Welcome back to your seat at the Epic Table! Today I’m going to be discussing a topic that’s pretty near and dear to a lot of our hearts: verisimilitude. I’m coming at it from a bit of an unusual angle, though: I want to talk about a case where verisimilitude is the enemy of the good. Do note that while “Persuasion check” is a D&D term, I believe this applies to any game with social mechanics.
First things first: definitions.
Verisimilitude (Add Attitude Pun Later)
Our good friends from Oxford Languages define “verisimilitude,” a word I absolutely know how to spell without looking and therefore have logically chosen to write a blog post about, as “the appearance of being true or real.” This isn’t a bad definition, per se, but it’s one that lacks a lot of the nuance of the word.
First, verisimilitude primarily exists as a quantifier. In other words, no one ever really says, “The verisimilitude of that counterfeit $20 was uncanny!” outside of like… maybe the SAT or something. We tend to use verisimilitude in regards to whether a given work (book, movie, game, etc.) has it or doesn’t generally. If we want to get more specific, we can talk about how much verisimilitude a work has or doesn’t have, or how much a particular element of that work adds or takes away. In practice, we end up with discussions such as, “This game had a ton of verisimilitude until I got to the Monsters section; the Demonic Cat Toy absolutely killed it for me.”
(Side note: please put more Demonic Cat Toys in RPGs. Thanks.)
The other thing about verisimilitude is that it is not a synonym for “realism.” Remember: verisimilitude is about the appearance of truth, not about truth itself. This is most easily understood in sci-fi or fantasy settings. A logical system of magic can decrease realism, but increase verisimilitude by providing a power source to explain from where many of the work’s movers and shakers derive their might. Similarly, having technological explanations that sound reasonable can help mitigate some of the stranger leaps in science fiction work. This isn’t to say that realism and verisimilitude are opposed—adding more realism to a work can be a great way to increase verisimilitude. It only means that something being “realistic” isn’t the same thing as having verisimilitude.
One final note before we move on: we can also refer to verisimilitude as a factor that aids in the suspension of disbelief. It’s much more difficult to invest in fiction that seems unreasonable, and in that sense verisimilitude is one of our main weapons against disbelief. Verisimilitude failing often cause the suspension of disbelief to drop.
Given all of this, why is verisimilitude ever a problem?
SME Goals
There are two ways to say something that sounds true: 1) tell the truth, or 2) make up something sufficiently plausible.
Narrowing our focus a bit to be on, y’know, RPGs as opposed to creative works in general, there are two big problems with that first option. The first is that the sum total of events leading up to a particular decision or event in a given moment is almost unknowable. I’m sitting in a Starbucks to write this blog post; in order for that to be the case, the entire history of Starbucks had to occur. And that’s just the coffee place, let alone me, my laptop, etc. So to simulate anything, RPGs have to compromise on the truth in some way. Past that is just negotiating how much.
The other side of it is that real life is boring and that’s why we’re playing a game. Nobody wants to run Starbucks & Shortform, the “exciting” new RPG about writing blog posts in a Starbucks. (Note: now that this sentence has been published, I’m estimating about three weeks until the itch.io alpha and maybe four months for the DriveThruRPG release.) We wanna do cool and exciting things, most of which are not things the majority of us encounter in our everyday lives.
The problem with the second one, though—that is, saying something plausible—is that plausibility depends entirely on your audience. This is where subject matter experts (SMEs) come into play.
One of the things I’ve done in my life is sailing. I know a fair amount about traditionally-rigged sailing vessels because of this. And let me tell you, nothing knocks me out of a work faster than seeing badly-done ships. I was reading something not too long ago from someone who feels similarly about maps and geological phenomena. We’re all subject matter experts on something, and that something can absolutely derail a session. (And these cases can come up more than you think: imagine the typical Shadowrun getaway of “pretend we’re garbage men” if one of your players actually happened to work in municipal waste disposal.)
As such, it’s way harder to come up with a lie that sounds plausible when dealing with a subject matter expert. And some subject matter experts are more common than others.
Almost The Part About Persuasion Checks
Okay, we’re 900 words in and I still haven’t mentioned Persuasion checks. We’re almost there, I promise. One other quick thing first: most games have a rule that goes something like, “If something is truly impossible, you can’t roll for it.” Just keep that in mind as we go forward.
Activities in games can more or less be divided into three categories: physical, mental, and social. This is a bad and arbitrary division of the entire scope of human activity, mind, but 1) it’s the one a lot of games more or less follow and 2) it’s better than nothing. The thing about SMEs, though, is that they’re not spread out evenly across all of the disciplines.
Out of the three categories, physical ones are the hardest for most people to intuitively estimate. Example: your warrior wants to leap on the back of a dragon! Did you know that the Guinness World Record for the highest vertical jump with a running start is a hair under 4 feet, 2 inches? Probably not. I didn’t either, and now I feel cursed by this knowledge because it’s going to affect how I GM basically everything forever. Likewise, most of us have no idea how best to fight an alien beyond, “I stab him with my laser-sword again.” So generally speaking, “Can I hit my enemy with an arrow from 120 feet away while my three friends stand between us?” isn’t something that affects our verisimilitude.
Mental verisimilitude is interesting because on one hand we all have phones and a weirdly high amount of truly random trivia in our brains. On the other hand, though, the great thing about mental concepts in tabletop games is that they’re inherently comprehensible by humans because the game itself is a mental concept created by humans. Even if you’re dealing with something like the Old Ones in Call of Cthulhu, anything truly incomprehensible is going to be described as “it’s incomprehensible.” (This is a special tool that will be useful later, by the way.)
And then there’s social verisimilitude.
The Part About Persuasion Checks
Humans are social creatures. We are constantly socializing. In a sense, you’re even socializing by reading this blog: you’re interacting with an expression of thought generated by another human for your consumption. As such, all of us think we have a pretty good handle on how this whole social interaction thing goes. In other words: when it comes to social rolls, everyone thinks they’re a subject matter expert. It actually doesn’t matter that they’re not, in fact, subject matter experts—they behave as if they are.
Obviously, this is a problem.
What this means in practice is that every time a social roll comes up, it gets analyzed in a way that other rolls don’t. GMs, or even other players, demand that exactly what’s getting said be presented for group dissection and approval. If the suggested phrasing is deemed insufficient, it’s rejected regardless of the roll on the basis of “impossibility.” You can’t roll for impossible things, remember; that’s taken here as “this thing you said would never convince any reasonable person.” How do they know? Because they’re a reasonable person, obviously, and it’d never convince them. As far as they’re concerned, they’re a subject matter expert on being persuaded.
The reverse of this also occurs. Frequently, social rolls are completely circumvented if a player is clever enough at phrasing and tone out of character. That unlocks the opposite of the impossible rule: if something is trivially easy and/or everyone agrees it would work, it just happens, don’t roll for it. All the SMEs agree: this is a thing that would work every time, and therefore verisimilitude demands that it work this time as well!
This is, of course, entirely mechanically unfair—either to the character that’s specialized in social matters or to everyone besides the one who dumped social mechanics, respectively. So how to fix it? That’s a big topic, and this post is already pretty lengthy. So we’ll take a look at that in Part Two of this post. Look for it next week!
The contents of this post are © 2024 H. Tucker Cobey. All rights reserved.
