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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 1913773" data-attributes="member: 26473">I aply realistic treatments of elements such as physics, ecology, culture, and so on to my campaign-worlds - as others have noted, it provides a touchstone of familiarity for the players and adds depth and verisimilitude. I also find that when the mundane things work relatively seamlessly, the fantastical elements are that much more more magical and interesting - if everything is strange and unusual, than nothing is.The amount of effort I enlist in getting the details right is also somewhat genre dependent. I spend a lot of time on ecology, geography, and culture for my HB game-worlds, as I find these elements are what tend to bring a world to life in the minds of the players - the way in which these elements interact creates much of the tension that I turn into story-arcs, so I find this level of detail makes encounter development much easier.For modern settings I focus on the kinds of details that place the characters in a particular time and environment - for example, for a d20 Modern adventure, the characters are on a ferry and a television is playing in the passenger cabin, so I created snippets of fake news that the characters hear in the background: traffic on the Viaduct, the score in the Sonics game, and so on. The ferry is one that is in actual service between the locations, the characters are given directions that are real streets, and the house they were sent to visit came from a real-estate listing on San Juan Island. The goal in this case is to give the players a "you are there!" experience through their characters, to capture the immediacy of the moment.For a historical game I'm working on, I'm doing copius research on the places and events of the period. That said, I don't feel straigh-jacketed to recreate the historical events - rather, they provide a means of understanding the time and place so that my adventures and campaign will have a convincing feel. I rather liken this to writing historical fiction.One thing that I haven't heard mentioned so far is that, for me as the GM, this is FUN! I enjoy the time I spend reading and writing, prowling used book stores and searching the Internet, striving to give my campaigns and settings an air of authenticity without making them into travelogs or history reports. This is one reason I rarely find myself drawn to published campaign settings - it really sucks a lot of the enjoyment out of the creative process for me. Being able to create a believable illusion for my players is probably my favorite part of role-playing, so working out the "realistic" details of the game world is a labor of love.That said, while I enjoy adding verisimilitude to my settings, I'm really not overly worried about realistic game mechanics - in my experience, rules that strive to create detailed simulations of real-world activities tend to be dry as dust. I prefer that resolving the use of skills should be quick and easy, even if it lacks precision and accuracy compared to other simulations.</blockquote>

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