You don't have to apologize for being swamped, lol. And yeah, I quite enjoy Web DM and a few other channels. They don't often say things that I find totally new, but they always help inspire me to think about cool things I could do, or jog long-neglected bits of my memory into action in interesting and fresh ways.
For full disclosure, I started this thread kind of with the intent to tease out people's thinking, but I already had (and have) fairly strong thoughts on the topic. I definitely find verisimilitude of extreme importance, personally—but what does that really mean?
In my case, I'm very much a dilettante and autodidact, and while I'm no expert or genius, I read very broadly and fairly deeply, and as such I'm unusually aware of lots of little things about our own world, which means that I tend to be hyperaware of missed opportunities—which is generally what they are, to my mind; chances to add depth behind the scenes that got neglected for lack of effort or understanding on the part of the designer or DM. From my perspective, no game, no matter how low effort and goofy, was ever
hurt by having a more tightly coherent world. I don't want every world to feel like ours, or expect every world to be as fixated on, say, physics as Khoras is, for example; I do, however, deeply appreciate and prefer that the setting and mechanics reflect an understanding of how the relevant parts actually fit together and interact with other parts, and that the designer or DM know what they're going for such that the setting and mechanics have high ludo-narrative consonance with the specific game in which I'm playing. If it's Conan, I want it to
feel like Conan; if it's Buck Rogers, I want it to
feel like Buck Rogers; and if it's
A Canticle for Leibowitz or
Brave New World, I want it to
feel like that, too. Regardless of genre or setting, I want the game to reflect both the genre-specific touchstones and the underlying universals of existence accurately, not by adding crunch, but by framing things well.
Another way to explain it might be: I trained in martial arts and fought a lot as a kid (plus I've studied arms and armor), so I have an intuitive sense of when and where a combat mechanic falls down; I'm an Eagle Scout and I've done a lot of backpacking, so I know what humping weight cross-country is actually like, and can tell when a designer thinks you can carry a cargo ship in your pockets; I've studied history and geopolitics (and grew up on the campaign trail), so I know when a setting isn't in geopolitical equilibrium and the map or polities don't make sense; I've studied religion and mythology and can tell when the designer(s) don't understand religion, especially outside of our narrow contemporary context; I'm familiar with historical magic, so I see ways that magic systems could be very different than the dominant Vancian paradigm as well its "magic-as-science"alternative; etc. And vice versa, I can tell when a designer has done a good job, too.
For me, I realize that getting everything "perfect"—whatever that would mean—isn't feasible without lots of experts working for lots of money, and if you're an indie or hobbyist doing things in your free time like David, it takes years and lots of study to even come close, so I don't expect anything close to perfection; rather, I'm looking for details that evidence an understanding on the designer's part of that aspect of the world, and abstractions that are elegant while also being accurate and effective proxies for the real complexity at hand.
It's the reason why so much of D&D frustrates me: I fundamentally like its orientation to play (viz. being a combat- and exploration-focused game), but a lot of its abstractions—even generally good ones—frequently get details wrong. The combat system, for instance, gets things like 5' being a good distance metric right, but then all of the weapons are twice or thrice as heavy as they should be. Additionally, the way that armor, hit resolution, damage, and HP interrelate drives me nuts as someone who understands fighting and how armor works; not because they're abstractions, but because the abstractions they use defy my intuitive sense of how fights, especially between armored combatants, actually work. Or my point with the Forgotten Realms, from before: the Sword Coast shouldn't exist, at least not in its current state. It's not Renaissance Italy, protected by natural barriers and with enough distance from its neighbors to be capable of defending the sovereignty of its constituent city states, nor does it have such a technical, resource, or other geopolitically-relevant monopoly that the various city-states could hope to prevent conquest; if it did exist, it would need to have a different political structure, at the very least.
I generally think that tabletop gaming, at least as far as the big mainstream systems, is stuck in a rut of self-reference and decades-old system baggage that is stagnating how people design things, and while there are a lot of great systems out there from indies and smaller publishers, personally what I'd love to see is a game and campaign setting that did things differently while still aiming to fit in the same space as the more popular systems. Especially since, in my view, a lot of the worst stuff is better understood today than it was in the '70s and '80s when most of these systems were designed, and would be easy to fix with relatively minor tweaks. Most of the big systems with a fantasy setting are just pseudo-Renaissance Europe, created by people who know little-to-nothing about what Renaissance Europe was like or its wider historical and cultural context, with the possible addition of Western stereotypes of other cultures and a decent amount of racial baggage. There are way too many other things that would be interesting to play for me to be satisfied with such mundanity.
Tl;dr I want to play a game of D&D where the system, setting, and DM all work together to ensure that my pants are made from the right fiber.
But really, I just see a lot of games get a lot of small details wrong that add up to take me out of the world, and even if I'm playing a silly, low-effort game, I'd find the experience enriched if the DM, at least in the planning stages, thought to get them right. And I think that a system that gets them right to begin with and saves the DM the time and effort of manually correcting everything is superior to one that doesn't—though a DM that understands those details, and the underlying design of the system, is probably better able to implement it all as well. Material culture is just one that's heavily neglected because most people playing tabletop RPGs aren't medievalists or anthropologists, and the video that inspired me to ask the question was focused on it, so that was the lens I chose to frame the discussion initially.
Can y'all tell I'm fun at parties?
