pemerton said:
To retierate: there is more in the heaven and earth of the gameworld than is dreamed of in any GM's philosophy.
This is irrelevant to whether or not something is more or less realistic.
No it's not. Reality is characterised by unpredictable and unanticipated events. GM decision - more-or-less by definition - can't produce those. That's one reason it produces outcomes in the fiction that are not particularly like real life.
Generalising the point: GM decisions are, more-or-less by definition, made for reasons. Thus they create a fiction that reflects one person's priorities for a shared fiction. This is not a characteristic of real life!
Are you really arguing that if I add becoming nicked and dull in combat with the need to sharpen the edge and work out the nicks, and rusting if not cared for properly, that my addition does not more closely match how longswords work in the real world?
What do you mean by
adding becoming nicked and dulled in combat? Do you mean adding that as a mechanical state? As a way of narrating why an attack roll fails? As background colour in the manner that [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION] describe upthread?
And what does this example have to do with
GM decides as a method of resolution? In Prince Valiant, I can narrate a dulled weapon (reducing its adds in combat) as an outcome of a loss in combat. In BW, there are various rules for equipment degradation as well as the possibility of narrating this as a consequence of failure. In Cortex+ Heroic I could impose a Dulled Blade complication on a PC as a consequence of a successful reaction by a NPC.
There are any number of methods that can produce such outcomes in a RPG which allows for it. You've given no reason to think that
GM decides is the one that will produce the most realistic distribution/occurrence of such events.
in D&D there is no such dulling or assumed care. Longswords simply never nick or get dull in D&D.
<snip>
Swords break in real life. If I now add breakage to combat in my game, it's more realistic than the game that doesn't have it, but does have assumed care of minor damage. Sword breakage in combat is NOT something that can just be assumed and glossed over the way you did to the damage. You either have it as a possibility in combat and have to deal with the consequences when your sword breaks or you don't.
If [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION]'s D&D game includes player's narrating their PCs' care for their weapons, then we have at least one counterexample to your claim that
in D&D there is no such dulling or assumed care. You
seem to have in mind the dulling of weapons as a mechanical state of affairs, but your argument would become clearer if you spelled some of these assumptions out,
and related them to the thread topic of
processes whereby the shared fiction is established.
As far as weapon's breaking is concerned, there obviously are versions of D&D where this happens - eg 4e Dark Sun. They could easily be generalised. Would they make the game more realistic? Well, there are some swords that have been used in combat yet never broken. So it's not unrealistic that the gameworld should contain such swords, nor that they happen to be in the possession of the PCs. A GM who cares for such things could narrate awauy with broken swords that aren't part of the PCs' immediate situations.
Really? You're seriously arguing that weapon degradation happening due to a pink bunny dream is as realistic as a DM coming up with probabilities based on real world weapon degradation and going with a roll based on those odds?
There are so many assumptions built into your rhetorical question that it's hard to unpack them all. But just to focus on one: What are the odds of any given warrrio's sword breaking in any given fight? What are the odds of a GM dreaming of a pink buddy? What is the variation, across time and place and circumstance, in rates of broken swords and in rates of pink bunny dreams?
If the GM decides, on the basis of his/her dream, that today is the day when s/he will narrate a NPC's sword breaking at the dramatic moment, what makes the resuting fiction less realistic than any other decision-making process?
Because dragons flying has nothing whatsoever to do with falling 100 feet. They are completely different aspects of the game and each aspect has a different spot on the realism spectrum.
How can they be compltely different? They both involve the question of how massive bodies do or don't fall to earth. That's why [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] has connected them to one another.
The fact that the game treats the differently
in mechanical terms is neither here nor there.
Realism, to the extent that it's germane at all, is a property of fiction, not game mechanics.
This is ultimately another example of you making many many assumptions in your posts about how RPGing works, what an RPG system looks like, how it produces outcomes in the fiction, etc. I can unpack most of these, but the presence of the assumptions is making it very hard for you to engage in a conversation that isn't taking those assumptions for granted.
Consider, for instance, [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION]'s remarks about whether or not it is "realistic" to frame a scene with a 100' drop: whereas D&D leaves that sort of thing entirely in the discretion of the GM, Classic Traveller (as AbdulAlhazred knows) has rules for world generation, which in turn yield details about world atmosphere and hydography and average temperature, which actually create a starting point for answering questions about the "realism" of any particular posited topography.
These world features also feed into the creature generation system, so that flying "dragons" become more likely on low-grav, dense-atmosphere worlds while they are impossible on worlds like earth.
That's not to say that he's wrong to think that there is no "realistic" inferential pathway from those world-level details to any particular drop that the PCs might find themselves adjacent to. My point is that you don't seem to have a very well-developed sense of the range of RPG mechanics out there, and also the range of mechanical and non-mechanical decision-making processs.
Let's go back, for instance, to your claim that deciding which is the more-travelled path in the way [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION] suggested upthread - ie on the basis of a player check - is less realistic than [something-or-other]. Such a system can be used to introduce weapon degradation and weapon breakage - 4e Dark Sun uses a version of it, as does Prince Valiant, Burning Wheel and Cortex+ Heroic. You've said that these systems are not apt to produce realism, yet they have more prospect of yielding instancs of weapon degradation and weapon breakage than does D&D as you would pkay it out of the box, which is - you've said - a mark of realism. What's your response to this apparent contradiction? I've got no idea, because you don't seem to have anticipated it because of the assumptions you make about how RPGing works.
For my part, I take it as amply sufficient evidence that there is no valid inference from
method of establishing the fiction to
degree of realism of the fiction that is establsihed.
