Ross Isaacs from SoulJAR Games and I recently had a yelling match over the meme pictured on the left, which I am given to believe originally came from Drinking Quest. By yelling match, I really mean civil discussion, but those aren’t nearly as exciting. While I’m revealing my blatant falsehoods, I might as well admit to one more. That article title is misleading too. You see, I don’t believe in realism in RPGs. I’m pretty sure that no one believes in realism in RPGs. Yes, I know that there are games from a hoary, ill considered era of RPGs and wargames which involved doing vector calculus to find the trajectory of your starship as it moved through space and I know there are systems that require multiple table lookups and math equations to simulate simple actions in an attempt to be as realistic as possible, and that even today there is a resurgence in these types of games now that the computing power of mobile devices can be harnessed to assist in the work, but frankly that sounds less enjoyable to me (and in my experience to most gamers) than a prostate exam.
But, I think realism is a common enough misnomer that we’re forever stuck with dealing with debates over how realistic a system is ad nauseam, even if no one in the discussion means realism and is instead using it as a clumsy synonym for what they’re talking about. Another common buzzword that’s a step in the right direction is verisimilitude, which roughly means “having the ring of truth”. This is better but can still fall into the trap of assuming the standard for “truth” is the real world. Instead I like to say that games need to start with a framework of givens and then logically progress from these so that they make sense. For example you might say your game is “generally like reality” but “it has 3 types of magic, none very powerful” for which you might give a few sentence overview based on theme, power level etc. This approach has the advantage of being able to completely divorce itself from the real world but still provide a setup for sensible extrapolation.
Now, I am given to believe that there exists a faction of gamers out there who thinks that worrying about this sort of thing is silly. “We are playing a game with dragons”, they will say. “Given a world with such fantastic beasts, how can we question anything else?” My answer to these gamers is that just because a world is not like our own, and even if it contains strange things like magic and dragons, that in no way means it does not follow it’s own internal rules for reality and that things in that world are not predictable and repeatable. We need not concern ourselves with the nuts and bolts behind magic or dragon physiology or fairy culture but these things surely exist in those worlds, regardless of whether anyone is aware of them or not. Applying this standard doesn’t take much work. All you have to do is occasionally answer the basic “why” or “how” if it’s not obvious. In most cases these questions are easy to answer based on the setup of your game and many of them will pull double duty. Once you’ve stated that owlbears and goblins are natural creatures no different than wolves or people and they evolved in the same way, that answers the same question for many other beings. Many of these questions are answered for you by your game system as well. Somewhere in the monster manual it probably tells you where little golems come from. Long story short, you’re just keeping your “WTF radar” up and pinging for things that don’t make sense and either changing or explaining them. Having a world that makes sense isn’t simply a decision of style. It brings all sorts of benefits to your table.
Benefit the first:
It makes the decision making process easier for the players and planning sessions easier for you. If your setting makes sense and follows a general set of rules, then both you and your players can be expected to know what is reasonable and what isn’t in terms of actions and consequences. The more you ignore the need for the setting to make sense, the more difficult this becomes.
Benefit the second:
The more your world has internal cohesion, the easier it is to accept. This eases immersion and reduces the need for “Wait? How does THAT work?” moments. While there is always an answer to those questions the more of them you have to answer both in frequency and magnitude, the harder it becomes to suspend disbelief.
Benefit the third:
Lacking internal sense has the ability to corrupt your vision of your world. The more often you leave WTF? moments hanging unanswered or answer them with essentially “It’s just magic O.K.? Don’t worry about it.” the greater the perceived level of magic and/or chaos in your setting. Knights of the Dinner Table once mentioned a RPG dungeon crawl setting in which nothing made sense and gave an example of a common dungeon encounter: the dreaded duck with the hot dog cart. If you didn’t purchase a hot dog from the duck and consume it (which had random potentially deadly consequences) the duck would beat you to death with the cart. I don’t remember if this was mentioned as a joke or as a true story from someone’s table (someone out there source me if you have it). The more unexplained WTFs you’ve got, the closer to this campaign you edge. That may not be an issue if you’re aiming for magic heavy or nonsensical, but if you’re not, it’s best to avoid the issue.
Benefit the fourth:
Generally these things, if you know when to stop, are interesting fluff without being too much work. A sentence or two on why a strange monster is in your dungeon, or why the monsters in your dungeon don’t starve, for example, can help you dress the setting or provide interesting material to pass on during the game. Don’t think though that you need to, or can get away with droning on for an hour about say, the tax codes on Coruscant, but placing a ruined wizard’s lab to explain your weird critter and pale fleshy fungus to shore up your ecosystem can help make your settings more interesting.
Benefit the fifth:
It adds a level of polish to your game. We’ve all had an occasional laugh at other forms of media that rely on deus ex machina to do all their heavy lifting, that have plot oversights, or that make little sense. Heck, Mystery Science Theater made a show of it. While no one is going to publicly mock you for an adventure with a few plot holes in it (hopefully not anyway), avoiding those pitfalls makes your adventures seem more well thought out, better written, clean and professional.
So that’s my argument for, if not “realism”, explaining away or removing major WTF points from your campaign. Just remember, no one’s asking you to say, calculate population densities, or use real-world queue distributions for your random encounters. Anyone would tell you that’s purest madness. But brief simple tweaks are easy, fast, and have a host of benefits.
Realism = ability of the story to suspend disbelief
Realism is why I really hate dungeon crawls. Here’s a room in an inexplicably underground city. It has a big pit of spikes in the middle, and is littered with booby traps. A door beyond leads to a corridor that goes nowhere save another room full of traps, and the corridor is also full of traps.
At the bottom of the pit, among the spikes, are zombie snakes.
WHY?
to my mind, that’s less a lack of realism and more a lack of applied imagination. WHY is not the end of the scenario, but the beginning.
Or how about going through the human sized door into the room with the huge dragon. That little door was the only way in or out…
When I complained, the GM shrugged and just said, that is just how it is written in the module. I found a new GM after that.
Silly, the dragon had a Polymorph Self spell. You should have looked for its spellbook.
I dislike that “It’s a dungeon, just accept it as part of FRPGs” style of scenario, too. That’s the primary reason why I haven’t written a traditional dungeon crawl since I was, like, 15 years old. Instead, I aim for a certain level of realism. Far from being tedious, the exercise of designing in realism makes the whole adventure better.
For example, a dungeon might be the underground portion of a large stronghold built by an ancient power that no longer exists. Centuries of war and weather have wiped away the above-ground construction, leaving only the underground that the original power used primarily for storage and emergency shelter. Today a variety of monsters inhabit it as a lair. Rooms are littered with the crude trappings that monsters like kobolds and giant snakes might drag in, but the fact that the underlying walls are carefully cut and dressed is a clue that the story here is bigger than just kobolds and snakes. PCs who look carefully will find an area that the monsters don’t know about– or are afraid to enter– with even more clues about the history the place that will lead to further adventures.
In reference to the original picture at the top of the article…I am certainly one of those people who doesn’t like “Hit Points” (D&D HP, to be specific) because it’s not “realistic.” But what I mean when I say that is that HP, as a game mechanic/construct, makes no conceptual sense. HP in D&D makes mechanical sense, in that they are internally consistent and allow the game to functions well within a set of other mechanics. However HP in D&D makes no conceptual sense. When you try to extrapolate them to something realistic, the concept of HP (as done in D&D) totally falls apart. That’s what I (and many like me) mean when we say “Hit Points aren’t realistic.” We’re playing fantasy RPGs, clearly we’re not interested in “realism†for its own sake. We want game mechanics that make conceptual sense.
I’m a big fan of verisimilitude–know the genre you’re playing in and work from/off those tropes. For Spirit of the Century, I’m a fan of traveling via an Indiana Jones style red line; for a high fantasy setting, rolling your cart through a teleportation gate is routine.
The more your setting makes sense, the more you can subtly cue players. If nothing makes sense, then you have to explain why this thing makes no sense to a person in this world–and it’ll be awkward, given the straightforward presentation required.
Maybe you need a word somewhere halfway between realistic and “internally consistent”. If things work one way in game, they should probably work the same way next time unless there’s a reason for them not to.
There’s also a “paradigm” thing at work. If you say fantasy world, people will not be surprised if it has elves and dragons, but cyborgs will cause some raised eyebrows; cyborgs aren’t part of the standard fantasy paradigm. Cyborgs are “unrealistic” in a standard fantasy world while dragons ARE. Half-pixie fairy wizard psions are “unrealistic” because each of those things is assumed to be rare, and having them all together in one character is pushing too hard against the internal logic of the world.
I think hit points are a good example as well; in a gritty game they don’t make much sense, but in a macho game they do. They fit in with the “action movie” paradigm, where a Bruce Willis gets beat up by lots of thugs, grunts in pain, but the next scene he’s still performing at 100%. In an action movie we expect and accept that; in a historical drama we think it’s wierd and unrealistic.
So if I want to play a macho game where heroes kick in the door, beat up the monsters, and end up with a boss-looking cut across their cheeks that doesn’t seem to actually hinder them, hit points are a good mechanic; they model how many times you can take a blow that would stop a lesser man and keep going because you’re The Man.
I very much want realism in my games, especially since I normally run modern-day games. However, “realism” to me does not mean tons of tables and calculations, it means that the in-game results of actions match what would happen in real life. For example, where hit points are concerned, let’s assume a character is shot. Different games have the following happen:
1) “You take 12 HP damage. Another 57 HP and you die, until then no effect.”
Simple, but not realistic
2) “Let’s roll on Table 12a to determine the path of the bullet and cross-reference by caliber and muzzle velocity… it hits your upper right chest, between the fourth and fifth rib, with a 47% chance of being deflected… OK, you die. Oops, sorry, that was a 6 instead of a 9, you are fine.”
Complicated, and gives the illusion of a realistic process, but not guaranteed to give realistic results
3) “Ouch, that hurt – you are at -3 to all actions until you get medical attention. You will pass out from blood loss in five minutes.”
Can be made very simple, but gives realistic results.
Doesn’t take into effect all the minutiae from #2, but doesn’t need to.
Very much agree, sir. You can get more realistic feeling results via simplicity.
I want the mechanics of an rpg to have a reasonable authenticity, wherein a consistent framework of probability follows plausibility. Verisimilitude is the word I prefer for it. I find that the term best captures the ideas of reasonable authenticity and consistency.
One thing that gets lost in the shuffle/noise is that, in my experience, you can get verisimilitude better via simplicity rather than complexity. In other words, you can get “realism” with out resorting to convoluted mechanics. Verisimilitude doesn’t require fine granularity.
To play a system like I just described, I had to craft it myself. Anyhoozle, that’s my two cents (via 5 dollar words).
Very much agree, sir. You can get more realistic feeling results via simplicity.