Braving the Rapids of Realism

Alexis Smolensk made a rather incisive post regarding anachronistic ways of thinking about the game.

I’ve encountered this too, it is one sure way to break my immersion.

As I haltingly muck about with creating a setting, it defies my understanding that someone would take it upon himself to run that facet of the game with levity.

For, you see, that’s part of the ticket for a complete Rpg experience for me: discovering new worlds, different realities; and tackling them through the eyes and mores of a character. But it is the player's sensibilities that must be educated, confirmed or challenged, not the character's.

A rather big part of this is achieved by a consonance of expectations regarding realism, both natural and technological. It is a very important tether from our world to a fictional setting and one that is central in operating a duality: immersion through predictability and realism, wonder through unpredictable shattering of the latter.

If you’re like me and a few others, you recognize that the more the world is grounded on the historical realities that make it such a fascinating place, the more a little magic and whimsy can go a long way in contrasting with the rest.

If, on the other hand, you’re onboard with most contemporary rulesets and general disney-mentality of modern DnD playing, the act of leaning over details is to be faced with a stoic shrugging of the shoulders and a “let’s get this over with” frame of mind.

Understand, for all my rethoric, that I’m not a realism freak, much less a simulationist. There are plenty of aspects where the fictional character of a world can appealingly come to the referee's aid, as it allows him to gleefully tamper with things without fear of making everything hopelessly off, or – when things don’t quite slide on the little grooves and something he’s ignorant about gets asked or leveraged -  he can rely on the crutch of “in these lands, this is how it is done” or “magic & gods!”. 

But overdoing this steadily undermines the setting’s realism and is an appeal to laziness of the worst sort. Not exactly a refereeing but rather a GMing sin.

Understand, too, that I have many many shortcomings as regards the subject of this spiel. I’m not an encyclopaedia or an historian, an outdoorsman or even a recreator. I'm a suburbanite and good money says that so are you. I'm just pointing out the rocks while angling the kayak right their way all the same.

So you buckle down and you learn. That, come the right time, things that make sense will be found where they make sense and things that don’t make sense can suitably get themselves noticed as such.

It’s bad enough for me when the Renaissance bleeds too profusely all over the Medieval, but a lot can happen in degrees between modernity and the supposed historic period(s) depicted.

For example, I was shortly involved as a player in a maritime-themed campaign.

The initial action was framed to a departing ship on which the party supposedly first met; when asked about the ship's destination, it turned out its whole purpose was “for transport service between cities”. It had such quaint ammenities as “cabins” and even a convenient “bar” where the crew gathered. It was a regular Enterprise.

Later, the party came across a remote island village of 10-odd standing structures that included a full-fledged lighthouse in the middle of the settlement.

When sneaking through said village at night, we chanced upon the blacksmith’s. What did the party find in there, you could have asked? The answer: anvil, hammer, weapon rack, that’s it. That’s what a blacksmith is for. No mention of bellows, water pails, iron tongs, horseshoes, nails, plows, arrowheads, weapon heads, wheel-rims, pickaxes, shovels or any other kind of possible handiwork beside _completed_weapons_ and standing neatly in a rack, too. Thanks, video-games!

I get that a lot of such incongruities could be neatly explained away with a little effort, but it is the unthinking acceptance of their existence - with nary a raised eyebrow from the remaining players, mind you – that gets my goat and herds her to jump down a ravine, where at last it'll be happy. This is what happens when we fail to appreciate humanity’s existence-long struggle to master the natural environment. 

Of course, if the weapon dispense-a-thon is already the norm (something bordering on magical as it is), we then come to the heavy handed arcane daubings on this canvas: magic will forcibly have to be something so utterly unbalancing in natural terms that anyone with a brain has to aknowledge that its existence would upset the world in ways would that twist it out of all recongnizability.

And that right there, descending down the white-foaming rapids?

That’s right, that’s my immersion. Again.