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1 year ago ::
Apr 10, 2012 - 3:55PM
#31
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Date Joined:
Jun 19, 2005
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The great irony of those claiming the unbelievability of martial powers bringing back unconcious people is that in movies, tv shows, novels, etc, the instances where a yell, kiss or kind word bring someone back from near death probably out number 20 to 1 the instances where the same feat is achieved through magical powers.
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1 year ago ::
Apr 10, 2012 - 3:55PM
#32
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Date Joined:
Feb 13, 2012
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At some point HP represent physical injury. At the point I'm unconscious and bleeding to death it represents real injury.
But, living things are resilient. Note that if you roll a 20 on one of your death saves you'll get up on your own. If you have a feat you can get a bonus to that roll and be more likely to get up. Clearly, then, the injury in question is not absolutely mortal. You could just be unconscious. Also, while you're unconscious, you can make a perception check at -10 to hear things. If you're just asleep, you wake up. So, clearly, someone shouting at you is a stimulus you might respond to.
When you use encouraging words to fix this, it becomes unbelievable.
It's unbelievable that someone who might (5%) get up in any given round, and can probably hear you, might get up when you shout something meaningful, reminding them what they're fighting for?
There's no way to square that with any real experience, because there's not even the remotest kernel of realism to it.
That's probably outside most of our personal experiences, yes. But, truth is strager than fiction. You hear news reports of gravely injured people waking and staggering to safety because they heard their child's cry for help or their dog barking or something like that. And fiction abounds with such things.
On the other hand, if you designed the warlord in a way that he could encourage to a degree that isn't remotely achievable in real life, I bet you wouldn't hear a single complaint. He could inspire people to Str + 20 and HP + 100, and at a very basic level, this would be exceptable from a believability standpoint, because we've all had a coach or someone that urged us on at some point.
Judging from the tennor of these forums, I would probably take that bet and consider it money in the bank. There's always someone complaining bitterly about something.
Maybe I've just a bad first impression?
However as soon as he says to an unconscious half dead guy, "get up you wuss", it just doesn't square.
Are you kidding? It's awesome, one of the coolest things about playing a Warlord.
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1 year ago ::
Apr 10, 2012 - 4:10PM
#33
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Date Joined:
Feb 27, 2010
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It has been my personal experiance that compaints about realism come from people playing Wizards about fighters trying to do more than "I Attack". My answer to this after a warning to the player is to remove said wizards spellcasting ability for a couple of rounds. Afterall magic isnt realistic. I take the view that magic and such forces purvade everything and as you level up it show more obviously allowing martial types to accomplish great things as long as it stays within the rules.
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1 year ago ::
Apr 10, 2012 - 4:40PM
#34
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Date Joined:
Feb 13, 2012
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The great irony of those claiming the unbelievability of martial powers bringing back unconcious people is that in movies, tv shows, novels, etc, the instances where a yell, kiss or kind word bring someone back from near death probably out number 20 to 1 the instances where the same feat is achieved through magical powers.
One example that probably served as an inspiration for D&D would be Jason and the Argonauts. It has not one but /two/ scenes of magical healing, probably a cinematic record for 1963. In one, Medea uses a flower to instantly heal a cut on Jason's arm. Hey, I guess he was 'Bloodied.' The most remarkable thing about that scene was how unimpressed Jason was by instantaneous magical healing. In the other, Jason uses the Golden Fleace to revive Medea after she was shot in the back by an arrow. Mind you, he laid her down on her back and left the arrow in, so that's a lot of healing. Why bother dressing the wound when you've got an artifact.
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1 year ago ::
Apr 10, 2012 - 4:42PM
#35
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"Realism" in a fantasy setting has to be taken with a grain of salt. That is part of the very definition of "Fantasy"- It's not real.
That is not to mean that the laws of the fantasy world do not need to follow consistent principles, that may or may not mirror reality.
The key to D&D, is that for the majority of decades, the realism inherent in the game assumed that general conventions of reality (gravity, human strength, behavior of fire, states of being) were a given. Thus the verisimilitude of the players was maintained throughout the iterations of the game.
The problem D&D gained as it progresed into the modern age, is that it started to abstract a number of things that players took for granted, and began to break the consistency of the gameworld that many people had been "living" in for some time.
It seemed absolutely preposterous that a martial hero who generally resembled a "Batman" was now capable of performing feats that made him more akin to "Superman" Instead of Aragorn, the archetype was changing to Sauron. An example is knocking an ancient red dragon prone, or proning a poltergeist.
While in later editions, this could be handwaved as not actually "proning" the creature, the verisimilitude which had been painstakingly built in the realm of D&D for decades was turned on its head.
New players to the game, and those who had witnessed the perceived inequities in the 3x edition, had an easier time swallowing the level of abstraction and balance that 4e brought to the game in place of familiar verisimilitude. 3x broke verisimilitude of many old school gamers with the advent of racial restrictions being dropped, commoditized magic and magical treasure etc.
That being said. I think the new version of the game should strive for the realism levels inherent in the older editions of the game. It is much easier to add fantastical elements on top of a robust realistic base layer, than it is to try strip them out of the game.
There is a trove of "realism" elements from prior editions that can be reimagined, simplified, or ignored if they do not make sense.
"If it's not a conjuration, how did the wizard
con·jure/ˈkänjər/Verb
1. Make (something) appear unexpectedly or seemingly from nowhere as if by magic.
it?" -anon
"Why don't you read fire·ball / fī(-ə)r-ˌbȯl/ and see if you can find the key word con.jure /'kən-ˈju̇r/ anywhere in it."
-Maxperson
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1 year ago ::
Apr 10, 2012 - 4:47PM
#36
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Date Joined:
Jul 25, 2003
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On the other end of the spectrum pre 4e magic is unrealistic. I know, it is magic and all, but why train knights to protect your kingdom when mages will do a much better job. Come on sleep with no save and 2d4 HD of warriors taken out. 100 level one knights vs 50 mages, mages win. Why have cooks when you can cast presdigitation. For that matter, that 0 level spell can do the work of many everyday jobs. Just seems silly that the world is not entirely filled with (low level) casters.
This is actually a more a matter of magic before 4e than in 4e. In 4e, the kingdom doesn't have an army of mages because PCs that have access to Sleep are special, and all the rules pertaining to them don't necessarily apply to NPCs. Potentially, no one in the world knows Sleep other than one guy in your party. In previous editions, the NPCs followed the same rules as PCs, so every NPC spell caster and his brother knew Sleep.
In any case, this doesn't effect "realism" of any edition because the DM can easily say that magic is too rare for the kindgom to find 50 guys that know sleep. Or he can say that they don't serve the king for whatever in-game reason (think Tibetan monks vs Communist China).
But Lawolf does raise an excellent point (And Tony Vargas hits on this too) in that magic might not necessarily be subject to "realism" based on its imaginary nature, but if the rest of the world is, then realistically, we expect the world to react and conform to the presence of magic within it. You can't add magic to medieval europe and expect it to be exactly the same anymore than you could drop functional machine guns into medieval europe and expect the world to work in the exact same way. And the more powerful or unconstrained magic is, the more of an impact we expect to see on the world because of it, which means you either have to limit the scope and power of magic, realism or lack thereof be damned, or you have to make sweeping changes to the world.
In other words, while you might think that Fighters have to be realistic and Wizards don't, the more powerful the Wizard is, the more work you have to do in explaining why the Fighter still has a job, and the more you have to change the world to reflect the fact that Wizards can modify it at whim.
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1 year ago ::
Apr 10, 2012 - 5:22PM
#37
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Date Joined:
Feb 13, 2012
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New players to the game, and those who had witnessed the perceived inequities in the 3x edition, had an easier time swallowing the level of abstraction and balance that 4e brought to the game in place of familiar verisimilitude. 3x broke verisimilitude of many old school gamers with the advent of racial restrictions being dropped, commoditized magic and magical treasure etc.
I'm afraid I missed most of that. I guess there must have been some groundswell of 'verisimilitude' after the mid-80s that disapeared completely a few years ago. When I drifed away from D&D it was a very abstract game, and when I came back it was a very abstract game, just one that didn't feature nearly so many arguments about what the rules really meant.
As for things like racial restrictions or pretending no one would ever buy or sell a magic item, they're among the many things that I remember DMs trying to fix back in the day, that now have been fixed. Not in a way I'd have ever envisioned, of course. I don't think I ever spent any time trying to envision what D&D might be like in the 21st century. I hardly stopped to wonder what I'd be like in the 21st century. If I had, I might have eaten fewer donuts.
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1 year ago ::
Apr 10, 2012 - 5:32PM
#38
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Date Joined:
May 17, 2009
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I'm afraid I missed most of that. I guess there must have been some groundswell of 'verisimilitude' after the mid-80s that disapeared completely a few years ago. When I drifed away from D&D it was a very abstract game, and when I came back it was a very abstract game, just one that didn't feature nearly so many arguments about what the rules really meant.
Not really, just a lot of people getting used to certain abstractions. Then when they were presented with different abstractions, suddenly the old ones were incredibly realistic.
Seriously, though, you should check out the PbP Haven. You might also like Real Adventures, IF you're cool. | Knights of W.T.F.- Silver Spur Winner | |
4enclave, a place where 4e fans can talk 4e in peace.
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1 year ago ::
Apr 10, 2012 - 8:14PM
#39
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Nothing worst than a realist killing everyones fun at the table. We are fighting dragons, the guy next to me is shooting fireballs out of his fingers, the woman behind me is instantly healing wounds with a touch and a prayer to a god whom answered in a open manner and the realist is bitchin' about a human jumping a few extra feet than he considers real? WTF???
This.
More sex and gender equality and racial equality shouldn't even be an argument--it should simply be an assumption for any RPG that wants to stay relevant in the 21st century.
I could say anything in D&D is silly though, because it's a silly game and we are silly people.
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1 year ago ::
Apr 10, 2012 - 9:17PM
#40
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Date Joined:
May 26, 2005
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I think some of the realism questions (at least ones that bugged me) were ones where people in a game world did not behave like real people would seem to in that kind of world. Lemme explain, one thing in Forgotten Realms that bugged the hell out of me was that with all those people with high level magic wandering around why was everything pretty much still Tolkienesque medieval? I'm not saying that the whole place should be magitek cities or anything like that, but it did bother me that when that much arcane power was floating around that world, and a lot of it among heroic types, and we weren't seeing even little things like say more development of civilization or anything like that. To be honest that was part of why I liked Eberron and the whole wide magic setup, where magic was an accepted part of the world and it actually did shape and affect peoples lives. Magic items were comissioned for cities, mages were trained for armies, and it even dealt with faiths in a good way too.
To me realism isn't about how high someone can jump or the 'effect' of a fighters strikes. It has more to do with the world not feeling completely alien and me being able to understand and follow the mindset of the people that would live in this kind of world. At least that's my thing.
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