Which is more important - smooth/fun game play or realism?

[Celebrim]

It might just be me, but nothing looks "wrong" with 10 or 20 foot wide corridoors, giant rooms...

Well, as I said, its not always wrong. What I said was that you should not always force your map to conform to gamist limitations.

Again: giants taller than skyscrapers. Squids that control the weather. Magicians with guano-powered miniature apocalypses.

Not relevant except to the extent that we are talking about what sort of structure a skyscraper sized giant, or an intelligent squid, or a powerful magician would be able to and would have the desire to create. When people talk about game realism, they are generally not talking about how closely it conforms to the real world (although they might be, and its worth noting that skyscraper sized giants, intelligent squid, and to some extent even particular spells are optional).

#1: You can play D&D and get tactical play as well as storytelling, character development, etc. Adventures are partially tactical excersizes. I don't need to go to another game just because I use a heavily tactical approach.

Strawman. I didn't say you did. I merely suggested that gamist considerations should not trump all other elements. It isn't merely a matter of tactical elements trumping all other elements - because 3' and 13' wide corridors are just as valid tactical situations as 5' and 10' ones. Rather, its making all the imaginary play spaces in the game ones that conform primarily to the gamist limitations of the game system. This turns your RPG into a board game IMO. The whole point of having a DM, is that it puts in charge of the game someone who need not be limited to rote mechanics. Anything that can be imagined is therefore possible, and mechanically resolvable.

#2: RPG's are only turned into wargames if people stop playing their roles. 10' wide corridors don't tell you that you are no longer Prince Farquat of the Empire of Poopenmier. So the only thing that can turn an RPG into a tactical wargame is if the participants decide to go play a war game instead. An RPG can, of course, have tactical wargame elements without loosing what makes it an RPG.

And again, this is certainly true, but IMO a DM that decides to let gamist tactical considerations trump all others is taking a big step towards "deciding to go play a war game instead". I didn't say that gamist consideration should never come into play - just that when they came into conflict with something else you should err on the side of that other thing. The game rules should not be a straight jacket.

#3: "Never" is a troublesome absolute.

Ok, I'll grant you that.

Players can get plenty involved with a battlemat, and imagination still has a strong role to play, even with representational figures.

True, but it is a different sort of imagination. This is just a personal preferrence, but I feel that the highest level of play is emmersive play. That is, the game is most enjoyable, when when in some sense the players are able to experience what the characters are experiencing. Battlemats have a role in the game, but they are in my experience a barrier to that more often than not. The only time I prefer them is when the tactical wargame element of an encounter is so intriguing, that it is worth sacrificing the emmersion for a while.

#4: Players won't always see things as a miniatures battle, simply because the terrain makes those interesting. Often, battles will simply be imagined as more dynamic, run-and-jump-and-dodge affairs, rather than "stand and hack" slugfests. Even if you NEVER use minis (I don't), the extra space gives imaginations room to run wild.

Not necessarily. Extra space in and of itself doesn't ensure anything. Varied, realistic, clever, and even dynamic terrain leads to :dynamic, run-and-jump-and dodge affairsF rather than "stand and hack" slugfests as the many threads in house rules asking 'How can I make D&D more dynamic' will attest.

And, I find it odd that you are trying to tell me how the use of battlemats and minis effects the game if you don't use them. It seems to me that if you don't use them, then you've probably got a reason for it that is congruent with what I'm suggesting.

#5: Just because something does work well as a battle mat doesn't mean that it necessarily interferes with the running of everything else D&D does.

I didn't say that it does. I suggested that 'making things work well on a 5x5 gridded battlemat' should not be your top priority, else it runs the risk of interfering with many other things an RPG does. I think that is a quite different thing.

In conclusion: Why does something so simple destroy verisimilitude so easily?

Because, the world isn't so simple as that. If you abstract the world to a 5'x5' grid, then you create something that lacks the necessary complexity to seem real. You've made a game world, not a imaginary world you happen to game.

 

[howandwhy99]

For me, fun regularly depends on being realistic and it also regularly depends on being unrealistic. It all relates to specific incidences and personal preferences. Some folks want body locations and called shot rules. Others could care less if 30' dragons are found in 10' rooms. What's fun has always been personal to me and my players.

Rules are abstractions to begin with, so realism is an unattainable goal. As Psion's signature says, they key is to let the imagined reality dictate what the rules are instead of vice versa.

 

[The_Gneech]

It assumes no such thing. It is asking when you have two directions to go and one is "fun" and one is "realistic" which way do you go. Clearly if the fun choice is also realistic then there is no conflict.

I don't want to sound snarky, but when you have options that say things like, "I go with fun over realism more often. My game is somewhat unrealistic," it very strongly implies that assumption.

Because I prefer fun over realistic, does not mean that my game cannot be both. But the poll option "I go with fun over realism more often, and my game is fairly realistic" doesn't exist.

-The Gneech

 

[sckeener]

Play or DM? As a player I like fun...as a DM, I prefer reality....I suck as a DM because I toss in too much realism. Admittedly the players keep coming back, but it is probably my soap opera stories...they want to know how it ends and it never does....

 

[Hussar]

Let gamist considerations triumph!!!

Seriously though, I couldn't care less as a player or a DM if the corridors are 5 feet or 10 feet wide. Heck, we had 10 foot wide corridors in pretty much every module for years and those are some of the best loved modules of all time.

Given the choice of doing something realistically, or glossing over the physics, I'll go with fun every time. Didn't always used to be so. I actually used Living Imagination's ship to ship combat rules for a while. Now that's realistic. But, not fun.

So, yeah, gimme verisimilitude and realism can go mooch smokes with world building down at the corner store.

 

[jdrakeh]

Per Gary Gygax in the AD&D 1e DMG, fun trumps realism. I play games for fun, as do most. If a game wasn't fun, I wouldn't expect people to play it.

 

[wedgeski]

Entirely unrealistic.

Eminently plausible.

Heh. I like it.

 

[Li Shenron]

Edit: There is a lot of confusion about this point because I was unclear. Let me make this more clear. This is purely about making a decision where one choice is more fun in the short term, the other is more realistic. I know there are other situations where one choice has both elements, this isn't directly about those. It's just about your priorities between the two elements where there is conflict between those two elements.

While this question came from the 5' corridor discussion (starting about post #8), it has been a balancing act since the beginning of the game.

Which do you feel is more important when creating a game element? Is it more important that the game element feels "real" or that it creates a more fun* game?

In the example above the general consensus is that 5 ft' corridors tend to make for boring combats that leave much of the party out of the action during combats. However, regularly having wide corridors and rooms for interesting combats lacks realism. How often are corridors going to be 30'-40' wide?

Such decisions come up often. It's at the base of any system. Do you create an abstract combat system that is more exciting, or do you create a detail oriented system that simulates reality better at the expense of extra bookkeeping?

In similar situations (and not just his specific example) which direction do you tend to prefer?

*Note that I'm not dismissing the "fun" element of simulating reality. However, simulating reality tend to be less about creating fun than avoiding unfun elements. A very unrealistic game tends to distract people from the fun, rather than directly creating the fun.

It totally depends on the subject.

Some gamers hate having to bother about how unrealistic it is that the PCs keeps buying and selling magic items like a piece of cake, or how the rest of the worlds "conforms itself" to suit the PCs' levels for example. They don't care, so for them it's totally ok to keep it as it is without adding more realism.

I usually care about these two for example, and my players are not bothered by the fact that I care, so I try to run games where there is a little more randomness instead of a world that perfectly fits the PC's shopping needs.

But when it comes to combat, I am not interested in adding more realism, for example differentiating weapons better, or expanding how armor works by adding extra layers like DR or protection from critical hits. It's just my taste: I'd actually like to have more variations, but then they tend to make the combat scenes more compicated to run, and since combat is already the most rule-heavy part of the game, I'd rather forget about adding any more realism.

So for me there is no definitive answer... I can say that I'd be much more willing to add realism and complicate an area of the game which is currently rules-light, and keep rules-heavy areas as they are (or even simplify a couple, such as grappling and mounted/flying combat, even it that would reduce the already limited realism).

But still, taste plays a big part in the final decision, and for me that usually means that I am more willing to add something to an aspect of the game that doesn't usually take the spotlight, and try to see if the game gets more interesting, rather than increasing the spotlight to combat which is already the dominating aspect of D&D.

 

[Li Shenron]

Ah, and about corridors and locales in general: in the real world they may be small, but in fantasy and epic literature they usually are grandiose and gigantic, everything is exaggerated... So when we have a wizard's castle with huge corridors and halls and high cealings, it actually feels quite "literature-realistic" to me, even if that sounds as an oximoron

 

[Hussar]

Li Shenron - I totally understand what you're getting at. There are just things that stick out and bug people. For some it's apparently large corridors. For others it's magic item shopping. For me, it's ships. It bugs me to no end when people talk about clippers in D&D (The Bullywug Gambit from Dungeon has a sunken clipper - to give you an idea why this bothers me, my great grandfather sailed on a clipper as a job - in the 20th century). I don't mind anachronisms, but, this was my limit.

So, yeah, I can see why some people get wigged out by some things.