General RPGs' Preferable Non-Realism 3

That’s right, it’s back, by popular demand!*  Yes, today we’re going to look at another handful of common RPG tropes in which it’s far better to just grit your teeth and suspend that disbelief, because making them more realistic is only gonna get in the way of a positive experience with the game.



Interior Lighting: They may get a bit dim in places, there might be a few shadows in the corners here and there, and of course there’ll be just enough shade in the final room that some self-important wanker will be able to hide his identity as he delivers sinister foreshadowing at the protagonist, but on the whole?  Caves, dungeons, whale stomachs, extra-dimensional crystal fortresses, they’re all remarkably well-lit in RPGs.  Like, you wouldn’t expect to be able to go spelunking in a cavern and still have better visibility a full mile deep into the planet than some people keep in their own homes, but apparently whoever explored these caverns last was a trigger-happy electrician who set the entire cave network’s ceilings up with a thorough suite of halogens.  When it comes to RPGs, the very heart of a labyrinthine ruin that hasn’t entertained visitors in over a millennium has a better-than-average chance of somehow being better illuminated than a path along the outskirts of a forest in broad noon daylight, with nary a torch, light bulb, or sparkling personality anywhere.

But that is absolutely 100% okay, because--better sit down for this one--audiences like to see things.  Yeah, I know, shocking revelation that flies in the face of everything that House of the Dragon has taught us, but it’s true, and every time an RPG decides to get cute and try to impose realistic dungeon darkness on us, it just winds up being an inconvenience that wastes time and nothing more.  Early Pokemon games deciding to make 1 random dungeon** pitch black does nothing more than inconvenience the player into hauling a Pokemon who knows the otherwise useless Flash around with them, while a small handful** of dark rooms in Startropics 1 and The Legend of Zelda 1 just boil down to forcing you to go into the menu and use a candle.  All that the dark means in Dragon Quest 1, or a Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder game, is that you have to take a moment to equip a torch or cast a spell, and then just continue along as you were.  Boy howdy, a momentary setback that’s immediately dispelled by 3 seconds of menu navigation!  I’m blown away; it’s like I’m really there!

Yes, okay, there are a couple examples where this idea is kind of okay.  Very dim lighting does help set a lot of the mood for settings in the Fallout series, and atmosphere is very important to Fallout, so I guess there are some occasions where a tiny bit of lighting realism can be warranted.  But overall, I’m just content to accept that RPG sunbeams can penetrate solid rock and walls of steel, and call it a day.  Look, I don’t deny that in real life, I, like anyone else, occasionally enjoy pretending I’m God by rapidly flipping the light switch in my room on and off to confuse and impress my pet gecko.***  But I don’t want to make that hobby into a damn chore as I’m forced to use a lantern item every time the protagonist enters a new room lest I risk bringing Grues back into the popular consciousness.


Weapon Vendors’ Technological Prowess: Is it particularly realistic that there is, in Chrono Trigger, a caveman vendor in the prehistoric age who not only has a real, actual handgun available for trade, but the firearm that this literal neanderthal has put together prior to his society having discovered gunpowder, trigger mechanisms, iron-working, or basic physics, is actually of better quality than the one that Lucca picked up in 2300 AD that was created with incomprehensibly advanced future-tech?  And let’s not even get started on the fact that this same ooga-booga artisan just happens to have an inventory of detachable robot limbs lying around for Robo to trade for and equip, which are, again, better than the parts he was manufactured with.  My Nintendo Switch can’t even function if it’s not hooked up to the exact right charge cord, but somehow this hut-dwelling missing-link MacGyver has hand-crafted perfectly-fitted attachments for a specific model of automaton that won’t exist for another 65 million years.

Still, if we had to do all our RPG shopping based on who believably has the means to create what weapon, it’d get tedious pretty fast.  Does it make sense that the weapon vendor in a village of talking cats sells bows and arrows that his entire thumb-less species lacks the capacity to both craft and operate?  Is it rational that the weapon shop in an underwater city of merpeople sells swords with metal blades made from alloys they can’t forge and wooden handles made from trees they can’t access?  Maybe not, but there’s no way I’m gonna have my protagonist go without an upgrade for 4 new towns in a row while that smug jackass mage in the party gets a shiny new toy every time just because he decided his armament of choice was going to be a literal fucking stick that any fool could make/find.

Also look if there was no unrealistic trope of weapon vendors’ means of manufacturing then there would be no reason to lampshade it in Shin Megami Tensei Persona Q2, and Theo using his popcorn maker to create all manner of instruments of war is eternally amusing to me.  We’re keeping this one.


Warrior Needs Food Badly: Last time, I mentioned just how nutritionally poor the adventurer’s fare generally is in RPGs, whether it be the Secret of Mana kids eating literally nothing but items you can find in a candy store over the course of months or Fallout 4’s Nora regularly chowing down on raw steaks made from postapocalyptic dogs or indulging in a hunk of giant radioactive mutant housefly meat on her cheat day.  But to add to that, have you ever thought about just how little of that nutritionally-stunted diet heroes are consuming?

I mean, how often do you see these people actually eat what anyone could call a meal?  Fayt in Star Ocean 3 may spend his entire day fighting from 1 end of an enemy’s medieval fortress to the other, permanently crossing an entire battalion’s worth of knights and guard dogs off the duty roster, and the most snacking he’ll do the entire time is to munch half a dozen healing blueberries, maybe a single blackberry if he’s really feeling decadent.  I don’t care how great antioxidants are for you, there’s no damn way that the man’s replacing the energy and strength he spent on Operation: Level 18 Or Bust from a single muffin’s worth of fruit.  And that’s still more than a lot of other RPG characters eat in a day; at least Star Ocean healing items are actual food.  Most adventuring parties walk from 1 end of a continent to the other on a single leaf of a healing herb.  Even Popeye needs an entire CAN of spinach to bust some heads; we’ve got RPG heroes out here doing cross-country marathons while throwing fists with ogres and entire wolf packs, all powered by a single frond of fennel that they resorted to chewing on to do something about those broken ribs.

Even RPG heroes who DO regularly and demonstrably have actual meals still aren’t getting enough to be realistically adequate.  It’s almost always solely a dinner-before-bed deal in an inn or around a campfire or whatever.  I adore Grandia’s dinner conversations, but if Justin and Ryudo actually want to keep their strength up and be at their best for their world-saving tasks, their parties really ought to consider also chatting it up as they hit a breakfast bar or break out some sandwiches for an impromptu picnic amongst all the corpses they’ve made of the local wildlife.  If a single bar pizza late at night isn’t enough for even just a retail worker who does a third of his job sitting down (as my doctor keeps insisting), you can bet it’s not realistic that a few pork chops and a conversation about local architecture are enough to keep a guy who fights world-ending calamities for his 9-to-5 healthy.

But the alternative is to have a game that keeps nagging you every 20 minutes that your protagonist’s tummy is hurting and he wants to go to McDonalds and do you at least have any mints in your purse he can have?  And look, that’s all fine and great as an optional mode to bring Fallout’s survival element to life, and I’ll accept it in a rare case like The Banner Saga trilogy, which expertly incorporates resource management as a function of its story of a group of refugees fleeing the end of the world.  But overall, I already have a pet whose meal schedule I have to keep track of in real life.  I don’t need another entire party of them.  Get out of here with that nonsense, Lords of Xuilma.


Decaying Weapons: Is this the third time I’ve talked about the detestable realism of RPG weapons that need constant maintenance?  Yes.  Am I bringing this up again for any real, reasonable cause?  No.  Am I revisiting this subject solely because of just how blindingly, totally, furiously, incalculably much I fucking HATE equipment degradation?  Look, you already know the answer, why are you bothering to ask?  I want the person who first came up with the idea of inflicting constant, necessary weapon repair on players to wake up every morning to fire ants nibbling their toes.  I wish for that person to have to be Elon Musk’s Valentine every year.  I hope that whenever they go out to a restaurant, the place is out of every beverage but Diet Mello Yello.

Alright, anyway, look, I’ve thought of a new angle of preferable non-realism to this stupid idea, so don’t get all bent out of shape, I can justify a third round of it.  Let’s say you’re a game developer who’s taken a few blows to the head, and you do, in fact, decide to insert a recurring equipment maintenance mechanic into your game.  Is it particularly realistic for the same whetstone and rag setup that fully repairs the thief’s daggers to also completely restore the hero’s longbow to working order?  Maybe not.  Does it make sense that the same parts in a single toolkit are somehow able to fully service 4 different melee weapons, 2 musical instruments being abusively treated as melee weapons, a crossbow, and a hardcover book (because Dohter the Charitable forbid a mage ever put any serious effort into defending themselves with an actual weapon)?  Er, no.  Should the same repair powder in Dark Cloud 1 that refurbishes a big wooden hammer also work just as well in fixing a goddamn laser gun?  I thought I just told you to stop asking questions you know the answer to.

But the alternative is Fallout forcing you to scrounge weapons and clothing of the same type as the one you’re trying to restore.  Having to constantly keep an eye on your battle axe’s physical and emotional state is already tedious enough; the last thing that needs to be added is ANOTHER layer of inconvenience to the stupid process.  As far as I’m concerned, if I’m gonna be saddled with the responsibility of treating my helmet like a goddamn Tamagotchi for the sake of oppressive realism, the least the developer can do is include a Fix-It-Felix hammer in every toolbox.


Treasure Chest Benefit-Cost Ratio: Consider the resources that go into the creation of an average RPG treasure chest.  Assuming a wooden version, you’ve got the boards and slats necessary to form a reasonably large box (to say nothing of those absolute monsters in Star Ocean 3), the bands of metal to keep them in place and reinforce its security, the metal fasteners to hold it together, the metal hinges to allow the chest to open and shut, the oil to keep those hinges in working order...and these raw materials are not gonna be the cheap ones, either.  This is not a cheap pine-and-tin affair.  RPG treasure chests have to be in it for the long haul, left out on their lonesome in abandoned temples and forgotten forest paths and forbidden crypts and so on for decades, centuries, sometimes even millennia.  These things have to make use of some sturdy-ass wood that’s been weatherproofed to Hell and back, and quality alloy that doesn’t just resist rust, it actively terrifies it.  The materials and preparation for them alone makes a treasure chest worth its weight in the very gold that gets put in it.

And the craftsmanship’s gotta cost a pretty penny, too!  Not a lot of RPG worlds have access to industrial manufacturing (and of those that do, they probably didn’t when the damn chest was made and stuck in the corner of a dungeon 400 years ago), so you’re gonna be hitting up a carpenter and a smith to commission this thing’s construction, and considering how perfectly, identically symmetrical and polished all these chests are in these games, it ain’t amateur artisans making'em.  A locksmith, too, sometimes, although admittedly most treasure chests seem to just be left unsecured, so maybe not.****  A cursory glance at Amazon indicates that in our current, modern age, a basic but reliable storage trunk goes for upwards of $150 - 250, and that’s with modern age technology being used to harvest the resources, modern age technology and workmanship techniques being used to craft it, and modern age vehicles and supply lines to haul the thing to your porch where the chest itself can ironically be the treasure that gets stolen by porch thieves.  So if with all that time- and effort-saving modern convenience a treasure chest is still at least over a hundred bucks, you can imagine the cost of just 1 of these things in most RPG worlds.  To say nothing of the time involved in having it made; the local smithy ain’t gonna 2-day-guarantee that shit no matter how many tips you grease Jeff Bezos’s palms with.

Okay, so now that we’ve established the substantial investment of money, effort, and time that goes into a single treasure chest...exactly how realistic is it, really, that some mook in Hyrule went to the trouble of getting one specifically for the purpose of storing 5 fucking rupees in it?  Did that dude seriously just drop more money  than can fit into the average Hylian wallet on acquiring a treasure chest just so his kid could stash her allowance in a box bigger than she is?*****  Imagine spending weeks seeking out and working with skilled tradesmen just to create a storage device for a single vial of healing potion.  One apple.  A chunk of charcoal.  A lone potato.  A solitary fruit gummy.  If half of these adventurers had any brains, whenever they found a treasure chest holding nothing more than a loaf of bread, they’d just grab the whole box and haul it back to a pawn shop to get some real value out of their find.

But screw it!  So what if the contents of probably more than half of all RPG treasure chests represent almost as bad a payoff for your investment as an NFT?  It’s still fun to find a shiny new treasure chest, open it up, hear that opening sound effect, and see what shiny new toy you just got.  I mean, okay, look, my excitement in Fallout 4 at seeing a promising safe is relatively equal to my excitement at seeing an equally vulnerable desk, locker, tool chest, lunchbox, or putrid body bag of rotten meat.  I will admit that I am perhaps not the pickiest post-apocalyptic pillager; my priority is the plunder more than the package presenting the prize.  Still, it’s undeniably more satisfying to pop open a prominently placed, polished, promising treasure chest to acquire the next step in your journey to 99 healing herbs in your inventory than to just happen across a zip-lock bag with a leaf in it, so by all means, ancient dungeon architects, keep artificially propping up that storage device economy!


Boring Planets: It's a real, actual fact that most of the planets in our universe, from all observable data, are barren and lifeless.  There's not a lot of stuff to see and do on most of the worlds floating in space.  Unfortunately, however, "seeing and doing stuff" is, in fact, something that players of a sci-fi game--hell, any game--want out of their narrative- and exploration-based adventure, so it's generally good to put aside astronomy for a moment if it's going to be a deal-breaker for making a good game.  This might seem obvious, and to most RPGs like The Outer Worlds or Phantasy Star, it is, but there's always at least 1 idiot who would rather something be realistic than worthwhile, and unfortunately, he was the guy calling the shots at Bethesda when they created Starfield.  Thanks for the empty, boring game about empty, boring planets, Todd Howard; your vision of procedurally generated planets in a game about the thrill and wonder of space exploration is exactly the kind of genius I'd expect from the mastermind behind the idea to have a Fallout game without a story or characters.  I feel like Howard is the kind of guy who would love the realism of Penn and Teller's Desert Bus game and see it as an ideal to aspire to.


What’s Mine is Yours and What’s Yours is Mine; Damn Time and Space If It Says Otherwise: RPG inventory bags are already not exactly the most realistic things in terms of how much they can hold, as previously noted, but a less remarked-upon unrealistic quality of theirs is that once this gang of world-saving adolescents has adopted you into their midst, you have access to the communal backpack forever.  You’re on the other side of town doing your own character quest?  The group gets separated into 3 different pairs inside a large dungeon?  You’ve been stranded on a different continent thanks to an incident involving a raft, a talking freshwater octopus, and a really dumb decision to apply martial arts to an underwater environment?  You’ve fallen into another time period altogether?  Did the protagonist get completely and thoroughly disintegrated, including all items on his person, one of which was the inventory bag itself?  Doesn’t fucking matter, the potion sack is still there and you and the rest of the party all still have simultaneous full access to it.

Realistic?  Not in the slightest.  But frankly, not having access to the cheeseburger backpack during Greg, Amethyst, and Pearl’s section of the temple in the second Steven Universe RPG was inconvenient, and truly, what purpose is served by injecting this bit of accessibility realism in?  Let every party member’s purse contain a portal to a shared storage warehouse, it ain’t bothering anyone.


I Need Corrective Lenses Because I’m Bird’s-Eye-View-Sighted: Let’s face it, Hide and Seek as a minigame wouldn’t exist in RPGs if protagonists could actually see the world in front of their faces.  Half the kids that play these games aren’t hiding so much as they are standing out in the open, but because our own perspective as the audience is that of a very nosy pigeon, the fact that some brat is standing 2 paces away directly in the protagonist’s path but behind a tree from our own perspective means that the hero’s gonna be frantically searching the whole town for 20 minutes and considering filing a missing persons report before he finally happens by chance to bump into the tile of space the kid’s occupying.  Man, the amount of stuff “hidden” in Dark Half alone just because it’s out of an aerial drone’s sight but should be clear and visible to the dude who’s supposedly leading the adventure is crazy.

Well, so be it!  I happen to LIKE the overhead view of an adventure.  First-person perspective’s fine and good, too, and certainly far more realistic, but seeing an adventure unfold from a bird’s-eye view is far tidier, and allows the audience to get a full understanding of all that’s happening onstage.  Frankly, I’m not so enamored with the north side of houses, bushes, and statues that I want to give up my seat in the theater in exchange for the realism of a boots-on-the-ground perspective.


This Is What Happens When You Don’t Provide A Good Vision Plan For Your Employees: Well, the heroes may have their ocular quirks, but they’re nothing compared to the guards and goons of these games, good guys and bad alike.  Whether it be a monster’s aggro range, a patrolling sentry who is being paid exactly enough per hour to repeatedly tread a specific 25-foot rectangle of space and no more, or an enemy lookout in a watchtower who somehow will come into your own view from the ground before you’ll come into his, everyone you might want to avoid in an RPG handily only seems to be able to see a fraction as far as you might expect.

Hylia help you if you happen to be inside the 5-foot radius of a monster’s perfect circle of vision, but until you violate social distancing etiquette, you may as well not exist to the average wolf, giant scorpion, or eldritch abomination, the latter of which may ironically be actually made out of eyes.  You may be shit out of luck if you happen to stumble into a guard’s line of sight, but even the conical field of vision on the fancier RPG sentries sure as hell ain’t the standard 120 degrees, so there’s no such thing as seeing-something-out-of-the-corner-of-their-eye.  They've got seeing-something-out-of-the-quadrant-of-their-eye at best.  These assholes would have to swivel their heads and crane their necks just to take in a single lane of traffic.  Hell, even main villains and final bosses can clearly only see as far as 1 screen’s length, because last-minute reinforcements are ALWAYS showing up to bail the heroes out of a jam from off-screen, and as often as not they’re coming from the very direction that the villain is currently facing.  I can see farther than all these schmucks without even wearing my glasses, and I’m relatively sure I’m legally blind.

But obviously, the devastating combination of tunnel-vision and nearsightedness in all RPG denizens is purely positive, and giving monsters and villains and guards real, actual eyesight would be a terrible move.  No one would ever be able to ride to the hero’s rescue again if the bad guy could see them coming up the Dramatic Final Boss Stairs and opted to move his timetable of finishing the protagonist off up a few seconds in response.  If someone had specifically written “with your eyes open” into the employee handbook for Hyrule’s guards, then The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time wouldn’t have needed a 7-year time skip, because Link would still be trying to sneak into the castle courtyard well into his 40s.  And do you have any earthly idea just how far some animals can see in real life?  The aggro range of a realistically-sighted falcon enemy would be so wide that the thing would be attacking you while you were still out on the world map.  I think it’s best we forego the realism on this and stick with the “Don’t aggro until you see the whites of his eyes” approach.



Alright, that’s it for today.  See you again for the next installment of this series in another 4 years or so!













* Protip: If you restrict your polling audience solely to yourself, then popular demand is actually super easy to achieve for just about everything you do.


** What really gets me about this is that this stab at realism is so often selective and arbitrary.  Why is every OTHER cavern in the Pokemon games fully lit despite being exactly as submerged and lacking light sources?  Why THIS room at the heart of a labyrinth in Startropics 1, and not the one next to it?  How come some levels of SMT Persona 5’s Mementos are just pitch dark at random, while the ones above and below them were illuminated?  What, did that level just happen to be the one formed out of the cognition of everyone in Tokyo who’d forgotten to pay their electric bill this month?


*** I accomplish neither of these things, if you’re wondering.  She’s a tough audience.


**** Which you’d think would defeat the point, but I’ve seen how the Secret of Mana kids open their treasure chests.  Clearly RPG heroes are fully capable and ready to just smash a treasure chest against the ground until it relinquishes its goodies 1 way or another, so if you value your investment into the chest itself, I guess it might just be better to make the thing as accessible as possible to whatever greedy yutz happens across it.


***** Full credit to Danny Sexbang for pointing out the ridiculous cost logistics of this particular scenario.  I mean, I’ve already talked about this matter of treasure chest contents to some degree before, so I’ll still count this as mostly my idea, but I can’t deny that his quipping brought the subject back to my mind.