Quote from: The Traveller;694669Obviously this is seperate from genre conceits, but there's a reason that successful writers do a lot of research before publishing even fictional works.
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But even here every writer is different, and to be honest some writers take it too far and don't focus enough on writing a good story sometimes. So you have to balance it like everything else. Personally, I am the sort of person who needs real street level detail if I am going to run a game in a particular setting or write a story against a particular backdrop. So I think research can be fun and rewarding and see its value. It just isn't the only way to approach things. Some people can write a great story without really doing a whole lot of research, and their story might even be better because they shine when they are not tethered to sticking with the facts. I think it is a personal choice.

Also, even though writers may research what they are writing about, they don't necessarily research to make things realistic. I mean plenty of writers ignore basic physics when it suits them, even if they made damn sure understood the finer points of insider trading before they wrote a single word.

Yes, I don't get the reaction to the word. At the same time, I don't have a whole lot of patience for people who ruin my movie or gaming experiences by commenting how unrealistic or historically inaccurate something is.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;694718It just isn't the only way to approach things.

I don't think anyone's saying that it is.

Quote from: The Traveller;694722I don't think anyone's saying that it is.

I think you are right.

Quote from: Bill;694692No matter how 'good' ones research is, anyone looking for innacuracies will find them. Game systems always have limitations as well.

Not saying that research is not advisable, but you can't win.

well, yes.  Because game systems are approximations.  Even when we play modern 'Papers and Paychecks', we are still using the system as 'shorthand' for modeling reality, moreso when we are not playing our own reality.

DEpending on the setting, and style, and players, as much realism/verisimilitude as possible should be added in to avoid having the players look at the system instead of the setting.  Everytime the players are 'jarred'  by the inconguity of the system vs their perception of reality, it lessens immersion, Holy Immersion.  Hah.

The issue I've found is that when people say 'realism' they're usually meaning 'detail'. From a game design and statistical standpoint, those two things are incompatible.  It's pretty easy to find casualty rates for units under fire and map that to an appropriate die roll.  It's possible to do the same for an individual's survival against firearms injuries, provided you are only concerned with whether they survive or not.  You start trying to make the same assumptions about individual bullets, ranges, and impact points, and your model starts to fall apart.  And bullets are relatively easy to model.  Try doing the same thing for knives, fists, kung fu or swords and you're in some very shaky territory, and there's nothing like enough data to make any assumptions for swords.

I favor, for 'realistic' games, a high degree of abstraction. The mechanics of wounding are varied, but the results, on a gameplay level, only need a few levels of resolution to make a difference.

I say let the human brain fill in the details, keep the game system as abstract as possible.

Quote from: taustin;694455What people who say "We want realism" really want is verisimilitude, not realism. As has been noted, realism precludes all fantasy.

Know what? You're free to define it as "all or nothing" for yourself, but that's bullshit when it comes to other people's freedom to speak (and think) for themselves.

I say (and I reckon most people do as well, for what majority is worth) that a work can be realistic to some degree in one aspect, and to a different degree in another aspect. It's a spectrum, not a choice -- never mind a global choice -- between all black or all white.

Quote from: JonWake;694874You start trying to make the same assumptions about individual bullets, ranges, and impact points, and your model starts to fall apart.  And bullets are relatively easy to model.  Try doing the same thing for knives, fists, kung fu or swords and you're in some very shaky territory, and there's nothing like enough data to make any assumptions for swords.

That sort of stuff is modelled every day in computer games, that's why they trumpet "more realism" as an achievement. Clearly they take liberties, like you aren't debilitated by wounds until you're actually dead, but they could make it as real as they wanted to. The military has spent a lot of time working this stuff out too. It's a solved problem and not that hard to abstract to pencil and paper.

The desireable level of abstraction is a different question of course.

One benefit to finding a realistic data point like falling damage and being able to map it to your system almost perfectly is that you now have a tangible baseline against which to compare everything else. All you need to do is compare relative survival rates of different types of injuries and plot it accordingly.

The system for falling incidentally is 1d10 per 10m fallen, with an average human HP of 5 (1 to 10). This also encompasses the possibilities for wounding as well, since it's a random roll. But now we know that weapons which have a roughly 50% chance of killing instantly at whatever range should do 1d10 damage. Weapons which have a 70% chance of killing should do 1d10+2 or whatever. Lots of things can be extrapolated from that one statistic. What you say and what can be done are two different things.

Another benefit I have found is that adhering to a more or less realistic baseline means things get a lot simpler. That example falling damage system above is a lot simpler than the standard D&D system and produces more realistic results.

Naturally where no stats are available you'll just have to wing it but c'est la vie.

Quote from: The Traveller;694889That sort of stuff is modelled every day in computer games, that's why they trumpet "more realism" as an achievement. Clearly they take liberties, like you aren't debilitated by wounds until you're actually dead, but they could make it as real as they wanted to. The military has spent a lot of time working this stuff out too. It's a solved problem and not that hard to abstract to pencil and paper.

What the. Which computer games? I can think of one offhand – Dwarf Fortress – that even attempts to model organic wounds with any degree of realism. There are a few others that model physics-based damage to machines, the Combat Mission games for example. "More realism" in the context of computer games usually means "everything is gray and brown", "you're gonna need a bigger graphics card", and maybe "you don't have very many hit points compared to what the weapons can do".

Quote from: The Traveller;694889That sort of stuff is modelled every day in computer games, that's why they trumpet "more realism" as an achievement. Clearly they take liberties, like you aren't debilitated by wounds until you're actually dead, but they could make it as real as they wanted to. The military has spent a lot of time working this stuff out too. It's a solved problem and not that hard to abstract to pencil and paper.

The desireable level of abstraction is a different question of course.

One benefit to finding a realistic data point like falling damage and being able to map it to your system almost perfectly is that you now have a tangible baseline against which to compare everything else. All you need to do is compare relative survival rates of different types of injuries and plot it accordingly.

The system for falling incidentally is 1d10 per 10m fallen, with an average human HP of 5 (1 to 10). This also encompasses the possibilities for wounding as well, since it's a random roll. But now we know that weapons which have a roughly 50% chance of killing instantly at whatever range should do 1d10 damage. Weapons which have a 70% chance of killing should do 1d10+2 or whatever. Lots of things can be extrapolated from that one statistic. What you say and what can be done are two different things.

Another benefit I have found is that adhering to a more or less realistic baseline means things get a lot simpler. That example falling damage system above is a lot simpler than the standard D&D system and produces more realistic results.

Naturally where no stats are available you'll just have to wing it but c'est la vie.

If you're looking for realism, HPs are a bad place to look.

1. You can be injured and have the injury not debilitate you and have the injury heal on its own.

2. The injury can require medical attention or it will get worse, but still not incapacitate a person.

3. The injury can incapacitate the person and require medical attention, but is not immediately life threatening.

4. The injury is life threatening, usually because of blood loss of damage to respiration systems. Emergency medical treatment is needed.

5. The injure is fatal, either instantly or within minutes.

If you're curious, these are the five trauma categories that ER rooms use.

Injuries may be additive, but not necessarily. A person with two broken legs is incapacitated, but barring a blood clot they probably won't die anytime soon.  If you break an arm on the same person, they're not going to die, though they might go into shock.  

On the other hand, a person who has been shot in the guts and is slowly bleeding to death will die significantly faster if you open a vein elsewhere.

None of that takes shock, pain, or adrenaline into account, which can change the symptoms of an injury significantly.  When it comes to pain, the narrative people tell themselves alters the perception of pain. Soldiers, doctors, and cops report feeling less pain from injuries than civilians, possibly because they can rationalize the circumstances of their injury.

HPs don't model any of these things. In fact, the more you attempt to make them model these things, the more you fall into a GURPS hole of subsystems for subsystems, and the more subsystems you have in place, the slower the game will run.  

Now, a computer will run these quickly, but the outputs they produce are pretty simple. If you look at ARMA III, the creme de la creme of realism, it's infanty damage model is abstracted into incapacitation and bloodloss, and that's about it.

Quote from: Imp;694898What the. Which computer games? I can think of one offhand – Dwarf Fortress – that even attempts to model organic wounds with any degree of realism. There are a few others that model physics-based damage to machines, the Combat Mission games for example. "More realism" in the context of computer games usually means "everything is gray and brown", "you're gonna need a bigger graphics card", and maybe "you don't have very many hit points compared to what the weapons can do".

Sorry, to be more exact, physics engines are a school project level challenge these days. It was the new hotness about ten years ago, with games like Half Life 2 and Forza Motorsport making a big deal of their ability to say model real world materials to the textures used to simulate them in the game - brick, wood and steel objects - all deflected bullets differently.

That's a level of realism that RPGs don't have and don't need. Phoenix Command again made more than a gesture in that direction, but it was quite difficult to actually play. And as I said, most video games deliberately take liberties with physics, but that doesn't mean the essentials can't be distilled down to something useful, as I hope has been shown. Or should I link falling fatality statistics as well to emphasise the point, which I have already done in another thread?

Even when you don't have precise statistics, like the fatality percentages in swordfights between people of different levels of skill, an extrapolation isn't really that hard. Should a minor cut have a high chance of killing someone, and what level of damage can a skilled swordfight inflict on an unskilled one?

The grounding in realism provides a superb gradient from unskilled to highly skilled here (depending on weapons used etc), leaving us with what might not be a perfectly realistic simulation but one which at a minimum is more realistic than one drawn from someone's posterior. And I don't mean to say that arbitrary numbers are neccessarily a bad thing, if players are enjoying themselves then they're enjoying themselves, end of story.

Quote from: JonWake;694905HPs don't model any of these things. In fact, the more you attempt to make them model these things, the more you fall into a GURPS hole of subsystems for subsystems, and the more subsystems you have in place, the slower the game will run.  

Please, there's no reason why HPs can't be combined with stun or permanent injury systems without having to go to massive depths of dependency. But as I've said many many times before, and I'm getting really tired of saying, I put playability above realism by quite a stretch - I don't even bother with hit locations and death spirals, because they involve too much accountancy.

The issue here, which seizing upon HPs won't help you with, is the perfect applicability of real world data to RPGs in order to provide a better experience, or at least one which has less chance of jarring immersion, in the face of irrational insistence to the contrary.

And it is completely irrational.

Quote from: JonWake;694905Now, a computer will run these quickly, but the outputs they produce are pretty simple. If you look at ARMA III, the creme de la creme of realism, it's infanty damage model is abstracted into incapacitation and bloodloss, and that's about it.

If the outputs are simple it's a deliberate effort to make them so, for whatever reason, perhaps processing power or usability. Projectile trajectory code and Verlet integrators take mere days for students to put together, it's not going to take a team of professional coders long to do much better.

But when they do (did), they'll probably be thinking along the same lines as the method I outlined above.

Quote from: The Traveller;694908If the outputs are simple it's a deliberate effort to make them so, for whatever reason, perhaps processing power or usability. Projectile trajectory code and Verlet integrators take mere days for students to put together, it's not going to take a team of professional coders long to do much better.

But when they do (did), they'll probably be thinking along the same lines as the method I outlined above.

Tracing the trajectory of a bullet in air is pretty dead simple. ARMA has the best sniping simulator out there, complete with windage, drop, and bullets tumbling through cover.  

A bullet moving through a body with a variety of densities is a whole other bag of beans. A low caliber bullet, say, a .22 LR, has very little momentum but also very little surface area. A person can be shot with a .22 and literally not even notice it for days.  But they kill more people than the far more common 9mm round. The .22 will ricochet off of bones, sometimes doubling back through tissue in unexpected ways. A .22 to the skull might just part your hair or it might scramble your brains. The narrow profile of the .22 means that it will penetrate a Class II vest where the heavier 9mm will just deform.  And that's just a single round.  

A rifle round, say, a 5.56 will shatter bone if it hits it. However, it's not any bigger than a .22 (.223, for reference), and the permanent cavity varies dramatically by depth. At 9cm, the 5.56 round begins to arc upwards, tumbling end over end in the body cavity, crushing a huge amount of tissue. However, if the body part it hits is thinner than 9cm, the injury isn't much worse than the .22.  And then you have the hydrostatic shock, which is the shockwave that moves through the body. Through most tissue, the body simply deforms around the shockwave and springs back. However, if the shockwave moves through a frangible tissue, like the liver or brain, the shockwave will effectively detonate the organ. And  what's more, if the shockwave gets close to the spine, the pressure can cause swelling in the nerve sheath and cause temporary paralysis.

All those effects change at semi random by angle of entry, rotation of the body, normal of the bone impact, so on and so forth. That's a lot of effort to produce a result that boils down to Incapacitated/Dead/Bloodloss.

Quote from: JonWake;694911Tracing the trajectory of a bullet in air is pretty dead simple. ARMA has the best sniping simulator out there, complete with windage, drop, and bullets tumbling through cover.  

A bullet moving through a body with a variety of densities is a whole other bag of beans. A low caliber bullet, say, a .22 LR, has very little momentum but also very little surface area. A person can be shot with a .22 and literally not even notice it for days.  But they kill more people than the far more common 9mm round. The .22 will ricochet off of bones, sometimes doubling back through tissue in unexpected ways. A .22 to the skull might just part your hair or it might scramble your brains. The narrow profile of the .22 means that it will penetrate a Class II vest where the heavier 9mm will just deform.  And that's just a single round.  

A rifle round, say, a 5.56 will shatter bone if it hits it. However, it's not any bigger than a .22 (.223, for reference), and the permanent cavity varies dramatically by depth. At 9cm, the 5.56 round begins to arc upwards, tumbling end over end in the body cavity, crushing a huge amount of tissue. However, if the body part it hits is thinner than 9cm, the injury isn't much worse than the .22.  And then you have the hydrostatic shock, which is the shockwave that moves through the body. Through most tissue, the body simply deforms around the shockwave and springs back. However, if the shockwave moves through a frangible tissue, like the liver or brain, the shockwave will effectively detonate the organ. And  what's more, if the shockwave gets close to the spine, the pressure can cause swelling in the nerve sheath and cause temporary paralysis.

All those effects change at semi random by angle of entry, rotation of the body, normal of the bone impact, so on and so forth. That's a lot of effort to produce a result that boils down to Incapacitated/Dead/Bloodloss.

Something that looks like this (PDF warning) you mean?

None of which has any bearing on the way you're avoiding the actual point. The HP segue didn't go anywhere and the "even computers can't simulate it" route is following in its footsteps. Not that it matters, we aren't using computers.

Do you think that realism as described has any place or can even exist in RPGs or not?

Quote from: Phillip;694877Know what? You're free to define it as "all or nothing" for yourself, but that's bullshit when it comes to other people's freedom to speak (and think) for themselves.

If you use words differently than other people, other people will not understand you when you speak. When you use "realism" to mean "verisimilitude," people will think you mean "realism" and not "verisimilitude." If you do not wish to be understood, that's certainly your call, but don't whine like a little baby who pooped his diaper when people don't understand you.

A realistic game will not have:
Dragons
Elves
Orcs
Interstellar space ships
Laser pistols
Magic of any kind
Lizard-like aliens
Intelligent computers

And many, many other staples of roleplaying games. You're pretty much stuck with playing episodes of Law & Order, only without about 90% of the interesting stuff.

Quote from: Phillip;694877I say (and I reckon most people do as well, for what majority is worth) that a work can be realistic to some degree in one aspect, and to a different degree in another aspect. It's a spectrum, not a choice -- never mind a global choice -- between all black or all white.

As I said, you can make up definitions to words all you want. But if you don't, don't whine when nobody knows what you're talking about.

And make no mistake about that. The part of this thread I replied to was entirely based on two people using the word "realism" in differnet ways, one of them correctly, the other incorrectly. If that hurts your feelings, tough shit. You'll get over it. But "realism" and "verisimilitude" still aren't the same thing.

Quote from: taustin;694970If you use words differently than other people, other people will not understand you when you speak. When you use "realism" to mean "verisimilitude," people will think you mean "realism" and not "verisimilitude." If you do not wish to be understood, that's certainly your call, but don't whine like a little baby who pooped his diaper when people don't understand you.

I agree with your first and third sentences, in any event.

Yes, indeed, verisimilitude would be a more correct word.  Your assertion notwithstanding, people generally use "realism" in this context, which is why I used it in the title of the thread.  I'm pedantic often enough without pushing the issue.  This is not the first, nor the fifth, nor the fiftieth bit of generally acknowledged gaming jargon which contradicts Merriam-Webster and the OED.

And, come to that, you understand perfectly well yourself.  You didn't start out saying "Huh?  What?  What are you guys talking about?"