The great debate continues! Good points all.

I wanted to add, that one of Beth's development paradigms is:

"Life another life, in another world"

When I play a sandbox style game, I want that statement to resonate. In particular, i want to feel that:

A) The world is plausible (i.e. realistic) according to it's own pretense. That is, supermutants aren't realistic in "our" world, but they are realistic in the the world fallout. "Magic" isn't realistic in "our" world, but it is part of the world of oblivion/Tamierl.

B) I want to feel that the world is "alive" on it's own, irrespective of my actions. While my character can (and should) influence the world, it is exactly that, one influence. The world will continue with or without my interventions.

C) That my character is bound by the rules that govern everything else (barring FWE's bullet time of course ). Fallout pitches itself as a world struggling for survival. I cannot at all "roleplay" a character in the wasteland if I'm not also struggling to survive on some level.

So, if I'm exempt from eating or sleeping, or can magically travel from point A to point B, I'm an "outsider" relative to the rules that govern the rest of the world's residents, and that is not fun. It's the difference between being a "part of world" and a part of the story versus being some demi-god that get's to break the rules for their own pleasures.





Have you played Morrowind?

The reason why I hate fast travel without some plausible mechanism to explain + balance it, is that for me, 90% of the enjoyment of a sandbox style game hinges on discovery and seeing "random" events or encounters that happen spontaneously specifically because the game IS a sandbox game, designed to create those kind of situations. If you fast travel all the time, you don't allow yourself the opportunity to have those novel discoveries / moments that make sandbox games "sandbox games." How many caves and dungeons would i have missed, or random NPC's asking for help (or robbing me) would I have never met if I could freely fast travel around morrowind?

Anyway, no-fast-travel clearly isn't for everyone

???? Huh ????

Sounds great to me. I hate light pollution.

zip 41240, google it.

I just find it slightly odd that there's a place that dark in the USA, but again, I live next door to Kentucky, I should know that at night in some spots it gets dark as the inside of a black hole.

But yeah, I hate lots of sunlight, but without light, I can't see my keyboard, and therefor can't play games easily. Or write this post.

so, Light is a good thing. Too much light, like being on the Surface of Mercury, and too little light, like Pluto, is not good though.

Again, it's a balance, per se, and just like fun, it's a different balance for different people.

Mez, I love Morrowind to death. It's the one reason I joined this forum. Because of how much awesome it is.

However, because of the addition of fast travel for Oblivion, I don't see any reason to remove fast travel from it or by extension, Fallout 3.
The thing is, I love exploring in Fallout 3, Oblivion, and Morrowind, but do not tell me that Fast Travel is bad. I need it so I don't waste insane time getting back to the city after a quest is done.
It's like if someone would put magic to the Fallout 3 world, or port Guns to Oblivion, to me, it's a really silly idea.
To others, it's a God-send. However, I think we can both agree, that it is true, the old adage, to each his own.

Yeah? What part? I live just outside of Winston-Salem!

Up by Wake Forest. I'm a bit of a distance away from you though.

Well dang, who would have thunk it! We got 2 Carolina boys, and a Ky boy in 'da house, lol! Here I thought all y'all were Yankees!

I hate it here.

I don't know how it is there, but I can't stand the worshiping nature of those here, I have been constantly hassled because of my lack of something, and the racism here is very bad, as is the education levels.

but I have not the money to move, so what can I do?

I'm originally from Kansas, so I'm definitively not a Yankee.

As for the topic, let's get back on it. I'll PM you two later.

Sometimes I use some of those style mods because they increase difficulty. When they're done right, they're not game breakers, and they make things a little more interesting. A lot of the eat-drink/sleep mods are too extreme though - they make the player spend time doing boring things, which I'm not fond of.

Many of the realism mods borrow ideas you would have seen in old school war game simulations. I tend to like them because I like RPGs that are part simulation, but I also recognize that it can go too far and affect game play and "fun value" too much.

People who enjoy simulations tend to look for certain things in a game. In broad terms, they can be a certain "type" of gamer. There are many other types though, and for a title like Fallout 3, the middle ground must be satisfied.

What Lost Dragon replied to this above just reminded me of something... I assume that if you don't like eating and drinking in games, you'd be totally against... the consequences of these actions... being present in the game as well.

And yet one of the funnest surprises in Duke Nukem 3D (a really fun, fun FPS game which I still play all these years later) was walking into the bathroom on the first movie theater map, killing the enemies (of course), checking myself out in the mirror, and then-- just for a goof, I didn't expect anything to actually happen-- attempting to use the urinal. Mostly because, let's face it, you don't often see urinals in games, so I figured what the heck.

Imagine my surprise when I heard "... aaah...!" and got a few points of health back (since relieving your bladder does make you feel better). Naturally you couldn't do it more than once at a time, which was also cool, and it really made me laugh out loud that the devs had thought to do that.

I guess that was my first experience of how 'realism' in a game can be both fun and functional. Then, of course, eventually I played Morrowind, added NoM (Necessities of Morrowind) to it, and I was sold for life... NoM is really the greatest 'realism' mod ever, but then Morrowind is much closer to a 'real' RPG in the sense that you can happily laze around your house baking pies for a day or two with much more of a feeling that you're 'living your life' rather than 'wasting time'. 'Realism' in these more action-oriented RPGs is less of an easy fit, but helps somewhat by 'forcing' strategic thinking into the mix if you're not as interested in pure action as such.

Of course, we have never defined 'realism' in the context of this thread, or indeed 'fun', but clearly the activities I find endlessly tedious (enter a location, kill all the enemies with relative ease, head back to town, sell loot, rinse and repeat) are not so in your opinion. That's fine, of course, but I do not play a putative RPG to enter locations, kill all the enemies with relative ease, head back to town, sell loot, rinse and repeat over and over-- OK, not completely true, but the games like that were 8-bit for the NES. Fun for what they were, but in 2007 the days of me essentially exiting town, going a couple of cells away and killing slimes, heading back to town to buy a couple health potions while trying to save enough money to get a bit of decent armor, and rinse and repeat until my eyes cross are supposed to be over. In a 'free-roaming' RPG with a whole world around it should contain something like an interesting variation on the theme-- and something to do that's somewhat entertaining-- but there isn't, really, in the stock game.

For myself, the only reason I participate in 'action' in an RPG at all is to advance the story. I don't care about 'loot' (except insofar as I need to exchange it for money sometimes, and on occasion there's something useful to protect me to be found). I certainly don't care about the 'body count' as such beyond the question of whether an area is clear or not. If I have to participate in 'action', which I already find annoying and stressful, and especially if I have to participate in so much action as an 'action RPG' requires, it danged well better be interesting-- and interesting to me means 'strategy'. This comes more naturally to party-based RPGs, of course, so the fact that it's just me (OK and maybe Dogmeat or one of the other companions, but you can't control them, so stragegizing their actions doesn't come into play) is a limitation. As well as the fact that the game is so 'player wins'-centric that there's no real strategy needed for me to succeed, which is not only boring, but allows me to proceed through the game far too fast.

Having to take into account that there are outside factors that I must plan around in order to succeed 1) slows things down to a pace that I'm more comfortable with, and 2) gives me something that I find interesting to do with all that extra time.

But of course, that's just me-- I would be interested to know (since you've never said), what precisely makes this game 'fun' for you, to the extent that the concept of adding eating, sleeping, etc, to it falls completely outside any idea of 'fun' that you can conceive. In other words, your question back at 'cha, in reverse. If you're asking us to explain why we like realism mods in some detail, you ought to return the favor and explain what it is precisely that rubs you so the wrong way .

Interesting discussion. I'll add my two cents:

What makes an RPG an RPG is a matter of debate.

• One school of thought is that role playing is mostly about pretending to be your character as thoroughly as possible. Realism and Immersion are catchwords. Realism in this school of thought ends up being about the character's ability to do what you would do in real-life: eating, sleeping, lying under a tree looking at the sky, etc. Immersion is very similar but is usually used to describe the experience which is a result of realistic game mechanics: The mod that adds a need to eat and sleep makes my game experience more Immersive.

[I'd like to point out that the word immersive does not, by itself, pertain to realism or role playing as described above. Generically the term can be equally applied to a very abstract and unrealistic game like chess: [i]Once he starts a chess match, he is wholly immersed in the game, forgetting about the rest of the world entirely[/i]. I myself find Immersion without Realism. Torchlight, for example - I am entirely immersed in that game once I start. Hours can go by...]

• Another school of thought is that RPGs are mostly about the gameplay mechanics and balance. Character development and advancement are goals in themselves. A lot of the fun here is in juggling the huge interlocking groups of numbers: primary stats, skills, derived stats, bonuses, weapon and armor stats, experience points, etc. Realism may crop up as a concern now and then, but it takes a back seat to balance. When weighted ammo adds to the fun and challenge of managing the numbers, it's a nice bonus that it is slightly more realistic. But, when thirst (or a need to shave) adds nothing to the fun number crunching, it becomes an annoyance - and realism is ignored in favor of mechanics.

Most people lean toward one of these schools of thought, although the spectrum is pretty continuous. I lean toward the game mechanic shcool of thought, but I can catch myself, for instance, adding a mod to my game that does nothing except add rainbows after a rainshower. So much for hardcoe...

Games like Oblivion and FO3 are big enough to accomodate a broad swath of that spectrum of preferences, which is pretty amazing. You'd be hard pressed to gather as diverse a group of people around a table for some old fashioned dice-rolling rpg sessions. But, being broad, the games end up not satisfying either camp very thoroughly. Therefore mods spring up to cater to individual playing styles.

To the OP - it's not uncommon at all for someone on one end of the spectrum to just not get the appeal of the other end of the spectrum. I'm amazed at the FWE project, because it actually considers both ends of the spectrum, while remaining modular enough for the user to lean whichever way they desire.

gothemasticator

I wholeheartedly agree with you on this point. It'd be a pretty dull world if we all liked the same things...


There are other games out there, which don't rely on arbitrary levels. I was always more of a RuneQuest fan than one of D&D, which was far from levelled; indeed, the gamesas games appear to owe more in their mechanics to the Basic Roleplaying System than to D&D (could it be Ken Rolston's influence, I wonder?)

Other games, such as the Phoenix Command Combat System or Harnmaster, even went so far as to go hitpointless. Sure, the mechanics were ridiculously complex at times, but throw in a computer to deal with all that and you take out the issue of spending hours determining whether your foe is dead or not Whilst I think of it, I don't recall HP being a factor in Traveller either...


I don't recall mentioning armour and to a point I'd agree, but a lucky headshot with an assault rifle to a raider who isn't wearing a helmet (or even just one of those damn stupid gasmask things) should drop them. Even heavily modded, these guys just keep coming.

Unless I'm mistaken, even D&D had mechanics for one-hit kills (assassination tables in 1st ed - ah, how I miss the 1st ed Assassin class - plus the "half hitpoints in one shot" rule from 3rd ed). RQ certainly had one-hit kills. FO3 certainly goes a long way towards going HPless with the "crippled" status but still retains, at least in its vanilla state, a game that makes a character physically tougher simply because they had a few lucky breaks and found the odd abandoned subway station.


Sure, if you want to play vanilla and suspend the disbelief that your character can go for hours, nay days, without even the basic needs of sleep, food and water (despite the ability to do all three being part of the game) then feel free. It's your game, and I'm not going to lose any sleep over whether someone I don't even know plays it differently to the way I do. Different strokes for different folks, and all that. I'd perhaps go so far as to contest your description of FO3 (and by extension TES3/4) as an RPG/FPS hybrid - I've always felt that they were pure RPGs with a pretty FPSish interface; theoretically one should be able to play without firing so much as a single shot (true, it never seems to pan out like that, thanks to the vaguaries of the telepathic Radiant AI...), and I prefer to play both the TES games and FO3 as more of a sneak-em-up. Probably because I'm crap at FPS games (I didn't finish the original Half Life until 2006, and only completed HL2 thanks to saving and reloading every 5 minutes).

And yes, yes you can use the restroom in some games. Sims, anyone? :vaultboy:

Regards,
MadPauly
Realism Gamer Extraordinaire

Anyone who's adding realism to their game is going to be using a mod that adds weight to ammo. I have weight for everything I carry, including my Bottle Caps. Playing a realistic based game adds challenge, it's no longer just an arcade game doing that way. That can get boring after awhile.

There's a difference though between playing a realistic based game and Fallout 3, though, Belanos.
And sorry, but Fallout 3 is not an arcade game. I didn't see Shao Khan saying. "Fight." anywhere in it.

Also, MadPauly, I don't know what mods you've played, but everytime I shoot a Raider in the head in Fallout 3, he'd be dead.
Usually his head explodes. Perhaps I should stop using my Accuracy International rifle, but who knows, I didn't grab a Barret.

To be honest, I see no reason to play a game and be worried about needing to eat, or sleep, or drink. I just don't



The game is fun by itself. Adding the realism things to it doesn't make sense to me. You play a game to escape from reality. Anyone who plays a game with realism added affects isn't actually escaping from reality, and let's face it, your character in all games, even Duke Nukem 3D, and I loved that part by the way, , doesn't suffer from the petty problems of Real Life.
That's how it should always be. Again, that's my opinion.

I'm not advocating jumping in a time machine and eliminating Necessities of Morrowind from existence. I'm just saying I fail to see the reason for adding realism into games like Fallout 3, Morrowind, Oblivion, or any others that don't deserve it.

The Sims, and all simulation games should be the only games ever to have that aspect of realism in it.

Another last thing, the way Morrowind, Fallout 3, Duke Nukem 3d, all of them are set us as, it's like your character is Superman. He doesn't need to eat/sleep/use the facilities/drink/get burdened down by things too much, etc. That's why adding realism to video games is silly in a way. I don't see Superman needing to eat food, drink, or anything else. He's Superman.
But my Superman discussion is for another thread entirely. You'll see it soon.
Fun Fact: The voice actor who played Solid Snake also was the screenwriter for Watchmen.

David B,

While your original post has led to an interesting discussion, your most recent post is just out of line. Everybody on here has said that it's a matter of preference or taste, that people are different and enjoy different things, that we're all free to play as we desire.

You respond to a civil and tolerant discussion (which is hard to come by when roleplaying is the subject) by calling realism "crazy" and "annoying" and "silly."

I suggest you rethink your stated position of "not wanting to start a fight." Where I come from, calling people crazy and calling their tastes annoying and silly... them's fightin' words.

gothemasticator

It was not my intention. Allow me to fix the problem. I hope I fixed it.

Again, it was not by my hand I was given Flesh again..it was humans, who wish to pay me tribute... Er, I mean...yeah, good point.
I stand by that some aspects of realism added to games are annoying, and shouldn't be in games, for me. Nothing short of a shotgun blast to my face will change that.

That should not be fighting words. I can show you fighting words, if you want.

I have to agree with gothemasticator here.

I have had a number of thoughts/insights/arguements/points-of-view to share on the subject at hand - but a number of your posts, this last one more than others, have felt too much like thinly veiled excuses to insult others. As if you sprinkle smiley faces and placating words throughout your posts so that you'll have something to hide behind if anyone accuses you of being antagonistic, while you continue to belittle a way of thinking that simply isn't yours.

:banghead: I have edited the post. Do you want me to completely eliminate it? I lack that power.

I can only apologize so much.

I also resent the implication that I ever use thinly veiled insults. It's not in my style.
I am also not belittling anyone.
Honestly, my words may be hard to get across, but I do not see why I can't have any points at all?
Realism to me, and it was asked, I should add, doesn't make sense to me to add to games like these.

That is the way I am. Sorry. It's not being insulting.
Sometimes I can't get my words across, I realize that. But just because I use admittedly a lot of smilies doesn't mean I'm trying to dumb down my point, or hide behind a wall of niceness.

I'm hardly a diplomat. I come from the school of nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

If you add the words, "for me", then I doubt anyone here will argue with you. Without those words, you seem to be contradicting yourself.

On page one you replied...


Somewhere it seems the "for me" part got lost - and what was a statement of your own personal opinion, turned into passing judgement on others and/or telling them what they should or should not do.

I'm not trying to pass judgment on others though. I hardly have the qualifications for that.
It was not my intention to go about this in a way that makes everyone angry at me.

I should state again, the concept of realism in games to me, to me, I stress, is as alien as the surface of Mars to most people.

Let's just forget this topic now. I fail at getting my point across without coming across as hostile.

Got it. Just be careful with your words. There are clearly other people with vastly different opinions than yours, and to call their opinions silly or annoying is insulting despite your intentions.

Here's an example of cordially exchanging differing opinions:

• I just found this great mod! It makes it so I have to eat and sleep at regular intervals or my vision gets all blurry.
  
• Really? That sounds like something I would find incredibly annoying to play with.
  
• Hah! I, on the other hand, love it. What mods do you like?
  
• I like this mod that makes the SPECIAL stats have more effect on things like dialogue and hit points.
  
• Oh. I find all the micro-managing of stat numbers unimmersive. You like that?
  
• I do. And you like the eat/sleep stuff?
  
• I do.
  
• Wow. Maybe you can explain more to me what you like and why, and I can grow in understanding people who are not like me.
  
• That'd be great. And then maybe you can explain to me what's so fun for you about managing all those numbers.
  
• :foodndrink:

A little cheesy, maybe, but I think that's a decent skit-version of what is working about this thread.

gothemasticator

So I can never call something annoying again? Or just someone's opinions?
Sorry to be dense here, but I can't tell.

Again, I'm sorry for the problems I caused. Sadly, I can't turn back the clock.

I think you've apologized quite thoroughly. For my part, I accept your apology and forgive you.

Thought I'd try to explain a little further, though, since you asked...

I realize that at the end of the paragraph above you added "That's how it is for me." However, you should realize that "You play a game to escape from reality" is just not true. David B may play games to escape from reality, but I don't. Assuming general truths like that puts you in a position then of judgin other people's gameplay choices as if they were trying to get the same thing out of their game as you are from yours.

You've got to come to understand that different people do the same activity for different reasons and get different things out of it.

It is true that these games set you up with a character like Superman. But that is exactly what some people do not enjoy about the games. FO3 is such a big expansive game, that there are many reasons to love it even if you don't like being Superman. So, it only makes sense that someone who likes some aspects of it but not the Superman aspect would mod the game to their own liking.

People really are different from each other. And our differences are not bad. It can be fascinating and fun to learn about people who are very very different from oneself.

gothemasticator

I find it odd that you created this thread in the first place, but seem to ignore what people are telling you. You wanted to know the reason why people used realism mods and from what I can see a lot of people have given you reasons. No need for more discussion, as it is clear you will never use these mods and cannot understand the reasons given. You are entitled to your opinion and the rest of us are as well. We have different tastes and that's just the way it is.