If it's not real then why call for "realism"?

[Janx]

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).

 

[Barastrondo]

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!

 

[Galloglaich]

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.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/242110-history-mythology-art-rpgs.html

G.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

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.

 

[Galloglaich]

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.

 

[Nai_Calus]

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.

 

[pawsplay]

Why do you expect things to act like reality, or act consistently, when they aren't real?

Because utter nonsense is pointless and boring.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

Nope, not even remotely.

Fair enough. Have you seen the 4E lava rules?

 

[Scribble]

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.)

 

[Asmor]

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.