Why 'Realism' in Fantasy?

[WiserOdin032402]

No this is not a fighter thread, I'm pretty sure the class is settled at this point. My question is about the prevalence of the idea that some classes need to be bound to some vague-ish concept of 'realism' in D&D and other 'Fantasy' pursuits.

I understand there's some crazy grognard shit about 'oh but this character isn't magic and should function realistically' and then has their character cut up an iron golem with a magic sword, but there's also people who want to modify fantasy RPGs into 'gritty', 'realistic', 'survival'-oriented games where characters die grisly deaths from minor injuries and such, and never really advance past a certain level without magic.

I'm wondering what drives people to try to inject brutal realism into fantasy and D&D more specifically, and why people are hung up on the idea of 'realism, but only in this vaguely defined sense that doesn't offend my grognard sensibilities'

I hope I'm coherent enough on this...trying to tackle vague 'sounds right-isms' is hard

[owlassociate]

I think part of it is the dark souls mentality. Like they want the feeling of accomplishment for doing something that feels almost impossible at first. They want to feel like everything is earned. The problem is that people try to conjure that feeling by copying dark souls (metaphorically speaking at least), which seems to be a very ineffective way to actually have that kind of experience in a ttrpg.

[Dean]

The more grounded something is in the "real world" the easier something is to understand and the more broad the appeal can be. If your newest project needs me to understand the "rules" of alternate universes like the Marvel universe or an Anime universe then, the less familiar I am with those, the less I will understand your universe and the less it will appeal to me, a random passerby.

TTRPG's came because a deep fantasy universe had become cultural canon for the first time in history WITHOUT the requirement that you believe it to be literally true and gauge your life's value on the fantasy universe (which are requirements, I think you'll agree, that make those universes less fun at least in the age that their religion can express real power). For the first time enough people in your culture would understand fantasy world rules that you could just say "Dragon" or "Orc" and have that mean enough for a table full of very select people in your area to understand.

The more your thing is grounded in the rules of the one world everyone who exists has definitely experienced the more easily you allow people to enjoy your stories. That doesn't mean every story has to be about working an office job. Enough people understand enough fantasy universes nowadays that you have a lot more leeway than they did in the 70's. But you should still try to restrain your excesses for marketabilities sake if that matters to you. I'm sure you can check your own internal desires and agree that a game that was a semi-realistic tolkein-esque fantasy game would be very easy for you to agree to play with friends, while a game that was a Homestuck/My Immortal crossover universe would require a lot more inertia and effort to get into for you and would be less likely for you to show up to. The level of friend you'd need to show up to game 1 is probably much less than game 2. Of course if you're HUGE Homestuck/My Immortal fans then that niche universe is probably the only thing that can sate your desires. You'd probably end up only posting in a very niche forum about it specifically.

Boy I wonder what it would be like to spend all of your time writing and posting in a very small online community of people hyperfocused on the fantastical fandoms you are mentally consumed by.

[Mechalich]

In general, the greater the level of fantastical elements introduced into a fictional universe - in both amount and potency - the more difficult it becomes to have that universe maintain verisimilitude. Verisimilitude is very important in terms of producing dramatic heft, specifically in keeping the players (and the GM) sufficiently invested in the workings of the world that they actually believe the outcome of their campaigns produces something meaningful at all. In particular, if the intent is to produce novelization level dramatic potency, the imposition of major limitations on the fantastical is crucial, because the ability of fantastical elements to distort the world is exponentially greater in collaborative RPGs than in single-author narratives where problems can be elided, hidden, or otherwise obfuscated from the eyes of the audience.

Now, this only, only, matters if the goal of a TTRPG is to produce a certain kind of collaboration, one that is immersive, coherent, and demands a high level of emotional investment from all parties. Many, probably most, actual tables don't play anything like this as most tabletop play involves constant out-of-character chatter, joking, non sequiturs, and character concepts that are milked for the absurd and the comic more than anything else. In such cases verisimilitude is largely irrelevant because regardless of what is happening in game, the overall experience has embraced the casual meta-narrative and is being played for laughs.

Many game systems and an even larger number of game settings are directly geared to support this sort of 'beer & pretzels' style of play, because they are inherently and to a considerable degree deliberately, absurd. One of the reasons for the popularity of Planescape among D&D veterans compared to many other settings is that it's pretty much the only official setting that leans into the ridiculousness of D&D's kitchen-sink approach to high fantasy with the wink and a nudge.

But some people really do want a more character and story driven gaming experience and they want a game capable of delivering that experience, and one of the ways that think that happens is by hewing to 'realism' as a guideline. This is a mistaken impulse, since the goal is verisimilitude and not realism and they are not necessarily achieved in the same ways, and because in most games it is the immense power of the overtly fantastical elements (spellcasting, the Force, power armor, etc.) that are most in need of restraint and not unreasonable expansion of abilities built around a real-world chasis like swordplay or gunplay.

To use a very blatant example, the Dragonball universe is an example of one where there is so much power floating around that is becomes inherently absurd (to its great credit it is extremely self-aware about this) and has to be played for laughs. There's simply no other reasonable way to manage a setting where even extremely low level characters can literally blow up the setting any time they want - amply demonstrated by Piccolo blowing up the moon in like episode 4 of DBZ.

[OgreBattle]

Joseph Campbell's books mention that when he started his power of mythology talks, he'd get challenged by 'debate me' types that just said myths are lies and only some kind of scientific thing is 'real'. His usual response to them, if they actually were willing to listen was:

“Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.”

A lot of people are raised in school systems or internet cultures where you're right or wrong and they take that to how they play.

----

On Dark Souls, the director Miyazaki has a funny quote where western journalists asked if he was sadistic to make such a game, he explains he's the masochist who wants to have those things happen to him, die, and then figure out a way around it. It's kind of the reverse of say god of war where it's about sadistic executions done to other people while the protagonist doesn't get mutilated themselves. So even grit and dark brutal deaths can appeal to different folks between overcoming vs inflicting.

[Stahlseele]

I guess big part of the reason is that you, yourself, as the player . .
Kinda have to sorta go by what you know.
And that is the real world.
So you expect the laws of physics for example to be the same in whatever game you are playing as they are in our world.
For the most Part at least.

[Krusk]

Fantasy RPG means a lot of things.

Some people really want to play halflings wandering the woods. Others really want to play a planeswalker hit squad.

Both are fine premises, but many Fantasy RPGs claim to offer both in the same game. This is a problem when Frodo and Urza roll up at the same table. Frodo complains that Urza is OP and the game should be gritty and muddy. Urza complains that Frodo is under powered and holding him back and the game should be flashy and epic.

Essentially the problem is that people aren't picking the right rules for their game system. There's a massive player in the ring (D&D), so its hard for "Common folk" to even know about other options, and the massive player claims they can support everyone.

Compound it now, because people have to realize they were wrong and tricked by WoTC. Depending on how vocal they were in their support of grim/gritty D&D they probably have to tacitly admit it to other people. Thats hard for many. Then they have to go find a better system for their game. The better system isn't as flashy as D&D and might legit be a web site where Some Guy has a game system typed up in google docs. Now they have to go convince their group to play that instead of D&D.

Its a lot easier to just bitch that D&D is supposed to be gritty realism, and add a mod or two that makes the game suck more, but satisfies whatever grognard itch they have.

[deaddmwalking]

One potential element of role-play is wish fulfillment. Being able to be the hero and save the world simply isn't something most people will have a chance to do in their daily lives. We can all imagine ways we could save the world with fantastic abilities - if I, like Jafar, wished to be 'the most powerful sorcerer in the world', I could certainly solve a lot of problems. But that's not really 'me' solving those problems - that's someone like me with vast amounts of power that I don't have and never COULD have.

On some level, a mundane character speaks to the archetype of 'if it was REALLY ME in that fantasy world, what would I do'. Egoism being what it is, people like to believe that they're clever enough that they could defeat dragons (if given a chance) and overcome sorcerous powers.

That's certainly not the only way to play D&D, and lots of people like to play characters that are as different from themselves as can be imagined - even with far more power than they might ever have. That's part of where different expectations can come in.

These concerns aren't limited to high fantasy. There are some players that don't like the idea of cyberware for some of their characters even though it is NECESSARY in the game to be able to contribute.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

There's simply no other reasonable way to manage a setting where even extremely low level characters can literally blow up the setting any time they want - amply demonstrated by Piccolo blowing up the moon in like episode 4 of DBZ.

Everyone always forgets that Roshi blew up the moon first in Dragonball.
Including the writer of Dragonball.

[WiserOdin032402]

I...well damn. Uh....I didn't expect a response this good and from your answers I definitely bungled the question at some point or another, because I was also asking how like...people have this weird loose sense of 'realism' around some classes or archetypes but not others.

Desperately trying to not make another fighter thread, but for example a 'mundane' surviving a hit from some massive dragon or giant is just overlooked and brushed aside, and so is them hitting said massive superbeast with a standard medieval weapon and hurting it.

But then said character who has really high strength wanting to then choke out the dragon is seen as wanting the game to be about superheroes with superpowers but when the magic man prays to god really hard and does it's overlooked and it's fine and that guy doesn't have superpowers and isn't a superhero.

That's uh...at least part of what I want to talk about in this thread too, where that weird uh...sounds-right ism comes from?

[deaddmwalking]

Desperately trying to not make another fighter thread, but for example a 'mundane' surviving a hit from some massive dragon or giant is just overlooked and brushed aside, and so is them hitting said massive superbeast with a standard medieval weapon and hurting it.

You're always looking for a certain amount of 'plausible deniability'. In reality, 80% of falling deaths in construction come from falls of less than 20'. A fall of more than 50' is nearly ALWAYS fatal. But Vesna Vulovi fell more than 30,000 feet and survived. On some level we can accept that something that really OUGHT to be fatal does allow some exceptional individuals to survive. When you're looking at 'realism', there are people that are arguing that a fall from 100' doesn't HAVE to be fatal, but they'd argue that having a 50-ton rock dropped on your head must be. In the first case, they can imagine a way to survive it (even if it is rare), but not in the second case.

The same debate happens with fireball. How do you avoid taking damage within the blast range? A lot of people prefer to simply move you outside the blast radius because they can't imagine being unscathed within the area of the explosion.

You don't need a GOOD explanation for why characters don't die when taking massive damage, but the appearance of plausibility is important.

But then said character who has really high strength wanting to then choke out the dragon is seen as wanting the game to be about superheroes with superpowers but when the magic man prays to god really hard and does it's overlooked and it's fine and that guy doesn't have superpowers and isn't a superhero.

That's uh...at least part of what I want to talk about in this thread too, where that weird uh...sounds-right ism comes from?

There are people who would be fine with the fighter choking out the dragon if he can explain why he suddenly gets strong in mundane terms. If the dragon is threatening his child, perhaps, some people would find a burst of mundane 'super-strength' plausible (see people lifting cars in emergency situations). But those situations are seen as exceptional - people don't NORMALLY lift and throw cars outside of a Superman comic. Magical aid is a super-easy way to make anything plausible. Since magic doesn't exist in the real world, it's hard to say that 'magic wouldn't work that way' .

[hogarth]

I guess big part of the reason is that you, yourself, as the player . .
Kinda have to sorta go by what you know.
And that is the real world.
So you expect the laws of physics for example to be the same in whatever game you are playing as they are in our world.
For the most Part at least.

You basically summed up what I wanted to say: game worlds need laws of physics, and the default laws of physics we have are the ones in reality.

If you want to have a game world where non-real-world actions are possible, then you better have a comprehensive list of those actions because my mind will always tend to default to personal experience.

[Emerald]

Desperately trying to not make another fighter thread, but for example a 'mundane' surviving a hit from some massive dragon or giant is just overlooked and brushed aside, and so is them hitting said massive superbeast with a standard medieval weapon and hurting it.

"Realism" in fantasy is informed by people's perceptions of reality, not actual reality, plus vagaries and ambiguities in the fantastic reality (the kind of plausible deniability DDMW mentioned).

In action movies, people shatter windows by jumping through them, get shot in the leg and just walk it off, fall a good distance and just do a roll at the bottom to catch themselves, and so on all the time. Viewers who don't have personal or professional experience with these sorts of feats will often internalize them to the point that they will e.g. try to shatter a beer bottle to use as a weapon in real life (and find out the hard way that that doesn't actually work) or find it "unrealistic" if someone in fiction shoot someone in the chest and they don't immediately die.

They're also willing to forgive things they know would be unrealistic if it's not clear that said unrealistic thing actually happened or they're not sure of the details involved. A bunch of people complain that action heroes getting hit by cars would be a lot more badly injured then they appear, but others don't mind because you can't tell how fast the car was going and they don't know how much harm is actually dealt by getting thrown however far after getting hit at whatever point and all that. A bunch of people complain that Obi-Wan and Anakin fighting on Mustafar would have gotten badly burned just by getting so close to lava, but others don't mind because it's not all that clear how close they are and they don't know how hot lava is at what distances and all that.


Likewise, people internalize the idea that Medieval weapons were these massive bars of metal (false, they were quite light and the cumbersome ones we see were largely ceremonial weapons) and dragons probably have scales that are basically like regular old human armor (there's no real benchmark, but that's likely underselling it a lot just going by AC bonuses and such), so if arrows can punch through plate armor like you see in movies (they definitely can't, at least not with period-accurate plate armor and bows) and spears and arrows and swords are all basically the same kind of sharp pointy metal thing like the prop weapons make them look (they aren't, at all) then being able to hurt a dragon with a sword seems perfectly reasonable.

And if there's no hard benchmark for how much damage a hit point represents, how tough a superhuman martial character is, how strong a giant or dragon is, how sharp a dragon's tooth or claw is, and so forth, well, a giant punching a fighter is basically like a really big MMA fighter punching a smaller MMA fighter, right? And a dragon chomping on a barbarian is like a barbarian getting stabbed with a sword, right? And if a MMA fighter can take a punch and keep going and people can get shanked and walk it off, then a fighter or barbarian can totally take a giant's punch or dragon's bite.


Obvious and indisputable breaks in reality and/or explicit detail that doesn't allow any handwaving are what cause people to complain about a "lack of realism," which is why superhuman feats that are basically realistic feats scaled up in a handwavey sort of way are generally acceptable to those folks if they don't think about it too hard while stuff like walking on water or punching ghosts is definitely not, and why the same people who are happy to accept the abstraction of hit points without quibbling much often get very nitpicky and detail-obsessed when you start talking about things like called shots or piecemeal armor that are concrete in-world.

To make these "unrealistic" things palatable, play into tropes and/or add abstraction. People who complain about abstract gear packages that let you pull out any equipment you need are generally fine with them if you frame it in terms of "being Batman levels of prepared." People who complain about hit points being unrealistic are generally fine with them if you frame HP as "a mix of actual damage and dodging endurance" or the like. Some things can never be sufficiently justified without magic, and that's okay, but there's a pretty wide range of what can be accepted as "realistic" if you spin things right.

[Mechalich]

You basically summed up what I wanted to say: game worlds need laws of physics, and the default laws of physics we have are the ones in reality.

If you want to have a game world where non-real-world actions are possible, then you better have a comprehensive list of those actions because my mind will always tend to default to personal experience.

A game system is a mechanical model, of which a 'physics engine' is a part. It is a necessarily simplified representation of reality because it's a model. In tabletop is necessarily an incredibly simplified model because tabletop cannot support particularly complex math. Heck, most tabletop games operate under the presumption that you can't have math complex enough to require a calculator involved.

As a consequence the game system's model will inevitably fail to cover a pretty wide range of cases that might come up in play. When that happens it falls to the GM to develop some kind of resolution that the players will accept - many rules-light games accept this as pretty much what happens continually and simply offer a framework for the GM to provide generalized resolutions. However, in such situations the players and GM, being humans, fall back on their intuitive understanding of physics (and other sciences) based on their lived experience.

As a result, resolutions tend to go over much better when they match the expectations built upon said experience. This happens even when that lived experience happens to be wrong when compared to the actual science - for example, you can't actually grab a flagpole to avert a descent at terminal velocity, but people schooled by media consumption and vaguely remembered experiences on the uneven bars think that you can. That's a big part of the difference between verisimilitude and realism in gaming, you need to output answers that are believable rather than accurate.

Most fictional worlds are built upon a physics model best described as 'the real world, but with exceptions.' Essentially everything defaults to intuitive human understanding of physics and 'magic' and other fantastical powers represent someone mucking about in the command line of reality to create localized violations of the physics engine that your fictional world is running (a good comparative example is putting in console commands in Skyrim). When this is the case, you can always default to the intuitive understanding of physics shared between players and GMs and come up with a resolution that will make at least narrative sense.

But if you have a completely fictionalized version of physics you can't do that. And that's a problem.

Obvious and indisputable breaks in reality and/or explicit detail that doesn't allow any handwaving are what cause people to complain about a "lack of realism," which is why superhuman feats that are basically realistic feats scaled up in a handwavey sort of way are generally acceptable to those folks if they don't think about it too hard while stuff like walking on water or punching ghosts is definitely not, and why the same people who are happy to accept the abstraction of hit points without quibbling much often get very nitpicky and detail-obsessed when you start talking about things like called shots or piecemeal armor that are concrete in-world.

I would expand on this a little. It's much easier to accept a sequence of highly improbable events because if you break them apart in isolation the individual probability of any one action might not be all that low even when, aggregated together the ultimate probability becomes mathematically indistinguishable from zero. A good example is found in action films like John Wick, John Wick shooting twenty-plus guys in the head without ever getting shot himself in the nightclub scene is ludicrous in the aggregate, but none of the individual shots is in itself that unreasonable.

Whereas anything that tracks as being explicitly impossible, like say bullets bouncing off human flesh, requires a specific justification to maintain suspension of disbelief. Note that, because this tracks intuitive experience and not physical laws, certain actually impossible feats don't require explanation because the audience doesn't realize they're impossible. A good example is Iron Man - Tony Stark regularly pulls maneuvers in the suit that would inflict sufficient g-forces on his body to kill him outright but because the audience isn't really aware of these biological limits on acceleration it goes unremarked and no justification is provided.

[Harshax]

I think “realism” in fantasy gaming is only introduced to juxtapose fantasy elements that are introduced as the game progresses. I double quote realism, because I’m not certain that the term is narrowly defined to what is real in the context of our understanding of the laws of the universe.

Parallel to this preamble, is the Den’s usual methodology of making the world and the rules reflect each other. If you have rules about the impact power of so many grams of lead fired at someone at extreme velocity, guaranteeing the demise of whomever is on the receiving end of a volley, but your world fiction is all about defying the laws of physics and catching bullets between the teeth of your wolffish grin, you have created a fantasy setting.

But if your world is is built around the extremely useful and adaptive value of a fantasy substance called Meld that allows the merging of mind and machine, then Explored and extrapolated how meld has altered civilization, then you have created a realistic setting. Even if Meld does not exist in the real world.

Once you’ve defined reality and introduced a new element that turns reality on its ear, you’ve turned your game into fantasy.

This is the heart of all science fiction.

[K]

Here is a good explanation on hard magic systems and is a pretty good general explanation about how realism vs magic works in fantasy fiction.

[JigokuBosatsu]

Anecdotally, I think most gamers want verisimilitude, even if that includes things that aren't actually realistic.

The other side of that coin is that the grimderp OSR crowd want "realism" but that really means a sort of stylized level of detail that approximates reality in a very limited way.

Oh, I'm drunk so hopefully nobody already made this point.

[MGuy]

The players who complain about realism are probably not the ones who want verisimilitude. At least not in the context of the OP. We're talking about grognards who think fighters getting real abilities is toi weaboo for their tastes. These people have a certain view on the 'right' way to do fantasy. That's about it. If you start off telling people a 'warrior' can regularly throw fire out of their hands, have cybernetic arms that can produce shock waves, and can be a shapeshifter who steals souls right from the beginning you'll find a lot of people accept that. The reason people think fighters should be more bound is out of a sense of tradition/familiarity because that's how it's 'supposed' to be.

[K]

It's also probably also worth mentioning that there are lots of players who just can't handle complexity. A "realistic" world just happens to involve a very simple and understandable system with few inputs and outputs.

[Mechalich]

It's also probably also worth mentioning that there are lots of players who just can't handle complexity. A "realistic" world just happens to involve a very simple and understandable system with few inputs and outputs.

I don't think that's quite right. It is entirely possible to model a lightly fictionalized world at an extremely high level of detail, the late Tom Clancy made a rather substantial career out of doing so, and playing GURPS with no magic or superpowers doesn't make it a simple system.

However it is certainly true that, all other things being equal, adding additional fantastical elements to a setting or system makes them more complex, and often in a multiplicative rather than additive fashion because multiple interacting subsystems have a tendency to spew edge cases all over the game, especially if the systems are poorly integrated. This is one of the reasons why adding systems like psionics or tome of battle maneuvers to D&D has traditionally faced heavy resistance.

The players who complain about realism are probably not the ones who want verisimilitude. At least not in the context of the OP. We're talking about grognards who think fighters getting real abilities is toi weaboo for their tastes. These people have a certain view on the 'right' way to do fantasy. That's about it. If you start off telling people a 'warrior' can regularly throw fire out of their hands, have cybernetic arms that can produce shock waves, and can be a shapeshifter who steals souls right from the beginning you'll find a lot of people accept that. The reason people think fighters should be more bound is out of a sense of tradition/familiarity because that's how it's 'supposed' to be.

There's more to it than that, and it is a matter of verisimilitude, but it one that occurs at the world-building level rather than the party gameplay level. In order for the fantasy world to make any sense (again, this isn't actually an inherent requirement for game design, only for certain types of settings and stories), regardless of what you actually call the source of fantastical power or the form that it takes, you have to control both how much it can do and how many people have access to it. Even if everyone in the party has acess to this power - like VtM were the source of power is simply 'being a vampire' - the setting has to gatekeep the spread of power across its fictionalized demographics.

That trick is that, in traditional fantasy, the 'warrior' type characters are just ordinary people who train a bunch and enhance their natural physical human capabilities, and if the setting allows this to expand into blatant superpowers this pretty much inevitably breaks the setting because now superpowers are available to literally everyone.

This problem can be avoided by differentiating between ordinary training - which remains bounded by the natural limits upon the human body and normal physics generally - and by a fictionalized form of training that can properly utilize gatekeeping like 'Ki channeling' or 'Chakra manipulation' or whatever you want to call it.

However, this has the secondary consequence that such gatekeeping inevitably turns your setting into a superhero setting with a division between those who have powers and those who don't, with all the consequences that entails. If you don't want a superhero setting, and most fantasy settings with any significant amount of 'magic' are in a very real sense superhero settings, then you have a very significant cap on how much power you can let the empowered type of individual possess. The world of Avatar: the Last Airbender, for example, is at the very edge of that power curve - non-benders can just barely remain relevant - and by fantasy standards bending is a pretty weak-sauce superpower.

[MGuy]

Again there are settings where fighting dudes, warriors, straight up have superpowers and no one gives a shit about whether it breaks the setting. It is not at all realistic for Batman to go on most of the adventures superman goes on but people don't really care because traditionally it's been like that. Yes if Batman suddenly could knock out super man with one punch unaided by bullshit people would have a problem but that's more because the expectation has been set up that normal dudes can't do that. Yet people don't really question how the fuck Batman survived getting straight up punched by Darkseid.

What is and isn't 'right' depends on expectations. So no-one complains that fighters can jump off of roofs that are multiple stories tall or get straight chomped by a big baddie with jagged teeth no matter how unrealistic it is because it doesn't break their expectations. It really just is people expect fighters to in this game in particular to not have certain powers. That's really it.

[Dogbert]

Because neckbeards make no sense. At all.

The same neckbeards that cry if fighters get nice things are the ones that also cry when the spellcasters run circles around them.

[Harshax]

Here is a good explanation on hard magic systems and is a pretty good general explanation about how realism vs magic works in fantasy fiction.

I liked this video. I tend to get pretty meta, but never cohesively meta. Thanks for sharing it.

[Zaranthan]

Again there are settings where fighting dudes, warriors, straight up have superpowers and no one gives a shit about whether it breaks the setting. It is not at all realistic for Batman to go on most of the adventures superman goes on but people don't really care because traditionally it's been like that. Yes if Batman suddenly could knock out super man with one punch unaided by bullshit people would have a problem but that's more because the expectation has been set up that normal dudes can't do that. Yet people don't really question how the fuck Batman survived getting straight up punched by Darkseid.

What is and isn't 'right' depends on expectations. So no-one complains that fighters can jump off of roofs that are multiple stories tall or get straight chomped by a big baddie with jagged teeth no matter how unrealistic it is because it doesn't break their expectations. It really just is people expect fighters to in this game in particular to not have certain powers. That's really it.

No matter how "down to earth" your setting is, you've always got the One Punch Man excuse. Saitama went through (as explicitly explained in primary canon) standard strength training that "wasn't even that hard", but inexplicably became able to dispatch interstellar threats with a single jab. So be it. That's your world. Sometimes, people are able to roundhouse kick the planet for no reason.

Sometimes, they're Mumen Rider and are 100% normal and realistic. Except for the part where they survive being punched by dragons. Just ignore that bit.

[Kaelik]

When One Punch Man talks about the workout routine it's a joke.

People are sometimes willing to play TTRPGs where everything is a joke including their character, but please for the love of god don't actually do any design work under the impression that this doesn't make your RPG a joke or your characters jokes.