Confessions of a realist

I strongly suspect that one of the things which holds me back, both as a writer of rpg materials and as a GM, is that even when I'm running games about magical zombies fighting robots from space I really, truly want things to actually make sense.

When people talk about 'realism' in RPGs, it's usually in relation to physics and biology: whether it's 'realistic' for someone to survive that fall, or carry that much gold, or hold their breath for that long, or whatever. I don't actually care about any of that. What I care about is logic: how many soldiers could a settlement of that size really support? Where exactly are these cave-dwelling bandits getting their fresh water from? Is this trade route economically plausible? Could you actually run a secret society like that without anyone noticing it was there? How many people can be eaten by monsters every year before the village becomes demographically unviable? I don't obsess over these things, but it bothers me when the answers are obviously implausible. It bothers me a lot more than it probably should.

The army you imagine your holdings supporting.

The army your holdings will actually support.

In some ways this constrains me. It means I very seldom use traps, because I just can't get past the sheer impracticality of most of them. (Would you live in a house where accidentally treading on the wrong floor tile resulted in messy and instantaneous death?) It means that I barely ever use puzzles: 'try to guess the wizard's password' is OK, but 'solve this riddle / logic puzzle to progress' just leaves me wondering why anyone would bother building a security system which deactivated itself if the intruders were able to pass an arbitrary intelligence test. Catalogues of random weird stuff, in the style of McKinney's Isle of the Unknown, are almost useless to me. I crave explanations: who built all these random statues with random magical powers, and why? What possible purpose could they have served, given that most of them seem to exist purely to fuck with people who try to tamper with them? Intellectually, I know that asking these questions is missing the point: the traps and the puzzles and the magic statues exist because those sorts of things are fun to interact with during games of D&D. But they still nag at me, to the point where I tend to assign explanations for the things that appear in my games just for my own peace of mind, even if it's very unlikely to ever come up in play.

In other ways, though, this kind of realism can be beneficial, because the more deeply things are embedded in their fictional worlds, the more ways PCs have to interact with them in play. If there are logical reasons why things work the way they do, then it's much easier for players to find logical ways to manipulate them; and the more things happen 'just because', the more you lose that. I like my players to be able to say: 'They must be getting food from somewhere, so let's cut their supply lines', or 'This was obviously meant as a security system, so there must be some way to get through the room without setting it off', and actually have those deductions pay off. If the Generic Orc Warriors need to have food sources and fresh water and chains of command and somewhere to sleep and somewhere to shit and so on, then the possibilities for dealing with them multiply: the PCs can poison their food, or drug their water, or intercept and rewrite their orders, or rig their latrine to explode, or whatever. But if they get their warriors and supplies from nowhere in particular, then the PCs have far fewer options for dealing with them in ways other than kicking down the door and stabbing everyone in the face.

This isn't any kind of manifesto - I don't think that there's any optimal level of logical coherency that D&D games can have, or that anyone with too much or too little of it is Doing It Wrong. But I do think that they lend themselves to rather different modes of play: one more weird and anarchic and freewheeling, the other more logical and coherent and internally self-consistent. (Law vs. chaos, if you will.) I think players will swiftly pick up on the extent to which the game world around them can or can't be expected to make sense, and as a result, it's probably quite important to pick a level and stick to it, as suddenly shifting this around will just leave everyone feeling disorientated and confused.

Unless, of course, that's the objective. Having the game world itself shift progressively from internally self-consistent realism to high Gygaxian nonsense-logic the further the PCs went from civilisation might be a rather nice way of demonstrating that they have ventured into a place where the normal rules do not apply...