Realism is a Technique
Brand_Robins:
So, some actual play.
I'm playing Unknown Armies with Mo, and there is this scene where she's in a car in the middle of the woods with a guy who is the father of a girl she's trying to help. She isn't sure if the guy really wants to help his daughter, or if he's been abusing her. He's upset, she's upset, and things quite suddenly go to violence, as they often do in games, and he lunges for her gun.
Mo's character has a gun in her lap, not pointed at the guy. Both of them had seat belts on. He's a former army ranger, she's... well... more bad ass than even that.
I'm seeing this thing coming on, and I know that the fight is going to be ugly. Because in that situation there is just a lot of ugly, especially if she doesn't want to just shoot him and/or isn't able to get the gun up before he starts choking, kicking, and joint breaking.
Then Mo says "Morgan goes to bash him across the side of the head, trying to knock him unconscious."
Now, the knock unconscious maneuver is a thing. I mean, you can do it in real life, right? Cold cocking someone and rendering them senseless is possible. But the way that she was approaching it, the kind of "I'll just pop him one and he'll go out like a light, but with no lasting damage, because this is the safe way that the hero takes out someone without having to have things get ugly or real" sapping with a gun... well, that's less real.
It also happens that in Unknown Armies that maneuver doesn't really work. She ends up bashing him in the face, peeling back part of his scalp, and not knocking him unconscious at all. He gets a hand on the gun, and things get really ugly really fast.
All of a sudden this scene with two characters who were just trying to do their best by this girl (he wasn't the abuser, he was just trying to protect his daughter) are choking and kicking and biting and screaming and nearly shooting each other. Morgan finally beats him unconscious, brutally and with lasting damage, and then has to drag his body into the trunk. Then has to go back and explain why there is blood all over the car to the daughter.
Needless to say, that fight changed the whole course of the game, and what it meant, and how the characters felt about each other, and how we all felt about the situation. Even though no one died in that fight, people ended up dying because of that fight, and it left real and lasting emotional trauma scars on the characters involved.
So, here's the thing. If the game had been a world in which you can just bop someone in the head with a gun and they fall over like a narcoleptic the whole tone and meaning of the game would have been different. There would have been an easy solution possible, an easy out where violence can be casually used with no lasting consequences. But it wasn't, and so everything that happened went differently. Harder, uglier choices had to be made, and no one got off clean.
So yes, realism is a technique, and has a noted effect and affect upon the fiction. Realism constrains choices, puts emphasis on different areas, and shifts the emotional resonance of a story. And if that's what you want or not is something worth consideration.
Brand_Robins:
Simon,
After my last post I remembered that we once talked about a Sorcerer game you were running, and the viability of the "take the gun off the opponent" strategy, and how it doesn't really work, or at least doesn't work the way it does in movies.
That's the exact kind of thing I'm talking about here. It's one simple example of realism, but its one that's pretty easy to see. If players know that they can do a "disarm" to knock an armed and ready opponent's gun away with a successful single roll and relatively little risk, it leads to a different approach than a game in which they know that trying to disarm someone with a gun is very likely to lead to them being shot and dying.
The thing about this is when you combine it with a Narrativist agenda, it doesn't just become about "fights being real." It starts to inform the whole process of what goes on in the game.
Simon C:
Brand, those are some really excellent examples! I hadn't even thought about the connection to that thing about avoiding tough choices, but you're totally right.
So, I guess my next question is, in the absence of system, who gets to be the authority on realism? How do you avoid those "can a man outrun a wolf?" arguments?
For example, in that Sorcerer game you mentioned (which is a great example), what happens if I say "you can't just grab a gun off someone like that" and the player says "yes, you totally can, my dad's in the army and he says..."?
Brand_Robins:
Simon,
Hah! That's the difference between realism and realistic.
Anyway, as to the Sorcerer example -- the dice should do a good job on that one. Much as I've occasionally struggled with Sorcerer's dice mechanics, I'd totally trust them in that situation to make something interesting happen. Especially if you don't try to make stakes out of it, and just go in with intents and let things play out. Bonus dice would probably add into the issue as well, giving the GM some ability to say "Yea, I do/don't buy that as realistic" without having to simply resolve it by fiat.
The Unknown Armies example worked out much the same -- I didn't have to say what was realistic and what wasn't. The game was designed to have a certain level of grit, and it (mostly) delivers on that. Mo said what she wanted to do, we rolled, and bad shit happened. It was, given the intent and its interaction with the way the system works, pretty much inevitable.
Now, other games can be very interesting on this. Dogs in the Vineyard, due to its stakes setting, can have some interesting permutations around "well I don't think those stakes are realistic" that you can get into. Vincent has said some cool stuff about how these things tend to work themselves out over time if you just play it straight, but I've seen it cause problems in the short term. Figuring out stakes that are small enough and real enough really is one of those places where some skilled social play is probably needed.
In more freeformy games, this can get really interesting. Like, I was looking at Compass Gods this afternoon and it made this conversation pop into my mind. When you're moving to the divide between "humanly possible" and "possible only using colored coins" you can have some issues of realism and proportion. Like, if I'm a bad ass kung fu asshole is it humanly possible for me to beat up four semi-skilled opponents who all attack me at once? I really think it probably isn't, but I've friends who I know would argue it really is. So in that instance, what do we do?
Me personally, I'd probably say, "step it down or use the colored coin" but then, I've no problem being the heavy at the table. For others, I'm pretty sure it isn't that easy. Especially when you're not necessarily on the same page about what "realism" means in terms of whatever genre you're playing in.
Another AP example on this subject.
I was playing a TSOY 7th Sea game, and once again Mo was the active player in a scene. She's a fencer, and is being charged down by some flying hussars on open ground. We've said we're playing a "swashbuckling" game, and so she does this narration where she runs up the guy's lance and grapples him out of the saddle. I'm instantly like "you run up his lance? Really?"
Now, what I probably should have done at this point is said, "Sure, try it, but running up a lance is like a two dice penalty." Instead we kind of shorted out as Mo felt it was a reasonable thing to do in a world of swashbuckling, and I really didn't. The conversation quickly revealed that she was thinking "swashbuckling" in terms of, say, the new Pirates movies and I was thinking in terms of, say, Scaramouch. I was thinking of a genre in which the action is cool because its grounded in reality, and you can just barely believe that some real person could really do that. She was thinking in terms of a genre in which you laugh and shake your head while Johnny Depp has a sword battle on a giant rolling wheel.
If we'd gone to the system and she'd done it, then I guess we learned that in this games reality that is realistic. If she failed, then it was because a person in that world can't quite do it. Instead we came to a negotiated mediation out of game, then went back to the dice. It was a very mixed result, and I'm not sure which way really would have been better.
Anyway, this probably sounds like I'm off into "sim genre reality" rather than the "realism" we started this thread with. However, I think that the truth is that when you're looking at them as techniques there is a lot of cross over between issues with how they get dealt with in game. If you can really grab a gun out of someone's hand in the real world is a proposition whose argument leads to very similar rhetorical stances as that about whether a jedi can actually leap 100 feet straight up to get out of the garbage shoot before they get trapped with the muck monster. In both cases very often what is going on is less an argument about the actual feasibility of an issue (though that is involved) and has more to do with a sense of discontent, tilting, or power struggle over the state of the fiction.
Simon C:
Hi Brand,
You've identified one of the potential problems with Compass Gods. I have tended to interpret "humanly possible" as literally "a human body is capable of performing that action", allowing a lot of pretty far-fetched stuff, but it's not very well defined. I guess it depends on the tone you're going for in the game, but it could probably use some advice on that point.
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In both cases very often what is going on is less an argument about the actual feasibility of an issue (though that is involved) and has more to do with a sense of discontent, tilting, or power struggle over the state of the fiction.
That's a really good call, and lines up with a lot of my experiences with this kind of thing.
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