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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7562690" data-attributes="member: 42582">I tend to think of "realism" as meaning something like in play, the events and outcomes in this game are somewhat like real life.D&D tends to be somewhat realisitic, at least at lower levels, insofar as fighting things can get your killed, people tend to go from place to place in much the same way as people did in pre-modern real life, and water is wet. Even at low levels there are elements of D&D that are obviously unrealistic: the social and economic presuppositions of the game; magic; dungeons. And then there are mechanical conventions that are clearly not intended to evoke real life but rather serve a mix of gameplay and genre purposes: combat rounds, hit points and healing, etc.Systems like Runequest and Rolemaster try to reduce the scope of that last category by itroducing more granular and combat rules that allow for attacks and parries and the infliction of wounds; and try to reduce the middle category as well, by offering gameworlds that offer more coherence in their geographic and social elements.One feature of these more "simulationist" games is that resolution can become slower than in more simple systems. Is it realistic to take 5 minutes to resolve 10-seconds of action? And what about mechancial features like bird's/general's eye-view vs blind declaration - is the latter more realistic because it emulates the uncertainy of a real fight?Is Classic Traveller realistic? As a member of our grouip put it, it has a very 60s'/70s social science view of the social aspects of the gameworld - true to a certain conceptoin of life, but perhaps not true to life as such. But it does have rules for dealing with bureaucrats, which is a realistic thing in a modern-world game.It has FTL travel, and by contemporary standards very backwards infotech - but is that unrealistic, or a realistic example of a society that devoted all its innovative and industrial resources to some aspects of cosmology rather than to computing?In the end I'm not persuaded that realism serves as a very useful descriptive or evaluative category for RPG systems.</blockquote>

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