Realism in TTRPGs

and other "Non-Game Boredoms"

I’ll be blunt and say RPGPundit is one of those accounts that whenever his tweets cross my timeline its like the opposite of Jack Sparrow’s compass. Some take I am aligned completely against, without fail. Today this pundit post came my way.

Anything arbitrary that doesn't both explain itself in the game setting and work the way it is explained is going to be disruptive to the possibility of effective emulation and immersion.

XP for gold is a fascinating example of an arbitrary concept, that may or may not be disruptive.

Because obviously in our world the amount of money you earn is not something that makes you more physically strong or more capable of casting spells.
In the default D&D game world, XP for gold is a kind of simplification (because it's originally gold plus training), but it doesn't really cause a big problem. The D&D World (generically speaking) is a world where it is presumed that gold does certain weird things, like leveling you up, but also being required to get help from a priest, Gold has a kind of more powerful force of currency than it does in our world.

But if you're playing anything other than the generic D&D world default, XP for gold is absolutely ridiculous and fails every time.
So for example in any of my games it wouldn't make any sense at all. When I started the Dark Albion campaign it was actually with lamentations of the flame princess. But as we started playing it it became evident to me that even the rules of LOTFP were too unrealistic to the context of what actual medieval society looked like.

To give just one example: In D&D the mirror accumulation of gold is what makes you a person of great political power in this quasi medieval setting. Which was never true in real medieval settings.

But much worse still in a medieval authentic setting there should be entire character classes that would never ever pause to loot a body.

It was actually one of the most significant moments that led me to make the changes that would eventually become the Lion and Dragon system, when one of my players was playing a cleric and he half jokingly but half annoyed said that "he's the man of God but if he wants to get more miracles he needs to check the boots of these petty bandits for every coin he can grab".

So there you are: Gold for XP would mean that St Francis of Assisi needed to loot corpses. Can you credibly imagine St Francis going around the battlefields of the fifth crusade and instead of praying for the dead or tending to the sick he's pulling off someone's boots to see if there's a coin inside, in the hopes that it'll let him make one more miracle per day?

That's an excellent example of how introducing arbitrary elements from into a game world (like a poorly thought out XP system, or like 1:1 TIME) ends up damaging immersion.

Boiled down, this is an appeal to realism styled argument against XP for GP which is the most common sort levied. What makes it frustrating to refute is that it’s correct.

Manifest Destiny: The Tabletop Game

D&D was never realistic and it was never about medieval Europe in a real sense. I think this is uncontentious. What may be more contentious though is that leveling up as a concept is also completely at odds with realism, and experience points as they are presented in D&D do not represent hard skills and practice but instead metaphysical and spiritual power.

There are two components to this argument. Firstly, that the feats of “non-magical ability” that player characters such as fighters and thieves are able to perform are well beyond the confines of any realistic upper limits as early as level 4 or 5 or so, and secondly the disparity of outcomes between leveled and non-leveled PCs.

Winning a hand-to-hand fight when outnumbered by more than 2:1 is pretty much impossible unless a vast disparity of armor, arms, or motivation is at play. By that reckoning the highest “realistic” skill level for fighters is probably level 4 or so. This is not a problem, TTRPGs, or perhaps more accurately “fantasy adventure games”, are not intended to be simulationist on that level. We presuppose the existence of “super powered” individuals. So is the conceit of the game that in this canon of fiction that men can progress their fighting abilities to supernatural levels? Yes, but not in the same fashion men did in real antiquity.

Conan is the Ur D&D character. How often do we catch Conan training his body or practicing his skills in a story? Sure we can assume Conan has done this “off-screen” so to speak but it’s evident that Conan’s skills rapidly outpace the skills of men who have served as warriors and soldiers years or even decades longer than Conan has, so what gives? Conan has experience points because he is adventuring. He is earning the crystallized spiritual and metaphysical power they represent and this catapults him past normal men. This is not the framing Howard had in mind when writing the character but it is the way TTRPGs as a science interpret this sort of character.

Experience points represent divine right. This is how Conan comes to be a king. When viewed through that lens, we uncover that TTRPGs are distinctly American and thus Protestant in nature. D&D is about cowboys, it’s about the wild west, it’s about manifest destiny. A “realistic” depiction of medieval Europe through an old-world Catholic lens would not have XP for GP, nor would it have leveling up at all. Building a man up from nothing with his only his deeds and his wealth was the promise of the American West. This is why AD&D has rules for converting characters from Boot Hill. This is not a value statement on old-world versus new world or Catholic versus Protestant ethics, just an observation.

Viewing a TTRPG as being evocative of real history, or literature, can be a trap. No one levels up in the Lord of the Rings. You may argue Aragorn levels up when he becomes king, but he was always king. He was born at domain level. That is the “realistic European” fantasy. The reason D&D never prescribed to that ontology is because it’s not a fun game. It makes for much better novels. This is why for as much as people have distanced themselves from XP for GP they cannot escape it’s second order trappings, levels, experience points, progressing through levels, so on. As Gary Gygax once said “all very realistic but conducive to non-game boredom.”