Aristotle said works of fiction should favor probable impossibilities over improbable possibilities. Suspension of disbelief covers the big, crazy things like spiderman or aliens or wizards. But the audience still expects the mundane, background things to function according to intuition : just because superman can fly, doesn’t mean he drinks his coffee cold. That would be weird.
Video games aren’t like other works of fiction because they rely on abstract simulations. Hit points, or lives, have been around forever and never really made sense. Why does the last bullet you take kill you when all the others did basically nothing? The reason HP works in the player’s mind, I’d argue, is because it measures distance to failure intuitively. Take a hit, get closer to failing. Grab a medkit, buy yourself some breathing room.
I think that the abstraction of health points works only if it doesn’t stretch suspension of disbelief to improbable possibilities. Healing Word, Cure Wounds, Goodberry, sure! That’s what this world is all about. But no believable world has characters eating during intense exercise unless they’re looking for stomach cramps. It’s possible, but improbable.
Thank you.
Suspension of disbelief is something Larian should pay much more attention to in an RPG. And it goes beyond how they show every successful attack as a lethal strike that draws a huge pool of blood that can be frozen to trip the victim on their own blood, or eating a pig's head to instantly heal that wound.
It's about tiny arrowheads exploding in huge pools of acid, or spiders spitting out gallons of poison. It's dipping greatswords in a candle to add fire damage. It's a human fighter jumping 30ft. high using only their muscles. It's the ridiculous amount of shoving enemies in combat.
Most of these ideas are great! But Larian's execution is just consistently
so over the top it's increasingly difficult to suspend disbelief. Even if there is a target audience that enjoys crazy over the top gameplay, this is a sequel that needs to respect it's origins and find the right style for Forgotten Realms.
