Quote from: Jame Rowe;843245If my Traveller scout goes armed he usually just carries his gauss pistol in an undercover holster, even though he has a noble-granted Imperial level firearm license. Not for being subtle but for less attention.

A PC in the Traveller game I run is on loan from the Imperial Army to act as bodyguard for a Baroness, so he can wear combat armor and carry a sniper-rigged laser rifle if combat conditions are to be expected. Since the campaign takes place in the no man's land of Foreven Sector between the Imperial and Zhodani borders, that may come up often.

Quote from: Sommerjon;843269That is the problem, you're making it a historical context.

I honestly think you're trolling again, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt. Explain what you are trying to say, because I absolutely cannot follow your train of thought. The vast majority of the fantastic we hold as gaming tropes today derives from historically cultural world views.

Quote from: Ddogwood;842690Probably says more about the lethality of the presumed activities the characters will engage in than about the setting per se.

That brings up a relevant point, though - if the DM is regularly putting the PCs into situations where they feel that they need to walk around town wearing armour, maybe the issue isn't with how realistic it is that they would walk around in armour, but how realistic it is that they would feel constantly threatened in town.

On a planet where pillows, curtains, bedsheets, floors, ceilings, rugs, cave features, friends, strangers, the air you breath, may at any moment try to kill you? On a planet where someone can be criminally insane and still find gainful employment making murder tools in a murder factory filled with murder traps made by murder dwarves? On a planet where any given orphanage may randomly attack you?

Quote from: Opaopajr;843310I honestly think you're trolling again, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt. Explain what you are trying to say, because I absolutely cannot follow your train of thought. The vast majority of the fantastic we hold as gaming tropes today derives from historically cultural world views.

You answered the your own question.

derives

I'm not recreating some historical time.
I'm not bound by what some society did 1100 years ago.

I'm playing a fantasy game.

I find it laughable that people have no problem with walking corpses strolling down main street, but drop the suspension of disbelief card when a PC wants to wear armor in town. You want your rule system to reflect reality, only where and when you want it to.

Realism has nothing to do with wearing armor in town in Fantasy Games. it's about 2 things:
1. Historical contexts; Sorry we are talking Fantasy
2. Limiting player choice; Ding Ding we have a winner folks

Quote from: Sommerjon;843379You answered the your own question.

derives

I'm not recreating some historical time.
I'm not bound by what some society did 1100 years ago.

I'm playing a fantasy game.

I find it laughable that people have no problem with walking corpses strolling down main street, but drop the suspension of disbelief card when a PC wants to wear armor in town. You want your rule system to reflect reality, only where and when you want it to.

Realism has nothing to do with wearing armor in town in Fantasy Games. it's about 2 things:
1. Historical contexts; Sorry we are talking Fantasy
2. Limiting player choice; Ding Ding we have a winner folks

In some cases, probably so.

And if your fantasy is such that you want to fantasize that people wear armor all the time, ok, enjoy.

I don't mind playing in that trope, sometimes.

I also think that yes people expecting trouble who have armor will likely want to, and that could include cities and it could be accepted and common to wear armor in many towns. Yes, especially when the world has a high number of threats and characters have experience with attacks at any time.

When I want a more realistic fantasy, though, I also consider that probably there are many places and contexts where weapons and armor aren't expected, or may even be required to be left outside or surrendered at the door/gate, etc. And practically everyone will sometimes choose not to wear armor and carry weapons, and the exceptions are probably particularly paranoid. Reasons include comfort, fashion, variety, laundry, maintenance, weather, fatigue, speed, convenience, concealment, anonymity, laws, and to avoid intimidation, fear, attention, other unwanted social reactions.

I'd often tend to prefer to play in a fantasy world where unpredictable sudden attacks are rare enough to not feel like weapons and armor need to be ready at all times, and where the reasons I just mentioned are also present and significant. That also feels more realistic (or since it's fantasy and some people tend to think of realism as opposing fantasy, just more believable or sense-making) and interesting to me.

Quote from: Sommerjon;843379I'm playing a fantasy game.

Me too. I mean why should petty, realistic concerns like gravity, linearity of time, inability to be in multiple places at once, or cause and effect limit my character's actions. The only possible reason any of those would apply is because the GM want's to ruin my fun. It's a fantasy, so anything and everything goes...am I right?

You should literally allow my character to use his bumble-bounce power to avoid damage from a 50,000 foot fall and to change his position in three dimensions, so that he can use his temporal fugue to eliminate Attacker #1 before he was born by simultaneously causing Attacker #1’s great-great-grandmother and great-great-grandfather to cease to exist. Also since there is no chronological order, after I have been hit by Attacker #2’s gob-jabbar strike I can use my twixitar to time-parry his strike, which retroactively negates the damage, makes a random NPC within 1d10,000 fractars distance pregnant, turns a random other PC's clothes into daisies, while giving  my character 10,000 gold gobstoppars and a lipstick red 1969 Cadillac Coupe de Ville with a lizard man chauffeur dressed as one of the Pope's Swiss Guards.

After all, it’s fantasy and there should be no limits on my PC from big meanie head GMs.

Quote from: Sommerjon;843379You answered the your own question.

derives

I'm not recreating some historical time.
I'm not bound by what some society did 1100 years ago.

I'm playing a fantasy game.

I find it laughable that people have no problem with walking corpses strolling down main street, but drop the suspension of disbelief card when a PC wants to wear armor in town. You want your rule system to reflect reality, only where and when you want it to.

Realism has nothing to do with wearing armor in town in Fantasy Games. it's about 2 things:
1. Historical contexts; Sorry we are talking Fantasy
2. Limiting player choice; Ding Ding we have a winner folks

Disagree, on a few levels.

Suspension of disbelief depends on things being logical within the framework of the setting.  Historical context matters only when it is driven by things like physics and chemistry and biology.  If you set up setting specific crunch rules why armors don't rust or are uncomfortable or possible to sleep in, sure, it's a fantasy.  Go nuts, you can do this.  And similarly, you can set up setting fluff where it's perfectly fine to wear in town, that's also fine.

But the suspension of disbelief is about things making sense and not jarring a players sense of logic.  Walking corpses are fine if you have consistent rules about necromancy.  Wearing armor around town is fine in games where you are mainly worried about getting back to the dungeon or in games where you've set up fluff and crunch to create congruency.

Quote from: Bren;843402Me too. I mean why should petty, realistic concerns like gravity, linearity of time, inability to be in multiple places at once, or cause and effect limit my character's actions. The only possible reason any of those would apply is because the GM want's to ruin my fun. It's a fantasy, so anything and everything goes...am I right?

You should literally allow my character to use his bumble-bounce power to avoid damage from a 50,000 foot fall and to change his position in three dimensions, so that he can use his temporal fugue to eliminate Attacker #1 before he was born by simultaneously causing Attacker #1's great-great-grandmother and great-great-grandfather to cease to exist. Also since there is no chronological order, after I have been hit by Attacker #2's gob-jabbar strike I can use my twixitar to time-parry his strike, which retroactively negates the damage, makes a random NPC within 1d10,000 fractars distance pregnant, turns a random other PC's clothes into daisies, while giving  my character 10,000 gold gobstoppars and a lipstick red 1969 Cadillac Coupe de Ville with a lizard man chauffeur dressed as one of the Pope's Swiss Guards.

After all, it's fantasy and there should be no limits on my PC from big meanie head GMs.

Precisely!  Thank you for helping make my point.

Quote from: Bren;843402Me too. I mean why should petty, realistic concerns like gravity, linearity of time, inability to be in multiple places at once, or cause and effect limit my character's actions. The only possible reason any of those would apply is because the GM want's to ruin my fun. It's a fantasy, so anything and everything goes...am I right?

You should literally allow my character to use his bumble-bounce power to avoid damage from a 50,000 foot fall and to change his position in three dimensions, so that he can use his temporal fugue to eliminate Attacker #1 before he was born by simultaneously causing Attacker #1’s great-great-grandmother and great-great-grandfather to cease to exist. Also since there is no chronological order, after I have been hit by Attacker #2’s gob-jabbar strike I can use my twixitar to time-parry his strike, which retroactively negates the damage, makes a random NPC within 1d10,000 fractars distance pregnant, turns a random other PC's clothes into daisies, while giving  my character 10,000 gold gobstoppars and a lipstick red 1969 Cadillac Coupe de Ville with a lizard man chauffeur dressed as one of the Pope's Swiss Guards.

After all, it’s fantasy and there should be no limits on my PC from big meanie head GMs.

Ravenswing had this exact same argument with him four days ago in this thread.

Can we please stop feeding the fucking troll.

I'm aware of Ravenswing's post. Ravenswing presented a reasonable position on the use of reality in gaming. Sommerjon of course disagreed. I took a ridiculous position advocating the negation of any reality in gaming. Sommerjon of course agreed with the ridiculous position.

Clearly Sommerjon has a rather unique definition of the word fantasy that is more in line with the Beatles Yellow Submarine or Terry Gilliam's animations for Monty Python's Flying Circus than with anything the vast majority of gamers would care to have in an RPG setting. I felt that was worth clarifying.

Given that the walking dead are a derived trope from multiple real world cultures, with several even now currently believing in their very real world existence (Serpent and the Rainbow anyone?), it is a ready-made fantastic idea that comes with already extant expectations, limitations, and weaknesses.

Just like expectations, limitations, and weaknesses about armor.

Your argument is weak because it imagines our own world comes with no useable past assumptions, be they mundane or fantastic. In fact, I will go further in saying it is hard to derive the truly alien because so much has already been dreamt up and incorporated into at least one cultural tradition somewhere. Among our various cultures and their schools of ideas, i.e. theosophical, philosophical, various sciences, mathematics, etc., ideas of astral travel, the ethereal, extra-planar, extraterrestrial, and so on have been elaborated at great length and exacting detail, and are still being elaborated on.

Our RPG hobby can barely hold a candle to the level of creativity already in existence by our real world — that's why we mine the ever-living shit out of it for derivatives.

Quote from: Bren;843402Me too. I mean why should petty, realistic concerns like gravity, linearity of time, inability to be in multiple places at once, or cause and effect limit my character's actions. The only possible reason any of those would apply is because the GM want's to ruin my fun. It's a fantasy, so anything and everything goes...am I right?

Your counterexamples all involve defying laws of physics; allowing the wearing of armor in town only compromises a non-universal historical standard. The rules say that one of my Fighter's abilities is "wearing armor". If the rules say you have bumble-bounce power and the ability to hire lizardmen chauffeurs, then you get to do that, assuming you meet the requirements (as I have to meet the requirement of having armor that fits my character).

Various locations may put limits on the use of any abilities; the traditional anti-magic area, darkness and fog affecting vision abilities, and so on. Towns reacting in various ways to strangers is part of that, but having armor always forbidden in town is like having everywhere outside the dungeon be an anti-magic area. So I have to agree that banning armor by default as the only serious way to RPG is not right.

We have a very creative member on this board who already wrote an rpg about a "very different now" and how our cultural concepts are ever evolving even today. Just two grandmothers ago from me slavery still existed in USA, and Lowell's ideas on the nature of reality was assumed right. Go check out Lowell Was Right! - A Very Different Now, or anything derived from our past accepted mythologies, to note how worlds function with their own perceived realities.

There is nothing static or banal about humanity's everyday ideas. They just expect coherency so as to function well enough to suit immediate needs. Similarly an imaginative hobby pays credence to ideas of coherence about armor and magic, because of the need to relate to the audience quickly and establish functional boundaries.

Quote from: rawma;843482Your counterexamples all involve defying laws of physics

It's satire so I used the most ludicrous examples. Apparently you missed that.

Summerjon is arguing that PCs get to wear armor everywhere because its a fantasy game. The typical argumentum ad fireballum (or in Sommerjon's case, ad undead). Sommerjon's examples were magical and physical so I parodied them with absurd magic and physics.

Other people are arguing that limiting the sorts of armor, weapons, and magic cast while walking about town is a reasonable social prescription. Sommerjon disagrees. Are you agreeing with Sommerjon that there should be no social restrictions on armor and weapons?

QuoteThe rules say that one of my Fighter's abilities is "wearing armor".

Yes the rules do. But only a 14 year old halfwit concludes that based on that the GM cannot restrict where the fighter is socially allowed to wear armor, carry greatswords, halberds, and lances, or ride a barded warhorse.

QuoteTowns reacting in various ways to strangers is part of that, but having armor always forbidden in town is like having everywhere outside the dungeon be an anti-magic area.

No it is like having laws preventing MUs from casting offensive spells in town. People have already said they do that along with restricting certain armor and weapons.

Antimagic is similar to having a magical defense that strips the armor off the fighter once they pass the town gates. No one is talking about that. Except maybe you.

Quote from: RPGPundit;841352I've found that in most D&D games, it's totally typical that a PC might go do his shopping in the middle of the city wearing plate mail and armed with a half-dozen weapons.

Of course, this is totally ridiculous from any kind of 'historical' perspective.

Do you usually do things like this in your fantasy games? Or do your fantasy-medieval cities actually have weapon/armor control laws?

Yes. Peace bonding of swords and putting spell component bags in a locked and guarded place is typical in my games. And wearing visible armor or offensive spells and obvious enchantment spells is sure to get  a negative social reaction at the least. Hence the reason for things like Bracers and elfin chain and signature spells or covert subtle magic items. And certain feats that grant innate abilities or meta magic abilities.