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