Lanefan
Victoria Rules
All true, yet even there within that framework one can, if one wants, hew closer to or farther from the realistic.Actually, I think the entirety of D&D is a refutation of this argument. A rather thorough one in fact! The game was instantly, at its initial inception, trapped by the structure of its mechanics, the places where it is abstract, and others where it is concrete, and the way it structures participant roles, etc.
If you're referring to 4e (and if not, to what are you referring) and thus trying to imply 4e was less abstract than the other D&Ds, you're off the mark all round. One of the main reasons 4e was rejected was because it was too abstract.It has never escaped ANY of this, and the one time it got close/arguably did, you all utterly rejected the result!
The mechanics give a framework, within which a DM can decide whether to - and how to - make her game seem to her players a) more or less realism-based and-or b) more or less authentic within itself. Both a) and b) are choices a DM has to make, even if she doesn't realize she's doing so.I would argue that game designers find it necessary to implement some sorts of mechanics, lest there be no game at all. Yet, to a large degree, the choices they make at the start are unlikely to be overcome later, or incrementally improved. Instead, whole new game systems are usually constructed.