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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Galloglaich" data-source="post: 4742337" data-attributes="member: 77019">Thats funny, because I actually find the opposite to be the case. In my opinion, a realistic system can allow the rules to be more in the background.  DnD 3.5 could hardly be called a realistic game by any stretch of the imagination, I think a lot of it's high-complexity comes from trying to tweak a system based on an artificial faux medieval Universe with an almost irreconcilable mish=mash of elements without any connection to historical reality or recognizable literary genres.   By comparison, when I play Call of Cthulhu, I almost never think about the rules, (other than my SAN points). The genre is an extremely realistic, highly detailed historical background, onto which are layered distinct Lovecreaft mythos elements (and a few non-existent towns). As a player, I'm thinking about the last clue we just found, whether an NPC we met is part of a dangerous cult, of staying one step ahead of the law etc., not the rules. If I decide to climb on a window ledge, I know it will involve a relatively simple die roll with fairly realistic odds of success, and if I fall, I can predict what will happen based on my experiences of real life (i.e. I'm in trouble). There is this really persistent myth that realistic = complex, and unrealistic=simple. Thats a completely false dichotomy. Whether your system is based on a historical world or a completely new made up one isn't even necessarily related to the level of abstraction. The real problem with some 'realistic' systems in the past is a lot of game designers didn't do much research about things like martial arts or weapons, physiology or animals, or history, so when they do tried to make something realistic tend to make poorly educated guesses about reality based on re-hashed research done 30 years ago. And nothing fits together very well as a result. I find that people tend to use the excuse that it's fantasy and not meant to be realistic to cover poorly thought out, randomly fluctuating game environments that tend to become more rather than less complex over time as they get patched together like a rube-goldeberg machine in a doomed effort to achieve some kind of consistency. G.</blockquote>

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