Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8680123" data-attributes="member: 4937">So, the first thing you should be asking is, "Why do I believe this?  What is simulating of reality for?  What good is it?"There are several possible answers to that.1) A game that is similar to reality except where its conceits are specifically called out (things like "There are large flying firebreathing lizards.") is one in which players can make natural propositions with some expectations that they can predict the results of their propositions.  The less like reality your game is on a casual level, the harder it is to play because the player's expectations about cause and effect will be wrong and they'll not understand how to accomplish their intended goals.  This is "casual realism".  The results of interacting with your game world are close enough to realistic that they are familiar.2) Another reason to simulate reality is reality has depth and feels real and believable and immersive.  Simulating reality is the easiest way to bring the game to life such that the players are interacting with it emotionally and logically as if it was real, and for a lot of players that's a compelling and rewarding aesthetic of play.  If you have hard gamist construct like what you see in something like World of Warcraft, where difficulty is strongly silo'd into regions of balanced encounters then there are limits imposed on how much you can believe in that world.  Either you have to accept at all times the unreality of the world or you have to except at all times the unreality of game constructs (that is, you have to accept that level 20 bears are exactly as powerful as level 72 bears, and that the game numbers have no relationship to the world they ostensibly describe and can't be used to make predictions about how the world will behave).  3) A third reason might be that you are actually simulating a historical reality and not a fantasy.  However, all that said, there are a lot of reasons for eschewing realism because ultimately realism doesn't prove to be fun.  Realistically speaking, interesting things shouldn't be happening to the PCs at all.  The PC's live lives that are unrealistically exciting and filled with interesting events.  Things happen to them all the time, or else you are going to be in a situation where you have a slice of life RPG about the trials of being an ordinary miller's son that never has anything more adventurous come his way than an ale and a smart mouthed farmer boy looking for trouble.  What typically you actually want is just enough realism to suspend the player's disbelief.  As long as the player isn't taken out of the moment by the realization of how unreal everything is, you are good.  I'm old enough to remember the fetishization of realism in design discussions from the mid 80's through the early 90's.  In the early days of RPG design, realism was often treated as the solution to whatever ailed or seemed to ail an RPG or gameplay.  If the rules didn't seem to be working, there was an impulse to say that this was because they weren't realistic enough.  If the table wasn't having fun, there was an impulse to say that it was because the game wasn't realistic enough.  Lots of effort went into creating game constructs that met people's expectations of realism, right up to and including processes of play that looked like solving word problems in a physics or engineering class.  And those assumptions that realism would fix the issues really weren't questioned much until we had systems taking those ideas to their logical conclusion and we started to realism that by and large not only did they not fix the problems that they were intended to fix, but they weren't necessarily any more realistic and often we were gaining nothing by being "realistic".   The effort was in fact a waste.And quite frankly, I just disagree with the principle you've laid out here.  A good GM always, always, always has his finger on the scale to tilt the situation in the PC's favor ever so slightly in some regard.  A good GM never hits the players with no win scenarios intentionally.  If you are doing that, you have lost your way and your motives are questionable.  Now, the players may find way to dig themselves holes they can't get out of, and if they do you aren't responsible for always or necessarily ever rescuing them.  But there's no skill involved in hitting players with no win scenarios.  It's zero skill GMing because as a GM you have infinite resources, so challenging the players is never a difficult to do that requires a bunch of skill, and it never shows off your skill as a GM to challenge the players.  The skill is demonstrated by making something fair and challenging, where the player knows you aren't using a lot of force but still presenting difficult problems to solve.In the case of impossibly hard encounters, the skillful GM is always got a flashing neon arrow pointing to the way out and providing fun for tucking your tail between your legs and retreating.  In the case of death traps, the skillful GM always is telegraphing, "My god man, look at the bones!" so that if players want to push the big red button despite all the warnings not to, that's on them and they'll know it.  One of the surest signs you've lost your way as GM is you start fantasizing about how much in awe the players are going to be of the terrible thing you are going to present to them.  In fact, probably avoid spending too much time fantasizing about how a future encounter is going to go EXCEPT for thinking it through to make it balanced and interesting.Remember, if you are talking about game design this even goes beyond good GMing.  You have to as a game designer explain to your audience how to play your game in a way that is going to be functional and fun.  And that means essentially treating unbalanced encounters as an exception case and providing guidelines for how you run them in a way that they are fun.  For example, one of my campaign ideas that I've always wanted to run involves the town the PC's are in getting attacked by an impossibly high CR ancient red dragon, that they have no chance against at all.  The PC's are essentially ordinary inhabitants of Laketown when Smaug attacks.  And the start of the adventure is not fighting the dragon, but dealing with the consequences of a town on fire, buildings collapsing, livestock and people panicking and all that other mundane but exciting hazards that is in the scale of what starting PC's can handle, while the dragon is doing it's thing in the background and defeating and eating the town's BDH's.  But if I ran that encounter as, "A dragon flies up to you and breathes fire, take 15d10 damage save for half", that's not the start of a campaign.  That's not fun.  And that's not high skill GMing (unless the PC's are meant in the game to play as ghosts or petitioners in the afterlife, neither of which is something I'd expect a novice to pull off without considerable help from a designer).</blockquote>

Verification