where did you find the verisimilitude. Maybe I haven't looked in the right place.
I think ONE answer, mine at least, is that verisimilitude isn't "in the rules", it never really was.
<snip>
This ties into Pemerton's sort of techniques in that the key aspect of the game there is what the players decide to do or signal that they are interested. in. If a player decides his character is interested in pushing giants off the bridge, well, then lets make some interesting narrative about that! Not that the character will necessarily succeed, but success/failure is much more about mixing it up and making the story telling interesting than it is about the believability of the story. At least that's how I see it.
I'm sympathetic to AbdulAlhazred here. Part of the verisimilitude, for me, is connected to emotional investment of the players in the game - their commitment, that comes out in play - for instance the enthusiasm with which they plot, plan, suffer along with their PCs, etc. And I find that 4e gets this mostly right, in terms of focus at the table: when the stakes are high, the game encourages attention and detail; when the stakes are low, then generally the game doesn't make a big deal of it.
Whereas other games can sometimes go the other way. For instance, in Rolemaster (to choose a non-D&D example) sometimes calculating how long it takes to recover from an injury might take more time than actually resolving a key conflict, because of the use of scry-buff-teleport. So our effort and attention in play can become out of whack with the fiction. I don't think that is good for verisimilitude.
But another element of verisimilitude, for me, is that 4e gets the PCs right. They play like heroes. A few moments from my game that have reinforced this:
* When the PCs had just reached 7th level, PHB3 had also just come out - so the player of the fighter had taken Come and Get It as his power for 7th level, and had retrained a second-rate utility power for Mighty Sprint, a movement-buffing Athletics-based skill power from PHB3. In the first encounter at 7th level, the PCs were facing off some goblin and hobgoblin archers in a long room with a balcony. The goblins, at the back of the room, started to fall back down a trapdoor into another room. Then the fighter's turn came, and he used Mighty Sprint to cover the distance of the room and get up the stairs, Come and Get It to stop the goblins escaping (as I narrated it, the ones running down the trapdoor ladder saw/heard the fighter coming up behind them, and turned back around so as not to get cut down from behind), and then spent an action point on another close burst attack to cut the survivors down. That's how a fighter should play!
* When the PCs were 10th level, they were exploring a ruined temple. A couple of PCs climbed onto its roof, and started to check out a hole in the roof. They were attacked by a swarm of stirges, and were in a bad way. Then the wizard PC, down below at the base of the hill on which the temple stood, called on the other PCs down below to wait (ie delay their actions), while he ran forward as far as he could and conjured an Arcane Gate, with one doorway at the point where the party were and the other atop the temple. The other PCs were able to run through the gate up onto the temple roof and save their friends. That's how a mage should play!
* Around 14th-15th level, the paladin found himself alone against a phalanx of hobgoblins (statted up as a swarm) while the other PCs were a couple of hundred yards away dealing with some hobgoblin wyvern riders they had brought to ground. The paladin struck a mighty blow and drove the phalanx back (Strength of Ten, a Questing Knight PP close burst that, because it's a close attack, does bonus damage against a swarm). He then charged into the midst of the phalanx (enemies can occupy a swarm's square) and started cutting down the hobgoblins. When the ranger PC used his Flameburst bow to drop a fireball on the phalanx, it caught the paladin too (OG 10 fire damage) but being a tiefling he did not suffer from the fire. But the hobgoblins were scared, and as he lunged at them with his sword he did his best to set them alight (Intimidate check to do bonus damage in return for granting combat advantage to the hobgolins' attacks). That's how a paladin should play!
* At 19th level, the PCs were fighting a purple worm. It had already swallowed two PCs - the wizard/invoker and the sorcerer - who had escaped when the sorcerer forced its jaws open by turning the rock and grit in the worm's mouth into a pillar of stone (which then gave the wizard/invoker line of sight to teleport out). But it then swallowed the fighter, dangerously low on hit points. After tossing up his options, the ranger-cleric - riding his flying carpet - decided to fly into the worm's mouth to rescue his friend. And with his Acrobatics skill and a non-terrible d20 roll, he made it. I'm not going to say that that's how a ranger should play, but it was pretty good stuff at the time.
To me, this has the feel - the fantasy-world verisimilitude - that I want in a fantasy game. These are PCs that I can imagine doing things like the elves in the Silmarillion, cutting down platoons of balrogs and whole regiments of orcs, forging gems that capture the perfect beauty of the light of Valinor, shaping the destiny of the world as much as any god does.
When we look back on our history of playing, the spectacular events (bad as well as good) are often the ones that stick out as noteworthy, not the routine ones. And part of what has made events spectacular has been their improbability. When something succeeds often, it's routine rather than noteworthy.
IMHO the most memorable stuff is when the players come up with some cool/crazy/unexpected/ridiculous idea or spin on things and the game runs off in some cool direction. Even if the players roll many unlikely combinations of dice that by itself won't make an interesting session. Fundamentally, IME it comes down to an exercise in creativity
I agree fully with AbdulAlhazred. Spectacular is key to memorability, but mere unlikelihood is not the key to spectacular - drama and creativity are.
Sometimes non-creative exploits can be dramatic - like when the ranger Twin-Striked the beholder to death with something like 6 hits in a row despite needing 13+ to hit (firing at long range from the bottom of a 100'+ deep chasm).
But the things I posted above are memorable to me not becaues they were mechanically improbable but because the player, confronted with a particular situation, threw his PC into it and did something unexpected by me, and unplanned by the player until the moment arose. Naturally I think my players are awesome, but I'll give myself some credit too - I framed some nice situations there - and I'll credit the system too - it makes it easy to frame those situations, and easy to resolve the players' ideas for their PCs, however unexpected.
That's another source of verismilitude, too - the system smoothly delivers the fiction the players are aiming at, and actively supports it. It doesn't have to be fought against.
Your RPG predictions are as seer-like as my sports predictions!
