EN World seems to be peopled by only the most verbose posters in the rpg community. I feel like I'm taking a 400 level course in school I wasn't aware of reading through some of these posts.
I don't know about the other posters here, but this is how I post on other forums and how I talk in real life, with plenty of digressions, examples, parentheticals, asides, qualifications, and so forth. Pedantry, thy name is Eldritch_Lord. Just be glad that "talking" with us online means you can close the tab if the verbosity gets to you.
Spoilering long replies once again:
mlund[sblock]
See, I think that's not entirely accurate.
Fighting Men have been saddled with the Simulationist weighting since the war-game days before D&D. When Magicians got introduced the dedication to Simulationist elements went right out the window because, hey, MAGIC. With the narrative onus to transform the Fighting Man PC from a wargame pawn to an adventure protagonist things evolved. Abstraction migrated down from the unit-based level to the skirmish-based / individual combatant level gradually.
The biggest flaw of 3.X was that it was too focused on Simulation in some situations but nowhere near even-handed about it. Magic was hand-waved, while all things martial were compartmentalized into minutia that was often self-defeating. On the one hand, it appeared liberating because you didn't have to play "DM May I?" with a Fighter to do anything than make an abstract "attack" with your weapon. On the other hand it was actually more restrictive because now you were shackled to the "visible buttons" that were often-times mechanics with terrible game balance.
Well, keep in mind that simulationism doesn't mean "simulates the real world and real physics," it just means "simulates an internally-consistent world." Creating a fireball involves throwing bat poop, spouting gibberish, and waving your hands around, which is nothing like the real world at all. The simulationist part is that
if spells require bat poop, hand waving, and gibberish to make a fireball, then stealing the bat poop, tying their hands, or gagging them prevents the fireball. Compare to 4e, where a wizard might describe his casting as involving huge, dramatic gestures and booming incantations, but he can accomplish the same thing just fine if tied up and gagged. The game world's ground rules are nonsensical from a real-world perspective, but once the ground rules are known, things proceed logically from there. Different levels of abstraction doesn't mean things aren't simulationist; we have no idea what hand gestures you need for a fireball or what words you need to say, but we know
that you need to say them.
The fact that fighters don't get Nice Things is a separate problem unrelated to the level of simulationism; rather, it's related to the fact that fighters started off as the class you played if you didn't roll high enough stats to be a "real" class or if you were new to the game, and that before that they were the sidekicks and meat shields in Chainmail for the "real" PCs. That fighters need to gain the power level and options of a "real" class doesn't mean you need to get metagame-y with the fighter to do so.
What made it even worse was that it tried to be pointlessly universal in its mechanics. Storm Giants used the same Sunder functionality as Fighters. Dragons used the same Magic as sorcerers. Rogues got hosed on Sneak Attack due the "no anatomy" rule by like half the monsters in the monster manual. And then there was the Magicians vs. Grogs breakdown that really poisoned the game. All of that could be justified by a single-minded devotion to Simulation, but it really took a toll on game play and drama.
Sure, mechanics need to pay attention to simulation (Is it intuitive? Is it consistent?) right alongside game concerns (Is it fun? Is it balanced?) and narrative concerns (Is it dramatic? Is it germane?). They just don't need to go down the rabbit-hole of 3.X where Martial folks are slaves to real-world physics while the Casters play Calvin-ball because *handwave* MAGIC. D&D has always kept up a pretense of meta-physics behind magic, but never imposed the kind of restrictions a strict simulation models puts on non-caster actions - just a few token gestures.
I disagree that universality in mechanics is a bad thing: if you're trying to break something by hitting it with pointy bits of metal, it should probably work the same whether you're a 12-foot-tall giant doing it or a human-sized fighter doing it. If you want to have dragons, wizards, and magic items to all let you shoot fireballs, better to use the same mechanics for all of them then to come up with dozens of pointless variations, like how 4e cyclops all have an Evil Eye power yet none of them do the same thing. Making mechanics less universal just makes getting a handle on the rules more difficult and raises the bar to entry, since new players can't just learn "here's what a fireball is" but have to constantly look up what
this version does.
I'm completely on board with you about fighters not needing to follow the laws of physics, I just don't think they need to get metagame to do it. The D&D world has different laws of physics than the real one; we can make a fighter who follows those laws of physics just fine. Take the rogue, for instance; he gets Evasion, which lets him dodge 40-foot-diameter fireballs in a 20-foot-wide room. It's a fairly simulationist ability: your ability to dodge the fireball is dependent on your dodging skill (i.e. it works with your Ref save rather than being something else), you can't dodge if you're restrained, etc. It just happens to be physically impossible, which is not the same as non-simulationist.
I think we'd be fine with just a little more acceptance to the idea that D&D Martial characters are not "mundanes" stuck in a real-world simulation, but rather protagonists in a story that can take liberties by veering off into "action-movie physics" (or even flat-out Wuxia if the dial is set that high).
Real human beings never survive that "walk / jump away from fireball explosion" scenes you see in action movies, but sufficiently tough D&D characters can do it all the time. Sometimes you just let physics take a holiday and hang a lampshade on it, even if it doesn't pass muster on Mythbusters.
"Cool guys don't look at explosions."
- Marty Lund
Yes! Exactly! That's what I'm going for, but instead of saying "High-level fighters can't survive explosions like in action movies, but let's let him get away with it because plot," I'm saying make it so high-level fighters
can survive explosions like in action movies, and give them all that goes with that. John McClane survives crashing through a window because he's a protagonist; Beowulf survives crashing through a window because he's superhuman. John McClane can't survive a shotgun blast to the chest, because movie audiences know that that's lethal while they're willing to ignore the shards-of-broken-glass thing; Beowulf survives a shotgun blast to the chest because, yep, still superhuman.
Basically, I'd rather believe that someone who makes a living by stabbing twenty-ton flying death machines in the face survives that because he's
actually that tough, skilled, and talented, not due to an increasingly-long string of plot contrivances. Whenever I see mechanics that say "the wizard can do his job because his magic works like this, the fighter can do his job because the plot is throwing him a bone," that takes me out of it.[/sblock]
pemerton[sblock]
That sounds pretty cool for a maul-wielding fighter. Which makes me want to say - narrate it that way! (Which I know isn't really dealing with the process simulation issue.)
This is the real issue, I think.
Because I'm one of those who abandonded D&D as my primary game on simuationist grounds (I went to Rolemaster; plenty of others have gone to Runequest, GURPS, HERO, C&S, etc), I find the notion of D&D as a simulationist game ridiculous on its face. And Gygax expressly disavows simulationist treatments of hit points, saving throws and XP progression in his DMG.
He says that HP aren't
entirely physical:
1e DMG said:
It is quite unreasonable to assume that as a character gains levels of ability in his or her class that a corresponding gain in actual ability to sustain physical damage takes place. It is preposterous to state such an assumption, for if we are to assume that a man is killed by a sword thrust which does 4 hit points of damage, we must similarly assume that a hero could, on the average, withstand five such thrusts before being slain! Why then the increase in hit points? Because these reflect both the actual physical ability of the character to withstand damage - as indicated by constitution bonuses- and a commensurate increase in such areas as skill in combat and similar life-or-death situations, the "sixth sense" which warns the individual of some otherwise unforeseen events, sheer luck, and the fantastic provisions of magical protections and/or divine protection. Therefore, constitution affects both actual ability to withstand physical punishment hit points (physique) and the immeasurable areas which involve the sixth sense and luck (fitness).
Likewise in the 3e DMG, where hit points are both your physical integrity and your ability to turn bad wounds into less bad wounds (luck, skill, etc.). A simulationist view of hit points doesn't require that you treat every hit point lost as a gallon of blood lost or anything like that, it just asks that you treat a hit as actually being a hit (even if a hit for 40 damage is just 1 point of actual physical damage and 39 points of skill turning a decapitation into a glancing blow), because treating a hit as "a miss that makes you more tired" or whatever most of the time but as physical contact whenever there's poison or some other on-hit effect on your sword leads to silliness.
That's not to say that I think there's nothing to the idea of "Gygaxian naturalism", but I personally find it a bit exaggerated, and I also think it has less to do with resolution mechanics and more to do with world and scenario design.
When I look at 4e, I see a game that takes features of D&D that were always present in hit points, in levelling and (in pre-3E versions) in saving throws, and extends them into the "active" side of action resolution to solve the martial/caster balance issue. (I think 3E's simulationis-ation of saving throws is a pretty big deal that's often overlooked - that's what hoses fighter saves in 3E, for example, compared to AD&D.) It's a game that knows what its mechanics are for, and what result they're aiming for - and it delivers that result!
The problem with fighter saves has nothing to do with simulation vs. non-simulation, it has to do with simulation of different things. In AD&D, "magic" is a static thing (every fireball is as resistable as any other), while in 3e "magic" is a personal thing (a high-Int wizard's fireball is harder to resist than a low-Int wizard's). The math for good saves is actually fairly similar between editions (I did the math on that at one point and it turned out that translating save-vs.-spells to 3e DCs assuming minimum Int resulted in a fighter having +9 to +12 base saves), the difference is that in 3e you add your casting stat to your DCs and you can raise your casting stat a lot higher than in AD&D. Changing the 3e DC formula to just 10 + spell level doesn't make it any less simulationist, nor would changing it to something like 10 + 1/2 level + Cha like the SLA formula.[/sblock]
Manbearcat[sblock]
First, let me say thanks for your very thoughtful and thorough posts. They're all clearly sincere, respectful, and well thought out and presented. Onto the disagreement
Thank you as well. It's rare to see threads get to page-and-a-half-long posts without lots of arguments and snark getting thrown around.
- The biggest offender, of course, is Hit Points. There are a myriad of vectors through which HPs do not map to any physics (nor can the PCs understand them). They are patently, and explicitly, a gamist contrivance predicated upon the need for a scaling, ablative mechanic that abstracts a PCs ability to endure "damage-in". Its both a pacing and plot-protection device.
As mentioned above, HP are
simulationist as long as you always include some aspect of the physical, they just aren't
concrete. Just like BAB and THAC0 are quite abstract, condensing dozens of factors down to one number, but they're still simulationist (the better you are at fighting, the more often you hit).
- XP generally but specifically XP for gold. Its just a gamist pacing mechanism meant to incentivize a style of play...and it permeates the system.
Granted and agreed. I already said D&D was S with a side of G, and I dislike 3e's use of a metagame mechanic as "life force" for item creation and spellcasting or whatever; if you have to use a metagame resource like XP, keep it purely metamage, don't give it an in-game manifestation. I much prefer the straightforward loss of life force = Con loss mechanic from AD&D item creation.
- 1 minute combat rounds whereby dozens and dozens of flurries and parries will take place abstracted into one attack versus one passive defense.
Again, simulationist ≠ concrete. I prefer shorter rounds and more granular mechanics myself, and am glad 3e went that route, but that doesn't make highly abstract combat gamist or narrativist.
I'm quite tired so my brain is in neutral so it will have to start with these biggies. These are just the tip of the iceberg. There are plenty more, especially issues with the implied setting (unbound arthropod size, no synergy between physical ability scores to properly represent musculoskeletal kinesiology, giant creatures with horrible trim characteristics and without the requisite thrust being able to fly). Anyhoo. I'm not sure how D&D has a process-sim history. In my estimation its always been a very heavily abstracted gamist system that has attempted to in-fill a few simulationist nods here and there (that haven't really been true or granular enough) for a token nod at fidelity to a real world physics model. 3.x picked up the ball and ran with it in a number of directions. Some successful. Some less so (odd demographics, Combat Feint, oddities in the unified mechanics of NPC/PC creation, etc).
As I mentioned above, simulationism doesn't mean it follows real-world physics, it means it follows internally-consistent physics. I think the problem here is that you're associating abstraction with gamism when you can have either simulationist or gamist concreteness and either simulationist or gamist abstraction.
A Huge titan being able to move around normally as if it were human-scale rather than following the square-cube law isn't gamist, it's assuming different physics that allow giants to walk around, dragons to fly, etc., just as including magic in a game doesn't make it gamist. Titans following the same 5-foot step rule that Medium creatures do
is gamist (to prevent creatures from moving more than 5 feet without provoking AoOs) because the simulationist approach would be to assume that,
given that the laws of physics allow the titan to walk around just as if it were a big human, it should be able to move proportionally, so since its base speed is twice that of a human it should be able to take a 10-foot step instead of a 5-foot step.
I guess here is a large area of divergence. I've already spoken to CaGI but I'll do Bloody Path as this is one of my Rogue friend's (huge swashbuckler fan) favorite abilities. I'll analyze it under the auspices of the various agendas:
[...]
Simulation: Good enough. A swashbuckler runs a guantlet of defenders and makes them look foolish with his borderline supernatural dexterity, hand-eye/hand-foot coordination and flashing blade. Sort of like Barry Sanders running making otherwise world class athletes look like buffoons as he changes field 6 times in 6 seconds, stop, starts, dips, jukes, accelerates, breaks tackles...and they're literally chasing their own tails and running into each other.
I disagree with the assessment of it being good enough, and it's that kind of "eh, close enough" reaction that often marks more gamist mechanics. Consider: there are no other mechanics in the game that make you attack yourself beyond those few tricky rogue maneuvers, and you are forced to take the attacks whether you want to or not. To address the first point, if fumbles or some other means of attacking yourself (such as AD&D/3e
confusion) were part of the game, that would make that slightly more consistent: you run past some enemies in a tricky manner, and because you're tricky, something that can already happen (fumbles) happens more often. Sure, I can buy that.
Also, there's no general rule for making people fumble (like all of the 3e effects that say "this works as
confusion blah blah blah"), so the rogue can't attempt to do the same outside this particular power. The rogue can thus make this singular effect occur only in very specific circumstances and no other, and no other classes can accomplish that, which stretches the bounds of believability (for me, at least). More believable but more complex to resolve would be a Bluff check, an attack roll to parry, or something like that to justify the rogue actively tricking them, as opposed to them just whiffing and hitting themselves in the face, though of course that brings up the multiple-roll problem and resolution-speed problem. More believable and just as simple to resolve would be the rogue attacking each time, instead of the enemies attacking themselves; same number of rolls, same time to resolve, but more believable (the rogue is stabbing everyone as he goes by, and doing that requires some effort and setup, so he can't just do it all the time).
To address the second point, the automatic attack-forcing is problematic from a tactical standpoint. If you're fighting a guy in 3e who has Robilar's Gambit and Combat Reflexes (i.e. every time you take an AoO on him he gets to hit you), after the first time you see that he can counterattack AoOs, you
stop taking AoOs on him. An intelligent enemy who sees his buddy try attacking the rogue during Bloody Path and hit himself instead should know not to take that attack. An intelligent enemy who sees the rogue use Fool's Opportunity before Bloody Path or vice versa should be expecting that sort of thing and not take the opportunity the second time.
And even if you want to talk about the confusion of combat and all that, would you tell a player in 3e going up against that Robilar's Gambit guy, "Oh, I know Steve just tried to take an AoO and got hit and you don't want to get hit, but you didn't actually see that and your character would take the AoO, so you have to take it"? Of course not (or at least I hope not). Part of the game's abstraction is the assumption that you're watching in all directions, hence the lack of facing, so being able to react to someone's tricky tactic is something to be expected. Only when you have a mechanic to determine whether a character would fall for it ("You rolled a 5 for Sense Motive? Yes, you're
positive the creepy-looking noble is telling the truth") can we determine independently of the player's choices whether a PC falls for something and do players expect to have that choice taken away from them, and though tricking monsters obviously don't have the problem of removing player choice, players shouldn't be able to say "All the monsters fall for my tricks because my class makes me tricky" any more than they should be able to say "The NPC can't roll Sense Motive because my lie was believable."
High Concept Sim: Oh absolutely. Hits all the marks of emulating the swashbuckling, heroic fantasy of the Zorro, 3 Musketeers, Princess Bride, Count of Monte Cristo, Pirates of the Caribbean, etc genres.
If Bloody Path involved making enemies attack
each other, sure; that's both a staple of the genre and a mechanic that has shown up in every pre-4e edition so far, to my knowledge. But where in Pirates or Princess Bride did you see Jack Sparrow make Barbossa stab himself in the leg or Wesley make Inigo trip and fall on his own sword? And if they
were to accompllsh that, would you expect Commodore Norrington or Count Rugen, having seen the same trick just moments ago, to fall for it as well?
The reason skill checks for social skills to exist is precisely to define when characters are so supernaturally skilled that they can fool someone who is as smart as Vizzini thinks he is, turn someone into an instant ally with a few words, make someone wet their pants and run away with an angry glare, and so forth. We obviously don't know what supernatural skill at conning people looks like, or whether someone with supernatural intelligence can figure that out, so we turn to the dice to adjudicate that. For a power to not only bypass that for the first target (which might be excusable if they're just that sneaky) but also not provide an Int check for later targets to see through it, add a penalty on later attacks to represent people wising up, etc. goes against expectations, and that's why I advocate for either including such mechanical tweaks to grease the wheels of our suspension of disbelief or avoiding powers that cause that dissonance in the first place.[/sblock]
