innerdude
Legend
I've been following this thread off and on, have caught most of the general "gist," but can't reply to any specific post.
To reply to @Hussar's original post / original question, "Why use D&D for a simulationist style game?" the answer is, because you don't know any better.
Up until 2009, that's exactly where I would have been. I'd never seriously played any other game system other than D&D; my entire RPG history consisted of BECMI and 3.x. It would never have occurred to me to even attempt to use another system. If I was going to play a game, I would've wrangled D&D into what I wanted it to be.
It's interesting, because I read the post yesterday that statted up one of the Game of Thrones characters into a level 13 D&D 5 character. And I thought it was really cool. Until I saw that he had 147 hit points. And having now been thoroughly ensconced in Savage Worlds for a couple of years now, my mind just totally rebelled at the thought. Hit points? And a 147 of them? Had the same reaction to 13th Age, when I found it wasn't uncommon for high-level enemies to have upwards of 300+ hit points. And I'm sorry, but just . . . no. I don't have any desire to try and track, justify, or otherwise rationalize how a 13th level fighter has 147 hit points any more.
Savage Worlds has all kinds of gamist subsystems. Character advancement bears absolutely no relation to the "real world." The "soak a wound using an action point / benny" system is pure meta-game abstraction (though most of the rest of the damage system can be easily modeled to a reasonable "real world" analogue). But for all of its gamist / narrativist / meta-game "proud nails," Savage Worlds is BY FAR more "simulationist" in its approach to action resolution than D&D will ever be.
The reason is that where Savage Worlds feels the need to be simulationist, it generally adheres to those principles. When meta-game mechanics come front and center, they make zero attempt to weave their way into the rest of the game. It's not explicitly called out in the rules, but in play, the elements that are strictly metagame pretty much stay within the metagame, and don't intrude into other arenas.
Frankly, I'm eternally grateful for the advent of 4e, for without it, I never would have been compelled to look at systems other than D&D. And discover systems that suited what I was looking for in an RPG much, much better than D&D---of any variety---ever will.
I think the confusion with D&D, 3.x in particular, comes because there's a dichotomy between the abstract combat elements of hit points and armor class, versus the more relatively "real world" modeling of the skill system. The skill system feels like it semi-accurately models a character's relative capability, and so suddenly the cry of "D&D is now simulationist!!" went up. As long as you limit your view of D&D's "simulationism" to that narrow component of the mechanics, it's actually reasonably accurate. It's fairly easy to envision how a particular bonus to a skill correlates to a "real world" equivalent.
As soon as you expand your view to pretty much anything else in 3.x, claims of "simulationism" start to look dubious at best, or at the very least, rationalized by proponents through the view of an individualistic lens of what the "simulation" actually entails.
To reply to @Hussar's original post / original question, "Why use D&D for a simulationist style game?" the answer is, because you don't know any better.
Up until 2009, that's exactly where I would have been. I'd never seriously played any other game system other than D&D; my entire RPG history consisted of BECMI and 3.x. It would never have occurred to me to even attempt to use another system. If I was going to play a game, I would've wrangled D&D into what I wanted it to be.
It's interesting, because I read the post yesterday that statted up one of the Game of Thrones characters into a level 13 D&D 5 character. And I thought it was really cool. Until I saw that he had 147 hit points. And having now been thoroughly ensconced in Savage Worlds for a couple of years now, my mind just totally rebelled at the thought. Hit points? And a 147 of them? Had the same reaction to 13th Age, when I found it wasn't uncommon for high-level enemies to have upwards of 300+ hit points. And I'm sorry, but just . . . no. I don't have any desire to try and track, justify, or otherwise rationalize how a 13th level fighter has 147 hit points any more.
Savage Worlds has all kinds of gamist subsystems. Character advancement bears absolutely no relation to the "real world." The "soak a wound using an action point / benny" system is pure meta-game abstraction (though most of the rest of the damage system can be easily modeled to a reasonable "real world" analogue). But for all of its gamist / narrativist / meta-game "proud nails," Savage Worlds is BY FAR more "simulationist" in its approach to action resolution than D&D will ever be.
The reason is that where Savage Worlds feels the need to be simulationist, it generally adheres to those principles. When meta-game mechanics come front and center, they make zero attempt to weave their way into the rest of the game. It's not explicitly called out in the rules, but in play, the elements that are strictly metagame pretty much stay within the metagame, and don't intrude into other arenas.
Frankly, I'm eternally grateful for the advent of 4e, for without it, I never would have been compelled to look at systems other than D&D. And discover systems that suited what I was looking for in an RPG much, much better than D&D---of any variety---ever will.
I think the confusion with D&D, 3.x in particular, comes because there's a dichotomy between the abstract combat elements of hit points and armor class, versus the more relatively "real world" modeling of the skill system. The skill system feels like it semi-accurately models a character's relative capability, and so suddenly the cry of "D&D is now simulationist!!" went up. As long as you limit your view of D&D's "simulationism" to that narrow component of the mechanics, it's actually reasonably accurate. It's fairly easy to envision how a particular bonus to a skill correlates to a "real world" equivalent.
As soon as you expand your view to pretty much anything else in 3.x, claims of "simulationism" start to look dubious at best, or at the very least, rationalized by proponents through the view of an individualistic lens of what the "simulation" actually entails.
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