Why is realism "lame"?

Johnny3D3D said:

If it's going to take several months to heal, what's wrong with the GM explaining to the players how much time they have, and then asking them what they'd like to do during that time?

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Hussar said:

Because you now have one player riding the pines for several months while his character heals

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Burning Wheel has an interesting way of handling this. First, it has practice rules - so while PC 1 heals, PC 2 can practice.

Two, its advancement rules make it a requirement, for advancement, to take on challenges you probably can't win. And when you're wounded, those sorts of challenges are actually easier to have (because your numbers are lower, because of the wound penalties). So players of wounded PCs have an incentive not to just ride the pines, but to get out into the thick of it despite their wounds.

This might seem like a recipe for a (slow) death spiral, but the rules for adjudicating failed actions in BW emphasise "fail forward", so taking your wounded PC out to get hosed in the attempt to earn advancement will take the game into places that suck for your character, but are interesting for you!

Bedrockgames said:

I am not sure I buy this argument. I think whether you have wound penalties or not is more a matter of taste than anything else, but I have never really regarded them as simple "pain" modifiers. They are meant to simulate injuries that impede function as well as pain.

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What rules you use are a matter of taste, to be sure; what I'm trying to say is that there seems to be evidence to support a range of possibilities. The most recent studies seem to say that a lack of wound penalties is "realistic" - but the older assumption that this was not so is by no means comprehensively "disproved". I find that playing with biomechanical limitations (e.g., in HM, you can't use a limb that has a serious level wound or worse) but no "wound penalites" is simpler, quicker and quite acceptably believeable. Your mileage, quite naturally, may vary.

Bedrockgames said:

Wound penalties are not a perfect simulation of real combat, but I do personally find them more realistic than ignoring the effects of physical damage entirely (until the person falls). Whether they are better for a given game, is a different matter. For D&D I dont think they fit the kind of play it is designed for.

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Yep - this is pretty much my view, too. For the right game, "realistic" wound and recovery systems are a very distinct benefit. For D&D I don't find them to be so.

Th Cheapening of the Fantastic

I view it as a cheapening of the fantastic, magic becoming commonplace and therefore desensitizing people to how wondrous it's supposed to be.

All the time, I see threads with people complaining about how magic doesn't "feel magical" anymore, and they don't understand why. And yet they then go on to describe how their characters have 7 magic swords and 10 magic wands and 3 pairs of magic boots and 2 pairs of magic underpants. Too many people don't seem to realize that when EVERYTHING is magical, magic becomes mundane and ordinary and BORING.

At some point, if we're letting things become so detached from reality, we may as well set the standard height of humans at 7 feet, and set average human strength as able to bench press 400 pounds.

I believe that the game should be rooted in reality, and things that aren't supposed to be inherently fantastic or magical should be as close to real life as possible. Without a firm grounding in reality, the fantastic elements of stories and games are cheapened. What makes a dragon special if you see ten every day? What makes magic special if you see 4 spells cast before breakfast, and eat that breakfast off of a magically glowing plate? If you want the fantastic elements of a story (or whatever) to be seen as adequately fantastic or magical, you really need to have the majority and base elements of the world be mundane and rooted in reality, or EVERYTHING will seem fantastic, and by extension, eventually NOTHING will seem fantastic anymore, because the fantastic becomes standard and mundane. If magic become common then it is ordinary.


I also know quite a few people who simply wouldn't believe me that historic "longswords" (or arming swords, historic "longswords" would be bastard swords in D&D terms) were only about 3 feet long and weighed around 2-3 pounds, and two-handed swords were only about 5 feet long and didn't weight more than about 7 pounds, because they'd become so used to the ridiculously exaggerated depictions in D&D and videogames that they just couldn't conceive that things weren't like that in real life. I showed them actual photographs of real, historic "longswords" and they dismissed them as shortswords or rapiers! In fact, MOST D&D players believe this stuff, to the point that "D&D player" has become something of an insult in some forums that discuss historic swords, because of the horribly distorted image of swords that most D&D players have.



Now, as for games where healing takes a more realistic, longer time for characters to heal, well, in my gaming group, any time one character was laid up and needed a large amount of time to heal, such as in some of our AD&D 1E games without a Cleric, the other players had the common courtesy to wait for him to heal, rather than go right back out adventuring without their wounded companion (and thus leaving me as his player twiddling my thumbs.)

If I was playing with a group that consistently left my character in the dust to go adventuring without him (and consequently leaving me as a player to sit around doing nothing) rather than simply have their characters "wait" for my character to heal up, (which would consist of everyone as players simply saying "we wait for him to heal up" and not taking any time away from the players at all) I would stop playing with them rather quickly. I would consider it to be extremely rude and selfish.

Now, if there was a time-sensitive issue that needed to be taken care of and the other characters just couldn't afford to wait for mine to heal because it would cause them to miss the window of opportunity to accomplish something important, then that's different. But if the other players simply wouldn't allow their characters to "waste time" on me (by waiting for my character to heal) just so they could get back to routine, non-time sensitive adventuring, then I would consider them to be extremely rude, inconsiderate people, and would quit playing with them rather quickly.

Aaron L said:

At some point, if we're letting things become so detached from reality, we may as well set the standard height of humans at 7 feet, and set average human strength as able to bench press 400 pounds.

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They're waaaaaay ahead of you there: http://www.lhup.edu/tmitchel/wmst/pope.pdf

Aaron L said:

I believe that the game should be rooted in reality, and things that aren't supposed to be inherently fantastic or magical should be as close to real life as possible. Without a firm grounding in reality, the fantastic elements of stories and games are cheapened.

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Agreed. "Willing Suspension of Disbelief" is easier with a dose of realism.

Meh, adding in long term wounds to 4e is very, very easy. Disease track is right there for dealing with that. We use it in our Dark Sun game. Easy peasy. Any time you drop below 0 HP, you get put on the wound track - heal checks to get better, suffer penalties until such time as you do.

This is not hard at all.

Aaron L said:

I believe that the game should be rooted in reality, and things that aren't supposed to be inherently fantastic or magical should be as close to real life as possible. Without a firm grounding in reality, the fantastic elements of stories and games are cheapened. What makes a dragon special if you see ten every day? What makes magic special if you see 4 spells cast before breakfast, and eat that breakfast off of a magically glowing plate? If you want the fantastic elements of a story (or whatever) to be seen as adequately fantastic or magical, you really need to have the majority and base elements of the world be mundane and rooted in reality, or EVERYTHING will seem fantastic, and by extension, eventually NOTHING will seem fantastic anymore, because the fantastic becomes standard and mundane. If magic become common then it is ordinary.

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I'd point out that this has been true for D&D since day one. As a player, you see magic spells being used all the time - either healing or the wizard firing away. You have magic items being pretty commonly placed as treasure - most treasure types had around a 10% chance of 1-4 magic items. After a couple of levels worth of adventuring, it's not uncommon to be lugging around a fair chunk of magic.

D&D has never been all that fantastic, as far as the magic system goes. It's been common as dirt. Sensawunda doesn't come from +1 swords. It comes from what happens in the game. If you want your players to go "Ohh gosh golley" because they found a magic sword, D&D is not the game for you.

Been a while since I've been here. Like the new layout.

Now, about the realism, I like varying levels depending on what I am doing. Hard sci-fi? The really brutal combat of Eclipse Phase is awesome, and the granularity of skills. Pulp action? Savage Worlds is perfect.

Heck, even in traditional fantasy, we have games that are all over the scale. Pathfinder is considered (except the magic and hp bits) to be more 'realistic' or 'simulationist' than 4e, which is a high action movie with swords.

These days games are going away from realism cause we live in the real world, and right now it kinda sucks. The realistic games, it seems to my old memory, where most popular during the 90's, when everything seemed fine and life was good and beer was cheap.

Entertainment reflects the environments people want to escape by what the entertainment doesn't model.

As some have said, making the game 100% realistic just won't work - even beyond the magic issue - as things would largely grind to a halt.

That said, where realism *can* be easily inserted I'd prefer it if it was. Some examples of where realism can be (re)inserted to the game without upsetting too many apple carts:

- rerolling or randomizing initiative order each round to reflect the chaos of any battle
- at least a vague passing nod to facing rules: a shield can't help you against everyone when you're surrounded, etc.
- allowing or forcing things - particularly movement and spellcasting - to take time within a combat round; as in "You start your [spell, move] on initiative x, it'll take y amount of time, so you'll be done on initiative z"
- allowing simultaneous actions in combat - maybe use a much smaller initiative die with the expectation that lots happens in each segment - in other words, move away from the very unrealistic strict turn-based system
- going to a body-fatigue or wound-vitality h.p. system (though all h.p. have to have at least a tiny "meat" quotient otherwise poison becomes mostly useless)
- forcing an aiming roll for all non-targeted spells
- henches, hirelings, cohorts, guides, etc. should appear much more often
- a sphere is a sphere, not pixellated or "squared"
- everything (stats, h.p., spell and-or skill access, etc.) is on a bell curve, as that's how reality works; and balance be damned
- alignments are shades of gray rather than black-and-white; and everybody has one
- a default, clearly stated, that basic things (weather, gravity, magnetism, plant and animal life, etc.) work the same as they do on Earth unless the DM declares otherwise
- some serious restraint on the art department; it's easier to take a realistic image and use imagination to add the fantastic than it is to take an over-the-top image and imagine it toned down, and the game's art sets the overall tone for the game (in 4e Worlds and Monsters pretty much had it right, but for some reason it fell apart after that)
- provide a reasonable physics-based reason as to what magic is and why it works. It's not difficult - it can't be; as I've already done it for my own game surely a trained professional game designer can come up with something better in a heartbeat.

Lan-"denying any irresponsibility for apples falling out of carts"-efan

Capitalism. Reality is in the public domain.

You are actually going to use alignment and realism in the same sentence?

Lanefan said:

- alignments are shades of gray rather than black-and-white; and everybody has one

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