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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MNblockhead" data-source="post: 7180393" data-attributes="member: 6796661">Great thread!In high school I spent two summers with the Student Conservation Association, living in the wilderness, helping maintain fire breaks and backwoods trails, etc. It made me a rather insufferable DM.Realism in a game can make the fantasy more fantastic. Resource management can be an important pillar of the game that creates compelling challenges.  But both can be quite annoying in the hands of smug high-school DM who is assured that he knows better. I hand-wave a lot as a DM, but I still like to inject some realism. I research horse and ship travel times and will calculate travel times and require the party to raise the resources needed....some times.  When it adds to the game. For example, my current campaign setting is very large and the style is sandboxy. Forcing the party to think about the time and effort involved in travel helped to create a sense of the amount of distance and increases the sense of exploration and discovery. But more often, I hand wave it, assuming they make and spend money on the way, especially when they were at levels where they had their own ship and crew. Now they can fly and teleport. It's a different game now because of that, but there is still a sense of the size of the world, and an appreciation of the magic (which is very rare in my campaign world) because of the early tier one play. Despite my experience backpacking in the wilderness and several of my players' military experience, we generally hand wave encumbrance. I'll occasionally eye ball their sheets for reality checks, but we are not calculating the weight of every item. But, again, early in my campaign, I calculated coin weight and calculated the weight of chests and had some challenges where they had to make difficult decisions on what treasure to grab, having to leave most behind. Now we kinda all roll-play it out without doing the math.  I am a bit of a curmudgeon about torches, however.  Get a lantern. The torch is going to smoke you out of must dungeons before you have a chance to pray for dark vision.</blockquote>

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