Thought #1: Nothing should get in the way of having fun.
Thought #2: Reality is useful insofar that it helps people have more fun.
And these lead us to the inevitable...
Question: How can using reality make a game more fun?
Answer: Depends on the gamer.
I'll be the first person to vote this as one of the most unsatisfying answers, but at the same time it is the most specific answer that I can give. I can be more specific, however, with respect to how
I use reality to make the game more fun for
myself.
In a previous post to ENWorld I discussed the economics of brewing mead. I think that "make a craft roll and you make that many gp a week" is completely unsatisfying for a number of reasons: not all crafts make the same amount of money, some crafts are seasonal and make lots of money for certain periods of time and little money during others, there are many factors other than someone's skill that goes into making a product (quality of goods, local demand, etc.), and many more reasons. This mechanic is wholly unsatisfying to me and I find the idea of using this mechanic to make the game less fun for me. So I did some online research into medieval prices and with the help of ENWorlders (and most helpfully from my DM) we worked out the broad strokes of how mead makers both make mead and some ball park figures of what it would cost to do so. All it took were a few minds spending a few hours each and I feel like we came up with a much more plausible mead brewing economic model that just "roll one die". For myself, this is much more fun and at (relatively, I believe) low cost in terms of time spent outside of the game (i.e.: background research) and inside the game (i.e.: how much effort do players/DM have to expend to carry out this during game sessions). Low cost + an order of magnitude more realism = more fun.
My next step is to do a bit of research and find out how prevalent beekeepers/mead makers were (as the two seem to have occured hand-in-hand in medieval times) so I know what kind of towns it would be plausible to set up a meadery in different towns based on town location and town population. Again, this seems like a lost cost expedinture. I'd also probably do some basic "economics 101" reading to understand some basic economic principles that would affect running a business. Another low cost investment for some added realism. I also bought a used brewing book for $1.85 to understand the brewing process, brewing vocabulary, etc. More low cost for added realism.
I think that it would be natural to ask "okay, I get that this is how you use realism to make a game more fun, but
why do you think that this is fun?" A fair question.
Two important aspects of enjoyment of a game are (1) depth of the world and (2) plausibility of the world.
By depth of world I mean that I should be able to poke the world a bit and the world should hold up and not be punctured. It is not fun to say "I want to start a meadery" and have my DM say "Okay, pay this amount of money in overhead and start making Craft(Brewing) rolls to see how much money you make. Now let's move on to..." That seems to me to lack depth of world necessary to have an enjoyable experience. At the same time, I think it would be poking too far if I asked my DM for the names of all the beekeepers in town, all of the inns in town, and roleplayed negotiating each individual deal with them, went through interviews for workers, etc. Where's the line between poking the right amount and poking too far? I have no hard and fast answer for you; it's an (often implicit and unstated) agreement in a gaming group.
By plausibility of world I mean... Well, let me start out by saying what I do
not mean. I do not mean that there should be no surprises or that everything should be fully predictable. I do not mean that everything should have a logical derivation for why it happened. I do not mean that everything should have an air tight connection to historical fact. Now, on to what I do mean. Things that happen in the world should pass a "common sense" check for the world to be plausible. The idea of every village having a meadery does not pass my common sense check because I don't think that every village has beekeepers to make the honey byproducts to make mead with. However, without a bit of research, I can't be sure if my common sense is valid, so I think that having reality checks as a very of having an "educated" common sense. I'm happy with surprises and with things not always being how I expect them, and at the same time I'm quite unhappy if my "suspension of disbelief" is always being pushed to its limits. (I'd like to say that I would be satisfied if the DM explicictly said, for this example, that beekeepers in this world were more prevalent than in real life. That updates my common sense check with respect to the world we're gaming in.)
Taking this in a slightly different direction, I'd like to ask the question "why do many games not tie themselves at all or very much to reality?" I think that there are three reasons for this:
Reason #1: Outside of game cost. It takes time to read a book on brewing, to look up medieval pricing, to look up medieval brewing practices that differ from modern ones... DM'ing is a hard enough job without adding on extra research to it. My solution: have players do some prep work, too. I think that it's grossly unfair for DM's to have to do all of the prep work for a session while players expect to do nothing between session (aside from maybe leveling up). There is definitely some work that is DM-only and I accept that. At the same time, I think that players can help out by doing the outside of game work it would take to have games me a bit more realistic. My character wants to start a meadery? Great - I'm responsible for coming up with some background material on mead brewing. Want to start a mercenary company? Great - find some medieval warfare text and page through it. I think that players should be expected to invest time before sessions to help flesh out the world.
Reason #2: Inside of game cost. I think that many gamers expect that making their games more realistic will take up too much time during gaming sessions. I don't think that this has to be the case. For example, I don't think that adding realism to running a meadery is going to take up more than a few minutes a gaming session
at the most. There will be some sessions (most sessions?) where the meadery isn't even mentioned and there's no time spent worrying about it. I think that this ties in with the "how much poking at a world is too much?" question I spoke of earlier. If my individual character would need an hour each game session to handle meadery concerns then I'm poking too much. If my character news a few minutes each game session to handle his meadery then I think that's the right amount; after all, my character would have to spend some time managing it so I should have to spend some time managing it.
Reason #3: Gamer goals and expectiations. I think that this is the biggest reason for a lack of realism in games (and I hope that I can write this without getting too preachy). I think that a vast majority of gamers who play D&D have the goal of "We want to kill bad guys" and pretty much only have that goal. If that's your goal, then the only thing you'd really need to have be detailed would be your combat system, and D&D provides that for you. Realism doesn't matter in other areas of the world because they are just vehicles to get to more killing. The original post spoke about sailing not being at all realistic, which I think should be expected if the gaming group is mainly focused on the combats that arise when you get to where you're going. Personally, one of my goals for any gaming experience is "I want to have a 'day in the life of' feeling." Because of that some realism is important to me. If that isn't one's goal, or if one doesn't have some kind of similar goal, then I wouldn't expect any amount of realism because, quite frankly, it isn't desired.
I would like to reiterate the disclaimer I made at the beginning of this post that I can only speak to what
I find to be enjoyable.