[Cam]Interesting Question

[themidnightgirl]

How realistic should plot events be?

Obviously, ones involving supernatural entities are not going to be realistic. But ones involving real-life institutions and similar... how accurate should they be?

For example - there's a news report just issued that talks about the LSE system failing. That's not unrealistic - in fact, it happened in 2000.

On April 4 2000 a backup job overran by more than 3 hours, causing the start of trading to be delayed by 8 hours, in the end.

That was on the last day of the financial year and it caused massive knock on effects.

However, the bit that really isn't realistic is the "trading suspended for two weeks". Not only has that never happened, it's never going to. When the computer systems had problems when they were introduced, the traders went back to using paper. There's no reason to suspect that they wouldn't now.

It's in no way unfeasible that a number of companies would be suspended - this is run of the mill, and occurs frequently. But for the whole LSE to be down for two weeks? Inconceivable.

After September 11 the NY stock exchange closed for 4 trading days (they went back on the Monday after), but that was largely because they couldn't get to the building.

I'm just mildly curious - how unrealistic can a plot be before you start to think "hang on"?

Comments

[winterthing.livejournal.com]

I tend to think internal consistency is very important. The magic world is magic, but it still works according to certain rules and perameters. The mundane world - well - it's still meant to be the mundane world and should work according to those rules.

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[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

Thankyou!

You are now officially my favourite person for the next few hours.

[twicedead.livejournal.com]

I'd consider what caused the fall-down and how catastrophic it was... Maybe the technocs have to really secure the systen because the Traditions or Pentex or Thorn or some Glass Walkers have introduced a monster viral spirit into it and it will just consume value from the stock exchange, and can even operate on paper.

Normal cause... normal response.

Weird cause... weird response.

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[damianobf.livejournal.com]

yeah this was something else I was thinking in a supernatural world how can you be sure an event is normal?

You don't always know what is happening under the surface and maybe 2 weeks is due to something more happening and maybe that needs looking into?

[damianobf.livejournal.com]

I think how realistic you expect thigns to be is quite hard.

The problem is as a ref you are not omnmipitent but at the same time if you are running a 'realistic game' you need to keep the feel. I am not sure what game you are talking about where the LSE shut down for 2 weeks is.

There are several factors which can drive LRP events towards being 'unrealistic' ( I am differenetiating here from Table top as it is easier to resolve issues of being 'unrealisti' in tabel top as small group playing together so easier to question it)

First of all in LRP people aren't in reality living as their characters the whole time. This means sometimes events take longer to fix as they would in the real world and I think we have to except that. Even if this is to allow players time to react.

Also what one person thinks is realistic another person doesn't possibly as they have information the other doesn't. This is something people forget (both IC and OOC) and sometimes it is better to politely point something seems unrealistic for you.

I have given up on trying to find a 'realistic' modern system as I don't believe there can be which is also supernatural.

The one which always gets me in things like live modern supernatural games is Camera's

It is virtually impossible nowadays to get away from camera's so not causing people to be aware if there was really that number of superanturals out there would be almost impossible. But then thats one of my pet gripes :)

Anyway I am nost sure how much sense this makes but basically I think the bigger a system and the more sprawling it is the more benefit of the doubt you have to give to realism.

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[twicedead.livejournal.com]

The problem is as a ref you are not omnmipitent but at the same time if you are running a 'realistic game' you need to keep the feel. I am not sure what game you are talking about where the LSE shut down for 2 weeks is.

This is why I think it's important for STs to try and know as much as possible about everything, from how it feels to be shot to how one actually flies a helicopter, or to have enough knowledge to fake these things realistically.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

I worked in that sector for a while, so do know a little bit about this I suppose.

It would be very difficult to take out an exchange for an extended period. You might do it by nuking the city it was in, though I doubt people would be terribly bothered about an exchange being offline in those circumstances.

Traditional exchanges (i.e. ones with human market makers) would just go back to paper, as you say. However, an all-electronic exchange like NASDAQ *could* be taken out for quite a while, but it would have to be done with knowledge of the architechture of its infrastructure. A clever terrorist group, who had infiltrated the systems admin department, could do this by simultaneously destroying key infrastructure, e.g. the main machine room, the backup mahine room(s) and key bits of network infrastructure, could probably take out such an exchange for months. Another, cleverer, possibility would be to infiltrate the software engineering team and to insert modifications designed to destroy the market's credibility (i.e. randomly cause lots of trades to be reported wrongly and/or with delayo, causing arbitrage to go wrong, huge whipsaw losses, etc). This would kill volume in the market and make it go illiquid, at which point a press release saying "ha ha, got you" would send prices through the floor instantly and force the market to be closed down until the software was fixed or replaced from scratch (months of work, possibly).

[omentide.livejournal.com]

What she said. Consistency and 'believability' is very important to me (in a game, probably not in real life as that's asking too much).

So, my assumption is, if you're not told it's different from the 'real world' then it's the same. Where it's different, the 'rules' tend to cover it (consistency wise).

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

For a short-term game, or a game in which radical background changes can be allowed to occur, adherence to how the world works isn't so important, as you either don't have to face the consequences of them, or you don't have to care.

In an ongoing campaign, it simply makes sense to have background events that can be realistically recovered from without having to fudge it, and say "well, the events that would have happened from [cruddy plot y] didn't, because that would mess up the game, and I'm running it, so nyah". The easiest way to do that is to have them resemble their real world inspiration as much as possible, or at least to abstract them in a way to make such a difference immaterial.

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[twicedead.livejournal.com]

I once played a Mage style game where the first entire year of play was non-magical so we could establish not only the characters' relationships properly but also a baseline for what the world was.

We set the game in London. Unfortunately, having come from Melbourne, we had no idea of the scale of London and had players living in areas like bloomsbury having back yards and suchlike ;)

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[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

I think anyone setting a game in a locale they don't know is probably guilty of something similar.

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[twicedead.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, Melbourne was far, far to small to run a game of any epic scope in. We played Werewolf set there once and a single Glass-Walker energy pulse fried the entore central business district.

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[damianobf.livejournal.com]

But that's not actually a problem as none of you knew better and you all had a consistent view :0

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[twicedead.livejournal.com]

It was when we finally got over here and almost diedx of embarrassment ;)

[jonnyargles.livejournal.com]

The trouble with anything of this size is attention span. A crash of that magnitude would have far-reaching effects that would make 1924 or Black Monday look like a granny buying two shares in M&S. The same with all these anti-terrorism laws, explosions, deaths and every other piece of malarkey in the WOD. The trouble is, players look at it for about a second, and then if they're not directly interested, it just washes off their back. It reminds me of the South Park Underpants Gnome.

Stan - nonplussed "Oh my god you killed Kenny"
Kyle - equally so "You bastards."
Gnome "HOLY SHIT! YOUR FRIEND'S DEAD!!"
Kyle - "Yeah, yeah, so what happens with the underpants?"

[spikydavid.livejournal.com]

It depends, and a lot of it depends on your ability to separate character knowledge from player knowledge. The reason that (in this case) you have this discrepancy is due to your player knowledge. What (I think) you should (ideally) do in this, and every similar situation, is ask the moderator something along the lines of "Is this two week delay what my character expects?". If your character knows about financial markets, or can research, or has basic common sense, then the moderator can either say "Yes", if they don't know what a two week close down actually means and thought that they were being realistic, or "No", if they knew what a two week shutdown meant, and want people to investigate plot.

The problem comes in this gap between player and character expectation. I realise that the solution above isn't ideal for Cam/LARP, it isn't even ideal in table top, as it slows things down and reinforces the idea of the game, rather than allowing things to develop. Unfortunately, for as long as games are just simulations...

[sobrique.livejournal.com]

I'm prepared to suspend a lot of disbelief - I am an avid Sci Fi and Fantasy junkie. (Both literature, tabletop, or LARP).

So I'm willing to go a long way with things like magic existing, or other erudite concepts.

But I do get frustrated when in a particular setting, things are inconsistent with the setting. I'm happy to accept 'blasters', hyperspace etc. in starwars, but if you start using portable laser cutters, or cloaked cars in a present day setting, I get annoyed. Because it 'just doesn't fit'.

So the answer to your question, would be: "it depends".