Quote from: jhkimOK, I'm completely at a loss on this one.  There are an awful lot of things which I do in games which I do not do in real life.  Sure, actually tromping through the wilderness sleeping in armor, with no modern conveniences sucks.  Sure, it sucks to be slaughtered by cultists.  So what?  

Playing a game, even a realistic one, doesn't actually injure me.  I know that you understand this, yet your statements simply don't make any sense once you add in this fact.  None of this means that it can't be fun in a game.  

I'm not sure what the point of departure is here. You may "get it"; that may be somewhat less than universal. I think many folks who ask for "grittines" in their gaming might find they like is a bit less if games really ran it in a realistic fashion.

(I still remember an early Twilight 2000 game I played in where I had a character shot early in the game and spent the rest of the session in bedrest.)

The upshot is when people ask for a "realistic" game, I think it should be taken as a relative thing... realistic compared to the bulk of modern games, which very much aren't realistic. In the big scheme of things, they still may be pretty generous.

Quote from: Caesar Slaad

Quote from: jhkimPlaying a game, even a realistic one, doesn't actually injure me. I know that you understand this, yet your statements simply don't make any sense once you add in this fact. None of this means that it can't be fun in a game.

I'm not sure what the point of departure is here. You may "get it"; that may be somewhat less than universal. I think many folks who ask for "grittines" in their gaming might find they like is a bit less if games really ran it in a realistic fashion.

(I still remember an early Twilight 2000 game I played in where I had a character shot early in the game and spent the rest of the session in bedrest.)

So you're implying that when you had a character that was injured, you as a player just sat around and did nothing for the rest of the session, and thus it was unfun?  If so, that seems to me to be a pretty obvious mistake.  In any high-lethality system, regardless of whether it's realistic, you need to keep players involved if their character is killed.  This is just as true in, say, an unrealistic horror game as in a realistic game.  

When I played T2K, we continued playing with another character in the squad if our character was killed.  I don't recall cases of bedrest -- mostly we were on the run and didn't have that option -- but the same principle could work.  We did similarly in Ars Magica with grogs.  

Quote from: Caesar SlaadThe upshot is when people ask for a "realistic" game, I think it should be taken as a relative thing... realistic compared to the bulk of modern games, which very much aren't realistic. In the big scheme of things, they still may be pretty generous.

I'll buy that as the average.  It's always good to inquire more closely rather than just relying on a single word like "realistic" to tell what people are looking for.

Quote from: jhkimBut realism?   OK, let me make a quick glance through new RPG releases and people's typical posts about their campaigns.  The dominant games are D&D and Exalted, with various D20 games, Rifts, and a few other White Wolf titles mixing it out.  The attitude seems to be that it's edgy and gritty if our games don't have characters dusting themselves off after dropping over cliffs.  It seems like emulating James Bond movies (a la Spycraft) is on the more gritty and realistic side of things.

So what the fuck?  Is trying out a little more realism than the typical diet of fantasy action diet somehow threatening?  

My point is that "realism" is a chimera (as in, an illusion, not as in the D&D monster).

Making a game "gritty" doesn't actually make it "realistic". Gritty isn't a chimera; gritty is something you can do with a game. High-lethality, whatever.

But its like I wrote in my blog once: "realistic" combat simulation wouldn't be just gritty mechanics. "Realistic" combat simulation would be your GM screaming into your ear "WHAT DO YOU DO?! WHAT DO YOU DO!?" while the other players pelted barrages of dice at you and blew cigarette smoke in your eyes after you had been spun around till you got dizzy; to simulate the "realistic" effects of trying to keep your head and make split-decisions in combat.
"realistic" combat would be player characters getting shot and rolling 1D20 to see how many seconds they spent gazing at the pool of their own blood.

When most people say they want "realism" in gaming, they are really saying that they want:
a. a chance to show off their supposed (and almost always fake) geek armchair expertise about guns/katanas/whatever.
or
b. They want to be able to do something like Band of Brothers, which isn't real at all, but is rather a gritty cinematic emulation.

No one can fucking agree on what "realistic" mechanics would even be. Hell, no one can even seem to fucking agree on what "realistic" damage/combat would be; all the so called 300-lb. nacho-munching "combat experts" out there have their own pet theories on "why the Uzi is the most dangerous gun evar", or why the "Uzi is a piece of shit that suxxors" or "why you can kill a man with just one blow if you know tae kwan do but not karate" or "why you can't dodge bullets, ever"; or "how a katana could cut through a tank". Or the exact fucking opposite of any of the above arguments.
And all of this, almost always, couched in such a way as to make the original theorist sound like a badass. "yea", snorts the mouth-breathing 300lb. computer tech, "i've read a LOT of Soldier of Fortune and i know my way around guns"... or "yea i've been taking Temple Kung Fu for 7 years now so I know how lethal you can be with your bare hands" says the scrawny 92lb weakling that you just saw run away screaming when he thought he saw a spider in the carpet in last week's session.

Its bullshit, all of it. The fact that no one can reach a serious collective consensus beyond the occasional two guys with the same agenda agreeing with each other proves that its bullshit. And to top it all off if you were using ACTUAL "realism" you'd end up with a game that wasn't very fun to play at all (unless you consider having to roll a will check to avoid voiding your bowels when you start being shot at as "fun to play").

People want a lot of different things when they say they like "realism"; and none of it has anything to do with actual "reality" at all.

RPGPundit

I like a game to be intelligible. If the mechanics are consistent, that's a first step. Problem is, mechanics don't cover everything, and the connection between mechanics and stuff that isn't mechanics can be mishandled.

Case 1: I sign up for a space warfare game (say, Traveller) and partway through the second session it becomes apparent that "the fleet" is run like a D&D adventuring party, with every ship effectively the personal property of its captain, no chain of command, no formations, no planning before battle. It may be fun, but it's not realistic. It's a special case of I don't know how often I've seen fantasy/SF worlds which have no real social structure, which in turn makes NPC behavior unintelligible, especially in the "big picture".

Case 2: Inconsistency with regard to basic physics and the economic/social implications of the world as encoded in the game mechanics. To steal an example from JimBob, if flying is common in the world, why don't castles have roofs? What I prefer here is to work backwards and rethink the inclusion of mechanical elements that would have the macro-effects I want to avoid, but if your tastes can handle it, the opposite approach of putting roofs onto the castles is okay. But having to repeatedly handwave inconsistencies of this sort makes the world disorienting for the players--no plan or initiative can really be evaluated because you don't know when the GM is going to extrapolate from the rules and when the GM is going to handwave things.

Quote from: RPGPunditIts bullshit, all of it. The fact that no one can reach a serious collective consensus beyond the occasional two guys with the same agenda agreeing with each other proves that its bullshit. And to top it all off if you were using ACTUAL "realism" you'd end up with a game that wasn't very fun to play at all (unless you consider having to roll a will check to avoid voiding your bowels when you start being shot at as "fun to play").

People want a lot of different things when they say they like "realism"; and none of it has anything to do with actual "reality" at all.

This is a fucking stupid criteria -- because you're saying that if a game is "realistic" then it has to be perfect with absolutely no disagreement over anything by the players.  

By your logic, playing in the high fantasy genre is equally impossible.  No one agrees exactly what high fantasy means.  One player might say, "Well, the protagonist never dies in high fantasy stories, so therefore it should be impossible to kill my PC".  Another player might say "High fantasy PCs don't act like they're immortal so they should be killable."  And so forth.  In fact, it's all just an excuse for people to show off their Tolkien trivia.  

Therefore, there is no such thing as high fantasy play.  It's a chimera which no one is actually trying for, none of which has anything to do with high fantasy.  

Does that make sense?  Fuck, no.  The fact that no one can perfectly agree on every detail doesn't mean that something doesn't exist.  Get fucking real.  Toon is not at all realistic.  Twilight 2000 is fairly realistic.  There are lots of games in between.  The fact that you can nitpick doesn't negate the basic terms.

Quote from: RPGPunditWhen most people say they want "realism" in gaming, they are really saying that they want:
a. a chance to show off their supposed (and almost always fake) geek armchair expertise about guns/katanas/whatever.
or
b. They want to be able to do something like Band of Brothers, which isn't real at all, but is rather a gritty cinematic emulation.

In my case it's a little different. When people say they want realism or rather they say they want the campaign (any genre) to be realistic it could mean a couple of things.

a. They want the combat to be less Hollywood. You know stuff like running out of ammo. Damage taken when jumping/being hurled through glass. Collateral damage in the form of innocent civilians. The role of law enforcement(maybe) in limiting gratuitious combat. Little details like these.

b. They want fully fleshed out npcs and relationships which affect their characters. Most times, npcs come of as merely ciphers, and their role in the campaign has no real influence on the way how things turn. (This is the tricky part, making the npcs credible but at the same time, not allowing them to overshadow the pcs)

Now, this may or may not have anything to do with realism but (ignoring the contradiction) I do think it adds verisimilitude to my games.

Regards,
David R

I guess my criteria for realistic is that I imagine how a scenario would go down if I was my own PC, there in the game world. What do I feel would happen if I attacked a troll with a knife or went charging at a infantry platoon with a pair of Desert Eagles?

If the rules more or less produce results consistant with that, I am happy.

Quote from: Dominus NoxWhen people discuss realism in gaming, there's always a lot of friction over what relaism in gaming means.

In my experience (bearing in mind that I've mostly been spared the sadistic GMs that seem to be driving people to create systems to protect them from bad GMs or make them hate the very idea of "realism" in role-playing games), realism simply means "verisimilitude" or the perception or illusion of reality and it's fundamentally a suspension of disbelief issue.

What that means in practice is that what matters is what players think is real, not what's really real.  So if a player believes that a katana can cut through the armor of a tank, for whatever reason, it doesn't matter if it can or it can't.  It will feel realistic to them if a katana can cut through tank armor and will not feel realistic if a katana can't.  That's what most people mean by "realistic".  

That's an issue for many due to "willing suspension of disbelief".  As J.R.R.Tolkien put it in his essay "On Fairy Stories":

QuoteThat state of mind has been called 'willing suspension of disbelief.' But this does not seem a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful 'sub-creator.' He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates as 'true': it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, 'inside.

Verisimilitude makes it easier for people to believe that the "Secondary World" of the fantasy seems "true".

Quote from: Dominus NoxThat's my 'realism' test mostly. Does the combat rules reflect what happens in real life combat? I believe some games do a good job of this, especially if they throw in the wild card of the critical hit to reflect flukes that happen in reality.

The problem is that most peoples' sense of realism is based on anecdotal evidence and guesses.  I've read a lot of anecdotal cases of people getting shot in the leg dying (the femoral artery is a pretty big target) but surviving head shots from handguns (the skull is effectively an internal helmet).  The torso seems to literally be a crap shoot as illustrated by an  article in Discover Magazine a few years back.  

A doctor who had spent some time patching up Central American rebels in the 1980s talked about a shoulder wound he saw there where the bullet entered the shoulder, ricocheted off a bone and down into the person's belly where is shredded his intestines and he died.  In an Emergency Room in the US, he treated a young man who was shot in almost the same place.  The bullet passed right through his shoulder and he was sent home with a bandage.

And I think this illustrates one of the most important functions of a game system that treats combat in detail.  It's entirely possible that two people sitting at any gaming table will have mutually exclusive views of reality based on anecdotal evidence or less.  The rules act as the agreed upon physics of the game setting.  Regardless of what you are I think happens when a person is shot in a certain location, the system will tell us what happens in the game word.  And it also allows a person to hitch their verisimilitude to the consistency provided by the system rather than their view of the real world.  So it matters less if a person believes a katana can penetrate a tank or not if they are willing to allow the agreed upon rules to be the final arbiter of whether it can or not.

Quote from: John MorrowIn my experience (bearing in mind that I've mostly been spared the sadistic GMs that seem to be driving people to create systems to protect them from bad GMs or make them hate the very idea of "realism" in role-playing games), realism simply means "verisimilitude" or the perception or illusion of reality and it's fundamentally a suspension of disbelief issue.

What that means in practice is that what matters is what players think is real, not what's really real.  So if a player believes that a katana can cut through the armor of a tank, for whatever reason, it doesn't matter if it can or it can't.  It will feel realistic to them if a katana can cut through tank armor and will not feel realistic if a katana can't.  That's what most people mean by "realistic".  

That's an issue for many due to "willing suspension of disbelief".  As J.R.R.Tolkien put it in his essay "On Fairy Stories":



Verisimilitude makes it easier for people to believe that the "Secondary World" of the fantasy seems "true".



The problem is that most peoples' sense of realism is based on anecdotal evidence and guesses.  I've read a lot of anecdotal cases of people getting shot in the leg dying (the femoral artery is a pretty big target) but surviving head shots from handguns (the skull is effectively an internal helmet).  The torso seems to literally be a crap shoot as illustrated by an  article in Discover Magazine a few years back.  

A doctor who had spent some time patching up Central American rebels in the 1980s talked about a shoulder wound he saw there where the bullet entered the shoulder, ricocheted off a bone and down into the person's belly where is shredded his intestines and he died.  In an Emergency Room in the US, he treated a young man who was shot in almost the same place.  The bullet passed right through his shoulder and he was sent home with a bandage.

And I think this illustrates one of the most important functions of a game system that treats combat in detail.  It's entirely possible that two people sitting at any gaming table will have mutually exclusive views of reality based on anecdotal evidence or less.  The rules act as the agreed upon physics of the game setting.  Regardless of what you are I think happens when a person is shot in a certain location, the system will tell us what happens in the game word.  And it also allows a person to hitch their verisimilitude to the consistency provided by the system rather than their view of the real world.  So it matters less if a person believes a katana can penetrate a tank or not if they are willing to allow the agreed upon rules to be the final arbiter of whether it can or not.

OK, I read and respect your views, and to reply to them In would simply suggest that the guy who was hit in the shoulder and had the bullet shred his vitals so badly he died was a case of a 'critical hit" that did super damage, whereas the other guy was a case of a regular hit and a piss poor damage roll.

So a critical hit rule, like gurps and d20 have, would simulate your cited cases nicely.

Quote from: John MorrowIn my experience (bearing in mind that I've mostly been spared the sadistic GMs that seem to be driving people to create systems to protect them from bad GMs or make them hate the very idea of "realism" in role-playing games), realism simply means "verisimilitude" or the perception or illusion of reality and it's fundamentally a suspension of disbelief issue.

What that means in practice is that what matters is what players think is real, not what's really real.  So if a player believes that a katana can cut through the armor of a tank, for whatever reason, it doesn't matter if it can or it can't.

Hm.  Well, on a broad level, this matches.  There is a lot of stuff in RPGs which the players all agree aren't real.  However, I prefer for a realistic game to break with my preconceptions rather than feeding them.  Put another way, consider two games:  For the first, the designer does some research into his subject, checks his sources, and so forth.  For the second, the designer polls some gamers on what they think and makes up something which matches that.  I'll buy the first game over the second any time.

Quote from: jhkimPut another way, consider two games:  For the first, the designer does some research into his subject, checks his sources, and so forth.  For the second, the designer polls some gamers on what they think and makes up something which matches that.  I'll buy the first game over the second any time.

Are you sure you can tell the difference?

Quote from: Dominus NoxOK, I read and respect your views, and to reply to them In would simply suggest that the guy who was hit in the shoulder and had the bullet shred his vitals so badly he died was a case of a 'critical hit" that did super damage, whereas the other guy was a case of a regular hit and a piss poor damage roll.

My point was simply that it's random.  It's not the sort of thing a shooter could normally control.  A fraction of an inch one way and the bullet passes through.  A fraction of an inch the other and it bounces round the bones ofthe pelvis and chest.  It's a wonderful argument for random open-ended damage rolls, actually.

I think the first thing to do is to distinguish between "realism" as a reflection of reality - which is only rarely relevant ("but there is no such thing as magic!") and realism as operating consistently with players' expactations of the genre - basically verisimilitude.  

That means I'm not discussing realism in the sense of "how much damage would that round do based on detailed ballistics reports?" but "did that gun operate more or less as I, someone familiar with the type of world we're playing in, would expect it to?"

So realistic combat, in a swords and sorcery game, would mean combat that behaved more or less as you see it in the relevant novels, or as people see it in their heads - players should have the same general sets of options, similar things should occur with similar frequencies, and actions which would be a good idea in theory should be a good idea in practice.  Games which achieve this are, all else being equal, better games, but they will usually only achieve this by dint of having more complicated rules (at a given level of abstraction - you can solve this whole broblem by moving actual combat into colour commentary and just calling it a generic conflict, but I don't wanna) - which is, all else being equal, a bad thing.  

Good games will strike a balance between realism (by which we mean genre emulation) and complexity.  D&D, for my money, is unrealistic (in the sense of emulating its genre poorly) without sufficient ease of use to make the shortfall worthwhile.

Pundit's approach - "here is something realistic, no game does it, therefore there is no such thing as degrees of realism" is a non sequiter.  He likes simple games, and he is willing to put up with games which do a relatively poor job of emulating genre as a result.  That's fine, but he should be open about it.

Quote from: John Morrow

Quote from: jhkimPut another way, consider two games: For the first, the designer does some research into his subject, checks his sources, and so forth. For the second, the designer polls some gamers on what they think and makes up something which matches that. I'll buy the first game over the second any time.

Are you sure you can tell the difference?

Can I tell the difference browsing in a store?  Possibly not.  However, when in a campaign for a time I will almost always read about the subject of the campaign.  For my Vinland game, I read some of the first contact narratives as well as the Icelandic sagas and other non-fiction books about the cultures and periods.  I've read various other books about the period and the nature.  So over time I will notice, yes.

Quote from: YamoI guess my criteria for realistic is that I imagine how a scenario would go down if I was my own PC, there in the game world....

This is the level of realism that I aim for.  I think of it as realism at the decision making level - the game presents more or less the same options and likelihoods of success as someone would face is the real world.

I think it's important to keep separate realism and level of detail.  They're related but only very loosely.  Lots of games have tons of detail based on wacky assumptions so they might give the illusion of being realistic by pretending to take many things into account but the results don't match reality.

For me, realism doesn't need detailed damage systems, such as hit locations, trauma, differing types of damage or things like that.  It just needs to have reasonable odds of success, dying, or becoming incapicitated.

For example, imagine that the best swordsman in the world facing three professional swordsmen.  What are his odds of fighting them and what are the odds of running away?  In the real world, his odds of winning wouldn't be very good.  Try running simple scenarios like that with various rules and see what happens.