Verisimilitude

The point of fiction, to me, has always been to pull me into another world. I want to be sucked in and experience lives and worlds apart from my own. I'll never have opportunity to wield a magic sword, command a space battle, or solve a case for a femme fatale, so I want to experience these things through fiction.
This can be through books, movies, television, or computer games. It's all the same when you get sucked into the world with the right writing. No matter how outrageous the concept, there is always the verisimilitude of reality, mostly through the characters.
I can forgive a lot of technical and factual failures if the characters are believable. After all, if I wanted to truly simulate these experiences, I would read up on all the factual information, but that is, frankly, boring. I suppose what it comes down to is for a few hours, I don't want to be me.
One of the truly great things about being a writer is I don't have to be me. I get to experience life through my own characters as well as what I read, watch, and play.