Musings: How Much Realism to Expect in a Game?

Quickie MMO notes:
GW2 is pretty "stable." I may log on to do dailies, and that's about it. Sunday, I put in a couple hours, give or take, for guild missions, then another hour or so doing other guild stuff, which... usually just boils down to dailies at present, unless a story event comes up. "Big" patch tomorrow, but it's mechanical stuff rather than story stuff.
News comes of the World of Darkness MMO that was in development has been cancelled. I am not surprised. Doing WoD justice in an MMO is a tall order, and CCP never struck me as possessing the skill and resources to pull it off.

Otherwise, I've been pondering just how much one should apply reason and "realism" in an RPG.


I've said before that I find internal consistency more important to a fantasy story/movie/RPG than realism. "Realism" falls by the wayside once you start talking about magic or FTL travel or whatnot. But if you have a world with floating rocks, the inhabitants should probably not be surprised by, and even have uses for, said rocks.

But... if, for example, RPG players are expected to reason things out, the reason they can bring to bear needs to apply. Even in a wild fantasy world, a GM should probably not tell the players "you find horse tracks leading to the west" if the PCs are expected to be tracking a dragon. Maybe the dragon polymorphed into a horse to be harder to track, but if the players have no reason to think it can, that's a pretty unreasonable detail to include.

I've been getting caught up recently in our online Star Wars game over things that don't make much sense to me with a major alien society we've encountered. But I recently took a step back and asked myself, "Well, should it make sense? I mean, it's Star Wars. Star Wars planets/races tend to be oversimplified caricatures anyway. Maybe I'm just overthinking this." And that's probably true. Somehow, it doesn't make it much easier for me to let everything go, take the information at face value, and press on, though. Part of my mind keeps looking for a catch or touchstone to help make sense of it all.

At the same time, I recently saw a scene involving a newly-developed steam-powered vehicle where one player laid out some stats he felt was reasonable while another argued... well, pretty much against everything as near as I can tell. I didn't really see any "counter proposal" to improve anything so much as critical examination with a "this is wrong" attitude. I'm not heavily invested in either "side" of that... well, I hesitate to call it a debate. For me, it just resulted in a failure of a scene that I'm not even sure I want to try to get back to. But is that because one person wasn't realistic enough? Or because someone else was trying to be too realistic?

Overall, I guess it's probably one of those questions for which the only "right" answer is one based on the specific situation and people involved at the time. Which is often the case, but usually disappointing...