Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7574254" data-attributes="member: 42582">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 relevantIn 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 RPGingWith 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 realismI 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 RPGingThe 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.)</blockquote>

Verification