Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 130 - Is Realism Overrated

Episode Date: June 26, 2022

We all love campaigns that have actions and reactions grounded in realism but in this episode, Jeremy asks, is the work to make things realistic worth it?  Would it be better for you to spend that time preparing the next balls to the wall adventure than determining the realistic after effects of a kobold raid against the town's grain storage?  Tune in to find out.   #Pathfinder #RPG #DungeonsandDragons #DnD

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. There's nothing wrong with appreciating realism, but your campaign doesn't have to be chained to the gritty, hard, bullshit realism that we deal with here on Earth-616, as it's called in Marvel. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for tuning in to episode 130 of the Taking20 podcast. This week, asking the question, is realism overrated and does your campaign have to make any sense at all? This week's sponsor, flags. Just so you know, the flag isn't the main reason why you should move to Switzerland, but the flag is a big plus. Before I get started, I wanted to say thank you to Andreas in Sweden who donated to my ko-fi.com slash taking20podcast and he gave me a

great topic suggestion. Thank you so much, Andreas. Stay tuned for that topic in the next few weeks. I also want to say thank you to 3D Crafts and Curios for continuing to sponsor the giveaway of their beautiful artificer workshop, Dice Tower, tower excuse me you still have a few weeks to send in your ideas for an accessory that you would have or would like to have 3d printed for your use at your rpg table send those ideas to contest at taking20podcast.com for a chance to win plus you can take 10% off any item at their etsy store 3dcraftsandcurios.etsy.com, with the offer code TAKING20, that's TAKING20, during the month of July. Head over there, take advantage of the savings before it's too late,

take a look at their wonderful inventory and the huge number of colors that are available. So I came within a hair's breadth of naming this episode, very similar to your campaign, but I realized at the last minute that that would sound pretentious as shit. So let's just go with, Is Realism Overrated? Guys, I make dick jokes in this podcast. I'm not here to help you prep for the GRE vocabulary section in preparation for your master's degree. I mean, the audacity of trying to expand one's vocabulary from this trial podcast. While it would do no one any good for me to suddenly become largely laconic, trying to succeed at this podcast despite a paucity of words, the benefits of using this podcast to expand your vocabulary would be ephemeral at best,

and would likely engender ambivalence, garnering disdain, and probably scorn writ large for my entire listener base. disdain and probably scorn writ large for my entire listener base. This loquaciousness would largely have a soporific effect on all of my listeners. Oh, sorry, why did I write that shit? I mean, I meant all of that to say to mess it penis. In a lot of ways, it's hard for me to make this episode, not just because of my brain surgeries, but because I value realism in my games and campaigns, and I strive to make them as realistic as possible. I love it when character action and inaction has realistic effects on the world around them, both positive and negative. Imagine, the big bad has to change his plans because of the party's ability to counter what

he wanted to do. That's a great realistic reaction that any big bad would have when they wanted their plan to succeed. So the party's been having some success against them, so he adjusts his attack. So he attacks something near and dear to the party's heart instead of his original plan. Like he tries to take out their hometown, a loved one, or maybe even a major resource supplier. I like even little things that you can do to add realism to a campaign. Hey, the party goes on an adventure, come back with a plus one short sword that they looted from the nearby dungeon. Here you go. Here's 50% of the purchase price and that's what the town will buy it for. But if they bring back 150 plus one short swords looted from nearby

dungeons and try to sell them all at once, you're probably not going to get that good of a price per unit. It's the law of supply and demand and whatnot. The party is flush with cash and they give a huge donation to a small orphanage in a small town, you're probably going to change that orphanage for the better for the rest of its existence. But the person running the orphanage may be tempted towards dishonesty, stealing, embezzlement. They might take some of those funds for their own, or they may commit errors out of incompetence, mismanaging the funds because they've never dealt with this amount of cash ever in their life. These little realistic after effects make me enjoy games that I play in and DM so much. But should you even worry about realism in your game? I mean, okay, I want to start on the problems with realism and discuss why it may not be as important to include in your game as you think it is.

Number one, realism is a lot of work. It's work that has rippling effects of creating more work and more work and more work as changes beget other changes when we get further on down the line. Each change that you would have to keep track of creates still more work for you as a DM. Imagine you're using a pre-written adventure as the basis for your game. Every change that you make happens because of player choices, but those changes could further change the story down the line. Last year I ran a group of friends through Pathfinder First Edition Adventure Path Rain of Winter, and spoiler alert for anybody who wants to run through that adventure path,

there is a lot of interaction with the old crone Baba Yaga. The adventure as written railroads the party into working with Baba Yaga against one of her daughters, but the party made decisions that cast that path into doubt. So I expanded the options, gave them the ability to decide how best to help the people of Irison, and the ending wound up very, very different than what book six said it should be. Sure, I borrowed large swaths of what was written, but the climactic battle looked very different than the one the original author had intended, and it was a huge amount of work on my part. But I think they had fun,

and it worked out, so to me that makes it all worth it. But even if you're not adapting a pre-written adventure, making things realistic can still require a ton of extra work. Let's take something simple, like there used to be a kingdom here that spanned a region between two large lakes, but it's gone now. If you were going hardcore realism, you'd have to ask yourself things like, how long did the kingdom exist? What caused it to wane and eventually disappear? Are there any remnants of the former kingdom? And if so, what and where are they? What kind of kingdom was it? When did the kingdom disappear? Is the region feeling the effects of the power void? All of these questions and all of these decisions that

you make do require more work by you as the DM in preparation of just in case it comes up, or it's important to the adventure, or if an NPC just wants to mention it. Leading that in, question two. Most of the backstory about your campaign world and reasons for the realistic outcomes will go undiscovered by your players. Hell, the outcomes themselves may not be noticed by the party. They may traipse between those two lakes and completely ignore the fact that there used to be a kingdom there. Never mind the fact that there are these ruins over here and this dungeon over there. They may just trek right by them. A lot of the work that you put into making adventures, campaigns, or worlds realistic will forever remain in your DM notebook.

So if 95% of your work in making it realistic may never make it to the table, even as a mentioned aside in a conversation, is it worth it? It can easily turn into a tremendous amount of work for almost no payoff. 3. Another reason why realism may not be that important to your campaign is that the world is already magic or has technology that seems like magic. You're adventuring in a world with, oh I don't know, manticores and elves and hobgoblins and druids and space hamsters and elder beings from beyond the stars, millennia-old dragons, both good and evil. The dead can return from the grave and countless civilizations have risen and fallen

before your adventurers were even born. A lot of those things would not be realistic here on Earth. Can you imagine how hard it would be to be a mortician if there was, I don't know, a realistic chance of the body on your table rising as a ghost or zombie or a ghoul, I think that probably would change our burial practices quite a bit. Here at Jeremy's Funeral Home, we don't do open casket funerals, because the very first thing we do when we receive a new body is that we bash the skull to a thick, rich slurry, giving you the peace of mind that your loved one won't be returning in a week or two as the pawn of a necromantic scourge hell-bent on world domination.

We employ a number of holy warriors, which is why we always say at Jeremy's Funeral Home, channel and smite keep things nice and tight. So realism is a lot of work, may never pay off, and you're in a magical or technologically advanced world anyway, so realism may not be all that important to run your table to begin with. But there's another aspect of realism I want to discuss, and that's campaign setting consistency. Maybe your entire game doesn't have to be realistic,

but I'd argue there should be at least some consistency in the way your game world plays out. Some aspects of your game, for example, could be made realistic and feel like it's grounded here on Earth, but not all of it needs to be. For example, I want to talk about the movie The Fifth Element. I will admit I love that movie, and I use it as an example a lot. Assuming that you've seen this movie, I think we can all agree the elements of the story are crazy. Chris Tucker playing Ruby Rod is way out there.

The apartments look strange compared to what we're used to on Earth. The universe runs on the elements of Earth, fire, air, water, and of course the fifth element. The shootout on the cruise ship on Floston Paradise isn't realistic at all. But parts of that world are grounded in the world that we're familiar with. There are still military careers, good and bad parts of cities where crime rates are different, streamed entertainment programs, and greedy corporate entities. There's enough realism there to make the setting feel grounded in a reality,

even if it's not our reality. The same could be said for Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games, The Marvel Universe, Star Wars. Well, okay, here's where I could give my midichlorians or stupid rant. But I'm tired and let's just push on. Star Trek, The Expanse, The Boys, countless other pieces of media that we consume.

Your campaign can be exactly the same. Parts of it can be realistic, similar to Earth in terms of government, finance, social issues, science, rules of physics, or any other aspect of our world. But meanwhile, the rest of the world can be completely batshit insane if you wanted it to be. You could make it a capitalist world where most of the decisions are based on acquiring and keeping money. Money, though, can be made any number of ways. Money, though, can be made any number of ways. Magically, mining asteroids, cleaning out dungeons, cloning intelligent creatures that sweat delicious frappuccinos, whatever.

The world could be capitalist, but it doesn't have to be. Imagine your world is entirely on the barter system. Maybe the government is progressive utopianism. In the world, there's a restaurant named Steph's House of Curry who lets you pay for meals with hugs, I don't know, whatever. There's nothing wrong with appreciating realism, but your campaign doesn't have to be chained to the gritty, hard, bullshit realism that we deal with here on Earth-616, as it's called in Marvel. For example, in one major game system,

the drow are said to have evolved from elves and driders evolved from drow. This makes no damn sense. Unless some drow got busy with a spider in the past. Bleh. Then how the hell did that happen? Half spider, half dark elf. Well, you see, Jeremy,

the goddess Loth rewarded her most fervent roadshippers with stop, stop, okay, you've already left the world of earth-like realism. You have multiple gods taking a direct hand in shaping the fates of multiple races or ancestries, so you already have license to include unusual things in your world that might leave realism behind. I guess my most important piece of advice is this. This is a game, and games are meant to be fun. There is nothing wrong with abstracting part of your world to not worry about certain tedious aspects of the universe that just aren't fun to deal with. For example, in the Starfinder game system, even large starships can be safely piloted by six people. That being said, as a DM and a

player, I like having a modicum of realism in my games, as I mentioned earlier. Is six people piloting a starship realistic in our universe? Beats the shit out of me. Most of our currently primitive starships can be piloted by three to five people, but they don't carry many more people than that. Could it be like an aircraft where there are two to three people in the cockpit, whether they're carrying five or 250 people? Sure, but it doesn't have to be. An example from my current campaign is the pirate campaign that I'm running. To sail, for example, a Spanish galleon in the 18th century required about 90 to 100 people to successfully crew the ship. Does that mean that I need to get 90 PCs playing? Oh, no, that's not gonna happen. So what do we do? We abstract a lot of the tedious work like hauling

rope and patching sails and hunting vermin and other menial tasks and just hand wave these tasks as being done off screen. Ships still have officers like the navigator, the captain, etc. that the PCs can occupy and make the sailing parts of the adventure more successful based on the result of the player's role. That's the middle ground to me, and my players found that it still kept it fun, but still makes it feel a little bit realistic. It is a balancing act, because even if you do enjoy the realistic aspects of your game world, you don't want to include that at the expense of fun for your players and for you.

If you or your players don't want that gritty realism, then ditch it for fun, nutso, balls-to-the-wall, insane shit that would never happen in a million years, no matter how random and weird your world is. Find that happy medium between the two, where your players and you are happy with the balance between realism and fun. Now, let me make a counter-argument. Realism does have some importance.

The world needs to make some sort of sense. Some sort of, as I mentioned, consistent application of rules of the world. And I think that's the sweet spot to me. Does something make sense in the world that you've designed, even if it would be nonsense claptrap on Earth that would never happen? But your version of Galarian, or a bear Toril, or the planet Scott Barkstooth, whatever, it's perfect for there. Sure, dragons were all dormant until someone burps a perfect C-sharp note between two magical tuning forks, and boom, they all wake up. Why not?

Another counter-argument. It can be fun to create a realistic world. Some of us consider making realistic worlds and realistic outcomes fun as part of adventure design. So if it's not tedious work to you, and it's a fun way to make the campaign better, then please include it. Because imagine you just completely disregard any realistic outcomes and the world becomes almost a mess of randomness.

Complete randomness and a lack of causality can make your players lose interest in your game. Third thing about realism, adding in things like language barriers, different coins between different empires can make different parts of your world feel different from one another. And that does make sense. Even in our world, it feels different going to Germany than it does Canada or going to Antarctica versus, say, Egypt. Ultimately, it's your and your player's game, and you should make it as realistic or nonsensical as your group wants it to be. Whether that's a grimdark world rooted in an earth-like universe with all the sorts of political and social nightmares that we have here,

all the sorts of political and social nightmares that we have here, or you have a home repair store called Gnome Depot. Talk to your players and find where that balancing act is between abstracted realism and hard, gritty realism, and I guarantee you with a little communication and a little discussion before the campaign starts, you and your players have fun doing it. If you like the podcast, please consider following, liking, subscribing, or maybe even donating to the podcast. Every dollar that you give goes towards the operating costs of running this little podcast, and believe me,

every single dollar is appreciated. Hey, tune in next week where we're going to talk about some Dungeons & Dragons lore, the Orcgate Wars. But before I go, I want to thank our sponsors. First off, 3D Crafts and Curios. Please, again, get those ideas in. And our sponsor, Flags. Look, they're not very talkative, but they do try to greet you all the time. I mean, look at Flags waving at you. This has been episode 130, Is Realism Overrated?

My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking 20 Podcast is a Publishing Cube Media Production. Copyright 2022. References to game system content are copyrighted by their respective publishers.