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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3783358" data-attributes="member: 4937">IMO realistic campaigns:1) Have large stretches of land which is neither a 'haven' nor a 'dungeon', and a certain amount of travel is expected across this area.2) Have populations that are if not destitute, then are are recognizably primitive and impoverished and they do not consider this situation unusual.  Poverty is the most universal constant of the human condition, a fact which most modern people are well sheltered from to the point of having no experience with it (but often thinking that they do).  3) Experiences weather at times when it is not a plot device.4) Regularly involve various challenges which cannot be overcome by combat prowess.  One mark of a realistic campaign is that power gamers experienced with the campaign sacrifice a certain amount of combat prowess and that combat twinks typically have higher casualty rates than more balanced characters because there is more going on pretty much all the time than 'kill things and take there stuff'.5) Has NPC's with complex motives that are neither explicitly foils or enablers of the PCs.  These NPC's are proactive and are assumed to do important things offstage, and are not normally at the PC's beck and call because what the PC's are doing isn't the sum total of events in the world.  NPC's do not generally attack on sight or want to fight to the death unless they think they've no choice, because they do not want to live short lives.  The associated assumption is that PC's that do these things consistantly are planning on living short lives.6) Have taxes and laws which the PC's encounter at times when they are not a plot device.  In fact, tongue only half in cheek, I could probably shorten this list to, 'If your PC's pay taxes regularly, its a realistic campaign.  Otherwise, it's not.'7) Has dealt with the problem that you are trying to simulate a real world, that is based on a narrative world where the simpliest explanation for its characteristics is magic doesn't really exist.  In other words, if magic is rare and mysterious, you have a plausible explanation for this, or else, you assume that because it exists it's not rare and mysterious and take the consequences of that.  If monsters are always, 'over there', you have a plausible explanation for it, or else you assume a society were monsters are not always 'over there'.  Likewise, you have considered how society will have evolved with magic at the level of rarity you have assumed and not be surprised by how the PC's magic (fireball, flight, etc.) invalidates certain realities of the real world.  In other words, your campaign's history does not however much detail it has, effectively begin with the PC's.  8) Attempts to make some sense economically.  Specifically, some thought has been given to the question of what daily labor costs implies about available wealth in the area, and conversely what available wealth implies about daily labor costs.  For example, you don't have an encounter with a group of bandits (or its monstrous equivalent) that yields thousands of gp worth of wealth, if the people that they've been preying on have a daily income of 1-6 sp per day unless your willing to conceed that that group of bandits has effectively become the government of the region (because they've clearly aggregated that much of the societies wealth to themselves).  And, if you do conceed that, consider what it implies about the PC's impact on the society if they liberate those funds for themselves or try to spend them.  In particular, a realistic campaign will assume that some things just aren't available no matter how much money you have because of at the least labor or skill shortages.9) You avoid anachronistic tropes, or at least are consciously aware of when you are using anachronisms like monetary economies, goods on demand, casteless societies, slaveless societies, gender equality, cultural monotheism, universal cosmopolitanism, high quality free access roads, modern sensibilities about brutality or cruelty, individualism, well-defined nation states, universal rule of law, near universal literacy, freedom of information, freedom of travel, professional national armies, and so on and so forth.  It's not that you necessarily can't or shouldn't have these things, but if you accept them without consideration, you probably aren't running a realistic campaign.10) Informed by if not necessarily recreating history, so as to ensure that the simulated world is as a messy as the real one.The goal is for the whole thing to hang together not just as a game (for which you don't need any realism at all), but as something which suffers having its surface scratched.  Alot of the time you can get away with no realism because your players have no real desire to interact with the game world.  But, the minute that the players leave the default paradigm and start trying to interact with the world, the limitations of an unrealistic world become painfully obvious.  And for me, because I'm the sort of person who is continually scratching the surface even in the midst of watching a movie, the game losses something when it doesn't bear close inspection.</blockquote>

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