As I’ve stated, my primary RPG goal is Otherworld-Immersion, to feel like I am transported into a substantial Secondary World. I want to feel like my character is a real person in a real world matching my intuitions of cause and effect.
But from the get-go this term, realism is problematic. For some, this is helped by using, ‘verisimilitude’ instead. Some prefer, ‘internally-consistent’. Each such term has its strengths and weaknesses. I won’t quibble about them, but ‘realism’ is what I’ll be employing here. Like so many other controversies the first step is to get clarity. When we approach Fantasy RPGs (which all exist in a fiction), we are faced with a semantics conflict, for ‘Fantasy’ sounds like it’s at odds with ‘reality’. The common snipe is, “You’re in a world with ghosts/monsters/magic, and you think ‘realism’ is important?!” That’s cute, but the culprit here is simply how the word, Fantasy is being misused.
In ON FAIRY STORIES, Tolkien said:
“Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make.” p.54
“Fantasy worlds” are called such simply because they are not the world that we happen to inhabit –the Primary World— They possess different phenomena and histories than we have in ours.
Tolkien refers to these as “Secondary Worlds”. The common Fantasy Secondary Worlds are (some mixture of) Ancient/Medieval fictions—actually possessing the elements like we have in our mythologies and legends like magic, monsters, demonic forces, etc., But they can still be logical, ordered, coherent worlds. The shorthand is ‘realism’. “Realistic fantasy” is therefore not an oxy-moron because ‘Fantasy’ here does not mean unrealistic, rather “alternate” –A Secondary World.
So why bother with realistic (worlds, methods, mechanics) gaming? Because it facilitates natural believability. But one may ask, “isn’t belief in a Secondary World a volitional act on the part of the participants?”
That answer is complicated. We are (for our purposes) “role playing” in these fictions and therefore choosing to actively fight our disbelief in their “fictitous ontology”. The GM constructs a Secondary world and the plots therein, and the Players choose to “enter” it, in the same way that we choose to swim in the tales of novels and movies.
As Tolkien says,
"What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful 'sub-creator.' He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true:' it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. " p. 37
But “suspension of disbelief” is not truly (or at least, not wholly) a volitional act; it is more of a psychological state. We must be ‘hypnotized’ into that state by the quality of the world/tales presented to us. The less that we must strain our sensibilities (our own experiences and expectations of “life”), the easier it is to maintain the belief-bond with that fiction. Conversely, the more haphazard and irrational the characters, events or the Secondary World, itself, the weaker our potential link will be.
It’s possible to imagine any (logically possible) scenarios and actions. But the more chaotic/inconsistent the thing imagined, the less plausible it seems to us. Psychologically we can make leaps into ridiculous scenarios, but the connection will naturally be weaker, and this requires far more effort than imagining the plausible, thus we are left fighting back disbelief from the “outside” instead of enjoying the imagined from the “inside”.
When enjoying serious novels, movies or shows, we have all had those jarring moments of “They wouldn’t have done that!” “She wouldn’t have gone to the warehouse alone without telling her partner, she’s way too careful for that!” Genre to the side, when something ‘unrealistic’ like that happens, we feel it, and it damages the bond we enjoy, and we cannot simply ‘brute-force’ ourselves to maintain the illusion we enjoy.
“The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed.” P. 37
Tolkien is using two types of ‘belief’ here, natural and forced. There is the tale that pulls us into the world, generating a genuine plausibility –This is the “Otherworld Immersion” that I and many other gamers desire. But there is also the poorly constructed world which we don’t really buy but can tolerate and “force” ourselves to have a “play along with it” type of belief, but this is nothing like natural, immersive belief.
Again, Tolkien said,
“Fantasy has also an essential drawback: it is difficult to achieve. Fantasy may be, as I think, not less but more subcreative; but at any rate it is found in practice that ‘the inner consistency of reality’ is more difficult to produce, the more unlike are the images and the rearrangements of primary material to the actual arrangements of the Primary World. It is easier to produce this kind of ‘reality’ with more ‘sober’ material. Fantasy thus, too often, remains undeveloped; it is and has been used frivolously, or only half-seriously, or merely for decoration: it remains merely 'fanciful.'" p.48
When the players feel the ‘realness’ of the Secondary World, they feel a natural suspension of their disbelief. The Secondary World can be quite different from our own in multiple regards, but once they know the realities of that world, they become the new foundation for it. Inconsistencies that appear damage the bond they feel for that world. For example, if I am playing in the Star Trek universe and the Vulcans start behaving irrationally (with no good reason provided), then my link in that moment is damaged (a la, many instances in the show, Enterprise).
I’ll delve more deeply in future posts, but for now it’s sufficient to say that realism (‘consistency, plausibility’) is a useful, powerful tool for helping us to suspend our disbelief, and to therefore strengthen the sense of Otherworld-Immersion for our RPGs.
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