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<blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9575107" data-attributes="member: 7026594">Yuuup.&nbsp; This sort of thing is (and used to be moreso) endemic in the hobby.&nbsp; To the level of &quot;fish have no word for water&quot;.&nbsp; It's such an unquestioned assumption for a lot of folks.You can see it in RPG marketing all through the 70s and 80s and into the 90s, pitching how &quot;realistic&quot; games are, as a selling point.&nbsp; By which I think they mean a) that how the rules model things that exist in the real world looks a lot like how they DO work in the real world, or close enough to feel intuitive in their outcomes, and b) that the game is inherently a physics engine, for simulating a world.&nbsp; Rather than the prime priorities being to be a fun game to play and to create satisfying stories.Gary in his comments in the 1979 DMG was already reacting against the constraints of this design philosophy, but it's definitely one of the major assumptions of a lot of RPG design, and you see it in (of course) the zine and hobbyist discussions documented in The Elusive Shift and elsewhere.And I think that it really does originate in that &quot;shift&quot; from wargames (which, at least for historical ones, really WERE trying to simulate real things and have as realistic a set of rules as possible) to role-playing games, where the priority was no longer historical simulation but exciting adventure and satisfying and dramatic character interaction.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Mannahnin, post: 9575107, member: 7026594"] Yuuup. This sort of thing is (and used to be moreso) endemic in the hobby. To the level of "fish have no word for water". It's such an unquestioned assumption for a lot of folks. You can see it in RPG marketing all through the 70s and 80s and into the 90s, pitching how "realistic" games are, as a selling point. By which I think they mean a) that how the rules model things that exist in the real world looks a lot like how they DO work in the real world, or close enough to feel intuitive in their outcomes, and b) that the game is inherently a physics engine, for simulating a world. Rather than the prime priorities being to be a fun game to play and to create satisfying stories. Gary in his comments in the 1979 DMG was already reacting against the constraints of this design philosophy, but it's definitely one of the major assumptions of a lot of RPG design, and you see it in (of course) the zine and hobbyist discussions documented in [I]The Elusive Shift[/I] and elsewhere. And I think that it really does originate in that "shift" from wargames (which, at least for historical ones, really WERE trying to simulate real things and have as realistic a set of rules as possible) to role-playing games, where the priority was no longer historical simulation but exciting adventure and satisfying and dramatic character interaction. [/QUOTE]

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