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.
You know there have been people in real life who have walked away from falls at terminal velocity with scratches and bruises, though more often, if they live, they have broken bones and such. There have also been real life war heroes who, even though they sustained a large volume of injuries, continued fighting on against superior numbers, through luck, skill, and grit. The heroes of games
are these people, in their world. How are they "mundane" after surviving so much and saving kingdoms etc? What's mundane about that, and why would you want high fantasy to be "mundane"?
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.
Why? We're not talking about average Joe, here, we're talking a talented, stubborn, tough SoB, who started out with that talent, toughness, and stubbornness, and adventured near constantly for months... it doesn't seem like he might become something more than the average warrior?
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.
Few games lack
internal consistency. As long as you follow the rules of the game the same way in every applicable situation, then the game is
necessarily internally consistent. It's only not if the person running the game fails to make it so. It seems to me like you want it to be consistent with your picture of reality, hence saying you want it "realistic". A thing can be completely internally consistent while being absolutely nothing like what you'd find in reality... for example, the existence of magic and dragons. No, people who want "realism" are not asking for internal consistency, they're asking for external consistency, consistency with the real world. Which role playing games are historically bad at, and which would make the game boring in my opinion.
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.
The reason is that he's a freaking
hero! He doesn't succumb to the injuries or deaths of lesser men, or else he'd constantly have broken bones, internal bleeding, months and months of recovery time, physical therapy, and all of that instead of these "Hit Point" things which are akin to nothing you'd find in reality, and are completely, utterly, mechanistic in nature. I like a little grit now and again myself, but I don't want my grit to be anything like in real life, or else my characters would lose limbs in explosions, suffer soft tissue damage, get infections, etc. Again, realism isn't fun.