MichaelSomething
Legend
If verisimilitude is important, what are you willing to sacrifice for it??
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D&D General The Importance of Verisimilitude (or "Why you don't need realism to keep it real")
- Thread starter Alzrius
- Start date
Tony Vargas
Legend
Poor Regdar.
Snarf Zagyg
Notorious Liquefactionist
Well, if you’re offering bards up,,, how high can you count?
Alzrius
The EN World kitten
That answer to that question strikes me as being highly setting-specific.
Oofta
Legend
AnotherGuy
Hero
I find it interesting that we seem not ask this question for other elements of the game.
EDIT: There is a difference between asking in which areas would one prefer more verisimilitude and what woud one be willing to exchange/lose to earn such verisimilitude.
Snarf Zagyg
Notorious Liquefactionist
I agree with this.
The issue of verisimilitude is, to me, very much tied into two separate concepts from other areas that people are familiar with; suspension of disbelief and common sense.
To very briefly discuss this...
As I recently described in another thread, a role-playing game is what is created in the interaction between players or between player(s) and gamemaster(s) within a specified diegetic framework. This definition places an emphasis on the shared framework of the participants under the guise of diegesis (what is true within the game). The key here is the shared framework of the participants.
Most arguments about verisimilitude boil down to arguments about the suspension about disbelief, and common sense. To briefly describe this, I would point out the following:
1. People have various breaking points when it comes to the suspension of disbelief. Even in the most rudimentary games involving a shared space, there will be ideas that violate this necessary suspension for the participants. If a bunch of people are running around with sticks pretending to be knights, and then someone says, "But I shoot you dead with my laser gun," this would run afoul of the suspension of disbelief that created the shared space. We see this in all sorts of games; from campaigns that enforce restrictions based on a a priori themes of the campaign, to Story Now games that say you "Can't Jump Over the Moon" because that wouldn't be "good faith play."
2. On the other hand, there is the common sense issue. When there is a requirement for a ruling (for example) a participant will often have to rely on their judgment or common sense. Trouble is that one person's common sense may not be that ... common to other participants. Participants come into games with different life experiences and knowledge, and what is "real" to either reality or genre to one participant may not be the same for all.
With that said, there is an additional issue beyond these two; specifically that the perfect is the enemy of the good (which ties into the suspension of disbelief). People that value verisimilitude understand that it can't be perfect, after all, it's just a game. Much in the same way that people that enjoy Star Trek (or even Star Wars) understand that it is not perfectly realistic ... things, for example, don't go pew pew pew in space. Nevertheless, as @Alzrius pointed out, there is still a desire for internal consistency. What brings a person out of the game isn't a violation of already-established "magical thinking" (say, dragons can fly) but instead things that they feel violate the internal consistency of the rules of the shared space that they feel need to be established (humans wielding swords that are four times longer than the person is tall).
When I went to see The Last Jedi in theaters, I was willing to forgive a lot of the movie's nonsense- and there was a lot of it. But, I said to myself, "it's a course correction, they're bringing up new plot points, I could see where this could turn into something interesting".
Then Vice-Admiral Holdo yeeted herself at lightspeed into a starship and I was like...."wait...what?". Up until now, we'd been told lightspeed jumps required calculations to make sure you went anywhere. Sure, it was occasionally mentioned if you weren't careful you could end up in a star or smacking into a large asteroid or something, but it was always on the level of "uh...rolled a nat 1".
Suddenly, everything flew out the window. The Battle of Yavin? Big deal, strap an astromech droid to an engine with a warhead and have it slam into the Death Star at hyperspeed- no need for a trench run and a 1 in a million shot with a torpedo! Need more than one? We got droids all over the place, and you'd need less engines than were lost in the suicide mission in the first place!
I mean, it makes perfect sense if you think about the science involved with just something moving at near lightspeed, let alone surpassing it by slipping through another dimension, but somehow the realistic thing broke the verisimilitude of the setting for me, because that's just not how spaceship battles work in a galaxy far, far away!
They're dogfights and bombing runs (heck, the movie even opens with spaceships that function more like WW2 bombers than, uh, space ships) with lasers that go pew pew in the void of space! Suddenly the door is opened to modern drone warfare, and in the thousands of years these people had interstellar flight, this wasn't in anyone's playbook?
I checked out of the rest of the movie. And then they fired Ryan Johnson and ignored pretty much all of Episode 8 anyways, so...lol.
Then Vice-Admiral Holdo yeeted herself at lightspeed into a starship and I was like...."wait...what?". Up until now, we'd been told lightspeed jumps required calculations to make sure you went anywhere. Sure, it was occasionally mentioned if you weren't careful you could end up in a star or smacking into a large asteroid or something, but it was always on the level of "uh...rolled a nat 1".
Suddenly, everything flew out the window. The Battle of Yavin? Big deal, strap an astromech droid to an engine with a warhead and have it slam into the Death Star at hyperspeed- no need for a trench run and a 1 in a million shot with a torpedo! Need more than one? We got droids all over the place, and you'd need less engines than were lost in the suicide mission in the first place!
I mean, it makes perfect sense if you think about the science involved with just something moving at near lightspeed, let alone surpassing it by slipping through another dimension, but somehow the realistic thing broke the verisimilitude of the setting for me, because that's just not how spaceship battles work in a galaxy far, far away!
They're dogfights and bombing runs (heck, the movie even opens with spaceships that function more like WW2 bombers than, uh, space ships) with lasers that go pew pew in the void of space! Suddenly the door is opened to modern drone warfare, and in the thousands of years these people had interstellar flight, this wasn't in anyone's playbook?
I checked out of the rest of the movie. And then they fired Ryan Johnson and ignored pretty much all of Episode 8 anyways, so...lol.
Remathilis
Legend
I think the natural answer would be balanced play. Or at least the notion that PC options have to be roughly balanced against one another. Part of the two biggest debates in D&D (fighter vs wizard in terms of narrative impact and goliath vs halfling in terms of species equality) both have their origins in versimulitude vs balance (a fighter as a mundane character cannot do what a wizard can with magic; a halfling cannot, by virtue of their size, perform the same feats of strength as a goliath. Yet both sets of options demand to be balanced and viable choices for the game to work).
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