The Difference Between Realism vs. Believability

[Bluenose]

As a fan of 'realism' in RPGs, I found this discussion fascinating and well thought out.
For myself, I see no real difference between the two words; they are synonymous. However, in my experience when people talk about realism in RPGs they are talking primarily about game mechanics and, for lack of a better word, storyline. Often these are chaotic, hack and slash types who want to be able to do anything and look for anyway they can to get around the rules.
For storyline, I offer the following situations.
I put the party in a world where the local pasha had total power. One player, an anti-authoritarian insulted the pasha to the point that the PC was thrown in the salt mines for 10 years (essentially player death). That is realism and my rule #1: YOU are responsible for your own actions.

Amusingly, a historical Pasha simply didn't have total power. They were appointed under someone else's authority and answerable to them. All this proves is that different people know different things, and find different things realistic/unrealistic according to that knowledge.

 

[NoWayJose]

An setting may be believable in a "scientific" sense. That does not mean it follows real world's science, but that it consistently follows its own laws, laws that can be discovered by someone who lives there.
<snip>
A setting may also be ruled by laws of its genre; laws that treat it as a work of art. Indiana Jones, Star Wars or Pirates of Caribbean have very little "scientific" consistency, but are fun anyway. We don't ask how is something possible, or why a character acts as he does. We ask what is appropriate, interesting and fun in this kind of story.

Perhaps I've misunderstood or perhaps I don't know how to apply it, but I don't quite agree with the way this was worded.

I'll use the example of the recent Transformers movies. The law that alien machines can transform is an internal "scientific" law. The law that two fighting robots will utter one-liners like "Now you die, Optimus Prime" is a genre law. Neither of these bother me; I'm OK with that.

But if you were to imply that most other bits of silliness in the Transformers movies are also excused by genre laws; this is where I'd disagree. Bad plots and inconsistent character behavior is not a genre thing per se, but just lazy writing.

Then there's The Matrix. I don't question the "scientific" law that those who've taken Red Pill can escape the Matrix through a land-line telephone booth. I can accept the genre law that people can frequently outrace machine gun fire. Everything is just so well-written and well-thought-out that I am totally immersed in the experience.

I think that a "bad" unbelievable RPG game is like Transformers: entertaining but dumb and silly.

A "good" believable RPG game is like The Matrix: entertaining, well-written, clever and consistent in its internal logic.

Trying to apply scientific analysis to this kind of setting is an exercise in futility. Applying literary analysis, on other hand, works. In this kind of logic, an answer to "Why can't I trip an opponent more than once an encounter?" is "Because it would be boring if you did it all the time."

In that specific example, I think the real answer is not that it's boring to trip opponents all the time, any more than it's boring to use any at-will power over and over again. I think the answer is that the developers don't care if anyone asks the question "Why can't I trip an opponent more than once an encounter". If they did care about that, they'd either change the tripping rules (not, not to make it more complex, just different) OR offer some fluff to justify the rule (DM: "Your opponent doesn't fall for the same trick twice in a row and learns to evade your 2nd trip attempt").

As for the large picture of un/believability stemming from game rules, I'd use this analogy. In Transformers, they bring the All-Spark into the middle of a populated city and the climactic battle endangers the lives of its citizens and causes billions of dollars in damage to infrastructure. The decision to bring the All Spark to Mission City was utterly reckless and ridiculous. The internal logic is neither defensible nor relevant, really. The REASON they brought the All Spark into the city is because the writers wanted an explosive-y battle in the middle of a city, and they couldn't think of a better plot device. The question of internal logic is irrelevant because the ultimate decision was external to the fiction.

Equivalently, many metagame rules ruin the believability of the in-game experience when the metagame priorities are so high as to override the internal logic of the setting.

 

[pemerton]

Sometimes, in these discussions, I get the feeling like I'm reading literary criticism written by engineers.

Can't posrep you at this time, but truer words never were spoken!

 

[NoWayJose]

Amusingly, a historical Pasha simply didn't have total power. They were appointed under someone else's authority and answerable to them. All this proves is that different people know different things, and find different things realistic/unrealistic according to that knowledge.

He never said ALL local pashas have total power. Amusingly, the only point that has been proven is that misunderstandings and nitpicking are making this thread more complicated than it need to be.

 

[Argyle King]

Internal consistency is important; it's one of the reasons why there was a point in time where I was leaning toward becoming a D&D 4E Hater. Because of the vast difference of numbers generated by and for monsters versus numbers generated by and for PCs, the game world would at times interact very differently with the two groups. For example, a PC could easily blast through a door or a wall with even just an at-will power in many cases; however, the big bad dragon solo who was supposed to be the scourge of the land would have trouble doing so.

I've since come to realize that I was just trying to make the system do something it wasn't intended to though. 4E PCs are (I think) supposed to be the John McClains and Chuck Norrises of their world. Generally speaking, I've found that trying to mix realism into 4E doesn't turn out very well.

However, realism in a fantasy game does not have to be a bad thing. Yes, there are dragons, elves, and magic, but that doesn't mean you can't still have your fantasy grounded in realism. You can have realism in fantasy by having a fireball spell act just like any other fire once it hits; likewise, casting a lightning spell while standing in a pool of water might be a bad idea. In The Hobbit, the dragon Smaug was able to reliably fight an army - this is a level of realism injected into the setting. It seems plausible that a gigantic fire breathing monster would be hard to kill or require knowing about a specific weakness to exploit.

Action movies are a pretty good example of how fantasy can be created by exaggerating realism. As a whole, the world is realistic; the hero tends to have abilities which are exaggerated, but still seem plausible and not too world shattering. In many cases we know the hero is going to win at the end, but the story and the percieved realism of the world still manages to trick us into believing he might lose. The Punisher is a pretty good example of this; his only 'super power' is that he's good at killing. While his abilities are somewhat over the top in some cases, he generally tends to be fairly well grounded in reality; he feels pain; he has flaws; etc; etc. Conan is a very good example too; while he is easily above and beyond the ordinary swordsman, and he can reliably fight multiple opponents, he still has his limits.

Likewise -and to give another movie based example, I highly enjoyed the first Transporter movie. It had many fantastic elements, but they were interwoven with enough reality to allow my mind to accept the plausibility of things which probably couldn't happen under ordinary circumstances. However, I found Transporter 2 to be too unbelievable and too forced for me to enjoy it. In one scene, the driver simultaneously ramps the car, has it do a barrel roll in mid air, and uses a crane to remove a bomb from the bottom of his car. To me, the style of Transporter 2 was too much of a departure from the level of realism set in the first movie for me to enjoy it. I went into it expecting a certain amount of realism, and it moved too far beyond what I went into it expecting.

Expectations versus delivery is something very important to consider. I feel that part of running a successful game and keeping the players engaged involves the group deciding upon a collectively accepted level of (or lack of) realism in their game. This goes both ways.

In a super hero game that I'm currently involved in, one player went into the game expecting a power and realism level akin to something like The Watchmen; everybody else went into the game expecting a power and realism level more akin to Dragon Ball Z. As you might expect, the player who was expecting a more realistic style of game made a character who seems out of place, and he often feels underpowered compared to everyone else.

On the other end of the spectrum, I ran a fairly gritty dungeon crawl a while back. I had thought everyone was on board with what I had prepared, but one guy created a character who dumped all of his points into fighting abilities. Unfortunately for him, his character had no skills at all when it came to surviving the wild; finding food; etc. While he was totally awesome at combat, the other characters had to pretty much baby sit him when it came to doing anything other than fighting. His character actually ended up dying due to having a different idea about realism in the game than everyone else in the group had via trying to make a running jump across an immense canyon and splatting into the ground.

Take some time to sit down with your group and figure out what kind of players you have. Does Bob enjoy roleplaying? Does Dan like hack and slash? Does Ed like traps and puzzles? Does the group as a whole like certain things more than other things? This helps solve a lot of problems before they start.

If you are a player, figure out what kind of game your DM intends to run. Don't be afraid to ask questions. This usually helps you to know if something like the linguist feat will be virtually worthless or very valuable. Too often -especially in D&D- we focus on what's in the books; don't forget who's at the table.


edit: Looking back across this, I think I was rambling a little, and I drifted, but I still think there's some merit to the idea of deciding as a group what kind of game you want. Coming together and compromising as a group and reaching a level of mutually wanted realism -in my opinion- leads to more fun for everyone.

 

[DragonLancer]

Realism is accepting that something is doable in the real world by real people. For the most part this works fine in D&D and similar games.

Believability is accepting something improbable as real, such as dragons being able to fly and breathe fire, or magic. As long as there isn't anything too out there I think most people can accept such things in their games.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I think many aspects of the D&D world presented in the game texts are regarded by most readers as intended to be realistic, in the sense of operating the same way they do in our world, or our world's history.

There's air and earth and water, plants and animals and men, time, gravity, weather, human psychology, civilization, politics, cities, warfare, castles, knights, ships. All of these seem to operate the same in D&D world as they do in ours. The laws of physics are the same, until magic comes into it, which it rarely does. Although the PCs do encounter magic all the time, the world itself seems to mostly get along as if magic were not present*.

But are the laws of physics the same? Problems arise when the rules contradict this, when they tell us that a man who has acquired lots of wealth thereby gains the ability to survive a fall from a great height. When a feeble octagenarian is as quick as the most able twenty-year old, and has better eyesight and hearing.

One solution to this inconsistency is to regard the rules as taking precedence. By this interpretation the rules are the correct laws of this world, and they are different than our own, even when magic isn't involved. Another way to resolve this is to say that the rules aren't intended to simulate a whole world, just to provide playable rules for a limited game of squad level monster bashing that touches briefly on a few other areas such as travel and human interaction.

Extraordinary abilities in 3e - a troll's regeneration, a dragon's flight, a high level barbarian's damage reduction - are regarded as non-magical but only possible because the D&D world has different physics. It could be said that this supports the former view of rules but I think I'd regard them as being on the same level as magic, even tho technically they are not. Like magic, extraordinary abilities are of a fairly limited nature, possessed only by unusual (or even extraordinary) beings.

*This in itself is a whole 'nother consistency issue, dependent upon how common magic is.

 

[Scribble]

Well, for starters, I disagree with your opinion that "a game's level of realism/believability is determined primarily by things outside the rules". Or more specifically, I disagree with the possible implication that
unbelievable rules + believable fluff = believable in-game play.

I'd love to provide specifics, but I have to sleep soon (being honest, humor over).

Personally I think it's dependent on the personal preference of the player (or group of players.)

To boil it down to exaggerations I have noticed that:

Some people like the game world to be defined by the rules . If a thing is a thing in the game world it should have rules to describe it. (This group cannot have a Goblin Sharpshooter without also having rules to describe what a Goblin is, and what a Sharpshooter is. They want all elements of the rules in play to be fully defined before put into play.)

Others like to define their world first and see the rules more as a definition of a particular instance of something in the game world. (This group can have a Goblin Sharpshooter without rules to define what a Goblin is or what a Sharpshooter is. They only want what they need at the moment to be fully defined.)

It seems the latter group tends to have less of an issue with rules the former group usually call "unbelievable."

In reality though I'd say most people are a mix of the two, but tend to swing in one direction or the other.

 

[lutecius]

Personally, I don't agree with the premise that "it is impossible to overthink fantasy." […] That said, the point at which it becomes "thinking too hard" is really, really difficult to pin down, and varies by person.

precisely. even discussing D&D is nerdy and "thinking too hard" for some people. so posting just to dismiss the OP's points as nerd concerns isn't helpful.

I think there are actually two metrics of "believability": there's the pseudoscientific version in which you try to explain how a medusa's gaze works with Newtonian physics, and there's the mythic version where the gut check is "Does this sound like a logical extrapolation of a mythical or literary precedent?" These two things clash all the time.

I don't think many gamers care about the former in a fantasy setting and the latter is mostly a matter of preference and aesthetics (for example, I think fire-and-forget spell-casting is counterintuitive and unlike the magic depicted in most fiction, but I have no problem "believing" it)
believability issues are usually related to internal consistency or non-magical elements with real-world equivalents, like healing and fighting.

I just find the 'nerd' label belittling and I think there are better alternatives, like "You're thinking too hard". On the other hard, I don't think the "nerds" (I put it in quotation marks, so that's OK) are thinking too hard in this case. Anyone who reads or watches fantasy can have strong feelings about versimilitude, but only the "nerds" (again, quotation marks) spend extra time voicing their opinions about it on Enworld.

that was my point. I think.

Furthermore, it is wise and prudent for posts like the OP to be written in such an anal retentive manner. Otherwise, THEY (ie., Those Who Nitpick) will come out from dark places to attack you on semantics and derail you with devil's details. Thus the long carefully written expositions. The "nitpickers" have effectively forced the "nerds" into thinking too hard, which leads to accusations of "nerd" and "you're thinking too hard".

oh. THEM

 

[Bluenose]

He never said ALL local pashas have total power. Amusingly, the only point that has been proven is that misunderstandings and nitpicking are making this thread more complicated than it need to be.

Since there are perfectly good words which mean what Pasha is being misused to mean, one of those would certainly be preferable if you're going to be dealing with people who might now the difference. Unless of course your argument is that accept meanings of terms don't matter as long as people know what they mean in this context. This of course is why nobody would consider objecting to the term Warlord when speaking of 4e.