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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6986598" data-attributes="member: 996">Nod.  Like most "there are two kinds of..." saws (or three kinds in the case of GNS).  At its best, combining the two can get you something like the literary genre of "magical realism."There are dangers, though...D&D, since it has mechanics, can easily fall into a mostly-'naturalistic' (or deterministic, or simulationist, I suppose) rut that sucks the fantasy/fairy-tale/mythic feel right out of it, elevating the mechanical details of the rules system to a sort of de-facto set of laws of physics that dictate the nature and development of the world and characters.  Mixing the realistic and fantastic can also result in a double-standard in which some game elements are mundane and marginalized while others are miraculous and run the show.  In a fantasy game grounded in realism, all the PCs have to be in about the same place in the spectrum.  Presumably, if it's heroic fantasy, PC'd be quite a ways over on the fantastic side, with NPCs/victims/window-dressing providing the mundane floor, alternately, if it's gritty with an edge of survival-horror, the fantastic can all be on the side of the threats faced by the PCs.A powerful, but perhaps inappropriate tool, that's also potentially very constraining.  If a decanter of endless water can be used to flood the world, or a sphere of annihilation to drain the ocean, for instance, you just might decide not to include 'em, or to put constraints on them, making them less fantastic.  It's also easy to forget that scientific reasoning or, perhaps, 'modern' reasoning isn't the only kind of reasoning, and that part of the appeal of fantasy is to call us back to an earlier (whether in terms of earlier in history, or earlier in our lives) mode of reasoning with more room for wonder and emotion.</blockquote>

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