The Difference Between Realism vs. Believability

[AllisterH]

There's also the personal factor mentioned earlier.

If you grew up with Bleach, Naruto and DBZ, what you would consider believable/realistic would change I imagine


(Really, how the hell does Mayuri's Bankai make ANY sort of sense? Seriously, a giant centipede with a face of baby that breathes a toxic cloud?"

 

[UngainlyTitan]

There's also the personal factor mentioned earlier.

If you grew up with Bleach, Naruto and DBZ, what you would consider believable/realistic would change I imagine


(Really, how the hell does Mayuri's Bankai make ANY sort of sense? Seriously, a giant centipede with a face of baby that breathes a toxic cloud?"

I enjoy Bleach in spite of stuff like that. The underlying story is good enough to hold me in spite of that kind if sillyness Naruto could not though and DBZ I just could not stand may be though because I was introduced to the anime first. 5 minutes of them growling at each other and I was looking for something else to do. It might not have been so bad in the manga.

 

[Shazman]

Man, I feel like I'm trying to pull out a tooth. It is clear as day to me that the above makes no sense. The horde isn't a liquidy swarm monster that is greater than the sum of its parts. Each minion is a discrete unit and must be treated as such. Each minion has NO karma and can die from a simple knife wound or punch to the head, but an area spell causing damage in the double digits, so utterly destructive that it OBLITERATES THE LEADER even at half damage, somehow leaves the minions completely unscathed. That massive conflageration, which utterly destroys the leader and lieutenant and other beasts, leaves the hapless unfortunate decrepit minions miraculously alive for no apparent reason. Meanwhile, another minion on the other side of the chamber, who was lucky enough to be outside the reach of the spell, is killed when a hero farts on him.

For the record, I would never defend the plausibility of 3E mechanics that clearly make no sense. I would just admit: I admit it's not believable and/or I don't care. But I wouldn't BS that it was believable when it clearly isn't.

Face it. 4E has completely divorced itself from any form of realism, simulation, versimulatude, believablity, etc. That is the nature of the game because the designers put gamism, balance etc. above all else in importance. It is a conscious design decision, and it's not going to change because a lot of us don't like it. Some people that like 4E don't mind it and others try to rationalize it by saying that D&D has always been unrealistic. I personally don't like the emphasis of metagaming concerns over believeability, so 4E is not number one on my list of RPG's to play.

 

[Mallus]

Face it. 4E has completely divorced itself from any form of realism, simulation, versimulatude, believablity, etc.

When was D&D ever married to simulation, believability, or realism?

I'm not trying to convince you 4e is good. Or even that you're wrong. Or pull teeth .

It's just that I've played D&D for 25+ years, starting with AD&D, and I just don't see how the rules ever supported simulation. They were always gamist.

From my perspective, some people around here are mistaking realism (and simulation) for tradition. It's not that 4e is any less realistic, it's that 4e is unrealistic in several new ways, which they haven't spent the last 30 years getting used to.

Once upon a time, as ardoughter mentioned, I too asked why (and how) a PC standing in a room without cover got a save vs. the Fireball erupting all around him. And why, if he made his save, was he in the same spot? Wasn't he diving out of the way?

I stopped asking these question. Roughly around the time I stopped thinking it was a good idea to extrapolate a setting's natural laws from the game rules. That way lies madness, not to mention the inevitable loss of realism, simulation, verisimilitude, believability, etc...

 

[Doug McCrae]

I got a good one:

Forgotten Realms, and other high magic settings such as 3e's default and Eberron, are more believable than low magic settings.

The PCs, whether the setting is high or low magic, will always encounter tons of it. They will go to magic places and use magic items to kill magic monsters. Half or more of them can cast spells or posess other magic powers - wizard, cleric, magic races, etc. And they will do this again and again and again. The world the PCs inhabit is always high magic. If the wider world is high magic too than that's fine, no inconsistency. But if the wider world is low magic then we have an inconsistency, a credibility gap. And that has been defined as believability.

FR and the like are less realistic but more believable.

EDIT: When I talk about a low magic world, I mean the world as it is experienced by most of its inhabitants. The average person in such a world seldom, probably never, encounters magic. In a high magic world the average person encounters magic frequently. However PCs in a D&D game will always have a pretty similar experience no matter whether the world is high or low magic. Half of them will be casters, they'll have magic items, meet weird monsters and so forth. And this will happen not once, but repeatedly.

Middle-Earth in the time of LotR is a good example of a low magic world with high magic protagonists. The heroes seem to encounter just about every magic item, monster and magical being around at the time, save for Sauron. The average person in Middle-Earth wouldn't wield Sting and bear the One Ring and look into a palantir and meet Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel, Tom frikkin Bombadil, Ringwraiths, the last balrog, Shelob, etc. Protagonists lead very interesting lives.

 

[Ariosto]

Doug, just how is it that

The PCs, whether the setting is high or low magic, will always encounter tons of it.

?
What is it, then, that makes the setting "low magic"? All that's really "unbelievable" here is your nomenclature!

 

[AllisterH]

Doug, just how is it that
?
What is it, then, that makes the setting "low magic"? All that's really "unbelievable" here is your nomenclature!

Before the thread progresses any further, a definition of terms is in order I suspect.

Low and High magic refer to how "common" magic is to the non-PCs/NPCs of the setting. If the common populace react in disbelief or have never seen magic in their own lives, that's a low magic setting.

Pretty much the only DnD setting that I would classify as LOW MAGIC would be Birthright. Darksun might be another if one doesn't consider psionics equivalent to magic.

Both Dresden and LotR are examples of low magic settings.

There's also low and high fantasy.

High fantasy is one where the adventure takes primarily in an "alternate" world that bears no resemblance to the real world or a "past" real world stage.

LotR is decidely High fantasy whereas Dresden is low fantasy. Pretty much ALL of D&D campaign worlds are high fantasy, with maybe Ravenloft's "masque of the red death" campaign setting being closest to low fantasy.

EDIT: There's also Heroic Fantasy vs Sword & Sorcery - the former being where the plots ar eprimarily about "saving the world - classic good vs evil" a.k.a. LotR.

Sword & Sorcery being more of a personal motif such as revenge, riches, and other mundane stuff...Conan being the best example but the Hobbit would also fall under this definition IMO.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Doug, just how is it that
?
What is it, then, that makes the setting "low magic"? All that's really "unbelievable" here is your nomenclature!

The setting could still be low magic because that's the experience of most of its inhabitants. The PCs lead very interesting lives and encounter magic frequently while the average person never (or very seldom) does. Or, what AllisterH said. I will clarify in the original post, it's not as clear as it should be.

High magic PCs in a low magic world is, imo, less believable than high magic PCs in a high magic world. The latter is more consistent.

 

[Mallus]

Another observation...

At the heart of several objections to 4e is the belief that an in-game objects must have a single, global-level descriptor, or else the game becomes less believable/realistic.

An example of this is the dreaded "Army of Minions", whose poor soldiers die from tripping over stones or being stung by bees. Now it's pretty clear to me Minion is not meant to a global-scope descriptor. It's local in scope, applying only to an instance of combat. It's not meant to describe a creatures absolute state in the game world. It's a convenient abstraction, meant to do a specific, limited-in-scope, unit of work.

Moreover, the idea a single entity in the game world could be described in several different ways is hardly new to 4e. Consider a lowly AD&D NPC... let's call him Smith the Smith...

When the PC's first encounter Smith, he's the smith of the Village of Hamlet. He's described as a burly and honest chap barely making at ends meet (at this point, he's just a name and box text, no stats -- the DM didn't think he was worth statting out).

Later, the PC's hire him and several other villagers to fill out their expedition to the nearby Caves of Consternation (now he's described using a abrreviated stat block: AC, HP, to-hit, damage).

Smith survives, prospers, and becomes a loyal henchman (now he's a 4th level fighter with a full, PC-like stat block).

Later still, Smith is put in charge of his master's castle, and he has to take charge of the defenses during a raid while this master's away (at his point the DM hauls out the mass-combat rules and Smith is represented yet another way in mechanics, now being reduced to a series of modifiers to a military unit).

One character, represented four different ways, depending on the needs at the time. Simple, yes? No great harm done to the believability of the fiction of the game world.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Excellent work Mallus, as usual!