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

[Ovinomancer]

I am truly shocked that you missed it, along with the entire point.

But not as shocked as I am by the people who gave XP for a sentence of willful obtuseness.

I tell ya, bubbles are awesome.

You think that was a measurable definition? It fails in your immediate example, as items being destroyed by random chance is a subjective opinion as to more closely resembling real life vice items not being destroyed by random chance. Or, more bluntly, your proposed definition is not an improvement over defining "realism" as "matches my arbitrary preferences." No one has a problem with matching preferences (see "authenticity" or my proposed definitions), just that "realism" as a term implies there's some objective measure to what is just subjective preference.

 

[Maxperson]

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.

It has pork. You can find boar in the MM. Thatch can be added in by the DM if he wants it in his world. Yes, the DM can narrate in all kinds of things that the game doesn't automatically include. If he doesn't narrate them in, they don't exist until he does, unless the DM grants creation powers to the players under certain playstyles. If he does, they don't exist until the DM or a player adds them in.

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

You keep trying this as if it proves something. It is more realistic, but only marginally so. It's existence more closely matches reality than if it didn't exist at all.

Your example is also a situation that no DM above an IQ of 25 is ever going to use. Engaging in hyperbole doesn't add anything here. As I've already said, what I'm talking about is adding in hemophilia or whatever to the game in a reasonable manner, not making all people hemophiliacs. Adding hemophilia to the game in a reasonable manner, like normal people would do, adds more realism than keeping its existence at 0.

Likewise if one in every 20 perople is haemophiliac.

That adds more realism than everyone being a hemophiliac, yes. No reasonable DM is going to that, either, though.

 

[Maxperson]

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?

We don't hear about those things, because too much realism isn't fun. Not because it's not about realism.

 

[Maxperson]

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.

The same goes for any system in which the PCs encounter lots of monsters/deadly encounters, which is a good many of them, probably most, and maybe even all of them. It helps to think of the PCs as fated in some way. THEY encounter deadly things with this kind of frequency, but the world at large generally does not. The tables are built for them.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Aldarc]

I am truly shocked that you missed it, along with the entire point.

But not as shocked as I am by the people who gave XP for a sentence of willful obtuseness.

I tell ya, bubbles are awesome.

Your veiled insults do not seem particularly civil.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[pemerton]

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

It is more realistic, but only marginally so. It's existence more closely matches reality than if it didn't exist at all.

This is not a very plausible claim.

If you match objects to objects, the matching does not get closer: because in the gameworld with no haemophilia, the only mismatches are the few real-world haemophiliacs who get matched to non-haemophiliacs in the gameworld; whereas in the gameworld in which the incidence of haemophilia is unrealistically high, the number of mismatches obviously is greater.

Your example is also a situation that no DM above an IQ of 25 is ever going to use.

I've seen GMs with IQs much higher than 25 make extremely implausible calls in the name of "realism". One which was particularly frustrating, because it cost my group a convention game, was about the time it takes for the oxygen in a room to be used up. (It was a sci-fi game. The PCs were trapped in a room without external oxygen supplies. The call the GM made was for unrealistically rapid oxygen consumption - even I noticed it, let alone the engineers in our group.)

Running out of oxygen is a real thing in the world, but that GM's implementation of that trope made the game less realistic than if he had just ignored it!

Which really goes back to [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION]'s point: matching reality (which is as he said a notion of scale, which you also seem to agree with given your use of the phrase "more closely matching reality") can be hard, because reality can often be quite hard to pin down. You don't increaes your match with reality just be scattering in phenomena that happen also to occur in reality. That's not matching anything.

 

[Aldarc]

I apologize if you think my references were veiled. I didn't think they were particularly unclear. Here- was this better?

So that you can clarify that your uncalled for hostility was uncalled for? Yes.

 

[hawkeyefan]

In 5e ALL swords don't break. You see the difference, right?

Sure. But most campaigns don't deal with ALL swords, do they? They deal with the swords of the protagonists and their enemies.

It's pretty clear that there are many other swords out in the fictional world (even if the DM hasn't introduced them). So, really, we're looking at the career of PCs and their exploits, and in that case, perhaps they go their entire career without having a weapon break.

Or, and here's where in an almost paradoxical way, a system that has less hard-coded rules can actually replicate this better; perhaps it's assumed that the PCs repair and/or replace their gear regularly when they go to town. In classic D&D where you track GP and other treasure and belongings, this isn't the way it's handled, but there's no reason that another game can't eschew the tracking of GP, and therefore allow such gear maintenance to be accounted for in a narrative sense.

Again, this is where "no system" is probably better than having a system. The tracking of every GP and its use actively gets in the way of the "realism" you're striving for.

Most campaigns last longer than weeks, and involve fights. Even one fight against something with hard scales, metal armor, weapons, etc. will cause nicks that need to be fixed. If your campaign only lasts a very, very, VERY short time and has no fights with anything other than oozes and other super soft things, then sure.

Again, this is all assumed to happen in the same way that other forms of maintenance happen....bandaging wounds and eating meals and all other forms of mundane activity that it's not fun to focus on. If you prefer to handle it in a more mechanical way, then you can certainly introduce such a rule.

If your happy with these rules, that's great. If the game feels more realistic to you with them included, that's also great.

Just don't tell people that your game is more realistic than theirs because you use these rules. Because that's not so great.