How Close To "Real" Is Your World?

[Ace]

I answered very real since my world is based on "What if the stuff in the PHB was fact" --

 

[Faraer]

Hm.

Realist fiction itself doesn't conform to 'real life'. It resembles it on the surface, but its truths and motivations are still poetic, not documentary.

And yet here we have a sizeable minority of people who like their fantasy -- whose defining feature is that it depicts the symbolic and archetypal without much obfuscating baggage -- as naive realer-than-realism, as naturalistic hard-SF world sim.

The main problem I have with most campaign settings is that they don't take into account magic at their core. If magic works and is reliable, then the countries are not going to be medieval countries with magic lightly laid on top. Magic would have effects that would reach from the most minor to the most major. My world tries to take this into account.

You disagree with how they take magic into account, but it's not true to say they don't. See Living Fantasy for more on how it works in Gary Gygax's vision of D&Dlike fantasy worlds, or discussion of the Realms by Ed Greenwood at REALMS-L or candlekeep.com.

 

[CRGreathouse]

I'm not quite sure what your question is. I voted "Not Terribly REAL - Aristotlean physics, items have intrinsics values".

My world doesn't have the same physics as our real world, but the rules are internally consistent. Economics changes the prices of items, but magic is real and matter really is composed of four elements.

 

[Woas]

Beer and Pretzels

I can flip flop between "Roll the dice a bunch of times for 5 hours and see what happends!" kind of games and "You hit the ogre on the chest with your war hammer. Now, assuming your war hammer weights 13 pounds, and that delivers so much pressure over so much area mich means that you have cracked the ogers 5 and 6th rib!" type of games. In the end, I'd say that I'd prefer the first kind. Because really in the grand scheme of things, peronally, I couldn't give two birds whether I fractured the ogres ribs or poked him in the eye. Either way I want his gold points and XPs and to keep having fun!

So for me, it's all about the Beer and Pretzels. Actuallu beer and buffalo wings... like the kind of dry ones. Not the ones covered in sauce, that gets too messy....

 

[Goblyn]

Well, my world is an island floating in Limbo, being held together by the will of a single creature ... but physics n' stuff: sure.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

None of the options really suited me - I like internal consistency in the worlds I work up, but I don't care for historical simulation. I try to mix in things from history (I do have a degree in it, after all), but I pick and choose things I think are interesting, cool, or will be useful in the world.

 

[fusangite]

While I'm gratified that you made reference to my recent hobby horse of Aristotelian economics in your poll (naturally I chose that option), I don't quite hold with the premise of the poll.

It seems to me that what is being skated around is the question of how consistent worlds are with themselves. The main reason I end up with the level of "reality" that I have in my campaigns is the pursuit of self-consistency. It seems to me that in worlds full of magic, gods and weird monsters, the more you make physics like our own, the harder it is to explain these things and therefore the less self-consistent they become.

The term "obvious exceptions" in your opening post kind of hits the nail on the head. Because I strive for internal consistency, the more things in the world that obviously violate the world's own physical rules, the more my sense of "reality" is undermined.

So I'm not sure the word "real" makes sense here. What makes a place real? In my view, internal consistency is the single most important factor in achieving a sense of reality.

 

[Roadkill101]

I prefer to use Physics (as we understand them) to keep things realistic as we would relate to them. Thus if the duration of Potion of Flying ended while a person is several hundred feet in mid-air, that would person fall to the ground and more than likely be dead, short of having a contigency plan for such an event in effect (like wearing a Ring of feather Falling) or the odd chance of a miraculous survival (but in very poor physical condition, it is after all a game for enjoyment so a very slim saving throw is nice).
I use my own system of combat. Where Armor works similiar to Damage Reduction. How skillfull a person is with a weapon and how well the attack roll goes determines the amount of damage done. I use hit location to add flavor and a bit of realism, so it is all very well that a character may end up running around with missing limbs and digits.
The game world itself circles a sun, as part of a solar system, as part of a galaxy, as part of a multi-galactic universe. And real world science as we know it, is a part of the game world.
It's the inclusion of Magic as being part of that reality where the reality we understand begins to end and an altogether different type of reality begins to take shape.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

So I'm not sure the word "real" makes sense here. What makes a place real? In my view, internal consistency is the single most important factor in achieving a sense of reality.

I think I'm kind of assuming internal consistency as a given, and just wondering what route one takes to get there.

Myself, I'm fine with the idea that physics work as normal, and Magic breaks the rules - or perhaps just appears to break them, recalling Arthur C. Clarke's famous dictum about sufficiently advanced sciences.

I find it difficult to answer some questions that get asked here in regards to "how things work" in a game world because one has to know (roughly) the baseline of "reality" in the world in question.

I personally like the idea of using Aristotlean physics to explain things, and considered doing this way back in the late 80's (around the time I studied this in school) but I found there to be two issues: My own understanding of the subject, and that of my players. The less I need to explain to them about how things differ from the "known", the better.

 

[Trickstergod]

Mostly real, I suppose. I don't get too hung up on things, but I try to minimize the blatant supernatural, to a degree. So there are dragons and magic and the like, but generally it isn't very populous nor is it visible in public. Where it is, it tends to be isolated. I don't like magic item shops, kings and rulers that don't fear death thanks to resurrection magic, and generic guards or soldiers that have to be over 2-4th level to reasonably handle any threats they might see on a semi-regular basis. That's where my 'realism' kicks in, I suppose, where generally speaking, circumstances allow just that to happen reasonably.

So populated areas and regularly traveled roads usually don't have anything worse than bandits (or something with a similar challenge rating) wandering them, there's not enough buyers out there for magic items that aren't specifically commisioned, and priests of 9th level or above are usually miracle workers and saints, far too busy serving in the name of their god to bother with secular politics (pope-like figure equivalents will generally be low-level clerics, high-level aristocrats/experts). High-level characters and monsters exist, of course, but they usually won't just be bumped into randomly.

Of course, too realistic is just boring. But that's where the PC's come into play. They're alive for the sudden magic event that pops into the lime-light. Or go to the places where demons run rampant. Or run across the gods chosen who can bring back even the dead. Or whatever.

And for things that would reasonably exist in our world, that aren't at all magical in D&D, yet have no real world equivalents, I usually eliminate them as well. That mainly just covers many double-weapons for me.