I Want Realistic Dragons

Weighing into an ancient (or at least senile) fantasy debate, I’d like to go back a step. The debate usually goes like this:

An elf punching a dragon to death because of monk-training isn’t realistic.

    You think dragons are "realistic"?

No, but a certain semblance, in certain regards, to reality, which we might call ‘verisimilitude’, meaning ’the quality of seeming like-reality’, helps suspend disbelief, and enriches the tail.

That last bit’s bunkum, and here’s why.

  1. Having a long word for ’like-reality’, as a stand-in for ‘realistic’ (meaning the same), doesn’t solve anything. It just gives you a middle-class shibboleth.
  2. It doesn’t address the problem.

When an elf punches a dragon to death in a single hit, this negates a premise of the world. The book starts out (by writing or implication) that a magical world resembles our own, except for other races, such as elves and dragons. We see the elves make arrows to hunt, not because of magical fiat, but because they need to eat. The world asks ‘how could you protect a town against a giant lizard that breathes fire?’; and then it answers ‘with a hundred well-trained archers’, and the answer makes sense.

Back to our one-punch elf-monk, we can excuse her by making her abilities part of the premise. If people here can learn magical martial-arts abilities, we know what we’re getting into ahead of time, and the dragon-killing punch no longer feels strange. In a world where magical martial-arts abilities exist, killing a dragon in a single hit becomes ‘realistic’, because it conforms to that reality (if not ours).

Swords cutting through armour isn’t realistic, because swords don’t do that, even in a world with psychic dragons. I want realism, even in a reality where gnolls stalk ochre jellies to power necromantic artefacts.

For a better way to approach the underlying problem, check the Module Decalogue

Related Posts

Designing around Spike-Traps

When making things, once in a while you spot a pit-trap laden with spikes, and screech to a halt to think about the route ahead carefully. When making chairs, I guess people test by sitting in the chair. Writers and RPG designers can’t get this kind of snappy feedback, so I guess we’re all a bit fumbly when testing solutions. I certainly am.

Read More

System Realism Matters

A hundred paces down the dark tunnel, you see dozens of goblins dancing round a fire and singing about eating anything that moves.

Read More

Dungeons Need More Space

The dungeon ecosystem doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I think Tolkien has a fix.

Read More