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Old 09-04-2018, 02:50 PM   #14
whswhs
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
Default Re: Lifepaths in Faaantasy!!!

Quote:
Originally Posted by Irish Wolf View Post
Yet another reason why I say "realism" has little if any place in FRPGs. (I mean, aside from the fact that they take place in worlds where someone with the correct training can twiddle their fingers and mutter something, and the room down the hall will suddenly erupt into flame...)
That distinction is why I talked about "realistic versus cinematic" and "fantastic versus mundane" in GURPS Adaptations. You can have cinematic mundane narratives (say, the Jack Ryan novels); you can also have the realistic fantastic (Tolkien was already pointing in that direction with his hobbits complaining about mosquitoes and worrying about short rations, and a lot of science fiction tends that way).

But I think that why you're calling realism may be an exaggerated form of it. It's not unrealistic to write about people with unusual wealth or exceptional abilities, so long as such people do exist in reality; "reality" includes the whole bell curve, not just the middle ±0.5 standard deviations. What makes it realistic is that you figure out the consequences of actions in terms of actual cause and effect and not of "keep the story going" sweeping aside of small details.

There was a literary movement, naturalism, that went for the center of the bell curve, telling stories about typical people; it tended to emphasize the struggles and sufferings of average people, and it allowed them very little agency, seeing them as products of society. (A volume of literary criticism I edited two or three years ago pointed out that the authors assume that THEY had agency and could exercise it by reforming society through the publication of unflinching accurate accounts of these ugly details—it didn't occur to them that they too were "products of society.") You could do that in a game by having nothing by lifepath all the way, I guess. But I don't think realism requires that rigid adherence to maximum probability. You can have a realistic rpg if the player characters have to make choices and exercise agency based on probable alternatives.
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