“I reject your reality, and substitute my own.” – Paul Bradford, The Dungeonmaster (later quoted by Mythbuster Adam Savage)
Matt’s recent article on reality got me thinking. We game masters define or at least direct the collective reality of our gaming group; defining the rules of magic or super-science is old hat.
So why are we regularly tripped when someone asks why the goblins are multiplying far too soon to have recovered from their last butt-kicking?
Because – Science!
A shared artificial reality is easier to deal with when it resembles our own. Among many other things, we all know that most plants photosynthesize sunlight, that mammals nurse their young, and that Newton, Darwin, and various eggheads do a pretty good job of explaining physics, biology, geography, and other aspects of reality. Gravity and basic biology make the game much more predictable without our having to consult rulebooks.
Of course, when the game requires it (magic, FTL travel, etc.), we regularly break or bend the heck out of the laws of nature. We even ignore the cold hard reality when warm and fuzzy genre conventions are much more lovable and fun.
And now, for something completely different…
For centuries, the wisest among us believed in spontaneous generation and other obsolete scientific and biological theories. We borrow from these concepts all the time (aether and the four classical elements, etc.), so go back to the well for more.
- You’ve got a highly intelligent dragon in a closed cave, without a bathroom? Not a problem, because dragons don’t actually poop. Frankly, they rarely eat (except for sport and the occasional tasty virgin). Instead, they absorb energy from lying on piles of precious metals and stones.
- Tired of that awkward conversation every time the party kills off the men of the goblin clan? Begone, idealist-utilitarian philosophical conflict! Goblins spring fully-grown and evil as can be, from wherever demonic blood has been spilled. (At least some of them do, which can lead to further awkward situations.)
- You don’t want to map out the rest of the world. What do you mean, ‘rest of the world’? This is it. Travel any farther, and you’ll sail off the edge. Oh, there’s the Astral Sea, but that requires a really powerful wizard.
- Don’t feel limited to medieval concepts, either. Where do those underground critters get their energy? That faintly glowing stone that lights the caverns also emits a radiation that black-skinned critters absorb, just like plants absorb sunlight. Stay underground for enough generations, and your offspring will develop black skin, too.
Many of the iconic parts of gaming are impractical and nearly impossible, but they’re also a lot of fun. You can’t explain away everything with junk science, but you can smooth away the most irritating parts, and keep your players happy. And that’s the goal, not to redefine truth, but to make it ring true.
The V Word
Which brings us to Verisimilitude, the word that gamers both love and hate. We love it, because it describes the feeling of an internally consistent reality (or close to it). We hate it, because it’s often used as an artificial benchmark or a crowbar to wreck an otherwise enjoyable adventure.
Verisimilitude is the limit of redefining reality, and this is where the artistry lies. Don’t redefine it so much that it’s unrecognizable, but resist the urge to force your sense of wonder and imagination into a clinical box. It’s your world, play with it, but retain some internal consistency and make sure that you and the players are enjoying themselves.
Have you used unscientific explanations of otherwise impossible events in a game? Do you consciously or subconsciously try to explain your reality with modern scientific theories? How are those things working for you? Sound off in the comments and let us know!
This is probably one of the topics I’ve given some of the most thought to recently, running my last real campaign for about 80 sessions set in a world designed to have a very “rational” feel to it (it needed consistency so that it was learnable by the players – a very gamey sort of goal, but a very “realistic” result). The problem, of course, was that it also assumed the usual: tons of goblins to kill with little to no ethical dilemmas involved! Where were they all breeding, anyway? Where were the women and children? What gives!
This got me browsing around in search of a better solution than the usual “goblins as little green savage humans” approach that you might find in the typical fantasy offering, and if you go back far enough you find some interesting things about how goblins used to be treated – as rascals made of pure evil, born from the damp and dark, just as eager for the gold in your pocket as to knife you in the back just because you’re there, and plenty more where he came from! Spontaneous generation is something you mention, and I have to say that returning to these sorts of half-baked theories of yesteryear are just the thing.
As you say, we use the four elements, the concept of ether, and all manner of fairy tale beasts, but we often cross-breed it with a modern understanding of the scientific method, and especially of grouping areas of study by specialization rather than the more holistic approach of the period we’re roughly emulating. When you consider the Flynn effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect) and how modern education is making us all much more thoroughly logical thinkers, and then consider that most fans of tabletop RPGs are at least half-nerds (at least all the ones I’ve met!), it’s no wonder that we end up doing this and can end up feeling somewhat dissatisfied when the genres (fairy tale and scientific explanation) clash. The logical explanations we know from modern science don’t gel quite right when we throw in magic and goblins, you know?
There was a time when you heard “zombie” and thought “voodoo”, not “virus”; I think just that kind of reasoning is in order when we’re dealing with lands that existed, as far as we’re concerned, a long time ago.
Excellent article, sir! Though short, it gives one much to consider.
I think I’ve made it pretty clear (here and other places) I’m hugely in favor of verisimilitude both as a term and a practice. (So in favor of it in fact, I only misspell/mistype it like 1/2 the time!) I really like, almost need my settings to make sense. If there’s magic, I need a metaphysical explanation of it. Of course I don’t hold anyone else to my standards, and sometimes I just wanna shoot pew pew lasers from my rocket-pack.
On the subject of Genre conventions, I like to subvert them at every turn. In my current campaign, goblins are simply early hominids evolved from a slightly more carnivorous line. The clashing between the gobbos and man looks more like the Colonists vs the Native Americans, than Gondor vs Mordor. I like for my players to feel the ethical dilemma of their characters. Ending the life of a sentient being ought to be weighty, even if it’s trying to gnaw your face off.
Anyone interested about the setting can find more here –> http://violentmediarpg.blogspot.com/p/cronnon-and-southern-marches-a.html
Every campaign is different, and there is not “one right answer” to any of them. As long as you and your players are happy, drive on!
As usual Telas, I like your articles. You should make a fan page on Facebook or something.
Making something work for a game, and make it feel right, is both hard and fun. I had struggled with making a setting that had ships fly through space. While that is a “Spelljammer” idea, I liked the “Treasure Planet” tone better.
It took a lot of work, but the setting ended up being a fantasy setting that in many ways seemed more like a modern or even futuristic setting. I opted to have magical, alchemical, and other “special” devices more common so that they replaced the higher technological devices.
Many people seem to cringe when they see characters dripping with magical items. That is often called “High Magic” or “High Fantasy” and tends to have a negative connotation in many gaming groups. Most GMs that I have known over the years have tended to have less magic instead. It seemed to mean “my setting is gritty”.
The result of my endeavors has produced a setting that has many of the benefits of fantasy, modern, and futuristic settings. At the base it is fantasy, but with all of the toys and space travel it has really become versatile.
A Big Change was that space was not as we know it. Sure, science tells us that it is a cold and airless vacuum. But do we KNOW it? It felt weird at first, but once I decided to ignore that fact and define it as a truth for the setting things made more sense. We can now have cool sound effects in space, too!
I think the real heart of the issue is consistency. If something is different than the default/real-world, explain it and follow through with that change consistently. Consistency is in part what leads to authenticity. You can approach world building thusly: this is like the real-world (verisimilitude) except for these certain changes that work like this (consistency).
Verisimilitude + Consistency = Authenticity = Awesome Gaming.
Of course then there’s Rifts. Gonzo stupid can be fun too. Though, I find it less satisfying overall. YMMV.
We’re dipping into semantics here, but for me, verisimilitude means that something is plausible or believable. It requires consistency and an internal logic, and is the pathway to immersion.
Internal Logic + Consistency = Verisimilitude –> Immersion.
And yes, gonzo can be great fun, and can even have its own sense of verisimilitude (see: my current gamer crush, The Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG).
I like words, but words are slippery.
Semantics discussions/debates are good fun, so long as everyone remembers that words aren’t as precise as they seem. Connotation and Denotation and Context, Oh My!
Thanks for the compliment! I have considered a social media presence, but my gaming schedule is erratic these days.
Like any hobby, gaming has its trends, and the pendulum swings both ways. Complexity vs. simplicity, powerful characters vs. “grim and gritty” settings, class-based vs. classless, self-reliance vs. “walking Christmas trees”. It sounds like you didn’t let the popular option define your game, but did what is right for you and your table. Congrats!
Verisimilitude is a nice way to describe the happy middle ground in world design between, at one extreme, hand-waving away all the hard issues with statements like “It’s magic” and “It’s just a game” and, at the other extreme, sweating the mechanics of how to calculate how many acre-months of farmland a goblin needs to survive.
The question about verisimilitude, really, is where in that spectrum the happy middle ground rests. Basically, how much reality is enough? The answer is always going to depend on the players.
Take the example from the article of where a dragon poops. My own answer as a world-builder would be that the dragon flies outside the cave and poops. This is based on reality as even young birds know not to poop in the nest, and dragons are way smarter than birds. But I’ve GMed groups who really don’t care about that. You could say they don’t give a crap where the dragon poops. It wouldn’t even occur to them to ask. They’re in the game for the high fantasy aspects, or the hack-n-slash action, and that’s just not an element they’re concerned about.
On the other hand there could be players who draw inferences from fine details. “This dragon’s cave has no place where the dragon has pooped,” a canny player might observe. “In fact there’s not even a scrap of gristle or bone here from its feeding. Therefore this must not be its main lair. We must keep hunting!” If you’re GMing that kind of group you’ve got to be more careful designing your scenarios.
I love adding ‘science’ details to my games. I am a researcher in molecular biology by day, and I have a keen interest in … well, basically anything from the natural world. So I am constantly adding bio/magic ideas into my games. For example, I decided that for my most recent setting, elves would live in a colony system like bees or ants – the normal PHB elf is a sterile ‘female’ of the species, which makes up about 99% of the elven population. Then there are male elves, drones, which are like 9 feet tall and winged, and hidden in various places in the world are elven queens, but no-one has ever seen one …
Anyway, I find, I think in agreement with you, that a little science or similarity to science adds really nicely to a fantasy or magic element, giving it a feeling of rationality or credibility that it might otherwise lack. Nice article!
Players have to relax and let it go. We’re not modeling the world for a science project! The entire point of “magic” is that it does NOT need to be explained. I watch people go into conniptions over this or that rule. Sometimes, they even say “That’s not realistic!”
Really?
UPDATE: I guess there is an exception IF the GM is using the game as a vehicle to teach real science. I have experienced this before and it can be very interesting.