D&D General So, you want realism in D&D?

[Maxperson]

Pretty sure that origin was deprecated and completely sure that it only appeared during the 5e playtest, not 4e. And it was deprecated specifically because it has some seriously crappy implications.

From the 5e PHB

"Shaped by draconic gods or the dragons themselves, dragonborn originally hatched from dragon eggs as a unique race, combining the best attributes of dragons and humanoids."

4e dragonborn, no one knows their exact origin. It's an open question answered by ideologically charged mythology, not perfectly known history. (In brief: some say they were made from whole cloth, either as servants to dragons, predecessors to dragons, or equal but distinct siblings; some say they formed by direct and accidental creation when Io's blood fell to the earth; some say they were made from dragons by divine alteration, or conversely that dragons were made from them by divine alteration.)

I don't know about 4e.

It absolutely is. Also, I'm not talking about "I find X to be realistic in fictional setting A and unrealistic in fictional setting B," I'm talking about "I am totally cool with dragons, which violate several basic rules of biology, physics, and plain common sense, but having humans who can do things that aren't even on par with Olympic level athletes is COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE IN ALL CASES, and you are OBJECTIVELY WRONG if you disagree because SCIENCE says so." Even when it doesn't.

Dragons have inherent magic that allows them to do those things. And I've never seen someone complain about a human doing things that a normal earth human athlete can do. I DO see people say that a mundane Fighter shouldn't be able to split a large boulder with a single weapon strike, though.

See my referenced example of how "unrealistic" it is to have both full plate armor and handheld gunpowder weapons (or indeed ANY form of gunpowder weaponry like cannons) in the same game....even though handguns may actually predate plate armor IRL (they were certainly contemporaries) and gunpowder cannons DEFINITELY predate full plate.

I don't see the point of that. Your post containing gunpowder and plate armor isn't one of realism, rather it's all about attempts to mirror reality, which isn't what realism is about. Also, error or ignorance about what is possible in the real world isn't a realism issue. It's a player/DM issue. So even if someone does argue that plate armor came first and is wrong, so what. That's not a mark against realism.

Realism is about things like wanting falling damage to be more deadly, not about figuring out just how much damage a human body in the real world would take if it fell 5 stories onto dirt, or about when terminal velocity is reached.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

From the 5e PHB

"Shaped by draconic gods or the dragons themselves, dragonborn originally hatched from dragon eggs as a unique race, combining the best attributes of dragons and humanoids."

I don't know about 4e.

Dragons have inherent magic that allows them to do those things. And I've never seen someone complain about a human doing things that a normal earth human athlete can do. I DO see people say that a mundane Fighter shouldn't be able to split a large boulder with a single weapon strike, though.

I don't see the point of that. Your post containing gunpowder and plate armor isn't one of realism, rather it's all about attempts to mirror reality, which isn't what realism is about. Also, error or ignorance about what is possible in the real world isn't a realism issue. It's a player/DM issue. So even if someone does argue that plate armor came first and is wrong, so what. That's not a mark against realism.

Realism is about things like wanting falling damage to be more deadly, not about figuring out just how much damage a human body in the real world would take if it fell 5 stories onto dirt, or about when terminal velocity is reached.

Yeah not gonna get drawn into this sort of thing again. I've played the definition game with you way too many times now. Your definitions are your own, as you have amply proved in the past, and there is literally no point discussing it.

 

[Maxperson]

Yeah not gonna get drawn into this sort of thing again. I've played the definition game with you way too many times now. Your definitions are your own, as you have amply proved in the past, and there is literally no point discussing it.

Dragons having inherent magic is from the Sage Advice. Realism as I stated it in that post means is what quite literally how everyone I've talked to on this forum(and the old D&D forum) that likes/wants it uses the term. It's those arguing against it that repeatedly try to make it mean "Must mirror reality!!!!!!" in order to try and knock down our arguments. Strawmen aren't going to work to defeat our position.

 

[Oofta]

When it comes to gunpowder I never had much of an issue with it not existing. D&D is not in any way a historical simulation.

There are innumerable reasons gunpowder may not exist (at least not commonly).

• Chemistry works slightly different and gunpowder simply doesn't work.
• It works, but because it's unstable simple spells can cause it to explode prematurely.
• Fire mephits love the taste of gunpowder and will do almost anything to get it.
• Early gunpowder weapons were more about the flash, bang and noise than anything. Spells already have that covered so it was never pursued.
• It exists, use the rules for muskets from the DMG.

I'm sure there are other logical explanations. In a world with magic, gods and dragons, I wouldn't expect things to be exactly the same.

 

[Maxperson]

When it comes to gunpowder I never had much of an issue with it not existing. D&D is not in any way a historical simulation.

There are innumerable reasons gunpowder may not exist (at least not commonly).

• Chemistry works slightly different and gunpowder simply doesn't work.
• It works, but because it's unstable simple spells can cause it to explode prematurely.
• Fire mephits love the taste of gunpowder and will do almost anything to get it.
• Early gunpowder weapons were more about the flash, bang and noise than anything. Spells already have that covered so it was never pursued.
• It exists, use the rules for muskets from the DMG.

I'm sure there are other logical explanations. In a world with magic, gods and dragons, I wouldn't expect things to be exactly the same.

Not everything gets discovered. It could be that gunpowder just never was. When you view the fantasy aspect of the game, perhaps plate armor was a secret given to the races by the gods and gunpowder wasn't. That's would explain why plate has come first.

The game as you note, isn't supposed to be a historical simulation or model reality. People arguing that realism = modeling reality are not discussing the same thing as the rest of us, so their posts will generally be fruitless except when talking to other people engaging in the same incorrect position.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Without gunpowder, there are insufficient explosions. You can't always wait for a wizard for your boom.

Gunpowder, TNT and of course, delicious, tension creating nitro--all on the table for me.

Jumping tech forward makes for all sorts of fun--like introducing your players to carbonated milk, mincepies of candied fruit and actual minced meat, and of course the unmitigated sadness that is hardtack. And that's just the food.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Not everything gets discovered. It could be that gunpowder just never was. When you view the fantasy aspect of the game, perhaps plate armor was a secret given to the races by the gods and gunpowder wasn't. That's would explain why plate has come first.

The game as you note, isn't supposed to be a historical simulation or model reality. People arguing that realism = modeling reality are not discussing the same thing as the rest of us, so their posts will generally be fruitless except when talking to other people engaging in the same incorrect position.

I never worry about whether gunpowder should exist or not. I like it, so it exists.

 

[Maxperson]

I never worry about whether gunpowder should exist or not. I like it, so it exists.

Hah! And I don't, so it doesn't.

 

[gamerprinter]

Str 8 (it might have been 12, 40 years ago)
Int 15 (3 points short of 150, and eccentric, do I round up or down?)
Wis 0 (I'm a game author/designer/publisher/cartographer/artist - this is all I do, aside from living)
Dex 5
Con Unknown epic score (I never missed a day of high school until Senior skip day, and then only missed 1 day in 4 years; I ran my graphic design studio for 22 years, and never missed a day of work, including actually being pretty sick for a week, and sleeping in a back room, and getting up to take care of customers, so even those weren't days off. Now I work from home, no such thing as a day off).
Chr 12

And no I don't need realism in my game. I like nuanced settings, and tying it close to reality in the setting is a good idea for depth and immersion, however, the mechanics needn't be realistic, just fair and usable within the body of the total rules.

As far as gunpowder goes, honestly, I don't care for it in the majority of fantasy games I play. On the other hand, I have a shelved Weird West setting I was working on 6 years ago, that I need to return to (next year maybe), and because it's set on 19th century Earth, post Civil War, so of course gunpowder weapons dominate in the setting, both ball & cap, and cartridge pistols, rifles and shot guns - Bowie knives and swords as well native used bow & arrow still exist. So given the right setting, I'm all for gunpowder. In my fantasy games I prefer earlier medieval even dark age settings, rather than rennaissance or later. (Of course I do Starfinder now, so far future, I'm fine with too, preference wise.)

 

[Lanefan]

I mostly agree, though I think treating magic as part of the world’s physics can end up sucking the, well, magic out of it. Part of what makes magic magical is that it’s beyond understanding - if it works by totally coherent, consistent, physics-like laws, it’s just fantasy science.

For magic, fantasy science is exactly what I'm after, in part because it's already a known thing that when you cast spell X using components and incantations and motions A B and C you always get result Y; with the only variable being in some cases how much Y you get (e.g. the variability of damage dice rolls or range or whatever; or whether the target resists the spell). Cast Haste on someone, they're gonna speed up by J amount for K length of time, every time. Cast Flaming Sphere and you're gonna get a ball of fire you can roll around at your will for a fixed amount of time. Cast Warp Wood and a certain volume of wood is gonna twist. Etc.

And that ironclad consistency of results for every successful casting of a given spell no matter who does it implies strongly enough to outright prove, at least to me, that there's a consistent in-game physics and science behind it.

Magic needs some mysticism, some unpredictability, to really feel like magic. At least, to me.

In order to achieve that you'd need to rewrite every spell in the book to make it somewhat less certain what will happen when someone casts it. Or, taken to the extreme, there would be no spells as such; instead you-as-caster decide how much oomph you're going to put into it (i.e. what level slot you're using) and just cast what amounts to a wild magic surge every time.

Me, I just have wild surges happen (sometimes) if a casting is interrupted or a magic item is broken or magic is released in any other way it wasn't intended to be. That alone seems unpredictable enough, 'specially when casting is much more easily interrupted in my game than in RAW 5e.