Been Reading a Lot of Escapism Lately

[unseenmage]

Life is rough right now. Real rough. As a result I've been reading loads of escapist fluff.

Made me wonder, just how little realism are your playgroup'a and games tolerant of GitP?




For me I usually just want to get the campaign moving without blowing up planets until at least level 17-21.
More very high fantasy (Gandalf, Merlin) than shonen anime hero (Goku).
I never want Conan the Barbarian games without at least the option of magical brute force. Also less interested in character soap opera drama or gritty realism/horror.
Got enough drama/horror irl thanks. :smallbiggrin:

[Crake]

Also less interested in character soap opera drama or gritty realism/horror.
Got enough drama/horror irl thanks. :smallbiggrin:

This pretty much describes most of my games :smalltongue:

As a DM, my games are far less about escapism, and much more about simulating a world. Sure the players are a big part, but the players don't get plot armor, and they don't have a massive sign above their head with "Warning: PC, please follow their lead". I also generally match the level of magic with my players: If they're running t1 wizards and druids, I will too, which conversely means that "brute forcing it with magic" would be just as difficult as anything else, since the enemies have equally as much magic, wheras if you were playing a game of low/no casting characters, you'd run into much more mundane challenges, where sure, magic would be an instant-win, but since they're all mundanes, they have to come up with other solutions.

In short, no, I don't play or run dnd for escapist reasons. But that's just me, and I recently had a player quit because he evidently wanted far more escapism than I was willing to provide, something that he specifically verbalized after the last party wipe, stating something along the lines of "We're the players, just fudge the dice rolls once in a while so we don't always get completely owned". Little did he know I fudge the dice rolls heaps, just they sometimes make woefully poor decisions that there's only so much fudged dice that I can handle as a DM before I just feel stupid "whoops, guess they missed... for the twelfth time in a row."

[Mechalich]

Escapism doesn't really equate with power level. A game can be astonishingly positive and happy and full of bright shiny escapist rainbows at a shockingly low power level - the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are very much street level heroes, they're also massively escapist - and one can also be hideously grimdark and full of suffering even at very high power levels - The FATE/ universe is full of legendary heroes engaging in legendary superhero fights, but man is it really dark a lot of the time.

It is admittedly more difficult to maintain the 'suffer!' vibe in higher-powered games in large part because without giant heaps of GM fiat the characters can be pretty good at bypassing those elements (they also get progressively more able to simply bypass the plot entirely at such levels) and because high-powered settings tend to have much, much lower verisimilitude and therefore rapidly break immersion, and immersion tends to be essential to creating gritty drama.

In general, most tabletop is played a pretty low level of immersion, especially compared with single-author narrative versions of the same kind of material, and tends to default to the escapist, generally comedic, approach. Tables interested in in-depth games with lots of immersion are rare and require a high-level of dedication (including having all the players consistently show up, since nothing kills immersion like having party members regularly go into 'drone mode').

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is common for game designers to be part of the small slice of high-immersion players and for them to design games based on this sort of assumption without realizing that this simply isn't how most games are actually played, which is why they then subsequently accuse the playerbase of playing their games the 'wrong way.'