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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7566205" data-attributes="member: 42582">I didn't say anything about whether "realism" is a matter of degree or a categorical thing. I said that real human lives don't have the same dramatic "neatness" and development as do those of characters in fiction. The truth of that claim doesn't turn on any view about whether "realism" is or is not a matter of degree.I don't see how "more realistic" bears on this. How realistic is it to have a guy's arm cut off in an interstellar cantina? Or to have a guy shot? Jedi are supposedly extinct, and light sabers thus an ancient weapon, yet no one seems too shocked to see one pulled out - how realistic is that? The questions don't really make sense: the cantina scenes are not meant to be elements in an educational video, "A day in the life of an interstellar bar". They weren't authored on the basis of random sampling. They're deliberately-crafted scenes in a dramatic narrative.There aren't any goal posts here - we're neither literally nor metaphorically playing a game of football (or hockey etc). But in any even, how long do you, or any other poster, supppose the PCs who head down to the teahouse spend there waiting for a sect member to turn up? As far as I recall I'm the first person to even raise it as a consideration, in the post you quoted - so what goal posts am I supposedly moving? I mean, if the system were Traveller then the basic unit of time would probably be a week. In 4e D&D it could easily be a day.But in any event, the notion of the odds being "very slim" misses my point about fiction. The odds of any particular thing happening are slim. When I go to the teahouse and someone else is there, the odds that it should be just that very person who is there, rather than someone else who might have been there, are slim too. The thing about adventure fiction is that it tends to cash out these slim odds with the exciting rather than boring options. So instead of the extreme unlikelihood that person X is there, or person Y, we go with person Z who happens to be a dramatically interesting person in the context of the game.And as I posted, how we gate this state of affairs - behind checks, behind ingame time and/or money spent as a resource, etc - is a matter of system and of mood. But it doesn't go to the fundamanental point that, in a satisfying adventure RPG, exciting things are going to happen in ways and at frequencies that are not consonant with most real human lives.</blockquote>

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