[SIZE=-2]*I do think they are worse. But not a lot worse.[/SIZE]

Umbran said:

To you, there's a difference.

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Yup. That's why I posted that.

To me, there is a difference. Yup. My opinion and all. That's usually how these forums work. You post your opinion and I post mine.

To me, there is certainly a difference.

As with all forms of fiction, D&D is crafted for an audience. Realism is important to the extent that the audience values it. If people are laughing at the absurdity of the rules, they need to be more realistic. If people give up the game because it's too complicated and not fun enough, then it's too realistic.

The problem here is that the audience for D&D is so intellectually diverse. It includes kids playing in their parents' basements and working professionals who have played together for 20 years, as well as the top and bottom rungs of the intellectual ladder, and people from all different backgrounds and all parts of the world. There's also a variety of takes on what people want out of a game. Some people want World of Warcraft. Some people want Lord of the Rings. Some people want Game of Thrones. So playing to this audience is rather difficult.

My take is that I want realism up to the absolute threshold of tolerance. I want my battles to track injuries up to the point where I (a veteran gamer) find it laborious to do so. I want my character's to be able to break down doors with the same ease (or difficulty) as a real person of comparable strength. I want to track the effects of weather. I suspect that I'm with a significant number of people, but in conflict with many others.

P1NBACK said:

To me, there is a difference. Yup. My opinion and all. That's usually how these forums work. You post your opinion and I post mine.

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Yeah, but you're stating an opinion about his mental state (being "stuck on realism"). I don't see where you get that from what he wrote. I was arguing against doing so based on his word choice, as he's not likely using our rather particular local jargon.

If you have some other indication that he's really stuck on one concept (say, that he's shown a pattern of behavior outside this one article) I'm interested in hearing about it.

This is interesting. Some random thoughts as I haven't worked this all out yet.

What I think needs to be "realistic": if you are going to model something fictional, the model needs to line up with your expectations. eg. A house cat shouldn't be a more dangerous opponent than a normal man.

Thought: The more detailed the mechanical model, the more difficult it is going to be to line the model up with your expectations. You create many interactions between these models; if any of those break from your expectations, it's a jarring experience.

I wonder: If you 1) keep these models at an abstract level, 2) give the table the responsibility to make sure things fit within the group's expectations (DM or group, depending on play goals), and 3) allow within the mechanics the possibility of judgement calls, is it easier to make things fit within the group's expectations?

P1NBACK said:

Yup. That's why I posted that.

To me, there is a difference. Yup. My opinion and all. That's usually how these forums work. You post your opinion and I post mine.

To me, there is certainly a difference.

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Had you just posted that, Umbran probably wouldn't have said anything. But since you started your post taking a potshot at Monte, insinuating (at least from what I gathered from it) that he's been blind to the last 10 years of roleplaying games and thus shouldn't be commenting on it at all... that's why Umbran said what he did.

You can't insinuate that Monte's a moron and expect other people not to call you on it. And if you didn't mean to imply that... then you probably might want to go back and review your comments and see why some of us got that take from you.

Let's not shoot the messenger. Monte works as part of the team developing 5E and I am sure his topics are run by the group working on that project along with the nomenclature they are using to get the general idea across. As said up thread by LurkAway, most of us understand what he means when he uses the word "realism" and taking him to task for allowing it to fit a loose meaning probably isn't going to get us very far. There's a time for precision in semantics to be questioned, like when a word is used antithetically rather than generally. This doesn't seem to be one of those times given the overall context of the article.

I would have used the phrase "nods to simulation" instead, as that covers the whole gambit of realism, verisimilitude, etc. Come to think of it, I have used "nods to simulation" more than once in these conversations since 4E arrived, most often in conjuction with "4E removed them."

In any case, "nods" is the important word. And here, I think Monte is on the right track, but at least in this column hasn't acknowledged what "nods" being important means. (To be fair, maybe is trying to be objective here so as to not skew the survey responses.) Because providing "nods" to something is implicitly also not providing the thing itself.

A long list of weapons with slightly different damage expressions and otherwise modest differences is precisely a "nod". It is only "realistic" to someone that hasn't thought much about it, read about it, or has but doesn't much care. In a rough and ready way, it is correct in some sense (being on the business end of a sword is often likely to be slightly worse if the blade is heavier and longer) but skimpy on nuance (things that determine whether or not you end up on the business end in the first place, and what kind of strike was delivered, and in what conditions).

It is when you move into things like weapon speed factors that it stops becoming a nod and tries to be more than that. Technically, distinguishing reach, handedness, etc. are also more than nods, though at different points on the scale. (This is hardly an exact science.) If you start accurately modeling things like realistic load speeds and training times/efforts for longbow and crossbows, you've definitely moved out of the arena of nods into full bore simulation.

I'm all for nods that don't impede the main focus of the game and/or gameplay itself. Bonus points if they don't take up much space and/or are truly optional. Penalty points the longer they go on and the more intrusive they become. That is, for me, "nods to simulation" are distinctily a second order concern.

And just to be clear, for anyone that might be confused by some of my past statements along those lines, I do value that 4E ruthlessly excluded these nods, because it has forced this conversation. Way too often, people have treated the nods as, "if some are good, more deeper and intrusive ones, are better--especially the ones that I want." (Not said that plainly, of course.)

Nods that try to be more than nods, but fail, are the worst of all possible outcomes. You get something large and clunky that few really like. But the handful of people that want "more realism" in that particular area will get inordinately attached to it, making it harder to satisfy everyone else (those that value nods generally and those that just want them kept second order). And such things are seldom optional or very playable.

Dausuul said:

"Nods to realism" comes close, but I think the key point is "don't get between the players and the simulation." In other words, the moment the players have to step "outside the game" and think about how to justify the mechanics, you've lost them. Even if there is in fact a pretty good justification, the fact that they had to stop and think in order to get to it is a major problem, because the last thing you want people thinking about in the middle of a game is how to justify the rules.

On the other hand, if the only way to notice a lack of realism is to step outside the game, you can get away with some utterly unrealistic systems; hit points and XP being good examples.

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I think this is an excellent point. (And, apparently, I need to spread xp around...)

I think of this issue as one of immersiveness -- not in Monte's slightly strange use of the term, but in the sense of asking how much of the player's time is spent thinking about what is happening inside the fiction as opposed to thinking about the rules mechanics. The more the players have to step "outside the game", either to justify the mechanics or simply to select their next action, the less the players are thinking about the fiction itself.

Of course, this isn't the same thing as realism, but it comes from a similar motivation. The primary issue with a realism failure is that it yanks the players out of the fiction -- either because the mechanic is too complicated or because the results/process is unbelievable.

-KS