How much suspension of disbelief do you require?

A few RPG design questions:

1. When playing your favorite RPG as player or GM/DM, how much suspension of disbelief do you require? For instance, as a player do you prefer to have a character and game world that could make "sense" or it really doesn't matter as long as I am having fun and it is not too abstract and gamey.

Depends on the game, really.

I like my D&D with over-the-top heroic action. Believability takes a back seat to fantasy supers.

But when I played Harn or Twilight 2000, I was incredibly mindful of ensuring that the game was as grounded in reality as possible.

2. How much meta-talk at the game table do you like?

I encourage as much IC talk as possible, but I realize that game jargon is damn near inevitable. I tolerate it.

3. Do you mind if the mechanics get in the way of the story at times? For instance, is it ok if you cannot form "real life" tactics with the game mechanics?

You mean things like, "I want to roll the barrel of flaming pitch at the orc"? If that's the case, then I prefer systems which can facilitate that level of creative thinking.

4. What level of mechanical "robustness" does the game feel right at? Is it broad easily applied rules that stay out of the way or more detailed rules that have more individual application?

I like broad general rules with specific exceptions thrown in to handle subsystems---but only if they all feel like part of a unified mechanic.
 

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A few RPG design questions:

1. When playing your favorite RPG as player or GM/DM, how much suspension of disbelief do you require? For instance, as a player do you prefer to have a character and game world that could make "sense" or it really doesn't matter as long as I am having fun and it is not too abstract and gamey.

2. How much meta-talk at the game table do you like? For instance as GM/DM do you like your players in-character most of the time or do you like talk about mechanics and the best way to use them? How much do you allow?

3. Do you mind if the mechanics get in the way of the story at times? For instance, is it ok if you cannot form "real life" tactics with the game mechanics?

4. What level of mechanical "robustness" does the game feel right at? Is it broad easily applied rules that stay out of the way or more detailed rules that have more individual application?

On #1, I personally like worlds that make sense and have trouble engaging long term with worlds that don't seem to make sense (at least to me). Readily admit this is a personal thing but that's the way it is for me. If everything else about the setting is fun I can overlook it but it is something I generally consciously have to do.

On #2, as player or GM, a little meta-game talk is fine. Basing decisions solely on meta-game aspects or staying heavily on that side, not so good. Part of the fun my group and I have on game days is discussing the game mechanics itself and making fun of such things so we do have some meta-game chatter. But we have unspoken limits because we do try to roleplay and the refs generally invest a lot in setting so when it happens, it is more a "witty" meta-side comment followed by a return to normal in-character stuff.

#3- at times, sure. It's hard for any system to perfectly model things. They all have their trade-offs. We as a group are quite willing to acknowledge that our selected game system is simply a balance of competing constraints (time versus realism being one basic one).

#4- we sometimes play rules-light games (especially for sci-fi) but for fantasy the complexity of any of the recent D&D systems works fine for us.
 

Depends on the game, really.

I like my D&D with over-the-top heroic action. Believability takes a back seat to fantasy supers.

I'm seeing several different interpretations of the first question and what it means to be 'believable'. I don't think 'believable' = 'realistic'. I presume a fantasy supers game or a game featuring magic or indeed any game not set in 'the real world' can be quite believable, even if its not realistic because in the real world we don't have supers or magic.

Generally, I'm willing to accept the basic premise of the setting. What I consider necessary for believability isn't that the premise is realistic, but that once you grant that basic premise that the resulting world is internally consistant.

Hense my complaining about approximating a horse as a 10'x10' square rather than a 5'x10' rectangle. Any space the horse occupies is going to be an very approximate in a PnP game, but when the approximation of the space occupied by a horse gets up to the level of 10' cube its no longer consistant with the described world unless the basic premise is that horses are shaped like cubes. If horses are described as 4'x8' animals, then I'm going to demand the closest approximation in the system. The idea that two horses can't fit in a 10'x10' space without squeezing is more offensive to me than the idea that some Wizard can conjure fire. Wizards conjure fire by definition. Horses are not cubes by definition.
 

1. If I can't accept the premise of the game world then I'm out of there. I prefer the games I play in and GM to have a certain degree of internal consistency. However, and I think this is an important point, suspension of disbelief is not the same thing as immersion. (To me, most of the following questions have to do with immersion and not suspension of disbelief per se. Just an observation.)

2. Enough to play the game and have fun with it. Any more and it gets in the way I think. On a seperate but related note, metagaming drives me nuts.

3. Yes I mind. If I'm running the game, then the rule goes. There are going to be times of course when a situation arises in an RPG in which something is happening that flies in the face of common sense (magical flight for example) but in situations that are not explicitly "fantastical" (which changes by game and by group and is impossible to determine objectively) I prefer for things to work the way they would in a manner consistant with the groups expectations - not realism per se, but what passes for it amongst most RPG groups.

4. What does "mechanical robustness" mean? I prefer 'broader, more easily applied rules' as a general thing but that's by no means a hard and fast rule. Different games have different degrees of mechanical complexity and that's the way it should be IMO. As long as everyone has a solid grasp of those mechanics, there's no real issue.
 

1. When playing your favorite RPG as player or GM/DM, how much suspension of disbelief do you require? For instance, as a player do you prefer to have a character and game world that could make "sense" or it really doesn't matter as long as I am having fun and it is not too abstract and gamey.

Depends on what you mean by "make sense." If by "make sense" you mean "realistic" as in adheres to the real world, then that doesn't matter too much to me, for the following reasons:

1a. There are a lot of aspects of the game (e.g. magic and dragons) that are unrealistic by design. I don't see any reason to demand "realism" with respect to Aspect A of the game but not demand realism in Aspect B, just because Aspect B has the label "magic" attached to it and Aspect A doesn't.

1b. A lot of the time, events in the game (like medieval combat and animal training) are so far outside my real-life experence that I am not qualified to know what is realistic, and DMs and players can have very different "common sense" ideas on what is realistic. (If you don't believe me, just watch a few episodes of MythBusters.) So any system which requires DMs and players to make lots of judgements about what is "realistic" can lead to arguments.

However, the area where "make sense" does come into play is internal consistency: making sure that any changes affect the world in the ways you would expect.

For instance, consider the ease of healing in 4e - where warlords can make unconscious allies stand up by shouting at them, and everyone heals to full after 8 hours of sleep. These don't bother me in themselves. It's perfectly reasonable to me that the "supernatural" warlord healing ability and the 8-hour regeneration are just part of how the D+D world works, in the same way that wizards hurling fireballs are just part of how the D+D world works. But if that is accepted, its consequences should logically follow. For instance, there would be no medical facilities in the game world (except if they were needed to cure diseases, which don't auto-heal after 8 hours), and safety precautions would be much more lax, since they would be less necessary. If one asserted that only PCs get this "auto-heal" ability, then the above consequences would not happen, but there would be others - the residents of the world would notice that certain members of their population had a particularly powerful ability to heal themselves, and they would be very interested in why that is the case and how to use it to their advantage.

2. How much meta-talk at the game table do you like? For instance as GM/DM do you like your players in-character most of the time or do you like talk about mechanics and the best way to use them? How much do you allow?

I believe that talking about mechanics is not always "meta-talk." For example, I am playing in a HERO System campaign, and my character is a "gadgeteer" with the ability to reconfigure his gadgets in the field. The way this is implemented in-game is with a "variable power pool", where you have a certain number of "points" that you can allocate to powers, and there is a point system that you can use to build powers on the fly by starting with a base power and adding on "advantages" and "limitations." So in-game, I can talk about mechanics - "okay guys, if I give the invisibility to all of you, then I won't be able to afford the 'zero endurance cost' advantage, so it will cost me X endurance per turn, and I have Y endurance and recover Z each turn, so I can maintain it for W turns at most, unless someone can give me extra endurance, etc. etc. etc."

Now the thing is, what I'm doing here - using the list of parts (powers and advantages) with known specifications (the mechanics) and figuring out how to put them together to achieve what I want, while taking into account design limitations, power consumption calculations, etc. is exactly what real engineers do. So I don't see that talking about mechanics is not roleplaying - in that case I see it as the opposite.

3. Do you mind if the mechanics get in the way of the story at times? For instance, is it ok if you cannot form "real life" tactics with the game mechanics?

This goes back to #1. I don't mind if you can't form "real life tactics" with the game mechanics, because most of the time I wouldn't know what "real life tactics" are in the first place, and in any case, with the world so much different than ours there's not much reason to believe that "real life tactics" will work in the first place. As for 'story', I think that if you want to include an element of the story that conflicts with the mechanics, it makes more sense to change the mechanics, otherwise you end up with conflicting expectations. For example, let's say the story is about investigating a "one shot one kill" assassination, but the rules don't allow that because the number of hit points the target has is more than the maximum amount of damage any of the perp's attacks does. Then the players might go off in a wild goose chase the wrong direction, assuming that there had to have been something else going on because there's no way it could have happened the way it did. You could of course tell the players "the rules don't apply here," but that might give away the information, and in any case then players are going to constantly ask what they can assume about the rules when.

4. What level of mechanical "robustness" does the game feel right at? Is it broad easily applied rules that stay out of the way or more detailed rules that have more individual application?

The rules I prefer are rules that are as general as possible, but can still be applied unambiguously to specific situations. A real life example is Newton's laws of physics - they are very general in that they can be applied to almost any physical system that you will encounter in everyday life, but they are specific in that given a physical system, you can write down the equations and they will give you a specific solution.

A good in-game example is the Hero System's rules for strength. The rules for strength state that for any X >= 5, a strength score of X represents the amount of force required to lift (25 * 2^(X/5)) kilograms, and is enough to inflict (X/5)d6 damage. Also, in a contest of strength, each player rolls their strength dice and whoever has the highest score wins - so if A is grabbing B, A has a strength of 20 and B has a strength of 15, and B wants to get out of the grab, he rolls 3d6 to try to beat A's 4d6.*

Note that with this information, it is possible to derive a lot else:

- Rules for being damaged by an object crushing you: the force caused by the falling object crushing you is just the force of gravity on that object, so it has strength equal to the amount needed to lift it. So just roll damage equal to the strength corresponding to the object's mass (so a 200 kg object would have strength 15, and do 3d6 damage.) And since it is continuous, do that each round.

- Getting out from under an object crushing you: Make a contest (as described above) against a strength corresponding to the object's weight.

- Seeing if an object can support your weight: Roll the damage for the strength corresponding to your weight against the object (objects have "PD and ED" - which acts as damage reduction - and "BODY" - which acts as hit points) each round. Just like being crushed, except it's the object which is being crushed rather than a person.

- Throwing an object at someone: The force is equal to your strength, so just roll your strength damage if it hits. If the object has something that lets it do more damage than normal (like a throwing knife coated with poison) that's an extra effect that you buy as a power.

- Telekinesis: There's a telekinesis power, which is rated according to effective strength, so you can, for example, buy 25 strength worth of telekinesis. Then anything you can do with 25 strength normally, you can do at range with that telekinesis. So the telekinesis rules effectively inherit from the normal strength rules, so you don't need separate rules for each thing you can do with telekinesis (grab someone, steal his weapon, push him over a cliff, etc.)

The overall point is that you don't have to remember all these rules - you can just apply the general rule to each situation, and get the more specific rule.

*If you've played HERO System, you'll notice that you don't actually count up dice as normal, you could up the "Normal Damage BODY" on those dice. But that isn't really relevant to this discussion, so I won't go into it further.
 

1. When playing your favorite RPG as player or GM/DM, how much suspension of disbelief do you require? For instance, as a player do you prefer to have a character and game world that could make "sense" or it really doesn't matter as long as I am having fun and it is not too abstract and gamey.
I prefer it make sense except where it doesn't.

To expand a bit: obviously a fantasy game is going to contain fantasy elements - flying dragons, magic effects, gods walking the world, etc. - and those aren't going to make sense when directly compared to the real world. But all the things that aren't fantasy - basic physics, gravity, weather, etc. - are things that I prefer to either reflect our reality or the reality of the world as designed by the DM. For example, if a DM wants her world to have two suns and five moons that's great; but the weather and tides had better be adjusted to fit with that or it breaks for me.

Internal consistency is paramount, even to the point of if the DM makes a mistake and it affects the game, if at all possible that mistake becomes part of the game rules from there on.
2. How much meta-talk at the game table do you like? For instance as GM/DM do you like your players in-character most of the time or do you like talk about mechanics and the best way to use them? How much do you allow?
Some nights I'd be happy if they talked in character at all; but it's the out-of-game chatter rather than meta-game talk that gets int he way here. I'd prefer if there was no on-the-fly talk about mechanics during play, but I've no problem stopping things at a logical point if someone wants to discuss rules for a bit...I see this as a natural outcome of playing an always-evolving homebrew system.

Metagaming in terms of players using knowledge their characters don't have is a complete no-no.
3. Do you mind if the mechanics get in the way of the story at times? For instance, is it ok if you cannot form "real life" tactics with the game mechanics?
The mechanics need to be stretchy and bendy enough to handle all the corner cases that inevitably arise. In other words, real life wins.
4. What level of mechanical "robustness" does the game feel right at? Is it broad easily applied rules that stay out of the way or more detailed rules that have more individual application?
I prefer broad rules that give enough framework to play the game but can handle the stretchy-bendiness that arises as the game goes on and presents situations where I have to wing it; mostly because winging it now and then is far easier and far faster than trying to dig up some obscure rule that hasn't arisen in 3 years and nobody remembers what book it's in.

Lanefan
 

A few RPG design questions:

1. When playing your favorite RPG as player or GM/DM, how much suspension of disbelief do you require? For instance, as a player do you prefer to have a character and game world that could make "sense" or it really doesn't matter as long as I am having fun and it is not too abstract and gamey.

I don't have a favourite RPG. I've got a lot of RPGs that do different things. As long as the stuff that happens makes genre-sense, I'm happy. So a hard SF game will have me making one set of assumptions and will break my suspension of disbelief in one way, while Toon will probably not break it at all.

2. How much meta-talk at the game table do you like? For instance as GM/DM do you like your players in-character most of the time or do you like talk about mechanics and the best way to use them? How much do you allow?

I don't care about it. People talking about the game is good, whether in character or not. People talking about the film they saw last night is not good.

3. Do you mind if the mechanics get in the way of the story at times? For instance, is it ok if you cannot form "real life" tactics with the game mechanics?

If I'm trying to tell a story and the mechanics of the game don't support that story, I'm using a wrong rules set. Not that I'm often trying to tell a story, but that's a different topic.

4. What level of mechanical "robustness" does the game feel right at? Is it broad easily applied rules that stay out of the way or more detailed rules that have more individual application?

I don't believe highly detailed rules add anything to the game experience. Rules-light/rules-medium is my preferred style.
 


1. When playing your favorite RPG as player or GM/DM, how much suspension of disbelief do you require?
Like others, I only really require consistency-- unless the game is about inconsistency, of course ;)

2. How much meta-talk at the game table do you like?
I don't mind players talking ooc and using metagame vocab, because discussing tactics or updating character sheets can be difficult without it. On the other hand, I dislike players using metagame knowledge their characters have no access to; there's usually an in-game way to get that kind of knowledge, so I prefer characters use it rather than being mystically blessed with it through their RW puppeteers.

3. Do you mind if the mechanics get in the way of the story at times?
Never really saw this as a problem. The tenor and tone of the game itself usually naturally drives PCs to do things appropriate to the game. If there is a mechanics question, it's typically easy enough to make an on-the-fly ruling so as not to crater the story.

4. What level of mechanical "robustness" does the game feel right at?
I prefer having a rule set based on a very few simple mechanics, but that can be expanded to include many situations. Then it's fairly straightforward to just make a rule on-the-fly that is reasonably consistent with the rest of the official rules. At the same time, it keeps it easy to modify stuff, port in others' rules, rip stuff out, and so on. My ideal rule set is scalable in its complexity.
 

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