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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 6284207" data-attributes="member: 5143">I'll have to disagree.  I've definitely played some games I found believable.  There's always going to be moments that bring you out of that, but for the most part it suceeded.  Though the difference between believable and enough suspension of disbelief to become immersed in the story are pretty much the same thing in my eyes, so the point is moot.Yet detailed rules on these sorts of things are boring and make the game no fun in a lot of cases.  I love Champions/Hero System like crazy because it is one of the only games that attempts the "rules for everything" concept.  However, my last 2 or 3 attempts to play it as a system have ended the same way: with people bored out of their minds that we have so many rules with so much detail about everything.  Most players, I've found, would much rather the DM make a quick decision and get on with the game than rolling hundreds of dice to check for things like penetration and size of the hole created when someone attacks a wall.Why would you expect players to assume that walls are solid in absence of any other rules?  If they aren't meant to model reality then players should expect no such thing.  Rock walls made of tissue paper might be normal in this world.  The reason they'd expect rock walls to act like rock is because all players assume, in the absence of rules, that the game will model reality.  It's ingrained into them.  When you say "the walls are made of rock", that means something to people.  In fact, it means hundreds of things to people.  Words come with baggage and expectations because of our experiences in real life.When rules disagree with those expectations they cause a disconnect and cause people to laugh as you mention above.  Technically, modeling reality creates verisimilitude given that it is a synonym for "realism" and it's definition is "the appearance of being real".  People judge how much something has "the appearance of being real" based on how closely it matches their experience of real life.Here's kind of the point of what I was trying to say.  There's no way entirely around this.  You want to minimize it because it's an issue.  However, it's impossible for the rules to cover everything, even with a million pages there would still be cases where the DM was making up new rules on the fly in weird corner cases.  And that's assuming the game is fun anymore with all those rules.The key is the need to find a balance between the two extremes.  Enough rules that the DM isn't constantly forced to wing it and cause this issue.  However, you don't want too many rules that can make simple actions at the table take minutes to resolve.Plus, a number of times a rule can get in the way of what people expect to see.  For instance, if you have a rule that says a stone wall can take 50 damage to get through per inch of thickness and you have a game with a drill designed to drill through stone.  It stands to reason that this drill either has to do 50 points of damage or you need a new rule for just this drill.  A 50 damage drill might suddenly become the most powerful weapon in the game....on the other hand, if you make up a rule specific to this drill you need to write it down which makes the rules take up more space, makes them harder to understand, remember, and find.I believe the goal of the game rules should be to apply to the most common scenarios so that the majority of the time you don't need the DM to come up with rules on the fly while still leaving room for the DM to make quick on-the-fly rulings for situations that don't come up that often or don't fit in perfectly with the rules.Here's where I have to heavily disagree.  The vast majority of people will expect that the rules of reality will be applied over the rules in most cases.  If I take a bunch of people who have never played D&D before and have them sit down at a table and I say "The man tells you a story about the time he jumped out of a window 10 feet above the ground and landed and rolls then got up and ran down the street", I bet not a single person bats their eyes.The only time that this discussion comes up at all is with a bunch of really heavily invested hardcore RPG players.  They are the ones who will say "He took 1d6 points of damage when he fell so he doesn't have 1 hitpoint.  That is for sure or he would have died when he jumped out of the window."Normal people think "He didn't hurt himself when he jumped out of the window because he landed correctly not to do any damage to his ankle or legs."I believe it should be an RPGs goal to simulate that second thing so that players don't have to worry about whether the first thing.True.  But it's all we have.  Remove reality as a common factor and we have no basis for understanding each other at all other than the rules.  It's still impossible for rules to cover everything so in those circumstances that aren't covered by the rules, you're back to having no common factor at all.Although reality can be heavily based on our perceptions, it is still better than having nothing.  If I say "There's a door in the east wall" most people will know what a door is, what a wall is and what east is.  Sure, one person might imagine a modern door with a round knob while another imagines a door with no handle at all that you just push to open....However, at least everyone is still thinking of the same general thing.  With enough questions and clarity of communication you can bridge that gap.  Without falling back on reality, you now have to define what "door" means in your world, what the function of it is, how it works, what properties it has, and so on.It still comes down to not relying too heavily on the rules and not relying too heavily on the DM.  Both of them are flawed and only a careful mix of the two will fix the problems with each.Unless your rules don't cover jumping while in full plate.  Doesn't that deserve a modifier of some sort?  Sure, the rules cover jumping NORMALLY...but what about wind speed?  Certainly that factors in.  Add rules for armor modifiers and wind speed and you'll either run into another factor that someone thinks is missing OR you'll run into a situation where your new found rules cause a disconnect that makes people frustrated.Say that same DM who thinks its impossible for people to jump 10 feet in full plate comes across rules that say you lose 5 feet off your jumping distance for full plate but you can normally jump 30 feet.  Now the rules create a disconnect for that DM who doesn't like the fact that the rules let you do obviously impossible things.But what if your players complain that the game loses its verisimilitude because it doesn't feel right for fire not to set things on fire?  What if they try to set things on fire using a torch?I'm mostly playing devil's advocate because each DM kind of has to make their own decision on where the line is.  Some balance between realism and rules that are easy to resolve and keep track of for the DM is for the best.  What that balance is is precisely what causes different playstyles.Maintaining a physics textbook isn't practical for most people.In this particular case, it was a 4e Skill Challenge.  The DM didn't have any "rules" per se on building bridges.  He just suggested that we come with ways our skills would help us build a bridge then roll over the level mandated DC to get one success on the skill challenge.  When we got enough successes, we finished building a bridge.Since he was only concerned about running the skill challenge using the rules in the book as written, he never stopped and considered the scenario in terms of "realism" or "verisimilitude".We didn't even think to build a bridge at all, since we assumed it was impossible.  When we told him that we couldn't come up with any way whatsoever to get the wagons across the chasm he said "Well, guess the adventure is over then unless you think more creatively.  Can you think of any way to get across at all?  How about this, how do people normally get across chasms?  Bridges, right?  What are bridges made of?  You are in a forest."We were playing in a Forgotten Realms adventure which means we needed to use the rules from the book with new new rules being made up by the DM.  So, we knew there were no rules on building bridges.  I admitted that I had no idea how we'd even start building a bridge and he started miming the chopping down of trees.I don't believe it is the responsibility of the DM to tell the players everything.  The entire point of a challenge is solve it.  If I walk up to a chasm and the DM says "So, you need to find a way to the other side.  Let me know what your ideas are.  Any of them are good.  Oh, by the way, you should know that anyone in my world can build a bridge in an hour with their bare hands and can cut down a tree with a sword.  So, any ideas?" it seems like the DM is solving all our problems for us.  It isn't very fun.The problem is that you might assume there IS no false perception.  After all, I think most people would just assume that arrows would hit a solid stone surface and break.  However, some people have seen movies or read books where people do some extremely impossible things and won't even stop to think about it, they'll just assume those things are possible.  The movie or book made it seem possible.There aren't rules for most things in most games.  There are no actual rules for how to walk without tripping, how to open doors, how to breathe, how to move your arms and so on.  I don't assume that every time a player attempts something not covered by the rules that it's suddenly a gotcha.  If someone says "I lift my hand in the air and wave at the man" I don't say "You should know that in my game you can lift your hand only as far as your arm reaches and you can only hold it in the air so long before your arm will get tired and you'll need to drop it.  I don't want there to be any confusion.  In fact, let's update our rules document to reflect that so that we can stay consistent in the future."If I did that for each time there was no rule for something, I'd be doing nothing but updating the rules and clarifying things.  The vast majority of the time we just assume that everyone's experience in real life is about the same and we don't need to explain.</blockquote>

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