A GMing telling the players about the gameworld is not like real life

Kurviak said:

Do you have statistics to backup that claim?

BTW I was making up those numbers to make a point about not any rule been more realistic than no rule, and not to give any approximation to real numbers.

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Right, there are plenty of attestations in the historical record of warriors discussing the breaking of swords and at least anecdotes about wanting or acquiring types of weapons which were thought to be more reliable. Clearly there was a progression from stone to copper to bronze to iron/steel swords over time, which we would expect to be a result of attempts to increase durability and reliability. Ancient Japanese warriors wrote about adopting curved swords (which became a traditional design over time) as a way to prevent weapon breakage (but also perhaps more importantly this corresponded with the adoption of mounted combat).

So, we can certainly conclude that durability and reliability of weapons was a significant concern in the real world. From that we can conclude that breakage was a pretty realistic possibility that most warriors would have to feel concerned about. That STILL doesn't tell us what would be a realistic rate. One blow in 1000, 1 in 100, 1 in 10? For which type of material? As you say, it may well be more realistic to say 'no breakage' depending on what those numbers are. IIRC various D&D products have actually discussed weapons breaking (I know DS does) but only usually in respect of cruder materials, such as bronze swords. Realistic? We don't know. Authentic to the idea of them being less durable? Certainly!

Maxperson said:

If the DM adds in breakage like that, he's adding some realism to the game. As it stands, 5e doesn't have breakage unless the DM adds it in in some way.

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Well, 5e doesn't have thatch, either, does it, unless the GM adds it in? Nor does it have pork, as best I recall from the equipment list. I don't think that means 5e is unrealistic in relation to the roofing of buildings or the variety of meats made from domestic animals. It just means that, as a RPG, it takes it for granted that the GM will narrate some fiction as part of the process of play.

Maxperson said:

Breaking(system) is like breaking(real life). Not breaking(no system) is not like breaking(real life). Sure, having a .00001 is more realistic than .01, but that doesn't stop .01 from being more realistic than 0, because 0 removes all chance at breaking, where in "real life" weapons break.

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This claim is absurd. A gameworld in which every person is haemophiliac is not more realistic than one in which no one is.

Likewise if one in every 20 perople is haemophiliac.

A gameworld in which every day sees a tornado or hurrican strike the village isn't more realistic than one in which extreme weather never occurs, just because those sorts of weather events sometimes occur in real life.

Introducing real world elements in acontextual ways, or at a frequency that completely belies reality, doesn't increase realism. Realism means something like "resembles real life", not "contains arbitrary distributions of elements that might occur in real life".

hawkeyefan said:

I think you need to stop and give it some thought, Max.

You just said that having cow farts break swords is more realistic than swords not breaking.

You know some swords don’t break, right?

Sure, everything wears down eventually. But most RPG campaigns have a beginning and an end. So within the scope of an RPG campaign, it’s perfectly reasonable to not have any swords break.

Is it more or less reasonable than some kind of weapon degradation system? It’s impossible to say.

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Right. I don't think that having rules for weapon breaking or maintenance is necessarily about "realism," but, instead, it's about how we choose to frame the fiction. We generally trust that there are things - like the warrior maintaining the quality of their gear - that the fiction does not focus on but nevertheless likely happen. Or more profanely, we never hear about the fact that the adventurers are likely having to take craps in the corner of the dungeon room they are camping in while their fellow adventurers are present. We don't focus on these things because it's not about realism but, rather, fictional framing. What do we want to spend our (limited) gaming time, attention, and effort experiencing?

Aldarc said:

I don't think that having rules for weapon breaking or maintenance is necessarily about "realism," but, instead, it's about how we choose to frame the fiction. We generally trust that there are things - like the warrior maintaining the quality of their gear - that the fiction does not focus on but nevertheless likely happen.

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We don't focus on these things because it's not about realism but, rather, fictional framing. What do we want to spend our (limited) gaming time, attention, and effort experiencing?

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To me, this goes to [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION]'s notion of "authenticity" - what will make the experience an authentic one?

AbdulAlhazred said:

Right, so in my scene framing type of process I reveal some information which says "Boyleston has a reputation for fine swordsmiths" then of course if the PCs end up in Boyleston, guess what they will find? This is hardly difficult.

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You'd think so, right?

But in the end it all depends on how good the DM's notes are, whether prepared before the game or written down during it; because seven real-world years later (which might well only be two or three in-game years for the PCs) when the party go back to that area there's no way in hell I'm otherwise going to remember which town had the good swordsmiths or even if there were any here at all.

Likewise if the party is in Trenton and nobody has ever suggested that Trenton has top-notch smithies, then probably when the desire to find one comes up, the answer will be "gosh, you should have gone to Boyleston!" This doesn't seem harder in my game than in others.

I would also observe that it is quite possible to happen to show up in Boyleston without knowing much about the town and then learn from observation that it is a swordsmithing center. Depending on the characters and circumstances that might be more or less plausible. If it seems implausible then 'zero myth' certainly makes it trivial to remove that implausibility by simply not making it so. In that case it might later be established that the swordsmiths are all in Trenton.

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However it's established, the point is that is then has to remain established.

Sure, these are all simply matters of basic consistency. Of course the locals will know of the baron if he did/does rule them. Likewise if it has been established that no one rules the town, then said fact will (or should) remain consistently true, or else some justification should exist for why it changed or why the PCs were deceived.

My earlier point was merely that since most things aren't really established in either technique, that the variance in plausibility caused by some sort of 'missing foreshadowing' is pretty likely to be minimal.

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Most of the time, yes. It's the instances that don't fall under the 'most of the time' banner that cause headaches.

GMs, in either technique, normally only establish facts that are going to be actually salient in play, unless perhaps the setting has been heavily developed in past games. In that case either GM would have that information available, presumably, regardless of how or why it came into being established.

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So why not just have the setting somewhat heavily developed even if it's the first game there? This would allow for that same ready availability of information and also allow a chance to check it all over ahead of time and fix or remove any inconsistencies or errors before they affect anything.

pemerton said:

I think some early systems, like classic D&D, RQ and Traveller, are a bit confused about this aspect of design. A fairly obvious D&D example is the City/Town encounter matrix in the AD&D DMG Appendix C. If we treated that table as a model of the prevalence of powerful fighters, undead, demons etc in typical AD&D urban settlements the result would be ridiculous - how would anyone ever survive?

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I think that table is supposed to work kind of like how 1e combat works. Your to-hit roll in 1e combat represents your best swing out of many in that one-minute round. Your encounter roll represents the most interesting/dangerous/exciting encounter out of many encounters within that hour or half-watch or whatever time frame the DM is using.

When thought of that way, it's still a bit crazy but nowhere near AS crazy.

pemerton said:

Just to add to what AbdulAlhazred has said - this all seems like very basic stuff. How does it support an argument that "no myth" RPGing must generate inconsistencies in the fiction?

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Because even very basic stuff will at some point trip people up.

I don't quite understand.

Are you asking - what do I do if my players want to read Appendix B (ie a Tolkien-esuqe timeline)? In that case, I tell them that there is no Appendix B. They can imagine it to be whatever they want!

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So each player can come up with their own imagined timeline for the setting you're using? That sounds like a recipe for madness. And yes, I'd be one who would want to not only read such a timeline but also know it was the same as all the other players had access to.

This is not unlike eg REH's Conan stories. If I'm wondering what was in the other rooms of the tower in Tower of the Elephant, there's no wikipedia page or diary entry - I just have to use my imagination.

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The difference being, of course, that in the game your PCs can wander over to those rooms and see for themselves what's in there if the Tower of the Elephant is where they happen to be.

If you're asking - what do I do if I want to include campaign elements in play nut not as part of the context of presenting the fiction to the players? Then I think this is contradictory.

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Why? Even something as simple as an overview map of the continent is bound to include all sorts of campaign (by which I assume you mean setting) elements that the players/PCs might never encounter during play, yet the game-world - and, thus, the game itself - is made richer and deeper by the map's existence. A player can pick the map up, look at it, and let her imagination take over. Another player can pick the map up, look at it, and say "Hey, it's blank there - so that's where we're going!" A third player can pick the map up, look at it, and calculate how long a particular journey might take. And so forth.

pemerton said:

A gameworld in which every day sees a tornado or hurrican strike the village isn't more realistic than one in which extreme weather never occurs, just because those sorts of weather events sometimes occur in real life.

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This exact issue is what did in the original version of my weather table: too many extremes kept coming up.

Introducing real world elements in acontextual ways, or at a frequency that completely belies reality, doesn't increase realism. Realism means something like "resembles real life", not "contains arbitrary distributions of elements that might occur in real life".

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True, though I find I'm beginning to prefer the term 'authenticity' (thanks, [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] ) over 'realism'.

Realism, in the strictest sense, does base itself on our own real world/universe.

Authenticity, on the other hand, bases itself on the reality present in the game world/universe - whatever that may be - and asks it only to be consistent with itself.

How closely the game-world reality matches real-world reality is the next issue. My simple rule of thumb there is that it matches as closely as possible until and unless something says it doesn't; where "something" can be anything from magic and its effects to inaccurate combat simulations to hit points to alternate planes to fantastic creatures to whatever.

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Lanefan said:

However it's established, the point is that is then has to remain established.

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Who thinks that's controversial?

Lanefan said:

it all depends on how good the DM's notes are, whether prepared before the game or written down during it; because seven real-world years later (which might well only be two or three in-game years for the PCs) when the party go back to that area there's no way in hell I'm otherwise going to remember which town had the good swordsmiths or even if there were any here at all.

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It's the instances that don't fall under the 'most of the time' banner that cause headaches.

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Well, if no one remembers then it's not going to come up, is it? So there won't be any headaches.

But if someone remembers (whether literally, or by reference to notes) then there are no headaches.

Lanefan said:

So each player can come up with their own imagined timeline for the setting you're using? That sounds like a recipe for madness.

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You're missing my point.

For exactly how many days was Watson stationed in Afghanistan? I'm pretty sure A Study in Scarlet doesn't answer that question. So if the reader is curious, she has to just make it up. Suppose that you imagine it to be some days or weeks more or less than I do - why is that going to cause madness?

In the context of my 4e game, was it summer or winter when the gnoll army killed the king of Nerath around 100 years ago? And was that exactly 100 years ago, or approximately? And for how long did the empire linger on after the king's death? Nothing in my campaign has answered these question, so each player can envisage it as s/he wants to. What does it matter?

Supppose that an answer were established, it might turn out that one or more of the PCs had made a false assumption. How would that be unrealistic!

Lanefan said:

The difference being, of course, that in the game your PCs can wander over to those rooms and see for themselves what's in there if the Tower of the Elephant is where they happen to be.

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And if they do it can be narrated in the appropriate amount of detail. But there'll always be something that could have been, but wasn't, investigated. And some detail that could have been, but wasn't, narrated. That's my point. What colour is the timber of the table? Do the chairs have carved or flat saddles? Are the door jams timber or arched stone? Etc.

Lanefan said:

Even something as simple as an overview map of the continent is bound to include all sorts of campaign (by which I assume you mean setting) elements that the players/PCs might never encounter during play, yet the game-world - and, thus, the game itself - is made richer and deeper by the map's existence. A player can pick the map up, look at it, and let her imagination take over.

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I thought you were objecting to the use of imagination in respect of unspecified fiction?

But the map I use in my 4e or BW campaign (I don't have a map for my other games) is not an existing fiction to be explored - it's a list of prompts, or placeholders for possibilities. Which the players know.

Lanefan said:

So why not just have the setting somewhat heavily developed even if it's the first game there?

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My answer would be: there's a big difference between a setting that we've created through play and one that's been invented by one person outside the context of play.