How important is "realism"?

[Endroren]

How important is it that your games reflect reality? Examples include making coins in a D&D game more closely reflect the size and weight of real medieval money, limiting the number of predators in an area to a realistic number, or not having sound in space. Are there some specific "realistic" elements that make the game more fun, but other things that always disrupt the story? Or maybe you don't care at all?

My friends and I have been debating this, and I'd love to hear what everyone else thinks.

 

[Garthanos]

One thing which is more important to me is genre conventions and tropes...

 

[Scars Unseen]

I can appreciate some nods to realism in world building. But really, it's less appreciated because it's real, and more because it means the GM is putting some thought into the world.

It tends to go less well in the game mechanics.

 

[billd91]

How important is it that your games reflect reality? Examples include making coins in a D&D game more closely reflect the size and weight of real medieval money, limiting the number of predators in an area to a realistic number, or not having sound in space. Are there some specific "realistic" elements that make the game more fun, but other things that always disrupt the story? Or maybe you don't care at all?

My friends and I have been debating this, and I'd love to hear what everyone else thinks.

A certain degree of it is necessary for players to be able to expect how things work. But it’s also got to be colored by the genre. Superheroes will fall if dropped off a building, but are unusually resilient even if not powered in a particular way to survive falling. And super-strong characters can lift things based just on weight, not leverage and with the result not affected by the material strength of the thing being lifted (such as things breaking apart).

 

[Umbran]

A certain degree of it is necessary for players to be able to expect how things work. But it’s also got to be colored by the genre.

This is my take on it as well. The game will not be notably improved for my players by setting the weights of coins by historical examples. Realism for the sake of realism has little value to me or my usual gamers.

Realism for sake of support of genre can be good, but should be measured against other elements - if you are breaking realism 27 different ways, invoking realism for a single favored element can often seem petty, or disjoint from the rest of the presentation.

 

[MGibster]

How important is it that your games reflect reality? Examples include making coins in a D&D game more closely reflect the size and weight of real medieval money, limiting the number of predators in an area to a realistic number, or not having sound in space. Are there some specific "realistic" elements that make the game more fun, but other things that always disrupt the story? Or maybe you don't care at all?

I hate to be "that guy," but it really depends on the game. Also, I don't necessarily need realism I just need the appearance of realism. Verisimilitude. For games like D&D, I couldn't care less about how the economy works, the size and weight of coins, or be bothered to figure out how my fantasy city feeds itself. None of that really contributes to high octane fantasy adventure. I don't even care if the geography doesn't make any sense.

For games set in the recent past or present, I usually like a little verisimilitude. If I'm playing a "realistic" game like Call of Cthulhu, it's going to take me out of the game if a PC can leap 15 feet into the air or walk away after getting shot in the face three times without the aid of the supernatural. On the flip side, things can get a little too real when setting a game in the 1920s. I typically won't have a PC run up against the virulent racism, sexism, or xenophobia that was so prevalent in American society at that time because it wouldn't make for a fun game.

 

[payn]

It used to be very important to me. I liked tracking rations, ammo, carry weight. I also liked worlds that made sense like the coin example. However, all the bandwidth that went into simulationism started to weigh down on my sense of adventure and advancement of story. I came to the conclusion that there is a certain amount of bandwidth at the table to dedicate to all the elements of an RPG. I was dropping too much into the realism pursuit. I still like to be realistic when I can, but I have let up on the need to be hyper-accurate in my older age.

 

[Fenris-77]

My answer to how much realism? is just enough. For a lot of fantasy games that 'enough' is far lower than it might be for a game set in the modern day. As several posters have mentioned this is often a function of genre expectations as much as anything else.

 

[Mallus]

I find the signifiers for 'realism' vary widely depending on media type, genre, subgenre, day of the week, current barometric pressure, and individual whim.

(I'll try to be more helpful once my second cup of coffee kicks in)

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

Some musings on my group idiosyncracies...

1. Internal consistency has more weight than realism. Players must be able to work with limited knowledge of the setting compared to their characters ; if a "rule" of the world is established and they memorize it, it's to be respected for their choices to make sense in setting (or, if it's established for a long time, a break must be explained somehow). But this consistency isn't necessarily realistic (If superhero fall and landing is a thing, the GM shouldn't surprise players claiming that yes, you can die from a 5-ft fall, roll damage, and if resurrection is a commonality in the world, assassination should still be mean, but not something that would bother royalties much.

2. It's oddly genre-independant. I play a game in the "real world" roughly (X-files like at most) and I am pretty sure that absolutely no government agency would keep our group in employment anywhere in the world given our disregard of rules and procedures. We once landed safely an attack helicopter on the roof of a building, by making a crit roll in Driving (narrated as looking on youtube for an appropriate tutorial). I feel that our Sharn sleuth campaign was... more realistic despite, you know, fireballs.

3. Us geeks can be oddly obsessive on minutiae.

"Two weeks later, after an uneventful trip, you arrive in Xzor, the capital of the evil empire of Kargath". As a GM, we've all done that. In my group, it would be met by "What? Two weeks? How could we do that? We're not crossing the Swamp of Death. We'll do all the way around by taking the North Shire road, that will be three-week and a half if we do 35 km a day." And another player will interject "What?!? No way. I am not walking that fast several day in a road! Even riding is too tiring." "OK, let's settle for taking a boat at Hangton Ford and go down the river? We'll be there in 4 weeks." "Four weeks and three days, last time we were in Hangton Ford (shuffles notes) the boat was running twice a week and we can't count on getting lucky and arriving on Monday or Thursday" Especially of course if the campaign has absolutely no sense of time pressure and noone cares if the trip takes 12 parsecs.