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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 7600565" data-attributes="member: 6785785">Sure. I think when research enters the situation and people are attempting to accurately model some real world event in a statistical manner, then we can perhaps compare models and determine which is more accurate. I think you're using "real" in place of "accurate", but yes, I otherwise agree with what you're saying. Do you think such statistical analysis is what's used to come up with a chart in the DMG? Or do you think that what's being attempted is to come up with some game mechanic that may create interesting instances of play, and that the game mechanic has a bit of a nod toward real world cause and effect? I disagree that it's not all subjective. I think opinions will vary, as my example attempted to show. What did you think about my example? I have no problem if someone says they add a system of some kind to their game because the addition makes it more realistic. That's fine. It's conversational and casual, and I generally wouldn't bother correcting such a usage because it's semantics. But insisting that one system is more realistic than another....even if it's no system....that's when I think the question of objectivity versus subjectivity comes into play. There's no metric we can apply to determine which is objectively more realistic. Lanefan and I have been discussing PC inventory systems in D&D and Blades in the Dark. Both seem equally reasonable to me, and the one I like more is simply a matter of preference in how it plays at the table. I think that it's especially true in RPGs where what we're talking about is the content of a fictional world. If a game lacks a system for something, that doesn't mean it's absent from the world, does it? We can assume the common cold exists in most RPG worlds despite there being very few (if any?) that have some kind of rule to determine when a PC comes down with a cold. This can be handled narratively, or assumed to come up now and again, but to not have a mathematical impact on the game. Maybe a player has a cold one week, so he decides to roleplay his character as if he has a cold, too. Is this less realistic or more realistic than if we rolled percentile dice and consulted a chart? I mean, I'm sure we could conduct a few years of research and see which method more accurately maps to real world trends.....but absent that kind of analysis, can we really eyeball them and say that one is more real than the other? This is why I said that I can see how sometimes no system may actually be more accurate than a system.</blockquote>

Verification