I’m a member of various system agnostic role-playing communities. Often people ask how to deal with various GM’ing related problems, most often associated with some problematic mechanic that isn’t “realistic”.
As a consequence, a fair share of my comments can be summarised to “I play Dungeon World, where the GM decides what happens when the players roll bad. As such, this is never a problem in DW,” along with a short explanation of how the resolution mechanic work, the strong hit / weak hit / miss structure. “You could try it out?”
So, despite the fact that I’m blatantly advertising, I’ve concluded that Dungeon World is the most “realistic” fantasy RPG ever written.
Just saying.
Yea, shooting dragons with fireballs that stream from your bare fingertips is hugely realistic. 😉
‘Realism’ in a RPG is a notion that i have always found amusing. After all your are playing an elf in a world full of dragons, orcs, dwarves (or if sci fi, flying around in space ship that can go faster than the speed of light armed with a laser). What exactly is realistic about this :))
Its escapism, pure and simple, and the rules should make that fun, not aim for realism, which often makes the game hard work and not fun (Dungeon world done realistic would be something like, “The goblin cuts you with his dirty rusty sword, your wound becomes infected and you die.)
Not to nit-pick here, but “realistic” in this case could also mean “internally consistant”. 😉
To avoid confusion, you should use the word “verisimilitudinous” instead of “realistic.”
When players talk about ‘realism’ in RPGs, they’re referring to ‘what I imagine would realistically happen in this imaginary situation’ when they feel the rules conflict that, the system isn’t ‘realistic’.
Dungeon world avoids this by using the GM’s and to an extent the players’ imaginations to simulate the imaginary world. So long as your group agrees on how the imaginary world behaves, it works well.
It also means that two groups can use the same set of rules and have two worlds with very different ‘physics’ and be playing correctly according to the rules.
Just to point it out, I put quotation marks around “realistic” to show I was kidding.
I think that calling any system realistic is a joke.
That’s what I get for reading G+ posts on the train via my smartphone. Missing things like quotation marks. 😛
I totally agree with Adrian Thoen, though. Players can feel that, given the ‘reality’ of this setting (as defined by the rule system of the game), certain actions and outcomes are not “realistic”. Meaning that they break the internal consistency of the setting.
Christopher Stone-Bush
This is the right answer. It applies to all kinds of fiction, not just RPG’s. All fiction has to be internally consistent.
Example: Wolverine is anything but “realistic”. But as far as the universe is concerned, it seems to have the same physics as ours. When you fall off a bullet train you die (if you are a normal human) So one expects the same sort of results as in our universe. Yet in the last movie there is a fight on the back of a bullet train, which is clearly inconsistent with my perceived physics of the Wolverine universe. It broke the suspense of disbelief completely for me, and I decided I hated the movie immediately.