Quote from: jhkimFirst of all, I'm not looking for a single thing.  I play a variety of games, including many which have neither depth nor realism.

I never said you were looking for one thing in all of your games.  I thought the subject here was "realistic" games.

Quote from: jhkimThat said, while I can have some academic interest in examining some fantasy religion which has a bunch of stuff piled up about it, I more often prefer real cultures and religions.  It is a far better investment-to-return ratio, for one.

Why do you say that?  What's the investment and what's the return?

Quote from: jhkimFor another, doing so merges my ordinary reading with my RPG reading.  For example, I'm reading "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" at the moment -- which is an interesting book in itself and also applies to my game since my character is a Nazi.  It would take an enormous amount of creative effort to invent a background which is as detailed as conveyed with simply saying in three words that he is a gay Nazi officer.  Reality gives you depth for free.

I think that those three words don't necessarily mean the first thing that pops into many people's heads.  Ernst Rohm and possibly quite a few other Nazis in the SA and elsewhere, for example, were homosexuals and did quite well for a long time as Nazis.  Ernst Rohm was even fairly openly gay until they became a political problem for Hitler and there is evidence that the persecution of homosexuals was political and hardly universal.  In other words, if you treat "gay Nazi officer" as a pigeonhole or single possibility rather than a broad range of possibilities, that's not depth.  It's a cliche.  

What image pops into your head if I say, "Unwed pregnant Puritan"?  Contrary to the images of Hester Prynne wearing a scarlet "A", Puritan marriage and birth records suggest that at least 10%, and sometimes an even higher percentage, of women were pregnant before marriage among the Puritans.  Very little depth can be crammed into three words, regardless of whether their source is reality or fiction.

Quote from: jhkimBut even if there is depth created by a fantasy game with pages upon pages of background, it doesn't seem as interesting to me to play in that.  Reality is often more interesting.

Why is it more interesting?

Quote from: jhkimI eventually switched PCs because of irreconciliable differences between him and another PC.  I was a bit peeved at the time, but it made sense that they would no longer associate.

Could the PC have died as a PC the way he did after you stopped playing him?

Quote from: jhkimAs for why he was racist, that's a pretty open question.  I'm not sure what you're looking for.

I'm looking for the depth.  In my experience, people who try to play characters with perspectives that they don't really understand tend to lack depth and be straw men.  I'm also looking for anachronistic attitudes, which can be very hard to avoid.

Quote from: jhkimI wanted to make a character who was hardened to the East End.  It was a terrible place, and I wanted my PC to be tough and yet still pro-active in seeking change.  I soon had a vision of a rough brute of a man who saw himself as a defender of order.  In character, it was a product of temperament.  He wasn't raised particularly racist, but he fell to that as a way of rationalizing the problems of the East End.

Have you ever run a racist that simply knows he or she is better than those they are bigotted against?

Quote from: jhkimBut reality isn't always the pinnacle of unpleasantness.  I'm GMing a horror game now which is far more unpleasant than the vast majority of reality.  The WWII game which I am also GMing was also dealing with a pretty unpleasant slice of reality which was D-Day and the fighting that followed.

I've already agreed that reality isn't always unpleasant.  

Quote from: jhkimIn many genres, the fiction portrayed is often more unpleasant than the reality.  For example, war movies often give the impression of most characters dying.  Yet the number of people killed throughout the entire course of the war even in the risky 506th paratrooper regiment was about 1/8th.

Unpleasant doesn't just mean dying.  I've yet to see any war movie that portrays the WW2 as or more unpleasantly than what's described here:

http://www.ux1.eiu.edu/~cfib/courses/Fussell.pdf

The reason for that is that many real world incidents couldn't be made into a graphic movie without earning an NC-17 rating.  

Quote from: jhkimSimilarly, horror films often have blatantly over-gory deaths from minor attacks.

And action movies have blatantly under-gory survival from major attacks.  At what point do they cease to be realistic at either end?  Does realistic simply mean "possible in reality"?  If so, then plenty of stuff that's normally considered "unrealistic" is really pretty "realistic".  What's the standard for "realism"?

Quote from: jhkimI agree that players have limits to the unpleasantness that they are willing to deal with.  However, realism doesn't require massive unpleasantness.  You can pick some incredibly horrific times/situations to play out, but you can also pick much more pleasant ones.

Correct.  So why is a particular slice of realism picked to be horrific or pleasant preferable to a fantasy crafted to be horrific or pleasant and why is a fantasy crafted to be horrific or pleasant unrealistic?

Quote from: jhkimThere are many things which are fun for some people that aren't popular for the majority of tabletop role-players.  The TRPG market is a niche market with particular interests, consisting mostly of geeky white males.  It is very fantasy focused, such that even the top cyberpunk game has elves and orcs.  There are certain trends to what is mainstream in it.  I'm sure there are patterns and reasons for RPG market trends, but that doesn't mean that the non-mainstream is always opposed to fun in general.

No, but it does explain why there is a common reaction that realism is not fun.  There are parts of reality that do not conform to what perhaps a vast majority of role-players consider to be fun.  

Quote from: jhkimSuggesting otherwise is just pressure to conform -- and pressure to conform to a group which is a niche in the first place.

Human beings have a difficult time imagining preferences that differ greatly from their own.  So what else is new?

So, John, as a suggestion -- you're breaking down my post nearly sentence by sentence and trying to pick apart what I say.  I think dialogue works better if you try to make your point more generally.  

Now, you seem rather narrowly concerned with the unpleasant parts of pre-modern living, and particularly rare events like riding accidents, gang rape, heart attacks, catastrophic famine, etc. -- which you insist have to be possible even if they don't happen during a given campaign.  I did address techniques for playably incorporating rare events into games,  which realistically should include windfalls as well as disasters.  However, I also think this is buying into a nitpicking standard which misses the forest for the trees.  In a market where the standard is chopping heads off of dragons, I think it's preposterous to insist on standards like "Oh, unless the campaign's freezing-to-death rules are accurate, then it's not realistic and should be lumped with unrealistic games like Exalted and D&D rather than with the weird realistic ones."  

For example, you cited freezing to death as an issue.  In my Vinland campaign, I didn't write up any freezing rules though it was in a cold climate (the New York area in 1392).  However, I don't see how this is a problem for the realism as a whole.  None of the PCs ever went more than a few miles from their home during the winter, and with one exception of an adventure at a neighbor's homestead, there were no adventures during winter.  I don't see how the game would have been at all different if I had included freezing rules, since they never would have come into play.  

It applies similarly to starvation.  So in the Vinland game, we kept track of PCs holdings by an abstract Wealth system which went from 1.0 to 9.9.  So there was no counting of cow by cow what the holdings were, but we knew how many people there were (including slaves and huscarls) and rough estimates of how many cows and sheep.  Now, in principle over the five years of the campaign I could have varied the harvest by year, but I don't see how that would have changed the PCs behavior or the vision of the characters.  

For example, if you read a biography of a historical figure (like Pepin III, say) -- would you say it was unrealistic unless it talked about his dietary problems and what his chance of starvation was?  If not, then why do you insist that every RPG campaign has to include that?  Now, in some sense it is true that it is an incomplete picture of Pepin and his world if the book doesn't talk about how he ate, but it's still a stretch to call it unrealistic.

Quote from: jhkimSo, John, as a suggestion -- you're breaking down my post nearly sentence by sentence and trying to pick apart what I say.  I think dialogue works better if you try to make your point more generally.

My general point is that I still don't really undestand what you mean by "realism" or "realistic", which is why I still question the usefulness of the term.

For example, it's common for people to complain that the Hero System is "unrealistic" because normal people can survive falls from great heights.  But the reality is that people have survived falls from great heights and lived, including at least one person I know of who had their parachute fail to open.

At some points your standard seems to be that if it could happen in real life (e.g., a charmed life, never dying from an infection), then it's realistic.  By that standard, the Hero System is more realistic than a lot of people give it credit for because people can survive falls from great heights just like they do in Hero and, in fact, Hero is more realistic in some ways than systems where a normal person could never survive such a fall.  Similarly, by the "it could happen" standard of realism, Brain's concerns about whether a .45 and a 9mm are irrelevant because either handgun could kill a person with a single shot or barely slow them down.

What I am suggesting is that the same consideration of probability and patterns used to judge whether a system is "realistic" (e.g., A system that regularly lets normal characters survive falls from a 10 story building is unrealistic not because it's not possible to survive such a fall but because surviving such falls is very unlikely, though still not impossible, to survive dozens of such falls), and used by people every day to detect irregularities in real life, to all other elements of the setting.  If nobody in a Depression-era setting ever has to encounter Polio or nobody in a real world Tokyo setting ever feels an Earthquake, then I question the realism of the setting just as much as I'd question the realism of a game system where nobody can ever die from a single gunshot wound.

And the reason why I'm so "narrowly" concerned about the unpleasant parts of pre-modern living is that those are the elements that frequently get sanitized from a "realistic" setting for the exact same reason why they are sanitized from fantastic settings.  It is just as fantastic that a wound never gets infected in a "realistic" setting as it is that wounds are magically healed in a fantasy game.  Again, a sword dropped in either setting still falls, so what makes one setting more "realistic" than the other?  

You mention that you could have varied the harvest by year in your Vinland game but didn't, because you didn't think it would have changed the behavior of the PCs.  Given that you were playing at the start of the Little Ice Age, it could have played a major role in your setting if you wanted it to.  The issue here is not that you chose not to make it an issue but that it sounds like it was never a possibility you considered, even though it's an issue that loomed large in the real world.  You took an issue that was of major importance to pre-modern people and pivotal to the failure of the Viking settlement on Greenland and, perhaps, the real Vinland settlement, and abstracted it away and made it a non-issue for the players.  Why?  And how much of the real world can be similarly abstracted away to a non-issue can a GM get away with before their game becomes "unrealistic"?  Unwanted pregnancies?  Diseases?  Infection?  Weather?  Food and water?

John, now that you've written out your thesis this way I absolutely agree that a game where people don't have to worry about disease or whatnot can be criticized as unrealistic. But in that very example (your 4th paragraph), you've used "realism" as a valid criterion for evaluating games, at least in their component characteristics. Unless you insist that a game must be "wholly realistic", or else be "wholly unrealistic", realism is a meaningful dimension for comparison and criticism.

Quote from: Elliot WilenBut in that very example (your 4th paragraph), you've used "realism" as a valid criterion for evaluating games, at least in their component characteristics. Unless you insist that a game must be "wholly realistic", or else be "wholly unrealistic", realism is a meaningful dimension for comparison and criticism.

I think that realism can be a meaningful dimension for comparing individual components with respect to one being more or less realistic than the other (e.g., falling rules, the damage done by a .45 vs. a 9mm, the economic systems of a setting, historical details in a historical setting) but a less meaningful dimension for comparing entire settings or systems or assessing a setting or system, in isolation, as "realistic" or "unrealistic" on it's own merits.

With respect to a game being "wholly realistic" or "wholly unrealistic", I doubt you could find a game that would fit either category.  Even in D&D, if you drop a sword, it falls to the ground.  Thus D&D is not wholly unrealistic.  So does that mean D&D is realistic?  GURPS is fairly realistic about certain things but they purposely made damage less lethal than their research suggested it should be to make the game more fun.  Thus GURPS is not wholly realistic.  Does that mean that GURPS is unrealistic?  At which point does a game cross that line?  Or is "realism" like "pornography" -- people know it when they see it, at which point I think verisimilitude is a more useful word?

Quote from: John MorrowEven in D&D, if you drop a sword, it falls to the ground.  Thus D&D is not wholly unrealistic.  So does that mean D&D is realistic?  GURPS is fairly realistic about certain things but they purposely made damage less lethal than their research suggested it should be to make the game more fun.  Thus GURPS is not wholly realistic.  Does that mean that GURPS is unrealistic?  At which point does a game cross that line?  Or is "realism" like "pornography" -- people know it when they see it, at which point I think verisimilitude is a more useful word?

OK, how does this make it any different than any other term in RPGs -- like what is a "cinematic RPG", or what is a "dark fantasy RPG" (as opposed to a horror RPG, say), or what is rules-heavy versus rules-light, or what is a violent RPG, and so forth?  This isn't a binary label -- I thought we agreed on that before.  

Is any game totally lacking in any verisimilitude?  How exactly do you draw an objective line between a game which has verisimilitude and one which doesn't?  What if a game is perfectly in line with verisimilitude for me, but I don't like it's drowning mechanic.  Should I then call it un-verisimilitudinal?

Quote from: jhkimOK, how does this make it any different than any other term in RPGs -- like what is a "cinematic RPG", or what is a "dark fantasy RPG" (as opposed to a horror RPG, say), or what is rules-heavy versus rules-light, or what is a violent RPG, and so forth?

It may not be any different, and debates about those other terms go round and round, too.  So do debates about what "simulation" means.  And I think that's a problem if clarity of communication is a goal.  Every single time someone mentions "realism", it leads to a lengthy debate about what the term means.  Yes, I agree that you are looking for something real and distinct when you say you want a "realistic" game but I think the terms "realism" and "realistic" do a very poor job of communicating exactly what you want.

Quote from: jhkimThis isn't a binary label -- I thought we agreed on that before.

The problem is that when used comparatively, it's not binary but used as an assessment, it generally sounds like one.  For example, if I say that GURPS is more realistic than Hero, it doesn't sound like I'm saying that GURPS is, as a binary label, "realistic".  If I say that GURPS is realistic, that does sound like a binary label and I'm not sure how else you could interpret that.  

There are also two standards for realism that have come out in this discussion.  One standard looks at the distribution of outcomes to assess if a system is real while the other applies the standard that if it could possibly happen in real life, it's realistic and these are two very different standards for "realism."  Which standard does a person use when they say "realistic"?  

Quote from: jhkimIs any game totally lacking in any verisimilitude?  How exactly do you draw an objective line between a game which has verisimilitude and one which doesn't?  What if a game is perfectly in line with verisimilitude for me, but I don't like it's drowning mechanic.  Should I then call it un-verisimilitudinal?

First, you'll notice that unlike saying that GURPS is "realistic", people generally won't say, GURPS is "verisimilar".  I think that verisimilitude is more clearly an objective or goal, not a binary assessment, thus it is closer to "realism" than "realistic".  

Second, the line between a game that has verisimilitude and a game that doesn't is entirely subjective.  I think that's a feature, not a bug, because I think that the terms "realism" and "realistic" create an illusion that the assessment of realilsm in a game is objective when, in fact, it's usually subjective.  It's not that there is no objective reality.  The problem is that we experience objective reality subjectively, thus our assessment of what is or isn't real is subjective, especially when dealing with abstractions.  

I would agree that "verisimilitude" doesn't capture everything you are talking about wanting in a "realistic" game.  Part of what you seem to be talking about is using real world facts, ideas, and events as elements of a setting or a model for setting elements.  But I'm not sure the term "realism" captures that well, either.  Is GURPS' Yrth more "realistic", because it includes Christianity and Medieval Earth crossovers, than Middle Earth?  Is Time Bandits more "realistic" than The Dark Crystal just because they visit Agamemnon?  Is the recent Pearl Harbor movie more "realistic" than 2001, a Space Odyssey because it's about a historical event?

But what I'd really like to see is a reply to my longer post that addresses the more pactical problem of assessing a system or setting as being "realistic" or "unrealistic".  What are you actually assessing?