D&D General The Importance of Verisimilitude (or "Why you don't need realism to keep it real")

[Micah Sweet]

Which is just one of the great frustrations with any invocation of "verisimilitude." It is an inherently biased standard.

Biased against what? Humans beings being limited by what humans beings are physically capable of doing, absent of explicit evidence to the contrary? Doesn't seem unfair to me.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Magic has its own limits, or at least it should. Different types of magic should have different limits in fact. It's just that none of them are the limits of Earth physics.

Right, but those limits aren't defined outside the game or setting the magic is presented, while real-life is always there, mocking your fighter.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Right, but those limits aren't defined outside the game or setting the magic is presented, while real-life is always there, mocking your fighter.

Them's the breaks. If you don't like it, say it works otherwise in the book.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Biased against what? Humans beings being limited by what humans beings are physically capable of doing, absent of explicit evidence to the contrary? Doesn't seem unfair to me.

Biased against a balanced, fair, fun sort of game, where no class choice is a trap. Biased, more specifically, in D&D towards casters and against martials. Thus the sad reality of the martial/caster gap in 5e, and LFQW, 5MWD, etc in prior editions going back to the beginning.
Indeed, that's the only reason realism, verisimilitude, dissociated mechanics, or immersion are ever brought up, to deny a player character that isn't defined as having supernatural powers an equal place in the game.

When someone points out that other aspects of the game, like hp, are also a problem under such restrictive ideas, it's like "yeah, but that's OK" - sure it is, casters benefit from the lack of realism of hp, too.

It's no coincidence that the most popular class, the fighter, is the one most hampered by these considerations, there's no point in having a trap if no one fall into it.

Were we to honestly consider how readily magic - lacking any yardstick for realism - could be balanced to, or below, 'realistic'/verisimilitudinous/associated/whatever takes on non-casters, we'd find that it should be a non-issue. Classes could be balanced in spite of demanding verisimilitude, but they aren't. If class imbalances were just, y'know, techncial errors, then you'd expect they'd be all over the map, not very consistently generating a 'gap' between martials and casters.

If the real issue is verisimilitude, then creating the reality-conforming classes, and arbitrarily limiting the casters down to their level should be fine. It never has been. Not once in any discussion I've ever seen. At most, we might get a nostalgic suggestion of restoring old-school limits on casting - forgetting how often they were ignored back in the day, anyway, because they just were never fun for anyone.

 

[Oofta]

Biased against a balanced, fair, fun sort of game, where no class choice is a trap. Biased, more specifically, in D&D towards casters and against martials. Thus the sad reality of the martial/caster gap in 5e, and LFQW, 5MWD, etc in prior editions going back to the beginning.
Indeed, that's the only reason realism, verisimilitude, dissociated mechanics, or immersion are ever brought up, to deny a player character that isn't defined as having supernatural powers an equal place in the game.

When someone points out that other aspects of the game, like hp, are also a problem under such restrictive ideas, it's like "yeah, but that's OK" - sure it is, casters benefit from the lack of realism of hp, too.

Were we to honestly consider how readily magic - lacking any yardstick for realism - could be balanced to, or below, 'realistic'/verisimilitudinous/associated/whatever takes on non-casters, we'd find that it should be a non-issue. Classes could be balanced in spite of demanding verisimilitude, but they aren't. If class imbalances were just, y'know, techncial errors, then you'd expect they'd be all over the map, not very consistently generating a 'gap' between martials and casters.

If the real issue is verisimilitude, then creating the reality-conforming classes, and arbitrarily limiting the casters down to their level should be fine. It never has been. Not once in any discussion I've ever seen. At most, we might get a nostalgic suggestion of restoring old-school limits on casting - forgetting how often they were ignored back in the day, anyway, because they just were never fun for anyone.

If fighter were such a trap option, I doubt it would be the most popular class. I know I wouldn't see plenty of fighters at the tables I play at, I know I personally have a lot of fun playing them.

But do we really need yet another hijacked into "Fighters suck"? We have plenty of them, go complain about how terrible they are over there.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Another thought: reality actually does give us a yardstick for magic, RL beliefs about it.

They are not fun for the witch being burned at the stake.
They are potentially a lot of fun for the Priest ruling a Theocracy.

 

[Oofta]

Because a setting (even an implied setting like any version of D&D) should be coherent in my opinion, and explicitly so. If human fighters are picking up boulders, throwing horses, cutting bullets in half, leaping tall buildings in a single bound, running faster than a locomotive, running along the ceiling, shooting laser beam from their eyes, etc., the game books I use as the base of my rules should be able to answer the question how is this possible. If they don't, they are incoherent.

I agree (and frankly, I don't want any of that in my D&D) but some of it is baked into the genre. For example, upthread somewhere I stated that the Indiana Jones refrigerator scene didn't work for me because the only thing coming out of the frig should have been blood dripping out of the seems. Yet there was a very similar scene in the original Iron Man movie where Tony is flying through the air with his first suit that was built from scraps. Now, unless Tony has some sort of inertial dampener, he should be just as dead as Indy. Yet it didn't really phase me in the same way as the refrigerator scene because while I realized it I just shrugged and said "Eh, superhero movies."

The core concepts of what we envision a game being has a ton of influence on me when I think of verisimilitude. I have no problem with The Hulk being able to throw a tank because he's really, really angry. But a raging barbarian tossing around something even a significant percentage of that weight wouldn't work for me. Just like when I had a monk in a campaign long ago that ran literal circles around a guy. When I asked why he said he was trying create a Flash Tornado. I let him know that he wasn't The Flash and that no, it wouldn't work.

I think part of this is because my ideas of what a fantasy world along the lines of D&D are grounded in is twofold. First, it's in the fantasy books I read. Yes, Fafhrd once chopped the head of a great worm, but he didn't leap tall buildings in a single bound. But it's also because I've been playing D&D pretty much from the beginning and fighters, for example, outside of 4E (which was why many people had an issue with it) have never been more supernatural than an action movie hero. I don't have a problem with anime or wire-fu now and then even if I'm not a huge fan, but if I wanted to play that kind of game, I'd find something other than D&D.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Biased against what? Humans beings being limited by what humans beings are physically capable of doing, absent of explicit evidence to the contrary? Doesn't seem unfair to me.

It is biased against non-magic character archetypes.

 

[Oofta]

It is biased against non-magic character archetypes.

Can we please, please not turn this into yet another argument about fighters?

 

[Pedantic]

Right, but those limits aren't defined outside the game or setting the magic is presented, while real-life is always there, mocking your fighter.

You keep saying things like they're some kind of mask off moment when they're just restatements of the exact point. Magic is an appealing design space because there's your mechanical technique limitations can also be your setting limitations. No one knows or even has an intuition how many spells per day a Wizard can cast, or how strong a magically conjured shield should be, so whatever you say is true goes, and is appropriate as both a mechanical and setting contrivance. Mundane combat does not enjoy those same benefits, and suffers thereby.

Trying to make the fighter a balanced archetype requires not only taking on "classes should be balanced" and "magic should do less than it does now" but also "fighters shouldn't be the 'normal' class" as premises you have to get everyone on board with. The definitional thing about the fighter is that it doesn't get to be a Paladin, and worse, it doesn't even get to be a Rogue. All of the arguments about fighter contribution tend to address the first two points, and try to assume the last one as a given, which simply doesn't work.

If the fighter is defined by being normal, then it can't do fantastical things. If you give out a fantastical thing to do, you're just going to get "oh so you made it not a fighter?" as a response. The point is that the complaint against giving fighters 1/day specific moves and giving fighters level appropriate abilities have the same motivation, and that motivation is orthogonal to questions of game balance. It does not matter from that perspective whether the fighter is balanced; my contention is that it doesn't even matter whether the fighter is present in the game.

The poisoned well is the "Fighter" conceptually itself; pick the stuff you want Fighters to be doing and find a different archetype that gets to the same place. Simply asserting that you don't care about the fictional justification doesn't fix the issue.