Why is realism "lame"?

Bedrockgames said:

Sorry to hear about your health issues. I hope the surgery improves things for you. Gaming when you are sick can definitely be difficult (and when you are not well, energy is often hard to come by). For the last two years I have been dealing with serious complications from crohns disease and it had a huge impact on my gaming. Earlier this year I blogged about gaming through illness (if you think it might be helpful feel free to check it out: http://thebedrockblog.blogspot.com/2012/03/gaming-through-illness.html).

I am also someone who doesn't play much D&D anymore. I used to play it a lot but now I prefer either a game like Harn (for more realism), or Savage Worlds (for cinematic stuff). I also play my own games, which are a pretty good blend of gritty and rules light. When different people in your group want to play different things it can be tricky to keep everyone happy. Best thing in my opinion is to have a frank discussion where everyone can freely give their opinion. You may be able to strike a compromise if you know what folks want. My own solution is to game with a few different groups.

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I will check your blog out.

Between my back injury and the pain and worrying about money and paying the bills my hobbies have suffered. For one thing my patience is very thin I get frustrated very easily and the pain medication dulls my senses so it is hard to concentrate.

I think one of the biggest fears my players have is that all they know is DnD they are worried they don't have the time to learn a new system or the money to invest in a new system. Most of them are in their 40s and are set in their ways sure in their younger days they played different things.

It is not that DnD is going away my roomie will be still running her game though when it finishes she is switching to Pathfinder but they are fine with that. She runs adventure paths. And we have all enjoyed for the most part Age of Worms. So DnD will still be there.

I am the one who runs home brews and am finding that DnD just does not work for me for the most part.

Elf Witch - I think the realization that D&D is not the be all and end all of gaming happens to a lot of us. And, I think you are completely right - D&D is its own fantasy and works best when the players and DM's accept that. Instead of trying to constantly try to shoehorn D&D into other molds, just enjoy the ride. Because, to be honest, I think it's a pretty smooth ride when you let D&D be its own thing.

And, yeah, it can be a real challenge breaking gamers out of the rut of only one game. I'd suggest doing a few one shots just to see what people latch onto. Savage Worlds is actually surprisingly crunchy and it's not as rules light as I thought when I first started. It's a great one shot game when people have at least a passing familiarity with the system, but, it's not the easiest thing to jump into cold.

Fortunately, there's a bajillion systems out there.

Hussar said:

Elf Witch - I think the realization that D&D is not the be all and end all of gaming happens to a lot of us. And, I think you are completely right - D&D is its own fantasy and works best when the players and DM's accept that. Instead of trying to constantly try to shoehorn D&D into other molds, just enjoy the ride. Because, to be honest, I think it's a pretty smooth ride when you let D&D be its own thing.

And, yeah, it can be a real challenge breaking gamers out of the rut of only one game. I'd suggest doing a few one shots just to see what people latch onto. Savage Worlds is actually surprisingly crunchy and it's not as rules light as I thought when I first started. It's a great one shot game when people have at least a passing familiarity with the system, but, it's not the easiest thing to jump into cold.

Fortunately, there's a bajillion systems out there.

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That is what I have started to realize as a DM, as a player is just not as noticeable yes there were times I would get frustrated trying to do things with my character that the system would let me do easily but usually a few tweaks and I had something close.

I have all these great ideas for my campaign world and the players tell me they love the world and want more. I am now on page four of different house rules and tweaks and they are level 5. They want a lot of political intrigue especially among the churches. And that gets very hard to pull off once you start getting all the divination magic and detect spells.

They like the idea of a more gritty realistic world where plagues have swept across the cities and people are afraid of strangers and clerics of different churches don't get together and sing kumba ya.

I like the idea of social skill rolls because it allows shy players a chance to play a more diplomatic character but it kind of annoys me that the bard at fourth level was adding a +8 to his roll.

Especially because in actual world time they had only been together four months hardly time for this wet behind the ears apprentice who just set out on his own to be able to have that kind of influence over high ranking members of the church or the other major guilds. It was not realistic to me.

DnD is not meant to run this style of game. After reading these forums for the last ten years I think a lot of people who are unhappy and want a fix is because like me they are trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. DnD will never be one game to rule them all no matter how well the rules are written.

I admit it is a little scary for me to think about DMing a new system I have never played in. I am not a rules person my strength as a DM is my story telling and the fact that I know the rules because I have played under some wonderful DMs and some bad DMs. So the idea of being the one figuring out the rules and introducing them at the table makes me nervous.

But to answer the OP realism is not lame but it was really never apart of DnD not really and I think once you realize that it makes it easier to see if DnD is the eight system for a more realistic style campaign.

Elf Witch said:

I have looked at Harn and when things are less chaotic in my life I am going to purchase it. Right now I am not gaming at all. My game is on hold my roommate game is on hold. Real life issues of unemployment and health issues are in the forefront. I am going to be facing major spinal surgery in the new year.

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Sorry to hear about your health issues - I hope they all work out for you.

Burnout is an occasional occupational hazard of GMing - especially if you are trying to "force fit" the game you want to play into a system that doesn't support it very well. You seem to be doing the right thing, though - take a break, get real life tamed a bit and maybe play a little. I'm confident you'll be back, but it would be well to make sure it's on your own terms, when and with what you want to run.

I long ago stopped talking about "realism" in games and replaced it with "believability". Although a game world may bend the known laws of physics, I except it to act consistently within its own laws of physics, and the ones it doesn't bend don't change. Gravity still exists and works exactly the same, yet huge dragons have some way of defying it despite their wings not being proportional to lift a being of their size. And because a lot of dragons have magic, A Wizard Did It is a reasonable explanation.

Zhaleskra said:

Gravity still exists and works exactly the same, yet huge dragons have some way of defying it despite their wings not being proportional to lift a being of their size.

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Two Words: Living Zeppelin. All that ignition, lightning, bubbling chemical goop has to do wicked things within the Dragon.

The real problem is what happens when they lose altitude...

Slainte,

-Loonook.

Derren said:

I just wonder. Games add more and more over the top stuff to appeal to their target audience and I can't really understand why this is necessary.

Somehow "down to earth" or even "realistic" stuff has become so lame in the mind of the current generation of gamers that they do not want to do anything to do with it. For fantasy this means among other things armor has to be non-functional and covered in spikes and swords have to be giant slabs of metal no person could wield.
Why is that? It can't be because of escapism. We do not live in a medieval/fantasy world so a "down to earth" setting would be equally effective in that.
And when you look back at the worlds history, especially at how other cultures than your own developed it is easy to see that a lot of interesting things happened there which would inspire your mind equally, if not more so than the usual fantasy cliches we get instead.

So what went "wrong"? When did save the world from ultimate evil plots, spikey armor, buster swords and fights against huge numbers of enemies which you easily dispatch with your superpowers become the norm? And why?

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Because realistic = very like real life, and real life = boring. Put on a 40 pound suit of armor, pop that 80 pound ruck-sack on your back, add a weapon to four on there, some knives, maybe some stickychewy, then walk around the country side.

Fire some bottle rockets at people who try to pick a fight with you, since there's no such thing as Magic Missiles.

Fall ten feet and break both your legs, and then don't get healed by a mystical cleric type.

Real life is not a fun setting for the kinds of things people do in D&D. Oh, not to mention all the monsters; Orcs, Goblins, Ogres, Dragons, demons, etc... they don't exist. There are no plots to steal king's souls through seduction, or to tear the prime material plane into the Hells to add a layer and turn the Blood War in the Devils' favor, or to resurrect ancient snake gods, or whatever.

D&D has never been remotely realistic, and people claiming they want realism from it, frankly, I don't believe. Or else they'd remove magic, Gods, and everything else that's not realistic. If you want realism, play a game designed to be realistic. I've never found an RPG that was too terribly concerned about being realistic.

CroBob said:

Because realistic = very like real life, and real life = boring... I've never found an RPG that was too terribly concerned about being realistic.

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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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This. Rooted in Reality. You give the players something familiar to latch onto as a springboard, then add fantastical elements as the icing on the cake.

Envision forests of branching coral the size of mighty trees, stretching upwards toward the surface atop mountainous seamounts. Or perhaps a jungle of free-floating sargassum seaweed would be more to your liking. Imagine a bramble of living sea stars, sea urchin barrens, or a dead coral 'desert'. You would do well to avoid the poisoned waters near the plumes of black smokers or the deadly undersea lakes known as cold seeps. Swiftly flowing underwater rivers can be found in abyssal trenches, assuming you pass the tidal bores and internal waves to each them. Boring? Nah. And that's without the icing.

CroBob said:

Because realistic = very like real life, and real life = boring. Put on a 40 pound suit of armor, pop that 80 pound ruck-sack on your back, add a weapon to four on there, some knives, maybe some stickychewy, then walk around the country side.

Fire some bottle rockets at people who try to pick a fight with you, since there's no such thing as Magic Missiles.

Fall ten feet and break both your legs, and then don't get healed by a mystical cleric type.

Real life is not a fun setting for the kinds of things people do in D&D. Oh, not to mention all the monsters; Orcs, Goblins, Ogres, Dragons, demons, etc... they don't exist. There are no plots to steal king's souls through seduction, or to tear the prime material plane into the Hells to add a layer and turn the Blood War in the Devils' favor, or to resurrect ancient snake gods, or whatever.

D&D has never been remotely realistic, and people claiming they want realism from it, frankly, I don't believe. Or else they'd remove magic, Gods, and everything else that's not realistic. If you want realism, play a game designed to be realistic. I've never found an RPG that was too terribly concerned about being realistic.

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Since I am one of the people who like a bit more realism in my game world let me try and explain what I mean by that. I love fantasy and magic you can have all kinds of fantastic things with out breaking the suspension of disbelief. I can believe in dragons and gods and magic what makes me go ugg is having a mundane character fall from terminal velocity and live and not by a miracle but simply because of hit points. Or facing an army with the kingdoms best archers but because of the rules the party of four can just stand there and stick their tongues out because they are higher level than the army.

I also have an issue with a someone who has been adventuring for three months game time is now high enough level to be the biggest bad ass in the kingdom.

Even when using fantastic things there has to be some kind of logic and rules on how this magic works. It has to have an internal consistency.

Some games manage to do this Shadowrun for example I don't care how experienced you get how much cyberware you get no matter how good a shot you are being surrounded by a bunch of people holding weapons is never going to be a cake walk.

This is the kind of realism I like in my RPGs either that or a reason other than metagame why a fighter can fall from terminal velocity and live every time or fall in lava and have enough hit points to be rescued before being I don't know killed instantly.

And, fortunately, as you mention Elf Witch, there are games which handle this better than others. GURPS and Shadowrun are both pretty good about keeping things pretty well grounded in "realism". I'm using scare quotes there because what's meant by realism can be pretty different for different people. D&D has never been a game that does this though. At least, not by high level. And it's not a secret. I remember an old Dragon magazine cartoon where they have this barbarian tied to a tree studded with arrows and a firing squad is shooting arrows at him. The guy in the background says something to the effect of, "Ok boys, keep shooting, he's got thirty HP left."

So, when things like the OP talk about how it's changed so much and that the action is now all over the top, all I can do is go back to our early AD&D games where the Dieties and Demigods was just a really high level Monster Manual.