I think there might be getting crossed wires with the meaning/implications of the word realism, I believe
@Lanefan is using it in the sense that the world feels like a real world, that there are logical world lore consequences that follow on from the fantasy elements, rather than specifically being ‘like reality’, am I correct Lanefan?
If so, I fail to see how that is any different from my description of groundedness:
- feels like the real world (even if it does not actually match real world behavior)
- there are logical world lore consequences (so one can apply naturalistic reasoning, even to fantastical things)
- the fantasy elements are clearly established and become the starting point for such reasoning
- being like reality is not required
Is that not pretty clearly how I defined "groundedness" above, just rephrased? Certainly I grant that there are relations between the concept of "verisimilitude" or "realism" and groundedness, there would have to be if people spent so much time talking about the former two when (as I assert) what they were really after was the latter. But my examples, and the question I posed above, were meant to illustrate that when the chips are down and one really actually has to choose between them, verisimilitude (resemblance to that which is true or real) and/or realism (imitation of actually-existing things) will almost always play second fiddle to groundedness (
feeling real and supporting intuitive, naturalistic reasoning.) Only when the cost to either of the previous two is inordinately high--high enough to threaten naturalistic reasoning--will they come into play, and as soon as the naturalistic reasoning is restored, they will become secondary priorities again.
A pithier way to say that is: groundedness has
intrinsic value. Verisimilitude and realism have
instrumental value. It takes an avalanche of instrumental value to equal a trickle of intrinsic.
For example a bit of verisimilitude I might expect for a world with dragons is that their towns near where dragons live might have alert sirens and bunkers for dragon attacks in the same way our world has tornado sirens/bunkers in areas in risk of those.
Sure. That does not require any loss of groundedness (and, in fact,
supports groundedness, because it shows naturalistic reasoning in action--"wouldn't people want to be warned about dragon attacks? Oh, look, they are! Nice.") But if verisimilitude
got in the way of groundedness, the former would be set aside for the latter. I gave my time travel example above, but there are others. For example, spells constantly violate the conservation of energy, but this does not lead to GMs mandating that every
fireball must extract an equivalent amount of heat from the environment. (Of course,
some will do this, but the vast majority don't.)
Instead, many of these physics-required secondary effects are ignored, even though they are theoretically required by hardline commitment to verisimilitude, because naturalistic reasoning does not generally include strict adherence to the statistical laws of thermodynamics. Partly, that's because such statistical laws tend to be really hard to observe; there's a reason we didn't develop kinetic molecular theory until quite late, and why the "caloric fluid" theory of heat held on for so long even though it's almost hilariously wrong by today's standards.
Or, consider the implications of conjuring up food. By the rules, conjured food disappears after a time, usually after a day or so. Yet conjured food that is
eaten does not disappear. A full-throated commitment to verisimilitude would either have to reject this, or have to come up with a detailed explanation for why conjured food has no ontological inertia when it is uneaten, but gains ontological inertia when it is eaten. Most GMs don't bother with that though, even those who desire highly "realistic" worlds. They just accept that that's how magic works, that that's just a new rule for naturalistic reasoning to operate upon. Hence: the behavior is grounded, even though it is not particularly verisimilitudinous.
Many of the implications of hit points, attack rolls and AC, Initiative and combat rounds, and other elements of play fall into this category.
Some set of these things will almost always get a verisimilitude-focused explanation. But most of them won't in any given game. They're accepted as things for naturalistic reasoning to operate on; they become part of the "new nature," as it were.
TL;DR: I argue the true value folks actually seek is groundedness, and verisimilitude/realism are merely tools used to get there. In almost all cases, if there
really is no choice but to either sacrifice groundedness for versimilitude/realism, OR sacrifice versimilitude/realism for groundedness, folks will choose the latter. Because these things are related and verisimilitude/realism is often a useful tool for
achieving groundedness, such sacrifices are rare. Oftentimes, when a potential conflict arises, time will be set aside for finding a way to reconcile it without needing to make that sacrifice. But if it really, truly is
absolutely unavoidable, the intrinsic value of groundedness will in most cases trump the instrumental value of verisimilitude/realism.