Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
Sure I have. I'm just not going to repeat myself for a 10th time.
A GMing telling the players about the gameworld is not like real life
- Thread starter pemerton
- Start date
Sure I have. I'm just not going to repeat myself for a 10th time.
Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
Max, I legitimately do not know what you mean by "realism." I'm asking you to provide a clear definition that isn't smeared across 100 or more posts in this thread (not 100s of your posts, but that many posts between).
Bedrockgames
Legend
Well, S'mon and I have a history as well. But I didn't have S'mon in mind here. He may well have coined the phrase (I don't know the precise history). But my point is, at least in my view, it has taken off because you are a thought leader here. And I do think it is fair to say you have posters who put faith in your arguments and ideas and can be said to follow you. If you don't like me saying this, I'll back off. I am not trying to be rude. I simply mentioned it, in honest truth, to be complimentary. I don't see it as bad to have followers online. If people hear what you say and promote it, and believe in your words, that is a good thing. It means you have strong leadership qualities and smart ideas. I am not blind to your strengths as a poster. But again, if it is bothering people, I am happy to drop it.
Bedrockgames
Legend
It is possible I confused arguments in the thread. That said, I have a very strong memory of you dismissing peoples' claims to realism, not just in this thread, but in others. If that isn't your position, then perhaps I am mistaken.
I still have issues though with the framing of the OP. But I think we've hashed that out as much as we can without going after punctuation marks.
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
The problem is that nothing you described there comes close to rising to the level of Mother May I. It's a disingenuous use of the term as a pejorative to put down a playstyle that is different than yours.
Manbearcat
Legend
I wish you could vigorously reflect on this post you just wrote.
Pemerton is a dude in a remote corner of the internet.
Followers? Seriously? Followers.
Do you realize how bunker mentality in the midst of an all-important culture war this, and all the other posts like this (and not just from you...and not juston this site) this reads as?
And also how disrespectful it is?
Plenty of people have thanked me for posts they found insightful and helpful to them in their RPGing. Does that make them followers of mine? Of course not! That’s ridiculous! They’re humans, sometimes fallible and sometimes insightful (same as me), who are just working through their thoughts on a subject (TTRPGing design and play) in real time and trying to improve their experience. Same goes for me. I’ve gleaned plenty of insight from people I disagree with.
Framing all of these conversations as secret, strategic culture war gambits with clergy, acolytes, and the vulnerable masses is the real poison here. It’s completely toxic, it drives people away from this site, and it stifles interesting conversation that actually helps our gaming grow, change, and refine (all of which can mean going backwards in time and recognizing the power of older design and play) rather than stagnate and ossify.
This actually happened in 4e. It was a constant, never-ending, scorched earth campaign against a stupid gaming system. It took place all over the Internet, in hobby stores, at tables, and cons. I really enjoyed that game and I engaged in endless conversations about all the various topics, which by your definition were well-poisoned from the beginning. Yet I engaged with the ideas, trying earnestly to reflect on them and analyze them. I didn’t focus exclusively on the poisoned well and my offense to it. And I’m not special by any means. So anyone can do the same.
* EDIT - and it really annoys me that I feel obliged to even waste my time on a post like this rather than focusing my small time available and mental energies on talking about actual design and play.
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Sadras
Legend
You could reciprocate, but like you said some time back it is not worth it - it does nothing for the conversation. My attempt was to rather use his definition of MMI against his own playstyle, but if one plays with that much transparency (monster knowledge checks) and less of a player-puzzle, that argument falls flat as I discovered.
My definition of MMI is much narrower, probably similar to yours I presume, but Pemerton sits very firmly in the other tent so from his POV any GM adjudication (no matter how justified) reflects as a MMI. I borrow ideas from all games (DM or Player-centric) so even though I'm in the opposite tent, I don't view the Say No as something negative but rather as another tool in the art of DMing that I can call on - whether it be for rule-of-cool, internal consistency or to punish players (KIDDING).
Having said that - the play reports, with the limited information, from @AbdulAlhazred 5e were in my definition heavy within MMI territory. Having said that, it means nothing much given that @Aldarc views my Frost Giant write-up as MMI and our table does not.
@Numidius play report on the other hand is just something else completely. I mean WTF!
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Bedrockgames
Legend
Like I said, I am happy to back off this follower thing. But I think characterizing it as a bunker mentality is just not an accurate reflection of what I was saying. People look to other posters for ideas and arguments. This is something you see all the time on the internet. The Alexandrian, for example, is a thought leader. Prominent posters on forums who gain the good will of other posters, are often thought leaders. It isn't meant as an insult. I think anyone who is honest with themselves will see they have followers, and that they follow people. I am not saying people are Pemerton's subjects. I am just saying, there are clearly people who have adopted his ideas and who look to him for arguments and analysis.
I'm happy to say a bit about this. I won't be engaging with what you have said upthread about imagination etc - you may find that what I say presupposes a very different view from yours about the nature of cognition, reference and representation, but I'm not going to go into those matters in this post.
What follows is not short and not always focused but hopefully conveys my thoughts to some extent.
Some concepts that seem relevant
In the context of fiction I think that realism overlaps with, but isn't the same as, verisimilitude and naturalism. I'm not really much of a critic, nor aesthetician, so my explanation of this may be a bit half-baked, but what I mean by the preceding is this:
* Verisimilitude is the property of having an intuitive/experiential plausibility - so it depends on the expectations/experiences of the audience. I would say that variable weapon damage in D&D is a manifestation of verisimilitude. Likewise healing rates in Rolemaster (which factor in the nature and location of the injury). Presumably for martial artists, variabe weapon damage is more likely to lack verisimilitude (or at least in more danger of doing so); and presumably for doctors the same is true of the RM healing rules.
* Naturalism is a particular way of presenting a fictional world, as characterised by a certain sort of "ordinariness" or "groundedness". If you've ever read Jack the Giant Killer (I think the version I've read is in the Blue Fairy Book) it is wildly non-naturalistic: giants just pop up, with their treasure, with no rhyme or reason. Whereas I see one of JRRT's major achievements as a writer being to present fairy tale and Arthurian romance-type tropes in the form of a naturalistic novel (eg his treatment of Lorien presents the faerie woods with a faerie queen in the mode of being a real, imaginable and in some sense measurable place). Naturalism can support verisimilitude but isn't necessary for it - the Hobbit is less naturalilstic than LotR (eg Rivendell in the Hobbit really isn't treated naturalistically at all) but I'm not sure it's any less verisimilitudinous. And sometimes the attempt at naturalism can undermine verisimilitude - the naturalistic presentation of the Shire in LotR to me ultimately undercuts verisimilitude because the material standard of living seems utterly implausible to me given the economic geography.
* Realism I would think of as meaning resemblance to or imitation of reality. Lorien is naturaistically presented, but not realistic - what do all those elves eat? and who is making their wine? Likewise the Shire, for the reasons I gave earlier. Conversely, a fiction might be relatively realistic but not very naturalistically presented - some Hal Hartley films are like this, for instance. Realism can support verisimilitude, but not necessarily - it can be quite realistic, for instance, for people's moods or allegiances to swing in volatile ways, but this may undermine verisimilitude or cause the audience to have to question their understanding of or intuitions about the work because they have to reframe it to re-establish plausibility.
Concepts applied to RPGing
With RPGing, I would think of the above features as properties of the play experience and the fiction it produces, not of systems. (Eg tracking encumbrance may produce a realistic play experience, or not, depending on how the application of the rules plays out in the context of the shared fiction at the table. In 4e I found the outcome unrealistic - even ordinary people seem (to me) inordinately strong; in Traveller the lack of realism feels the same but for the opposite reason - ordinary people seem to be penalised by quite light loads.)
I think an RPG game/fiction is realistic if the characters who figure in it have plausible and recognisable motivations; if the social contexts and institutions are likewise able to be made sense of (this can be tricky, because human cultures are incredibly diverse and if not familiar can seem quite alien - but I rarely see this done well in RPGs); if the unfolding of events appears to be explicable in its own terms.
Reflections on my own RPGing in light of the above idea of realism
I don't think of my 4e game as particularly realistic in these terms: the main antagonists and icons are cosmic figures (gods, primordials, etc) whose motivations are obscure and abstract (law, chaose, "evil", undeath etc); and the PCs' allegiances/hostilities to those beings are likewise framed in rather abstract terms with little connection to human realities and genuine human interests. In this way it closely resembles superhero comics, some romances (eg 1990s Hong Kong wuxia cinema; some approaches to Arthurian-type romance; etc), Star Wars, etc.
My Cortex+ games are similar to 4e in these respects.
Conversely, while my Prince Valiant game does features knights who travel about on various quests or looking for valorous deeds to do - not super realistic but a trope posited by the genre - the motivations of the PCs and the NPCs are generally quite comprehensible in human terms: there are peasants and bandits who don't like rich abbots; there was an apprentice who left his master because he wanted to marry a woman living in the nearby village, and the PCs were able to solve various problems by making that apprentice a proposal which would provide him and his fiance with a house and a livelihood; there is wooing, and rivalries, and the odd bit of betrayal, but also friendship; two of the PCs are father and son and this colours their relationship and also how they interact with NPCs; etc.
It's not always naturalistic (there's much "season pass", "you ride for days", etc, without any real attempt to convey a changing or unfolding larger world) but is (I find) quite realistic subject to some genre tropes (which include relatively light touch, by FRPGing standards, magic).
Burning Wheel has magic in a way and to a degree that Prince Valiant doesn't, but otherwise I would say it is similarly realistic. And also more naturalistic, as even when seasons pass there are mechanical devices in the system for making that matter, and expectations on the GM to treat the passage of time for rest, training, earning income, etc as a basis for amping up the antagonists.
You'll notice in my assessment - and I think consistent with my post not too far upthread - that I'm not including likelihood of having such interesting and exciting lives under my measure of realism. It's a basic premise of adventure fiction that the protagonists have inordinatly interesting and exciting lives. But the fact that, in my games, that adventure often results from social or interpersonal dynamics playing out in some challenging or threatening fashion, rather than from discovering some new purely external threat (like a new dungeon, or a new plot to destroy the world, or whatver) I would count as speaking in favour of realism. Because it grounds the situation in actual human motivations. Or in the more cosmic games, it locates the conflicts within the understood cosmic framework - which is taken to permeate the whole world of those games - rather than having all these (improbable both independently and in total) separate little unmotivated threats.
What I don't think too much about when I think of realism in RPGing
The issue of how far people can jump - and similar sorts of stuff around physical performance - which is probably a big deal for (say) [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] in relation to realism isn't a big deal for me. To stick to the jumping example, of the games I've mentioned the only one that ever measures distances in the way Lanefan takes for granted, let alone correlates them to jumping mechanics, is 4e. And who's to say what a realistic jumping distance for a demigod is? (The 30th level fighter in my 4e game can jump about 50'. At 10th level that was probably more like 30', which is world record level and thus probably about right for the pinnacle of heroic tier.)
In Prince Valiant or BW, jumping is resolved by a Brawn + Athletics check, or a Speed check, respectively, against a difficulty set by the GM. If the tabel think the difficulty is unrealistic relative to the narrated fiction, then the difficulty can be negotiated until a mutually acceptable equilibrium is reached. In practice it tends to work the other way, that from the GM-specified difficulty participants will construct their own conception of what it is that makes it so difficult (or easy), and so the issue doesn't even come up.
When I used to GM a lot of Rolemaster this sort of thing was more important to me, and I would (for instance) try to configure jumping rules so that for characters with bonuses at the top end of what was possible, the resuts of checks would be at the top end of what world record figures suggest is humanly possible. But in retrospect, given that this stuff never came into play (the players in my games tended to build PCs who could cast flight-type magic rather than PCs who had peak athletic skills) in retrospect this may not have been the best possible use of my time! (But RM puts a very high priority on system, including the (abstract) outcomes it will (hypothetically) produce; almost the opposite of, say, Cortex+ Heroic where the system is simply a device for producing concrete outcomes in play - and for me its those outcomes that determine realism, as I said above.)
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Bedrockgames
Legend
I think there is a lot here. First, I don't see this as a culture war. A culture war is a much broader conflict over major social and political issues. That isn't what is happening here. But this conversation is definitely an outgrowth of old flamewars over playstyle (I think that is pretty hard to dispute if you honestly examine the exchange of posts here). And I think my position on that has been clear: I don't want flamewars anymore. I am not interested in taking down other peoples' play styles. This whole I have not been attacking any of the playstyle suggestions Pemerton and others have made. I think engaging in that kind of playstyle war online, isn't helpful, and it hurts play at ones own table (because there is a tendency to build your playstyle and define against he style you are opposing...this is why I've said before you can end up with an inverse GNS theory if that is the thing you are arguing against the whole time---and I think you see that in some immersionist camps). I don't want any of that. I just want what works at my table, and I am not interested in gaming ideology whatsoever anymore (admittedly I used to be a lot more rigid in my views). My only point in this whole thread has been I felt by framing our style as Mother May I: 1) it is pretty dismissive and it is natural we will react with some amount of hostility, but more importantly 2) it clouds peoples ability to truly understand why we play the way we do. I get that they are using it as a thing they don't want in the game, which can be useful. But like dissociated mechanics, it becomes this bogeyman that starts to shape your style in ways you might not otherwise engage in. You can really end up throwing the baby out with the bath water if you are always on the look out for 'bad thing X'. And given how expansive the definition of Mother May I is here, and how it completely overlaps with our preferred style of play by that definition, I think its utility really needs to be called into question.
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