Verisimilitude
“You see a flock of 20 screaming chickens. Roleplay accordingly.�
Many people choose live-action roleplaying over tabletop roleplaying games because simple character actions, such as moving or talking, do not need to have mechanics in a LARP. Peter Litwack, a GM in the Guild, poses this specific question to other GMs: “Could the players just do it without having to mechanic it?� Mechanics have a tendency to compromise rather than enhance verisimilitude with the game world. For reasons mentioned in the previous chapter, there can be good reasons to constrain the natural abilities of the players but GMs realize that mechanics often come at the expense of the immersive experience.
However, this is not always the case. Mechanics of verisimilitude can encourage players to do things in the game world that are appropriate for their characters. Conversely, these mechanics discourage activities that would be inappropriate from a roleplaying stance. When players can identify closely with their characters, they are less likely to take frivolous liberties with their virtual roles in order to gain competitive advantages. These mechanics reinforce the players’ empathy with their characters by improving the correspondence between the players’ actions and their characters’ abilities and between the spaces in the real world and the environment of the game world. Unlike mechanics of dissociation, which encourage players to rely on highly abstracted game mechanics to achieve their goals, mechanics of verisimilitude encourage players to imagine, improvise, act and behave as if they really were the character to engage players in their characters’ motivations for achieving those goals.
