On Behavioral Realism

[pemerton]

The second part, immersion, is when a player desires to live a second life. They don't want to play D&D, they want to live it. Therefore, mundane stuff is welcome to them. They want to describe their baths and how they eat and experience a world that reacts to those small details.

In the case that players don't want to engage with that, fine. Let them not be engaged. That's how they have fun. However, it would be unfortunate if the DM never gave the players a chance to try the more immersive side. That's why I ask about the finer details, even if they didn't have anything special prepared for the scenario.

I don't think @Reynard is asking for advice on how to increase immersion by increasing narrations of bathtime. Apart from anything else, you can immerse just as easily in the look and smell and sound of the dragon you're slaying, so bathing has nothing special to offer on this front.

Reynard seems to be asking how to make the fiction of the PCs' lives more closely resemble real human lives. I think the answer is therefore to look at how your game generates fiction and what sorts of fiction matter to it. And this doesn't have to be done in the abstract. There are actually many, many easily-available RPGs that have solved the problem Reynard describes.

 

[John Dallman]

A friend and I were talking about how to run a successful game focused on treasure hunting in 5e ...

I think you're starting off on the wrong foot with your game theme. If the core activity is abstract and unrealistic, you're requiring the players to shift the way they play to consider more personal details.

How do you try and encourage players to play like "real" people, who just want a bath after a sewer expedition or are willing to throw away half their earnings to impress the bartender?

The way you do that, IME, is to have the filth from the sewer be part of the characters' experience. I recall an AD&D1e setting where the DM didn't harp on the characters being dirty, tired and hungry, but he did keep you aware of it. So when we reached a town that was well set up to offer luxury to PCs, they took it up enthusiastically.

It may have helped that the prices, while high in terms of the mundane economy, weren't large chunks of the characters' resources. It wasn't a matter of spending all the money that we'd normally expect to spend on replenishing healing potions; we might have nibbled into that a bit, but we weren't making future adventuring appreciably more dangerous for ourselves.

"Throwing away half your earnings to impress the barman" or gambling with lots of money is more challenging. I've never felt the slightest urge to do such things personally, and most of my characters are fairly cautious people who've come by money through dangerous work, and don't want to lose it all.

 

[Sadras]

But I'm not sure that introducing a new condition, and more generally establishing benefits for washing, eating well, etc, will make the game less gamist. It just seems to be establishing new avenues for tactical play.

You may be right. Now I'm curious if I am approaching this incorrectly, how does one make an RPG less gamist?

 

[Reynard]

I think you're starting off on the wrong foot with your game theme. If the core activity is abstract and unrealistic, you're requiring the players to shift the way they play to consider more personal details.

Doing dangerous, thrilling work for money (and the potential for loads of it) is not abstract or unrealistic. People do it every day in the real world. There are still adventurers and thrill seekers out there, not to mention straight up mercenaries and actual, for real treasure hunters.The nature of it in a typical D&D campaign is different -- holes full of monsters rather than trying to steal antiquities from civil war ravaged nations, but it's not like, say, superheroing where there is no legitimate modern equivalent a player can hang their roleplay hat on.

The way you do that, IME, is to have the filth from the sewer be part of the characters' experience. I recall an AD&D1e setting where the DM didn't harp on the characters being dirty, tired and hungry, but he did keep you aware of it. So when we reached a town that was well set up to offer luxury to PCs, they took it up enthusiastically.

It may have helped that the prices, while high in terms of the mundane economy, weren't large chunks of the characters' resources. It wasn't a matter of spending all the money that we'd normally expect to spend on replenishing healing potions; we might have nibbled into that a bit, but we weren't making future adventuring appreciably more dangerous for ourselves.

"Throwing away half your earnings to impress the barman" or gambling with lots of money is more challenging. I've never felt the slightest urge to do such things personally, and most of my characters are fairly cautious people who've come by money through dangerous work, and don't want to lose it all.

Most of the people I have known in real life that make their living as thrillseekers of one sort or another were not planning long term with their pay.

 

[Reynard]

Reynard seems to be asking how to make the fiction of the PCs' lives more closely resemble real human lives. I think the answer is therefore to look at how your game generates fiction and what sorts of fiction matter to it. And this doesn't have to be done in the abstract. There are actually many, many easily-available RPGs that have solved the problem Reynard describes.

Just to be clear, I am not hoping for a game to be focused on these things, just that they exist in play, giving the fantasy that is the heroes' lives a more grounded feel even while they are raiding tombs full of screeching spirits in search of magic boots and whatnot. I like the quiet moments between battles where the human comes out, and I like heroes that display complex humanity. I like when mundane needs end up driving fantastic moments -- think of the brownies in Willow "We stole the baby while you were taking a peepee!"

The purpose of the thread was to get ideas on how to encourage that thing in players that tend to take a more practical approach to their roleplaying.

 

[BrokenTwin]

Ryuutama would be a good example for how to add mechanical incentives to taking care of your character's comfort levels. Simply put, you make a 'condition' check once a day that's modified by the available creature comforts. Indulging in luxuries makes it easier to pass the check, and scoring high enough on the check actually gives your character a bonus for the day.
Granted, I think it would be easier to just use a system with these concepts build in and balanced around rather than trying to shoehorn them into a completely different system, but hey, if you're attached to whatever system you're currently using, then do what you can.

 

[Campbell]

Just to be clear, I am not hoping for a game to be focused on these things, just that they exist in play, giving the fantasy that is the heroes' lives a more grounded feel even while they are raiding tombs full of screeching spirits in search of magic boots and whatnot. I like the quiet moments between battles where the human comes out, and I like heroes that display complex humanity. I like when mundane needs end up driving fantastic moments -- think of the brownies in Willow "We stole the baby while you were taking a peepee!"

The purpose of the thread was to get ideas on how to encourage that thing in players that tend to take a more practical approach to their roleplaying.

I think the most basic thing is just making fictional positioning matter more. Someone who lives in squalor, subsists off of the wilds near town, leaves their weapons and armor in disrepair, and always seems beaten down by life is unlikely to be well regarded as an upstanding part of society. Have the people in their lives, even if just a local barmaid express concern for them. Maybe some NPCs will refuse to speak to them until they bathe.

Do not do this to punish them. Make it have an impact. Make it a choice.

 

[pemerton]

You may be right. Now I'm curious if I am approaching this incorrectly, how does one make an RPG less gamist?

Well that's a big question! But you won't be shocked by my thoughts on it - reduce the emphasis on win/loss conditions; increase the emphasis on (i) the fiction of the situation, and (ii) consequences/"fail forward" so that the outcome of those situations is mostly encountered in the form of more fiction rather than winning or losing.

So in the example I posted upthread of the drug-addicted PC who lost his house and status as a result, of course the PC was losing and suffering but for the player the gameplay was going on, he still had actions to declare for his PC that mattered to the shared fiction, etc. So to use a really crude comparison, it wasn't at all like being dropped to zero hp in the typical D&D combat.

 

[pemerton]

Just to be clear, I am not hoping for a game to be focused on these things, just that they exist in play, giving the fantasy that is the heroes' lives a more grounded feel even while they are raiding tombs full of screeching spirits in search of magic boots and whatnot. I like the quiet moments between battles where the human comes out, and I like heroes that display complex humanity. I like when mundane needs end up driving fantastic moments -- think of the brownies in Willow "We stole the baby while you were taking a peepee!"

The purpose of the thread was to get ideas on how to encourage that thing in players that tend to take a more practical approach to their roleplaying.

Yes. I understand all this. And as I said, there are RPGs that have solved this problem - Classic Traveller and RuneQuest would be two of the classics. Probably anything PbtA, Burning Wheel, and Cortex+ are just some of the modern games that manage this.

So I think that rather than approaching the question purely abstractly, or from unexamined D&D premises, it's better to ask what those games have actually done to deal with the issue.

EDIT: And to reiterate what @Campbell has said, paying attention to the fiction is part of it. I would say not just fictional positioning (though that's important) but also consequences and orientation of play. If all the actual fiction of play unfolds as if the real, mundane world doesn't exist and doesn't matter - if "life" is just colour and backdrop - then it's no surprise that players don't engage with it.

 

[GrahamWills]

A friend and I were talking about how to run a successful game focused on treasure hunting in 5e and it led to a discussion on how players rarely seem to do things that real people do. The example that came up was the classic Inn situation: the PCs have been in the wild and the dungeon for a week or two and they finally come back to civilization, but when presented with prices for a room, a bath and a meal they decide to camp outside and eat rations to save money.

... Even players that are very good role players from a funny voices and defined personality standpoint generally, in my experience, don't do tired, sick, afraid, horny, fed up, etc... well.

... How do you try and encourage players to play like "real" people, who just want a bath after a sewer expedition or are willing to throw away half their earnings to impress the bartender?

Interesting. This is quite different from my experiences with a number of groups. It may be that your group has a strongly gamist slant — they get their fun from working with the rules and optimizing the in-game success of their characters. My group has a lot of theater people and we have the opposite problem; players get annoyed by rules that don’t let them develop the narrative they are looking for.

funny you should mention baths, because they have been quite prominent in our campaigns. I’ve seen a high-level wizard so happy to have a bath he sent his familiar on the next adventure (scrying and casting through him for about a session) so he could have another one. My secret agents were seriously ticked when they had to live undercover in a hotel so cheap it didn’t have baths. I’ve also run some anime style games and hot baths are a trope there.

If your group gets its fun by playing the rules, I’d suggest not fighting it. Add some rules that give bonuses for ‘realistic’ behavior — social check modifiers; protection against disease, etc. but in general, if that’s the game your players like, roll with it. A game doesn’t have to be realistic to be the best possible game for any given group!