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<blockquote data-quote="Thommy H-H" data-source="post: 8726684" data-attributes="member: 6797019"><p>Fantasy RPGs, as a genre, tend to have concrete rules for the following things, almost exclusively:</p><p></p><ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Magic powers</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Terrifying monsters</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Murdering people with sharp things who are, at the same time, trying to do the same to you</li> </ul><p></p><p>Why these three things and (for the most part) only these three things? <em>They're all fictional.</em></p><p></p><p>Let me clarify: sharp-thing-murdering of course exists in the real world, but the kind of combat, and the sheer <em>quantity</em> of that combat that exists in the fantasy genre is fictitious. No one, even professional soldiers, even athletes who participate in combat sports, spends a third of their life in "combat". Most of us are lucky enough that we will never be involved in a fight to the death. Fights to the death are extraordinarily rare. Even in aberrant social orders that encouraged them - like the Romans with their gladiatorial games - they wouldn't have expected a competitor to have six to eight bouts in a day! The human psyche is not built for that kind of stress! </p><p></p><p>Historical and modern violence is overwhelmingly one-sided. Most military strategy since antiquity has been about avoiding wherever possible anything that might even look like a fair fight. A fair fight can go either way. A fair fight is random. If you're in a fair fight, you've messed up. But fantasy violence is a fiction about two evenly-matched sides duking it out. In reality, battles were (and are) brief, chaotic, and usually end as soon as someone is willing to stop shooting. </p><p></p><p>What I'm getting at is that the "social pillar" is what most of us call "all of human existence". Even a hardened warrior will spend only brief, terrifying moments of their life in actual, physical combat. Most of it will be the same things we all do: interacting, living, navigating society. Fantasy games don't model this for the same reason they don't model gravity, going to the toilet, or eating lunch. We already know how those things work, and any gameplay expression of them is going to be necessarily hollow.</p><p></p><p>Now, you can argue the same applies to fantasy social interaction - none of us know what it's like to talk to an ageless elf, or persuade an undead wizard to let us leave their fortress, or even negotiate with a monarch, which is a real thing. For that, there do tend to be mechanics to manage courtly intrigue and the like. 5E has faction rules in the DMG, and various books expand and iterate on these to support the expected gameplay experience. But you'll never find a satisfactory gameplay framework for all social interaction because it encompasses basically the entirety of human experience.</p><p></p><p>So, if you need to handle it as a GM, handle it like you have to handle real life: desperately wing it and hope no one notices.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Thommy H-H, post: 8726684, member: 6797019"] Fantasy RPGs, as a genre, tend to have concrete rules for the following things, almost exclusively: [LIST] [*]Magic powers [*]Terrifying monsters [*]Murdering people with sharp things who are, at the same time, trying to do the same to you [/LIST] Why these three things and (for the most part) only these three things? [I]They're all fictional.[/I] Let me clarify: sharp-thing-murdering of course exists in the real world, but the kind of combat, and the sheer [I]quantity[/I] of that combat that exists in the fantasy genre is fictitious. No one, even professional soldiers, even athletes who participate in combat sports, spends a third of their life in "combat". Most of us are lucky enough that we will never be involved in a fight to the death. Fights to the death are extraordinarily rare. Even in aberrant social orders that encouraged them - like the Romans with their gladiatorial games - they wouldn't have expected a competitor to have six to eight bouts in a day! The human psyche is not built for that kind of stress! Historical and modern violence is overwhelmingly one-sided. Most military strategy since antiquity has been about avoiding wherever possible anything that might even look like a fair fight. A fair fight can go either way. A fair fight is random. If you're in a fair fight, you've messed up. But fantasy violence is a fiction about two evenly-matched sides duking it out. In reality, battles were (and are) brief, chaotic, and usually end as soon as someone is willing to stop shooting. What I'm getting at is that the "social pillar" is what most of us call "all of human existence". Even a hardened warrior will spend only brief, terrifying moments of their life in actual, physical combat. Most of it will be the same things we all do: interacting, living, navigating society. Fantasy games don't model this for the same reason they don't model gravity, going to the toilet, or eating lunch. We already know how those things work, and any gameplay expression of them is going to be necessarily hollow. Now, you can argue the same applies to fantasy social interaction - none of us know what it's like to talk to an ageless elf, or persuade an undead wizard to let us leave their fortress, or even negotiate with a monarch, which is a real thing. For that, there do tend to be mechanics to manage courtly intrigue and the like. 5E has faction rules in the DMG, and various books expand and iterate on these to support the expected gameplay experience. But you'll never find a satisfactory gameplay framework for all social interaction because it encompasses basically the entirety of human experience. So, if you need to handle it as a GM, handle it like you have to handle real life: desperately wing it and hope no one notices. [/QUOTE]
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