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Monday, March 3, 2014

Where I Choose to Suspend My Disbelief

Part of gaming is suspending disbelief. Sometimes you need to do it for the world ("There is magic? Okay, I'll accept that.") Sometimes you need to do it where the rules smooth over reality to make it easier to just up and play.

Here are a few from GURPS that work well enough for a game, but which don't match my personal experience of reality. I choose to just not concern myself with their reality, because they work as the abstractions they are. If you dislike these and want to change them, have at it - but for me, suspending my disbelief is enough.

Languages - using the study time rules and languages, learning a language is pretty trivial. You can go from nothing to fluent in a short time, and never have communication issues once you get the fluency. Using the study time rules in GURPS, I'd have learned Japanese fluently twice over by now. But the reality of learning a language as an adult is a long slog of studying, learning crutches to get by, undoing the bad habits those crutches bring, learning new vocabulary, training your mouth to make the correct sounds, etc. - it's rewarding but not fun. Making it a smooth, relatively easy process makes for better gaming.

Arm ST - you can buy up ST just for your arms and improve weapon damage. As a trainer and occasionally a fighter, I can tell you, the strength in your upper body isn't that relevant to striking. It's all from the ground up. But honestly, a mechanism to give you a limited form of strength that affects all upper body actions is fine with me. So is being generous and saying it affects damage.

Full-Damage Dual Attacks - You can attack with two different weapons for full damage. Which is hard, in reality, because of the hip thing. It's possible to leverage your hips into a strike with two weapons, but it's not easy to do so, and it limits what strikes you can do. But again, modifying DWA so it does less damage depending on the type of strikes, your body positioning, etc. isn't as fun as just say "It's -4 to hit plus off-hand penalties" and just moving on. I suppose you could reduce the damage for the strikes in the first place ("they both do -1 or -1 per two dice, whichever is higher") or something, but that's making the weaker ones drag down the stronger ones. It's just as abstract, really, and requires just as much suspension of disbelief.

Linear Learning - Skills just improve in a linear fashion. You get better at the same potential rate until you hit whatever practical limits there are in the game. In reality, you need to keep working at an increasing rate to see any real improvement. But in a game, that discourages you from improving to a degree (something I saw often in Rolemaster), and it's not necessarily fun. A straight-up linear increase system is fine; modulating growth by moduling the value of improvement works fine, too.

I can't always do this. I can't just say "there are dragons and magic, so therefore realism it out the window, so therefore nothing needs to hew to believability." That's one reason I prize the believability of GURPS, and why I like reality checking. But it's a game, and I'm willing to take "close enough" and "get rid of the stuff that isn't fun" for all they can be worth. The things I mentioned above I think are a bit unrealistic, but they don't break my suspension of disbelief in the same way as other things might. What breaks the disbelief for others might be different - it's had to get a game going where all of the players have the same acceptance of all that occurs. The fun of games occurs in that area where there is a mutual suspension of disbelief, in my opinion.

7 comments:

  1. Thankfully, the inherent bell curve of 3d6 helps with the linearity issue of learning. Sure, the same number of hours will get you an extra +1 to your base skill, but that +1 may only be worth a fraction of a percent change in actual chance of success, or maybe not even that, but only serve to offset penalties that you might otherwise have avoided.

    Strict percentile systems have to do this more deliberately, by perhaps forcing you to roll above your skill to improve, or (as in Rolemaster) pegging the amount you improve to your current level.

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  2. Agreed.
    I keep changing rules and whatnot to make them suit my style better (and with more detailed/interesting mechanics), but in the end, I also want to keep a good pacing during play and keep things fun (whatever that means!).

    For the system I use, I'd call it aiming for authenticity, not for realism. That done, I just need to keep things coherent across the board, no matter whatever crazy stuff I put in there.

    Using your example, If PCs can learn the basics of languages in a week or two so that it's almost a non-factor, then it applies to pretty much everything in the world and languages for the common sentient beings probably have a common root somewhere (god created it, etc). Keeps it interesting, especially on first contact (which is the fun of it when you start using languages really), requires some "down time" to learn, but nothing drastic and then it's never mentioned again pretty much while still coherent in the setting.

    Once thing I don't do however (and I never did, not even when I was 13), is allow "leveling" anywhere. I always require for some down time in a somewhat safe place, usually at least a week, which is handled in-between session.
    It can create issues (though I announce it from the get go), especially if they are nowhere close to any friendly place (in my current campaign the PCs took 3 sessions to actually find a proper place after being able to level xp wise), but I simply refuse to let them "ding!" in the middle of nowhere. The buck stops here when I Suspend My Disbelief. :)

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    1. I limit improvement to downtime, too. With a few exceptions, though - DF Knights get the ability to buy or improve weapon skills at any time, even during combat. And Wild Talent (with Retention) lets you learn a spell on the fly. But otherwise, you need some time off.

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  3. Languages - using the study time rules and languages, learning a language is pretty trivial. You can go from nothing to fluent in a short time, and never have communication issues once you get the fluency. Using the study time rules in GURPS, I'd have learned Japanese fluently twice over by now. But the reality of learning a language as an adult is a long slog of studying, learning crutches to get by, undoing the bad habits those crutches bring, learning new vocabulary, training your mouth to make the correct sounds, etc. - it's rewarding but not fun. Making it a smooth, relatively easy process makes for better gaming.


    This... first of all full respect for learning Japanese. Languages are hard to model in games... let alone real life.
    Ive known spanish for 10 years. At least once in every conversation I make a mistake, but definitely would count as fluent in GURPS. I know people who have spoken Spanish for 20 years and there is no way they speak above accented.
    Ive heard esperanto can be learnt perfectly in two weeks!

    Personally I find going from english accent to english accent more frustrating than speaking in a foreign language.

    I think GURPS assumes a genuine best case scenario. A language suitable for learning, with fluent a wide band.
    Perhaps there is room for a quirk...makes some errors sometimes in foreign languages, or funny accent in GURPS.

    As commented above the bell curve helps fix problems with linearity of skills.

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    1. That said it is total bs to suggest you auto learn a language just by being there. I have met people who travel for years and cant even say 10 words in a foreign language.

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    2. I knew people who didn't speak any Japanese after a year in Japan . . . but if you even make a small effort to interact with native speakers, I think you can get to Broken (and only to Broken) without truly dedicated study. Combined with study, it's very effective. My best learning happened when I was doing 2-3 hours of one-on-one study with a tutor on Friday night, then showing up on Saturday morning for MMA class and using what I'd learned the night before and seeing the results.

      But yeah, free learning just for being there? I don't believe it either.

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