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

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Maxperson]

So what you're saying is that their experience doesn't matter....but you care about their experience?

Not even close. Try again.

 

[Maxperson]

It's not whether you win or lose; it's how you place the blame!

The whole thread is her fault.

 

[Aldarc]

Edit: Changed my mind.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Not even close. Try again.

I’m genuinely asking for clarification. You said both those things....and they seem contradictory to me. How do you reconcile them?

 

[Maxperson]

I’m genuinely asking for clarification. You said both those things....and they seem contradictory to me. How do you reconcile them?

Both things are not contradictory. It's all in the context. They don't matter for the purpose of determining if there is increased realism. I can personally care about what they experience without it having to do with realism at all. Those are two separate things. That's why I've said that increased realism on a particular topic won't happen in my game if it affects the enjoyment of my players.

 

[Sepulchrave II]

I’m genuinely asking for clarification. You said both those things....and they seem contradictory to me. How do you reconcile them?

Maxperson is asserting:

a) I care about people’s experiences, and they matter

and

b) I don’t care about people’s experiences of realism, and they don’t matter

He doesn’t understand that by denying the specific case, he also invalidates the general case. His position is better summarized as:

c) I care about people’s experiences, and they matter, unless I decide otherwise

We are not privy to the mysterious circumstances under which Max arrives at his decision that one experience matters, but another doesn’t.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Both things are not contradictory. It's all in the context. They don't matter for the purpose of determining if there is increased realism. I can personally care about what they experience without it having to do with realism at all. Those are two separate things. That's why I've said that increased realism on a particular topic won't happen in my game if it affects the enjoyment of my players.

Okay, so you're saying that the addition of realism is objective, but that opinions about the value add of a realism injection will vary, and you care about that?

I can at least understand that. I don't think it quite addresses the issue because I think its the Objectivity or Subjectivity of "added realism" that's in question.

To use an example that's already been brought up, you think that the addition of a system to introduce disease into the fictional world increases realism because it attempts to bring a real world element into the fictional world.

However, someone else may say that the implementation of such a rudimentary system actually reduces realism for them. They would find disease having no impact on the story being crafted in their campaign to be more realistic than would a world dictated by such a basic system. For the sake of discussion, let's say this person works in the medical field and has access to information beyond what is commonly available, and they have strong opinions about how adding such information into the fiction should work.

So in this sense, their opinion is that the system in question so poorly models the real world that it actually decreases their sense of realism. They could more easily accept that disease never became a concern for the PCs than they can accept the system as it is designed.

Does this person's opinion matter? Would you say this opinion is somehow wrong?

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[hawkeyefan]

I don't know about Max's answer to this, but I'd like to take one last stab at this, even though I addressed this before (perfect being the enemy of the good, etc.).

Think of it not in terms of a TTRPG, but in terms of a computer model of something. Let's say ... a computer model of the epidemiological spread of disease!

Now, imagine back in the day, with limits on processors. Someone would have to program a very basic, limited model. It couldn't possibly capture all the vagaries of actual disease, right? It would be exceedingly basic. Now, maybe someone would say, "Hey, why bother. That's not realistic." Because it wasn't perfect. It wasn't .... reality. But it was more real than not having any model at all.

And this is important, because once it's there, then you can at least have a conversation about how to improve that model- how to make it more real (or more authentic, or more closely matching the actual spread of disease). Get it?

Sure. I think when research enters the situation and people are attempting to accurately model some real world event in a statistical manner, then we can perhaps compare models and determine which is more accurate. I think you're using "real" in place of "accurate", but yes, I otherwise agree with what you're saying.

Do you think such statistical analysis is what's used to come up with a chart in the DMG?

Or do you think that what's being attempted is to come up with some game mechanic that may create interesting instances of play, and that the game mechanic has a bit of a nod toward real world cause and effect?

It's the same here. Having a model in a TTRPG (like the disease table in 1e) is "more real" than not having it in the game. But that's not really the point; the point is that once you do that, you can then improve upon the model (or not) because you have a baseline comparator.

Because it's not all subjective. Because disease does happen and spread in a certain way, and it can be modeled.

Now, that's why people talk about whether something is "simulationist/realistic" or not. And, again, it's okay if it's not (I'd argue that TTRPGs are not very good at it, and this shouldn't be a goal). But to say that people just can't understand what this even means seems .... to me ... like sohpistry, because these are generally understood ideas and concepts. It doesn't mean it's a laudable goal, but it does mean that most people have a general idea of what is being discussed, even to the extent of going back and understanding the debates of the last several decades in TTRPGs, and the debates in wargaming as well.

I disagree that it's not all subjective. I think opinions will vary, as my example attempted to show. What did you think about my example?

I have no problem if someone says they add a system of some kind to their game because the addition makes it more realistic. That's fine. It's conversational and casual, and I generally wouldn't bother correcting such a usage because it's semantics.

But insisting that one system is more realistic than another....even if it's no system....that's when I think the question of objectivity versus subjectivity comes into play. There's no metric we can apply to determine which is objectively more realistic.

Lanefan and I have been discussing PC inventory systems in D&D and Blades in the Dark. Both seem equally reasonable to me, and the one I like more is simply a matter of preference in how it plays at the table.

I think that it's especially true in RPGs where what we're talking about is the content of a fictional world. If a game lacks a system for something, that doesn't mean it's absent from the world, does it? We can assume the common cold exists in most RPG worlds despite there being very few (if any?) that have some kind of rule to determine when a PC comes down with a cold. This can be handled narratively, or assumed to come up now and again, but to not have a mathematical impact on the game.

Maybe a player has a cold one week, so he decides to roleplay his character as if he has a cold, too. Is this less realistic or more realistic than if we rolled percentile dice and consulted a chart? I mean, I'm sure we could conduct a few years of research and see which method more accurately maps to real world trends.....but absent that kind of analysis, can we really eyeball them and say that one is more real than the other?

This is why I said that I can see how sometimes no system may actually be more accurate than a system.