Your Game World vs. The Real World… Fight!

God-I-love-gaming. It’s one of those places I can go to be that guy… to live out my hallucinations of being a space-faring smuggler, medieval wizard, or modern action hero (the other place I go to hallucinate is my bed… when I’m trying to fall asleep). My point is that I love leaving the real world to visit my world. Sure, I go to my world for things that aren’t real (based on reality’s rules), but how much real-world stuff is really needed in my world? How much real-world stuff should be there?

If you’ve been gaming for any length of time, I imagine that you’ve run into the issue of what’s real in a game-world, what should be real, and what shouldn’t.

1. “A horse can’t take a rider all day long, sometimes you have to walk it.”
2. “I can reach a height of eight feet, therefore I don’t need a Jump check.”
3. “If these diagonal squares are also five feet, the room should be round.”
4. And so on…

Some of these reality rules make sense to me, and others don’t. If the goal is to be able to escape to a world that I can enjoy, I’ll have to believe in it first. The question is, what’s important to me to be able to accomplish that? I have found that figuring that out beforehand helps a game run more smoothly, and I think you could benefit by doing the same.

Here are a few “realities,” and my take on them…

Physics dictates that we exist in 5-foot cubes.
Traditional roleplaying games have rules to help us resolve actions in the game. When we bring in “real world” stats and geometry to circumvent those rules, we’re breaking the game.

If (in your game) diagonal movement is equal to 5 feet, then (geometrically) characters would appear to move 40% faster (or farther) in the real world. That means that if you are standing in the center of a square room, you’ll get to a corner of the room in the same amount of time as you would the center of a wall. On the map, the room acts like a circle, but it looks like a square.

Of course, some games make movement more realistic by counting diagonal movement as 1,2,1,2,1,2…, but that adds more math, which can add time and confusion. Not only that, but now your two-dimensional map does not visually mimic real-life – it may look like a square, but it’s actually a circle.

Now take a look at this: the big bad evil guy is allllll the way at the end of this lonnnnng corridor. The corridor is 10 feet high, but he’s 300 feet away. Can the archer make the shot? In reality, no. By the rules of the game, yes. There is no way a normal arrow can travel that distance without hitting the ground first; an archer would have to angle his shot so the apex is much, much higher than the corridor’s ceiling. Does the game have rules for this situation? You betcha… The archer can make attacks at 60 squares – it says so right there in the weapon’s stats.

My point is that both the square room and the circle room are not represented by reality; they’re represented by the rules of the game. How an arrow gets to it’s target is not governed by real-world velocity, mass, and wind resistance; it’s governed by the rules of the game. And those rules state that physics in the make-believe world are defined in 5-foot cubes. I only need enough physics from the real world to give my make-believe world a vague shape; I’ll let the rules of the game shape everything else.

Attack, Miss, Attack, Hit, Damage, Attack…
A lot of first and second generation games follow this pattern of combat (heck, a lot of games made today still follow this pattern of combat). Lately, there has been a push for combat to involve more options, to add realism and flavor to those crunch times. I think it’s great. What I think is a shame is that in too many games, role-playing stops when combat starts. Newer games adding combat options is a start, but we can do more!

I first realized this when my hobgoblin missed the target PC three times in a row. I got so irritated that on his next turn I said, “OK, this hobgoblin is so pissed off now because he’s missed you so many times. He yells out some howl to his war god… spits in your face… kicks you square in the chest… you slam into the wall behind you and fall to one knee. With him now towering over you, he raises his war axe high above your neck. No mechanical changes, and now he makes his fourth attack roll.” That was a lot different than, “I rolled a 19. Did I hit?”

I’ve never really role-played a combat attack before, so I thought this was a bold move on my part. The players loved it. I loved it. And the game became that much more real. The cool thing is, I do this even as a player character. And why not? Add some realism (story-wise) and everybody wins.

The real world is not a stale trading of attacks; there’s a whole infinite set of actions that are possible. Some games try to emulate this with extra combat options and powers, but why not take control and roleplay it out? It makes it more real, thus, a more engaging and exciting fight.

The Big Bad Evil Speech.
“That was surely a tough fight. Those immortal guards lay there, pooling in their own blood, and you have just one more foe to confront. This is it. All your hard work over the past year – escaping the labyrinth under the mountain, storming the dragon city, and uncovering the millennium-long line of genocidal lies – it has led you here, to the chamber of the demi-god responsible for it all. You push open the door to see the deity in all his terrible magnificence. He turns to you and says… So, you’ve finally…

“I attack.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake…!? Really?!”

The truth is, sometimes the big bad evil guy has shit to say, and sometimes the good guys will want to hear it. I know combat is fun, but I think sometimes adding a little primer beforehand is better. It’s generally unrealistic to play an emotionless cyborg, but it’s equally unrealistic to say that all serious fights lack engaging dialogue. I guess I’d just like to have a balance between the two.

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So, these are a few of the ways I try to balance the real world with my world. Please share your thoughts – I’m interested in your opinions…