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A GMing telling the players about the gameworld is not like real life
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7595390" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>One reason you are drawing sceptical responses (at least from me, and I'm pretty sure [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] also has this in mind) is that taken on it's own this claim seems to make no sense.</p><p></p><p>For instance, declaring that every NPC the PCs meet has smallpox would be <em>introducing a real world element</em> into the fiction, but clearly would not make the game more realistic.</p><p></p><p>When we look at the AD&D DMG disease rules, there are a number of questions that come up: is the incidence of serious and fatal diseases realistic in the pseudo-mediaeval context? is it realistic when we include the existence of clerical magic which makes it easy to purify water and not too hard to cure diseases?</p><p></p><p>And then, when we compare how the disease rules work to how the generic injury rules work, we get the further question: is it realistic that any debilitated person suffered the debility from a disease rather than (say) a weapon blow?</p><p></p><p>Your apparent insistence that all these questions are irrelevant, and that <em>any</em> reference in the fiction of a game to some element derived from the real world makes the game more realistic, is very odd.</p><p></p><p>What does "add in" mean?</p><p></p><p>My Traveller game includes chronic diseases as elements in the fiction: for instance, we have a high-STR/low-END PC whose backstory includes (in order to explain this apparent disparity) chronic heart disease. But there is no <em>mechanical subystem</em> for dealing with this. It's just fiction introduced retroactively to explain a mechanical outcome.</p><p></p><p>And as I already posted, not any old "adding in" will increase the realism of the game. If every NPC has smallpox, that's not realistic. If every sword breaks every time it is swung, that's not realistic. Etc. Realism isn't just about the presence of certain phenomena: it's intimately connected to their incidence, their imagined genesis, etc.</p><p></p><p>The only "weakness" you've pointed to (by way of bolding [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION]'s post) is that because I don't pre-author I won't have pre-authored material to establish which path is the more travelled. That's self-evident. (Tautological, even.) But you were defending Lanefan's claim that this will lead to inconsistent fiction. <em>That</em> is what [MENTION=9200]Hawkeye[/MENTION] and I are denying.</p><p></p><p>This makes no sense. If you go down the right path and observe no tracks, then either (i) there's no village, or (ii) for some reason there are no tracks to find. (Eg it's a village of ghosts.)</p><p></p><p>But why would anyone author inconsistent fiction?</p><p></p><p>I mean, yes, inconsistent fiction is inconsistent. That's a tautology too. But why would someone author such a thing?</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 7595390, member: 42582"] One reason you are drawing sceptical responses (at least from me, and I'm pretty sure [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] also has this in mind) is that taken on it's own this claim seems to make no sense. For instance, declaring that every NPC the PCs meet has smallpox would be [I]introducing a real world element[/I] into the fiction, but clearly would not make the game more realistic. When we look at the AD&D DMG disease rules, there are a number of questions that come up: is the incidence of serious and fatal diseases realistic in the pseudo-mediaeval context? is it realistic when we include the existence of clerical magic which makes it easy to purify water and not too hard to cure diseases? And then, when we compare how the disease rules work to how the generic injury rules work, we get the further question: is it realistic that any debilitated person suffered the debility from a disease rather than (say) a weapon blow? Your apparent insistence that all these questions are irrelevant, and that [I]any[/I] reference in the fiction of a game to some element derived from the real world makes the game more realistic, is very odd. What does "add in" mean? My Traveller game includes chronic diseases as elements in the fiction: for instance, we have a high-STR/low-END PC whose backstory includes (in order to explain this apparent disparity) chronic heart disease. But there is no [I]mechanical subystem[/I] for dealing with this. It's just fiction introduced retroactively to explain a mechanical outcome. And as I already posted, not any old "adding in" will increase the realism of the game. If every NPC has smallpox, that's not realistic. If every sword breaks every time it is swung, that's not realistic. Etc. Realism isn't just about the presence of certain phenomena: it's intimately connected to their incidence, their imagined genesis, etc. The only "weakness" you've pointed to (by way of bolding [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION]'s post) is that because I don't pre-author I won't have pre-authored material to establish which path is the more travelled. That's self-evident. (Tautological, even.) But you were defending Lanefan's claim that this will lead to inconsistent fiction. [I]That[/I] is what [MENTION=9200]Hawkeye[/MENTION] and I are denying. This makes no sense. If you go down the right path and observe no tracks, then either (i) there's no village, or (ii) for some reason there are no tracks to find. (Eg it's a village of ghosts.) But why would anyone author inconsistent fiction? I mean, yes, inconsistent fiction is inconsistent. That's a tautology too. But why would someone author such a thing? [/QUOTE]
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