Quote from: jhkim;953780The same thing can be said of any real-life simulations that are used for scientific or other research purposes. Nothing simulates all of reality. Car crash tests only look at how the human structure is stressed in a crash, without tracking bladder fullness or beard growth of the dummies.

Sure, but an RPG isn't a crash-test or a flight simulator.
An RPG is a WORLD-Simulator.
And you just can't get realism from that.
In theory, you might be able to make some kind of really super-detailed Realistic simulation of one or two specific things in an RPG; but what would happen then? It would actually fuck up the game.
It would fuck up the mechanics, because to do that kind of thing even with one single area would require Advanced Squad Leader-esque phone-book-sized rules. It would dramatically slow down play to do that one single thing. It would break emulation, switching from something actually really truly Realistic to making everything else abstract and merely emulative and then back again.
It would fuck up the world, because it STILL wouldn't be a "realistic world".  It would in fact be an even less "realistic" world, because it would be a world where that one single thing followed totally different world-laws than everything else.

Or you can get a more realistic treatment of the world across the board, without full simulation. And then you up that to a pretty realistic treatment of one or two areas, but covering the associated topics, too.
IME, that approach does result a more realistic world simulation overall.

Quote from: AsenRG;954083Or you can get a more realistic treatment of the world across the board, without full simulation. And then you up that to a pretty realistic treatment of one or two areas, but covering the associated topics, too.
IME, that approach does result a more realistic world simulation overall.

Yup.