How would you define a realistic rule in the context of tabletop roleplaying games? And why are realistic rules important?

Realistic is a rather loaded term that strives but fails to get out of its own way. Verisimilitude is my preferred jargon because it leaves room for the speculative while trying to adhere to setting self-relevant coherency. Or read quickly: the second you can "realistically" model health as a functional game abstraction, you should run to the nearest real hospital and share your new breakthrough in triaging patients...

Quote from: Cave Bear;945619How would you define a realistic rule in the context of tabletop roleplaying games? And why are realistic rules important?

Toss the HP. Use character attributes for hit points instead. That's as "realistic" as I want my rules.

Very well.

Suppose I were to define realistic rules, for my own purposes, as game rules where the outcome is intended to model real world observations and experiences?

Example:
I have observed, in Matt Easton's Schola Gladiatoria videos on Youtube, that longer weapons strike their targets sooner than shorter weapons (assuming the combatants have similar speed in terms of footwork.) A 'realistic' rule then would be one where combatants with longer weapons make their attack rolls before combatants with shorter weapons.
Whether longer weapons do hit before shorter weapons in real life is a matter of debate. What makes a realistic rule is observations of reality and an intent to design rules that model reality.

Your thoughts?

How do you define what is and is not realistic?

To one person HP are realistic. To another insta death is realistic. To another neither is realistic and they prefer hit locations and disabling.

To one person vancian magic is realistic. To another spell points is. Another thinks casting from HP is.

One person thinks initiative is unrealistic. Someone else thinks all at once is unrealistic. Another thinks personal speed is realistic.

Personally my go-tos and favourites for realistic rules is still Albedo. Followed by Boot Hill. They also happen to both be brutally lethal systems.

The core of the game is to make decissions on behalf of your character. To do this you have to have an idea regarding how things work in the game world.
In many cases you will want do deviate intentionally from the real world or you will add things that aren´t even existing in the real world.
And basically it is only important that there are rules that everyone knows - no matter how unrealistically they are, as long as they are generally known.

But there are 2 problems:
1) Once you set a rule, it starts to interact with the other rules and will influence the world as gaming happens. And if you don´t think about the inner logic of your rules, you will get unintended results or even contradictions - at least regarding to the world and events you originaly envisioned but also those leading to discussions about what is now the "truth" to build the character decissions on. So keeping inner logic is a basic need for serious gaming.

2) Even when there are rules that lead to certain results people will very often assume that things that are not defined as working differnet in world will behave like the identical thing in our world (or what they assume how it behaves). So you will get exspectaion clashes. You will get them anyway, because not everyone is an expert regarding what he assumes here. But it will lead to less shit piling on your work when you can point to some real info about it. (and perhaps these clashes get less then too)


And for some styles "getting it right" is one primal element of "fun". So the task there is to get as accurate as possible while still staying gameable for its own sake.


In most cases there will be not the one and aggreed on truth -like in real world science. But there will be different amounts of obvious deviations from known data or at least attempts to logically construct those differnece based on what we know or what we assume to know.

This topic tends to get a lot of noise, for example:

* Arguments about the meaning of the word "realistic".
* It's a game, it shouldn't be realistic
* It's fantasy, it shouldn't be realistic
* Trying to be more accurate never gets completely realistic, so don't try.
* Fast and easy is more important than realistic.
* Fun is more important than realistic.
* Realistic isn't fun.
* Realistic combat is deadly & dangerous and PC's dying & getting crippled is not fun.
* Having to deal with [insert aspect of reality] isn't fun.
* Realism isn't like a fictional genre that someone wants the game to be like instead.

Those mostly all seem like noise to me that is best disregarded, because players who are committed to those perspectives are welcome to play how they like, but those perspectives aren't very often relevant to the discussion of realism issues by players who are realism-oriented, since they do find realism fun and are instead interested in exploring methods for making things realistic, so most of that is off-topic.

Then there are also issues in a general discussion on realism when different major design decisions are all being discussed at once. Some design details work well in one context but not in another, for example very different time scales, or abstract hitpoints versus literal damage models.

And of course realism is very subjective and depends on the desired game type and various perspectives.

Quote from: Cave Bear;945630Very well.

Suppose I were to define realistic rules, for my own purposes, as game rules where the outcome is intended to model real world observations and experiences?

Example:
I have observed, in Matt Easton's Schola Gladiatoria videos on Youtube, that longer weapons strike their targets sooner than shorter weapons (assuming the combatants have similar speed in terms of footwork.) A 'realistic' rule then would be one where combatants with longer weapons make their attack rolls before combatants with shorter weapons.
Whether longer weapons do hit before shorter weapons in real life is a matter of debate. What makes a realistic rule is observations of reality and an intent to design rules that model reality.

Your thoughts?

For the longer weapons striking first issue, this came up in my first RPG system, The Fantasy Trip. It has a mechanic where pole weapons not only strike first when first coming into contact, but can get a huge to-hit bonus and do double damage, which with TFT's mortality means charging up a heavy polearm can easily get you killed right away. Some players have argued that skill should be able to overcome weapon reach, and they have some point, but reality is a bit more complex than yes or no. There is certainly a geometric truth that in a situation where two fighters come together from outside reach, a longer weapon has a physical opportunity to hit the opponent at a greater distance and therefore sooner than that opponent could physically hit them - that should be clear from geometry. However, it doesn't mean it will always happen that way. Grips and body positions vary, and feinting, parrying, dodging, other combatants and timing of movements could result in a shorter weapon actually striking first. But it seems to me that something should represent the difference and the fact that the longer weapon has some sort of opportunity to strike first and not vice versa. The question becomes what's a good way to represent that in a game. As I've played and thought this over in decades since, I think guarding space and maneuvering to strike effectively first is a central issue of the main style of play I like. So I'd rather err on the side of including a likely first-strike advantage for longer weapons. I've played both with absolute rules for that and fuzzy ones, but I like the situation to be that if your opponent has a longer weapon, you ought to count on doing something to avoid getting hit on your way in, and when holding a longer weapon, it's a natural tactic to use that to try to avoid injury by keeping foes at bay and hitting them before they're in reach. It also matches my limited experience via playfights, and historical accounts of tactics, and observations of brawls, and comments by martial artists.

Versimilitude is a good word to use for the positive arguments about these kinds of rules. Not because it means something very different from realistic - they are effectively synonyms. But people are not pre-conditioned to scream and foam at the mouth when you say 'versimilitude', so it lets you have a discussion.

I think the relevant two questions about any rule in a roleplaying game are, does it provide a credible simulation of something you believe is sufficiently interesting and important to appear as a player decision or random die roll at the game table? And, is your implementation of that as a concrete mechanic as parsimonious as it can be? Original Chivalry and Sorcery is filled with rules that are credible simulations of elements of combat, but they are not parsimonious or efficient and so they are kind of crap to play. Original D&D is filled with rules that are parsimonious, but don't really simulate the decisions and events in question. So, you might love it but you are wasting your breath if you argue it 'realism' value. Not many games hit the sweet spot on both issues. Runequest probably does the best job when we are just talking about resolving personal combat.

In my view realistic rules aren't important. Verisimilitude is, for ordinary observable phenomenon.

It's far, far more important to keep "what makes a good game" in mind instead.  Now, for some people, perceived realism is part of what makes a good game.

tl;dr There is no objective answer to the question, that's why there are so many systems out there.  Find one you like and use it.

Quote from: Cave Bear;945619How would you define a realistic rule in the context of tabletop roleplaying games? And why are realistic rules important?

It reflects the reality of the setting accurately. In addition that it accounts for the same decisions you would make if you were actually there as the character. Note that realism is not the same as abstraction. You can have a mechanic that abstracts a lot of details and still be realistic, or you could have a series of mechanics that goes into each element in detail.

The trick is for the designer to balance level of detail with play-ability at the level of detail his audience expects.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;945627Toss the HP. Use character attributes for hit points instead. That's as "realistic" as I want my rules.

Hit Points are an abstraction. In their original form they accounted for the fact that it took four hits to take out a hero in a medieval fantasy battle while an ordinary veteran only took one. So for what they were trying to do the mechanic was realistic for the genre. Is it realistic for a historical melee fight in the 13th century certainly no.

And Traveller's use of hit points (and GURPS for that matter) are just hit point in a different form. With the same issues that representing representing injury as a bag of points has in any other system.

The best system for realism for representing injury is Harnmaster Combat which doesn't use hit points at all.

I would define realistic rules as rules which provide an accurate model of the "reality" of the game world.

If Orcs are bigger and better fighters than Humans then giving them a bigger pile of damage dice to roll is a realistic rule. Giving Orcs a detailed set combat bonuses and special maneuvers is also a realistic rule. One is very abstract, the other more concrete but both will produce the realistic outcome of Orcs being better fighters.

Many gamers seem to equate "detail" with "realism". This is not always the case. I could write a very detailed RPG of the Napoleonic era, but since I know very, very little about that period my game, even if it possessed hundred page long charts and tables of weapons modifiers and damage ratings, would likely be very unrealistic.

I need a rubric for issuing rulings, part of which being a way to make comparisons and part of which being a system of measurement. The latter is why I like characters having stats covering bodily function, and the former being why I like characters having ratings in competencies. Same goes with unreal things (e.g. magic) that character either use or get used on them. More than that? Not really needed; I prefer natural language, real-world data (even for unreal things), and such to say "Throw (dice), get (x) or better to succeed."

Why?

Because too many mechanics turns players into pilots, characters into mechs, and the game into the virtual board defined by the mechanics and not by the actual situation at hand; they play the map, not the territory. (In its extreme form, you get the Gaming Den.) Players play characters when they remain focused on the situation and have no distractions from it; reducing the game's rules down to what is required to facilitate the core feedback loop ("You see/hear/etc. (X), what do you do?" "I do (y) because of (real-world data-driving reasoning, filtered by PC persona)." "Throw (dice), get above (x)." *rolls, reports* "Okay, now you see/hear this. What do you do?") is the best option.

In short, reversion to the core of the hobby is best. Building out further only makes the argument for competing RPG media better by comparison.

An important point made above is that 'abstract' and 'unrealistic' are not the same thing. Using a scalar metric like total HP to track health is an abstraction, which might be realistic or unrealistic depending on how it is implemented. A damage system that makes it literally impossible for your character to die when they jump off a 1000' cliff into a bed of razor sharp spikes is unrealistic.

Quote from: DavetheLost;945675Many gamers seem to equate "detail" with "realism". This is not always the case.

I think we're done here.