Why use D&D for a Simulationist style Game?

Been reading the The Ranger You got spell casting in my peanut butter! thead and the following quote really caught my eye:

Dausuul said:

It most certainly does not! D&D is not an abstract strategy game. If this logic applied to D&D, there would be no need for "rulings over rules." Chess doesn't need a DM.

At its core, D&D is a game of pretend. It's not all that different from when one kid says "I'm Batman!" and another says "Well, I'm Wonder Woman!" and they start fighting imaginary criminals. The rules exist to help the kids decide what happens when the imaginary Joker throws imaginary razor-edged playing cards at Batman. When the kids start debating whether Batman can dodge the playing cards, the rules offer a common ground and a set of tools with which to reach an answer. Sometimes, strict adherence to the rules produces silly results, in which case the kids can say "That's silly" and ignore them. This is one of the reasons Rule Zero was invented. But in most cases the rules provide decent answers.

Because the rules are tools for answering questions about the fiction, however, they can't be separated from it. When the rules say that Batman can only throw 3 Batarangs per day, that is a statement about the fictional world. It shouldn't be necessary for the kids to dream up ad hoc rationalizations for why Batman is choosing not to throw any more Batarangs. The rules have no authority over what Batman chooses to do, only over the results of his decisions.

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And, I have to admit, despite all the hoopla over the past few years, I really don't get it. I love sim style games. I do. GURPS is a favourite game of mine that I don't get to play anywhere nearly often enough. But, where does this idea that D&D is a good fit for sim style play come from? In 2001, if you had claimed that you self identified as a sim player and your go to game for that style was D&D, everyone would look at you like you had two heads.

When did D&D become the poster child for sim play? D&D has always been primarily gamist in most of its approaches. The mechanics have virtually always been, "What makes this a fun game" rather than, "How can we model this through mechanics"? This is why we have a combat system that is entirely abstract. We use Hit Points rather than any number of systems model physical damage far better. We have dungeons that make virtually no sense and game worlds that barely pay lip service to the massive impact that the mechanics would have if the mechanics were actually applied to world building.

So, I ask you, why D&D? If you like sim style play where the mechanics are making a statement about the game world, then why on Earth would you choose to play D&D?

Hussar said:

Been reading the The Ranger You got spell casting in my peanut butter! thead and the following quote really caught my eye:



And, I have to admit, despite all the hoopla over the past few years, I really don't get it. I love sim style games. I do. GURPS is a favourite game of mine that I don't get to play anywhere nearly often enough. But, where does this idea that D&D is a good fit for sim style play come from? In 2001, if you had claimed that you self identified as a sim player and your go to game for that style was D&D, everyone would look at you like you had two heads.

When did D&D become the poster child for sim play? D&D has always been primarily gamist in most of its approaches. The mechanics have virtually always been, "What makes this a fun game" rather than, "How can we model this through mechanics"? This is why we have a combat system that is entirely abstract. We use Hit Points rather than any number of systems model physical damage far better. We have dungeons that make virtually no sense and game worlds that barely pay lip service to the massive impact that the mechanics would have if the mechanics were actually applied to world building.

So, I ask you, why D&D? If you like sim style play where the mechanics are making a statement about the game world, then why on Earth would you choose to play D&D?

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Several thoughts occur to me.

1. It depends on which edition you're talking about. 3.x was by far the most sim-like edition of D&D, for my money 4th was the least.

2. The rules of D&D are, as you justly point out, sufficiently abstract that they generated endless hours of discussion about what they meant from the eyes of our characters. This trail of thought leads naturally into game-as-sim modes of thought.

3. It's fun! There have been, for the entire history of the game, many gloriously deranged thought exercises in how people in these crazy worlds would do things. Remember the "What would a D&D castle really look like" debates? Do you go with a classic design and put up with dragons and wizards incinerating everything in your courtyards? Do you go with the "the sky is scary!" clamshell designs and then deal with bulette herding goblin sappers digging into your belly? How do you stop the teleport squads?

4. Some "sim" style games don't actually sim very well after a certain point. Gurps for example is a great system, but it doesn't deal very well with power levels approaching modern weaponry, let alone surpassing it. You can decry the absurdity of HP systems, but the fact is that we know of big strong guys taking a minor fleshwound to the arm and dropping dead from shock and slight women taking multiple bullets to the face and then walking down several flights of stairs to the EMTs. How do you model real world behavior like that accurately? You can't and HP systems do the job well enough.

Hussar said:

And, I have to admit, despite all the hoopla over the past few years, I really don't get it. I love sim style games. I do. GURPS is a favourite game of mine that I don't get to play anywhere nearly often enough. But, where does this idea that D&D is a good fit for sim style play come from?

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If it's 1975, and you want to play a sim-style FRPG, your choices are prettymuch 0D&D w/Chaimail, or 0D&D+Greyhawk. And, even though there were lots of other games by the 80s, D&D was the one everyone had started with and knew well, so it was the natural point to start if you wanted something different - no matter how different, or how well something else already did that something different.

So were there young-grognards-to-be using D&D to play sim-style? You betchya. There were also some of them cooking up variants to try to play Star Wars using D&D as a base ruleset.

Really, if you could think to do it with an RPG, someone did it with early D&D.

In 2001, if you had claimed that you self identified as a sim player and your go to game for that style was D&D, everyone would look at you like you had two heads....When did D&D become the poster child for sim play? ...So, I ask you, why D&D? If you like sim style play where the mechanics are making a statement about the game world, then why on Earth would you choose to play D&D?

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I blame the edition war. (Hey, war is bad, we can blame it for any/everything.) In the years right before the edition war, D&D was (as it has always been & still was during the war, and still will be with 5e) an FRPG with wargaming roots and wildly abstract sub-systems like rounds & hps, and no one had a problem with that (anymore, the Role v Roll debate had quieted down), we were busy concocting builds and arguing the finer points of RAW.

Once the edition war started, people had to come up with reasons to hate one edition or the other, and that meant digging up things that D&D did well and pretending only your edition did them, and/or digging up things it did badly and pretending only the edition you hated did them. So symmetry broke early on and one edition ended up being labeled 'bad for sim' making the other edition 'good for sim,' and, therefore, D&D being all about sim.

I see it as 2 things.
First , there is no default setting holding you back nor dictating the physics and rules of the game work in that reality.

Second, there is the point that d&d companies are willing to sell you rules for stimulation if you're willing to pay the money.

There is no book or comic or movie telling you how far you can jump...
and if you want to know how far you can job both TSR and Wizards would sell rules for it.

EDIT: oh there was a third.
D&D promoted house rules so any sim rule that would or could not be purchased was homemade.

Isn't this one of those areas where you have to make sure everyone agrees on what "simulationist" means in this context?

The problem with sim games in general is that compounding imprecisions in the details yield enormous inaccuracy on the whole. A properly abstract system is imprecise, but accurate. Like a cone of uncertainty.

Hussar said:

When did D&D become the poster child for sim play? D&D has always been primarily gamist in most of its approaches. The mechanics have virtually always been, "What makes this a fun game" rather than, "How can we model this through mechanics"? This is why we have a combat system that is entirely abstract. We use Hit Points rather than any number of systems model physical damage far better. We have dungeons that make virtually no sense and game worlds that barely pay lip service to the massive impact that the mechanics would have if the mechanics were actually applied to world building.

So, I ask you, why D&D? If you like sim style play where the mechanics are making a statement about the game world, then why on Earth would you choose to play D&D?

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A whole lot of games have been poster children for sim play - just of different sorts of simulations. Traveller contains elements of simulating what an interstellar polity would be with communication traveling only about as fast as people can travel (no instant communications). It also has elements of simulating a rudimentary economy for speculative trade. D&D happens to have elements that simulate fantasy literary styles - particularly pulpy, combat ones by guys like Edgar Rice Burroughs.

I have a hard time saying that D&D has always been "primarily gamist" in its approach. Whenever you adapt some kind of other reality (be it real reality or genre reality), the main job you're doing is applying a gamist eye to the process. It's all about adapting some element into a playable game simulation of that element, but that doesn't make it "primarily gamist" in its approach, at least not how Hussar seems to be using the term.

As abstract as some of the rules in earlier editions of D&D before 4e, I still believe they hold more aspirations of simulation than 4e in many ways. Both games can be used to simulate aspects of fantasy literature, albeit with focuses on different styles of action. But if we were to compare multiclassing rules, for example, 4e drops a lot of the simulation aspects the previous editions held. In an effort to enable the player to create their particular character concepts, players can multiclass their fighter PC for an individual wizard spell to add to their suite of powers. There's barely even a nod to simulating a character gradually growing in wizardly power - elements that are included in previous editions in which wizards progress from neophyte 1st level casters whether they started as one in 1e/2e's multiclassing or picked it up later in 3e's version. It doesn't really matter whether or not any of the simulations in 1e-3e were "realistic" (as if that means much with respect to wizard characters), all of them simulate a growth in power common to the zero-to-hero focus of D&D and many stories about wizard apprentices. Sure, the structures are abstract and work in a game framework - but that doesn't stop them from simulating something that a lot of players find valuable and perhaps even necessary for their view of how an RPG should work.

Savage Wombat said:

Isn't this one of those areas where you have to make sure everyone agrees on what "simulationist" means in this context?

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Or at least is aware of the bizarre range of definitions out there. (I'm not going to do any of these justice or anything, just a quick outline.)

An actual, literal, *simulation* is only concerned with accuracy, it doesn't have to be fair or fun or anything like that. Think computer model of global warming.

Process-sim is a style of gaming in which you focus on the "how" of what your characters are doing and the realistic/self-consistent consequences thereof.

'simulationism' treats the rules of a game as if they were an accurate simulation, and explores what those de-facto laws of physics imply about the world and its denizens.

Genre fidelity or genre emulation is an attempt to simulate a genre (like fantasy, in an FRPG) or genre conventions, rather than simulate any actual (or even imagined), consistent, 'reality.'

Verisimilitude or realism is the selective simulation of reality in some cases, and of fantastic genre elements in others. For instance, to construct a self-consistent world like those described in a genre, but one where cause & effect (as modeled by simulationist-style rules) override genre convention.


I think the question was likely about process-sim, though.


Bottom line, though, a literal simulation is not a game, and unlikely to have the qualities that can make a game enjoyable (balance, fairness, or playability or being easy to learn and/or having depths to master, among other things). Games that partake of the qualities of simulations may have to sacrifice the qualities that would otherwise make them better games to do so (depending on how far they take the simulation aspects, obviously, but also depending on what they're simulating - circular though it may sound, for instance, a simulation that simulates a game may be a pretty good game).

So, if someone tells you "D&D is a bad simulation" shrug and console yourself that it leaves it room to be a good game.

Andor said:

4. Some "sim" style games don't actually sim very well after a certain point. Gurps for example is a great system, but it doesn't deal very well with power levels approaching modern weaponry, let alone surpassing it. You can decry the absurdity of HP systems, but the fact is that we know of big strong guys taking a minor fleshwound to the arm and dropping dead from shock and slight women taking multiple bullets to the face and then walking down several flights of stairs to the EMTs. How do you model real world behavior like that accurately? You can't and HP systems do the job well enough.

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I'd argue 4e GURPS handles simulating reality fine... it does not handle simulating Super Heroic "Reality" well. At least not with out a heaping dose modifying (which several genre books have aimed to do, such as GURPS Action). But Dungeon Fantasy? Cliffhanger Noir? Space Opera? Sci-Fi? Horro? Mythos Horror? Sure all that and more.



But even with heaping loads of modifications... I'm not sure it could ever handle Four-Color Super Heroic "Reality" well. At least no where near as satisfactorily as the HERO system does. Also it doesn;t accurately simulate the annoyances of classes and levels and other specific D&Disms... which is why I still play D&D, nothing else pisses me off quit the same way!

Tony Vargas said:

So, if someone tells you "D&D is a bad simulation" shrug and console yourself that it leaves it room to be a good game.

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Or correct them: D&D is a great simulation of D&D.



Now, don't get my harping and grouching wrong, what D&D does it does really well*, what it doesn't do is simulate "reality". But then my reality doesn't have Pointy-Eared Immortal peeps tossing about Fireballs... so... D&D is perfectly okay for that.









* Mostly annoy me to no end.