On the Value of "Realism"

[Reynard]

I find arguments like this easy to agree with but difficult to apply in practice. I've heard many an argument about what really is or is not realistic. And sometimes what is or is not validly fantastical is easy to agree upon, because everyone gives "proper fantasy" a margin of error that they don't give to the mundane.

It may not help, but here's an example: my current campaign is set in a "D&D-ized" post roman Britain (or "grimy Arthurian"). All the players are aware of this and on board. This is our "real like" baseline. I have a half dozen books or so on the subject (plus the internet) and we all make an effort to imagine and assess the world from that vantage point. Moreover, I've made it clear that the world works, physically, like the "real world" except when magic (or game mechanics!) says it doesn't. So, when the party is trudging along a cart path in the rain, they get wet and muddy and can't see or hear as well and therefore they (the characters) end up grumpy and watchful. When they get to town and have to deal with the local authority (be it a governor in a still "romanized" town or a chieftain in a defiantly celtic village) we refer to those archetypes (okay, stereotypes -- I am at best an armchair historian and probably more like an ottoman historian) to determine how people act and react. But there are elements that are decidedly not "real like". The Saxons and Angles haven't showed up at all yet (though they are coming) and the Picts are Half-Orcs that worship Cthulhoid entities locked beneath the world by the Irish Elves 2000 years ago. The players know this stuff (some of it because it is common knowledge, some of it because they have discovered it in play) and respond accordingly. In other words, where it is not "real like" and is something that is character-knowledge, it adds to or supplants the "real like" baseline.

Note that I think "real like" can be "unreal". If one is running a purely Arthurian game, for example, "real like" may include real world physics but the idealized "reality" of Arthurain Romance as it applies to culture and society. The same for your "bog standard" D&D campaign. Social, cultural and historical "real like" often gets short shrift, but physical and psychological "real like" can still be used as a baseline. Problems arise, I think, with settings like Dark Sun or Planescape (which are cool, no doubt) because they deviate so much from both the D&D-isms and "real like" worlds that unless your players (and the DM) are very familiar you end up with a lot of game time spent on exposition, plus the very real possibility of retro-action ("My character would know that so wouldn't do that.")

There, I think, lies the real value of "real like" -- it speeds up and supports "natural play".

 

[Rechan]

If gravity works and fire burns as it does in our world, there will be less unspoken confusion.

Except that fire doesn't burn and gravity doesn't work in the same way, given rules. Let's take a simple example: water isn't wet based on rules. If a man in full plate walks into water, and then walks back out, he has to deal with things like rust and the leather straps rotting. He should weight more because all his equipment and clothing are wet. Etc etc. But there's just no rules to reflect that; water doesn't operate the same way on things. Instead, we just handwave the minutia because it's not interesting and would slow things down.

I have multiple problems with things too close to the real world, not just in game terms, but in just assuming that things Just Are Like Our Reality. For instance, you have a player who says, "Making gunpowder is easy. I'll just make gunpowder. Now I have a bomb.. What do you mean I can't have a bomb? That's how chemistry works!" The issue is using real world knowledge in order to "beat" a situation.

Then there's the fact that real world knowledge differs from person to person, so making assumptions based on knowledge can get you into trouble. We're not talking about Gravity not working. But, let me give an example:

I was running a game where the party were in a Nevada/New Mexico like desert. They are going through a town. One of the players senses something Underground, beneath a building. The next player says, "Ooh! There must be a sinister reason for there being something underground; cellars are just not made in this sort of climate/environment!"

I just stared at the player, dumbfounded. I've always been around basements. I thought they were pretty universal. But apparently they're very regional. The player was making assumptions based on the Real World, which were wrong because I didn't know better.

Add the above point to things like genre conventions and levels of taste. Using the old example of the Fight over a River of Lava. Either the DM is ignorant to the real physics of lava and heat convection, or he's purposefully ignoring it because having a Fight over a River of Lava is cool, a convention of the genre, and he wants to capture that. So in this case the players assuming that going into the room with the lava = death, they are wrong.

 

[Reynard]

It's interesting to me that this discussion of realism doesn't incorporate mechanics at all. I dig that.

I don't find mechanics particularly useful for providing realism; I think the descriptions at the table do a lot more to make things feel "right". Mechanics are great for introducing risk, and that's what I prefer to use them for.

I agree. In fact, because mechanics for any game are necessarily abstract, the best thing one can hope for is that the mechanics stay out of the way and don't cause unnecessary breaking of suspension of disbelief. I don't really want to turn this into a mechanics discussion, so all I'll say is "hit points and falling damage".

 

[Cadfan]

It may not help, but here's an example: my current campaign is set in a "D&D-ized" post roman Britain (or "grimy Arthurian").

(snip)

Right, right... I just don't think those examples help much. I'm pretty sure that pretty much everyone plays in games where water is wet and fire is hot and hiking through the rain makes you cold and damp. If that's all realism is, then everyone's on board from the simulation fans (assuming they actually exist...) to the wildest high action superhero/fantasy gamers.

Problems crop up when you get to things that are actually contentious. How far can a person fall off of a building and expect to get up and keep fighting? Just how close can you get to lava and still be alive? If I want to knock down a cottage in which a brawl has broken out by chopping a support beam with an axe, how fast does the beam break, would the cottage actually fall, and if it did, how much would it hurt?

Few of us have personal experience or a meaningful frame of reference for questions like these. And complicating matters is the fact that many of us falsely believe that because these are questions of "realism," we not only have meaningful contributions to make to determining the answers, we, unlike those around us, in fact KNOW the objectively correct answer. And some of us continue believing this in spite of evidence to the contrary in the form of dozens of people, similarly certain of themselves, holding fast to contradictory ideas.

And then you get to the fantasy/realism issues. If its been previously established that Durok the Dwarven Legionaire is an immovable rock in battle, and he's charged by a raging bull that's sprinting at top speed right at him, does he get knocked over or pushed back or trampled? Or does he block the animal dead on with his shield? Well, there are no dwarves in real life, or at least no the D&D kind. Dwarven Legionaires, similarly thin on the ground. Real life people can't stop a charging bull by sheer force no matter how tough they are because of issues like conservation of momentum and basic physics. But this is NOT a real life person, its a heroic fantasy character with many non-real attributes, so who knows?

This is a question that touches on realism, but which is fundamentally unanswerable if you just use logic. Any attempt at logically answering the question is either going to begin with some shaky premises (like trying to objectively determine the characteristics of fantastical tunnel dwelling nonhumans), or its going to lead to more questions than it solves (if the answer is no, because its not logical for someone a dwarf's size to accomplish this, what about the dwarf's other abilities?).

I'm not taking aim at realism as a whole, because as far as it goes its great. But it only goes so far. And once you've gone there you look around and realize that you've got a lot more ground to cover. You're going to need some other kind of tool to continue onwards.

 

[Fallen Seraph]

Personally my take on realism and such is that simply, "assume it exist unless it screws up the story and feel". Basically for me any laws of the real-world or what not (even if the campaign deals with ordinary science a lot) takes a back seat to what makes the scene. So if it is scene appropriate to fit with the realism of the world then it does, if it doesn't then it doesn't. Simple as that.

 

[Henry]

One thing that seems to be getting ignored here (Rechan touched on it a little bit) is the level of realism that all players are agreeing to (or "Plausibility" is my favored word for what you're talking about). Namely, basic tenets of realism aren't as important as everyone setting the baseline for it ahead of time. Simply, all the players say, "OK, are we setting physics at Gritty-low-miracular? Pulp Novel level miracular? Silver Age DC MIracular? What?" and then they ensure they are in sync.

I have been finding, as noted, that my suspension of disbelief is drastically altered with the more I know about a subject. I'll not balk at some medical drama where they get all the terms dead-wrong and all the tests take 45 minutes to finish, but I'll roll my eyes and smile politely when (for the sake of story) Angelina Jolie in HACKERS looks like she's flying through the Matrix when she's supposedly using 1990's-era Unix.

I wonder if doctors have the same kind of "harder suspension of disbelief" problem when they look at someone who's gone to 0 or -9 hit points in D&D and healed back up to full in a few days or weeks' time? I suspect the proverbial devil is in the details - the more you know, the tougher it gets to call it "believeable physics."

 

[amysrevenge]

I suspect the proverbial devil is in the details - the more you know, the tougher it gets to call it "believeable physics."

You might just be right. I'm an engineer (still in academia even), and I know a fair bit about how the world works. Any game is going to blow my sense of reality.

However, I find that this has a different effect than you are suggesting. For me, since it's not "real" anyway, I can totally handle pretty much any level of fudging with the laws of physics you throw at me.

I'm not going to quibble about how long it takes to fall to the ground from a griffon mount that could never fly anyway, even without you riding it, with its huge girth and tiny wing span.

I'm happy to accept a -4 penalty to Athletics to swim while wearing plate armor and a huge shield and a great honking sword (that weighs a lot more than a real sword of that size should by a factor or 2-3) that all combined weigh enough that you are not bouyant at all and should sink to the bottom in seconds.

Hit points? Fine by me.

Turn-based combat, rather than real-time/simultaneous actions? No problem. (From my perspective, going turn-based for combat makes the whole system so un-real that any other thing is too minor to care about in comparison.)

 

[Ariosto]

This is pretty much the thrust of the 1st ed. AD&D DMG's page 21 ("The Monster as Player Character").

One fundamental law of physics is that matter cannot be either created or destroyed.

Strictly speaking, that is inaccurate; E=MC^2, and all that. However, relativistic and quantum-mechanical phenomena are pretty much beyond the realm of experience that contributes to "common sense". It is that sense, I think, that demands great respect in this regard. Even the clearly magical can have an internal consistency that aids simultaneously suspension of disbelief, the GM's ability to adjudicate, and the players' ability to make reasonable inferences.

Except that fire doesn't burn and gravity doesn't work in the same way, given rules. Let's take a simple example: water isn't wet based on rules.

If you're going to "rules lawyer" everything that isn't in a game book, then I think you miss one of the reasons for having a GM! The book simply cannot be a substitute even for the Encyclopedia Brittanica, much less for every ounce of common sense. If it matters that someone is soaking wet, then you can bet your booty I'll take it into account!

 

[Ariosto]

(From my perspective, going turn-based for combat makes the whole system so un-real that any other thing is too minor to care about in comparison.)

There are always compromises, but Igo-Hugo with individual initiative a la WotC's games is just so darned slooow!

Sometimes, speedier play is what matters most -- and if it happens also to be in some way more realistic, then that's icing on the cake.

 

[Lanefan]

There are a few ways in which the mechanics can help reflect realism a bit more without too much extra clutter.

Turn-based is one. Now, what I'm suggesting doesn't play well in 3e (don't know about 4e) because d20+modifiers initiative is too big, but for 0-1-2e it's pretty easy to put initiative on a d6 and *re-roll every round* to reflect the randomness of combat. And if several things happen simultaneously on a '3', well so be it.

In 3e, allowing interrupting or simultaneous actions sort of accomplishes the same thing. Take the following situation:

You've got a river with woods (and thus, cover) on both sides. There's an open bridge. Bad guys are crossing the bridge and we, the party, are hiding in the trees trying to shoot them as they cross; occasionally, some of them shoot at us to keep our heads down. This makes it a combat, thus we're on a turn-based clock.

By the book, unless the DM allows simultaneous actions, we can't shoot them when they have no cover as they cross the bridge! Say I'm one of the archers. My turn comes up, but there's no-one on the bridge to shoot (as it's my turn, it's not the turn of any of the enemy, so they're all safe under cover and not moving). So my action is to hold my shot until someone's on the bridge where I can see him...and a bad guy's turn then comes up and his move action is to cross the bridge. Well, if my held action puts my init. just ahead of his, he hasn't started moving yet and still has cover...and if it puts my init. just behind his, he's already across the bloody bridge and now has cover on the other side! For this to work, I have to be able to act simultaneously with his move; but the rules say I can't, and that is completely unrealistic.

Same thing comes up if two people want to move simultaneously in combat; my own example from a game I was in was a situation where some of us charged in to start a combat while two of us had held back hoping to sneak in on the enemy under cover of a Silence effect centered on me. Buddy held his action until mine so we could move together, but by the book we still could not do it - the turn-based rules dictated one of us had to finish moving before the other could start, thus there was no way we could run in together under Silence.

Now obviously a DM can overrule this (though I did lose the Silence argument), but wouldn't it be better to simply allow simultaneous actions in the first place? And think of the tactical and swashbuckling options to be had if characters could plan to act simultaneously ...

Another easy mechanical way to reflect reality is to put anything random on a bell curve (i.e. rolling more than one die in combination to resolve it) rather than a line (rolling one die), as that's how just about all random things in reality work - on a bell curve. It messes with the other math of the game - bonuses etc. have to be completely rethought - but it might be worth it. Hit point rolls are one obvious and easy thing to do this with...instead of rolling a d8, roll 2d4.

Lan-"what is it about this thread that attracts all these long posts?"-efan