Realism, or more accurately verisimilitude makes fantasy more believable. Particularly when it deals with items I have actual, real world experience with. If I know how something works, and why it is built the way that it is built I do no want to see it handled in a manner that would not work.

When designing traps for my game I create traps that could be built (and in one case I did build one).

It is also my problem with a large number of GW figures, I do not want to see a person wielding an 80 pound maul, I want one that is wielding a four pound maul. (And the warhammer designs used by the Empire in WHFB are some of the stupidest weapon designs I have seen short of video games - a wde head spreads the impact, making it less effective.)

The Auld Grump

Isn't there a blurb at the beginning of the new WFRP book about chucking the rulebook itself at people who feel the need to bring up "realism"?

For the sake of the topic, I have CWU and UM so far.

Heh, if I hadn't warned the shop class teacher ahead of time I would have! It was a needle trap in a knurled knob on a box. rotate it one way and it opened the box, rotate it the other way and it drove needles into your fingers. A very simple mechanism, essentially a ratchet with hinged needles. You had to rotate it counter clockwise to open it. Closing the box reset the knob. I used to keep my dice in the box . The box disappeared in a move more than 20 years ago, but I remember it fondly. It still had a set of the original TSR dice in it when it disappeared. (Including the D4 with a thumbprint imbedded in it. They were not very well made dice!)

The Auld Grump

The more you have to rationalize the more effort is required for suspension of disbelief. So how about this alternative - no 12 pound cannons on dinghies!

A good science fiction or fantasy author avoids having to start from the ground up, and bases as much as they can on the real world. 'Only those with their feet planted firmly on the ground can build castles in the sky' is a phrase that I believe was created by Terry Pratchett. (Who does create very good fantasy indeed!)

A good fantasy or science fiction game follows that same rule of thumb. If you need to explain everything then everything falls apart. Bah!

Warhammer, in some, but not all, of its incarnations can pass, but Man o' War (created while Warhammer was in those 'not all' incarnations at the time) does not. They had a ship on rollers* for the love of mud! Giant robot claws on orc ships! Cannon that ran for half the length of the ship and mortars that occupied the front third! I could vaguely live with it for Chaos, but for the Empire? No thanks.

Warhammer is currently in one of its more believable phases, hopefully it will last. It seems that enough people were complaining about the lack of believability that they finally did something about it.

Sadly not all of the miniatures currently out are as believable as the others - what they did with the Orc and Brettonian trebuchets annoys the heck out of me, as designed they would hurl the stone maybe five feet. The counterweight hits the ground before the arm even reaches its apex! The Lord of the Rings siege engines on the other hand... drool... Whoever Jackson hired to design for him knew what he was doing.

The Auld Grump

*It was a model that had originally been intended for another game*, but that game was out of print so...

*Mighty Empires**

**Which was a much better game than Man o' War***.

***Aren't footnotes fun?

And the worst thing you can do is explain it! I very much liked what I saw of the first season of CSI for example, because they didn't explain their equipment, just used it. Then they started explaining every step over, and over, and over... Bah!

Mind you the fact that I knew how the 'magic box'* worked may have had something to do with it. But then again, I read an awful lot of mysteries.

Oh, and if you think I am picky, there are mystery readers out there who put me to shame! Though I will admit that I just cannot read Mary Dahem... she has a novel where somebody is knocked out by cyanide and killed with sodium penthonal... an amount that it fit in a syringe the size of those plastic thermometers that come with frozen turkeys... Now the other way around I would have had no problem with, was it too much to ask that she look up the effects of the two poisons before using them?

The Auld Grump

*The box used for retrieving latent fingerprints using super glue vapor.