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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7594948" data-attributes="member: 82106">Careful how you sling around that 'everyone'. I think if you were to go back through my posting history on this forum or on rpg.net, or the old WotC D&D Community forums, if they still existed, you'd find I've never spoken in this fashion. I don't consider 'realism' to be a substantial axis on which to analyze most aspects of game play.In any case, the uses of this term, or analogous terms, is very loose. I don't think that the question of whether or not one or another mechanisms of determining things like who is in the tea room is more 'realistic' is even a sensible question which can be asked. A question like "what are the realistic outcomes of a 100' fall onto a hard surface?" OTOH has some more and less realistic answers. Even the later question however isn't utterly clear cut, as we can undoubtedly find an example in the real world of almost any outcome of such a fall (somewhere someone stood up and walked away from it, or at least survived). So even there its a fuzzy question of 'likelihood', not absolutes. If the game is Traveler, where the universe ostensibly obeys the same natural laws as our real world, we might remark "it sure was pretty unrealistic when that guy survived 100' fall onto concrete." That seems like a sensible remark. Arguing about the realism of the scene generation process which lead to the existence of a 100' drop, not really a question in which realism is germane. Now play D&D and we have a world where dragons fly, how can we even approach a discussion of how realistic it is to survive a 100' drop? Doesn't it depend on factors which aren't even explicit in the game (IE the luck, skill, and connections with fate which Gygax assigns to hit points?). Even this relatively straightforward question is no longer cut-and-dried and doesn't have any objective realistic character anymore.Again, all that is left is 'coherency'. D&D games frame scenes in which something akin to the laws of nature are narratively consistent. You can EXPECT to fall and be hurt if you step off a 100' drop. This isn't about 'realism' per se. It is about being able to reason about the fictional consequences of actions so that consensus can exist at the table as to the appropriateness of the resulting narrative and mechanical process.</blockquote>

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