Realism in your campaign.

[Nox Equites]

How much realism do you use in your campaign?

Do you have the hordes of mooks that fight to the death or do some or all of them have the willingness to surrender to a superior foe? Most sentient species and many animals will retreat given the opportunity when things look grim or they are severely injured.

If the party has a "take no prisoners" approach do they suffer for it? You can't always clean sweep your foes so eventually someone will get away to talk of your bloodthirsty ways. If your reputation gets bad enough no one will want to deal with you.

How involved do you get in tracking supplies? Sure you can make it easy to get more food, fuel, and/or water, as payment perhaps. But when you are in an isolated area you should seriously be concerned when you have used half your e-clips to kill a rampaging demon. Keeping track of time should be required if you have a juicer in the party and the need to top off his drug harness.

How human do you have NPCs act? Do you have evil NPCs suffering from compulsive stupidity making it obvious to the world that "this guy is bad folks"? Is every good NPC a paragon of virtue shining bright in a cruel world? Some evil folks are smart enough to keep their deeds hidden. Some good guys will suffer petty jealousy causing friction for the group.

Too much realism grinds everything to a halt, but it can add spice in proper doses.

[Bill]

In my games, enemies flee when it looks like they're losing. That frustrates players at first, they frequently want to chase down every thug with a gun, but they get used to not being able to catch them all after a couple sessions. Supplies are tracked inside combat, but I generally provide opportunities for them to be replenished without much effort when the players are able to return to a base of operations. My villains are typically very grounded in their motivations. They may be callous, cruel, and have no regard for the lives of others, but everything that they do is rational. Even miscreant characters are attempting to enrich themselves at the expense of others. They'll murder and mutilate people to sell off organs, and they may even enjoy it, but they're not carving up people without any profit to be made. The exceptions are the genuinely insane; they may engage in violence for the sake of violence. I have at times been accused of making even my non-antagonist NPCs unnecessarily uncooperative, which I will submit to. In my defense though, stories are driven by conflict and NPCs that give away everything that the player characters want without making them work for it are boring.

[Alrik Vas]

My players are pretty good about getting supplies at just about every opportunity. Since they've failed in the past and it really hurt them, they learned.

I make things realer than most would want. I have ways you can die not handheld by the books and when the PCs come across something terrible because they failed to gather information about the area, I'm not going to suddenly change the encounters so they can be dealt with.

Though just dice rolls have saved these lucky jerks in the past, even with poor planning. Sheesh...

I keep track of fuel, ammunition, drug supplies, all that. I even apply penalties when they don't service their gear.

I'm not out to get them, but entropy is a jerk.

[Crash187]

My games vary from player group to group, my default is a hyper realistc in terms of its subtlty. For examples the worst villains in my campaigns are often also the most polite and my npc protagnoists are often downright offensive but there is no specific formula you can use to judge my npcs they are the product of their context and often self absorbed(i mean they arent just sitting there waiting for the pcs to come up and make them real) i keep up with ALL relevant perishables and avail myself of the various rules for characters going without food drugs or whatever and i never clue my players into thing like their dwindling supplies until their chars would naturally be unable to fail to notice. Im not mean i just think these details are important. If my players wanted to play a video game with obvious cues and a set path to follow they wouldnt be at my house or at least we wouldn t sitting around the table. Moreover the necesity to mark seemingly trivial things and address them at certain times keeps my players heads 'in the game' so to speak.

Game sessions from my most recent group came off kind of like episodes of fringe. Complete with a hapless mad scientist...

Anyway thats my input...

[Crow Splat]

I don't force my players to get too bogged down with eating, bathing and other details. Obviously they keep meticulous records for ammo and armor status.

I do keep a mental note when players seem to be getting lax on things like never getting out of armor or PA. I don't come down on them too hard but I'll ask something like "when was the last time you took a bath?" Or in the case of PA, I may give them a small temporary penalty to physical attributes that will come back in a couple of days.

[PSI-Lence]

for the most part i do run games as realistic as possible, where if someone can shrug off SDC damage from a cut if they don't treat it and go marching through a swap it's likely to get infected
food, sleep, bathing etc are tracked, ammo and armor of course, carry weight. etc

the one thing i am a bit more lax on is fuel (for gas and electric vehicles nuclear i don't bother really since i never had a game run 25 years lol) but that's more as a result of me not driving IRL so i ball park it a bit more , full tank, half tank quarter, nearly empty etc if they travel at top speed all the time too i'd have it burn up a bit faster etc but i'm not going to sit there calculating the gas mileage between 55mp/h and 60mp/h either lol

[MaxxSterling]

Depnds on the game. Dead Reign or whatever it's called, very realistic, track weights and every item, food, sleep, unplanned bathroom breaks. It's 24x7 terror and worry. Rifts dimensional capaigns... Eh, most things don't get a chance to run from 2d6x10 or 3d6x10 mdc. So, it varies. Same with NPC's in the grittier zombie style, very real and I try to play it like hard sci-fi but the stupid PPE factor fudges that all up. But in Rifts campaigns, it's wacky. I try to run PFRPG similar to the Dead Reign game, more realism, having to deal with how to get 100,000 gold coins 100 miles to a town. As opposed to say a Rifts Phase World game, where they just put them in their pocket because who cares, the 2 guns they picked up from the dead NPCs are worth 3 million credits... That's generally how mine go.

[say652]

Realism. No.

Game mechanics. Yes.

[Leo H]

I concentrate on getting gear repaired and ammo stores. The rest of it not so much as I've been trying to encourage role playing and actually developing relationships with vendors. Loyalty counts with vendors and that's how people get discounts and those special sales. As far as combat my last group was all about a clean sweep. They'd hunt down any enemy combatants that got away. They'd do that at the expense of making a quick getaway. I had to learn to make a clean sweep not worth their time.