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Realism Pt. III
jhkim:
--- Quote from: RPGPundit ---Perhaps I was a bit hyperbolic in my last post about this, but I stick by the essence of my argument with a slight modification: It seems that in RPGs, either the "realists" are very poor game designers, or the medium of RPGs itself cannot convey the "real" very well.
--- End quote ---
--- Quote from: RPGPundit ---So there is NO RPG out there that attempts to be truely "realistic" or a real "simulation" of real life. "REALITY: The RPG" would in fact be a gigantic manual with thousands of pages where the rules were EQUALLY SOPHISTICATED for every aspect of your PC's existence, from reading a book to going to the bathroom to cooking noodles, to driving a car, to getting in a knifefight. That would be "realism". That would also be boring and unplayable as all fuck.
--- End quote ---
Sigh. This is just setting the goalposts at a ridiculous point again. You're trying to define that "realistic" means that everything has to be perfectly detailed to every last bit. Thus, your argument shows that no book can possibly be realistic -- because a realistic book would detail every trip to the bathroom and every motion in cooking noodles, and thus be completely unreadable. Similarly, no film, or painting, or anything else can be realistic. Even the wargames which are used to train naval cadets that are actually researched by the military are not realistic, because they have no "going to the bathroom" rules either.
Clearly, the medium of books just cannot convey the "real" very well -- nor can film, or wargames, or anything else. Unless you can offer different criteria, then this definition of "realistic" is worthless because it means that nothing is ever realistic.
Kyle Aaron:
--- Quote from: jhkim ---Unless you can offer different criteria, then this definition of "realistic" is worthless because it means that nothing is ever realistic.
--- End quote ---
But d00d, if I don't get to redefine words to mean whatever I want, how the fuck can I win every argument? I mean, it works for the Forgers, yeah?
arminius:
( In reply to jhkim.)
Yeah, that's my point above. It's a common issue in wargames when the detail is too far below the level of command (e.g., resolving movement and combat for individual soldiers in a game where the total forces that a player is responsible for would be the equivalent of a company or a battalion). Small errors at the lowest level of detail are easily compounded into severe distortions at the overall level of the game.
Problems of this sort may be amenable to fine-tuning but it's easier on bothe designer and the player to just pick an appropriate level of abstraction, not to mention that it's truer to the perspective of the person whose shoes the player fills, as it were.
For example in the case of the merchant character I mentioned above, I'd far rather have a subsystem that got the generalities of running a business right, than one that contained a mass of bean counting detail which, in the aggregate, yielded completely incorrect results.
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