D&D 5E Realism and Simulationism in 5e: Is D&D Supposed to be Realistic?

[overgeeked]

Could you clarify why you think so? To my understanding the definition of a dissociated mechanic is when the player's decision-making process can't be equated to the character's decision-making processes. Under my understanding, the attack mechanics would be associated because both the player and the character are deciding to try to hurt a foe. The attack mechanics (including the attack roll) then abstractly resolve that decision. By contrast, Action Surge would be a dissociated mechanic, because the player's decision to use Action Surge revolves around weighing present necessity against the opportunity cost of being unable to use the ability later, a consideration of which the character is entirely unaware.

There's definitely room for subjectivity regarding which mechanics are associated and which are dissociated. I'm curious whether we're reaching different conclusions about attack rolls because of such a subjective difference in how we frame the OOC/IC decisions to attack, or whether we're using different definitions of "dissociated mechanics".


I'm completely onboard with your point that using subjective disagreements about realism to make objective claims of "inherent wrongness" is problematic. But I don't see any problem with making openly subjective claims about one's preferred level of "realism" and advocating for the game to accommodate one's preferences.


I have an additional question regarding the scope of your conclusion:

My opinion is that 5e, taken as a whole, is sufficiently "realistic"/verisimilitudinous/etc to satisfy my personal preferences. There are certainly aspects of the system that I wish were more "realistic"/verisimilitudinous than they are, but there aren't enough if them to spoil my enjoyment of the system.

Could you please clarify whether you intend your conclusion above to be broad enough to cover subjective opinions like mine, and therefore that you think I'm getting tangled up in one of those layers (or an unspecified layer)? Or do your intend your conclusion to be narrow enough to focus only on objective claims and thus not apply to subjective opinions like mine?

Thanks!

At a guess, that poster is going off the idea that one attack roll =/= one swing of the sword or one shot from a bow. Rather the attack roll is meant to represent all the action, the feints, parries, lunges, and various other maneuvers that a person would or could do in 6 seconds of a fight to the death. Some editions make this explicit, others do not. 5E is unclear on the topic. Likewise people who see hit points as a disassociated mechanic likely think of hit points more as an abstracted luck or energy rather than actual meat and harm.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Could you clarify why you think so? To my understanding the definition of a dissociated mechanic is when the player's decision-making process can't be equated to the character's decision-making processes.

It doesn't help that even the Alexandrian has never been perfectly consistent about what it means, but under this metric: Your decision to "attack" is not actually correlated with any specific choices on your part. It's, by necessity, a mechanical abstraction. The biggest problem is the disconnect between damage roll and attack roll though. There's a causal break here, where it is purely because of the abstraction--the vagaries of damage dice--that can cause even a critical hit to deal minimum damage, or a barely-hitting hit to deal max damage. You can't know what the events are until after the mechanic resolves--not the choice, the choice has already resolved.

The problem is that "dissociated" wants to have all the useful aspects of "diegetic" without any of the baggage. It doesn't want to recognize that most D&D mechanics aren't diegetic, so that word can't be used.

There's definitely room for subjectivity regarding which mechanics are associated and which are dissociated. I'm curious whether we're reaching different conclusions about attack rolls because of such a subjective difference in how we frame the OOC/IC decisions to attack, or whether we're using different definitions of "dissociated mechanics".

Well, as alluded above, part of the reason I extremely strongly dislike the phrase "dissociated mechanics" is that it is not consistent, neither in what it means nor in how it is applied. It is a poster child for trying to reify "I don't like this" into "this is an objective fault," just presented with enough awareness that simply decrying things as abstract or non-diegetic is facile (since the vast majority of D&D mechanics are extremely abstract and frequently non-diegetic).

I'm completely onboard with your point that using subjective disagreements about realism to make objective claims of "inherent wrongness" is problematic. But I don't see any problem with making openly subjective claims about one's preferred level of "realism" and advocating for the game to accommodate one's preferences.

Because a serious problem with game design is that people refuse to consider new methods which might achieve their desired ends better, but which are not the same as the methods they're familiar with. They reject the unfamiliar as bad, and accept the familiar as good, rather than being willing to examine whether their aims are met effectively by the tools to which they have become accustomed. Subjectivity is fine when it is open and understood and not used as a shield against criticism or development.

This gets into one of the biggest problems with the "dissociated" mechanics argument: it's inherently pro-caster. Because magic doesn't exist, there cannot be any preconceived expectations about what it can do, and thus it is prima facie impossible to have dissociated magic. The player must just accept that that is how magic happens to work. But "martial" mechanics? Those at least resemble real-world stuff. Which means people can come in with some expectations, which is the true root of mechanical "dissociation": martial characters are forced to abide by what people THINK is physically realizable IRL, not what is potentially realizable in a fantastical setting. The whole thing then reveals its true colors, becoming "magic characters should simply have fewer limits than non-magic ones, because magic is whatever we choose to define it to be, whereas non-magic is limited to only (and often much less than) what we could achieve in the real world."

I have an additional question regarding the scope of your conclusion:

My opinion is that 5e, taken as a whole, is sufficiently "realistic"/verisimilitudinous/etc to satisfy my personal preferences. There are certainly aspects of the system that I wish were more "realistic"/verisimilitudinous than they are, but there aren't enough if them to spoil my enjoyment of the system.

Could you please clarify whether you intend your conclusion above to be broad enough to cover subjective opinions like mine, and therefore that you think I'm getting tangled up in one of those layers (or an unspecified layer)? Or do your intend your conclusion to be narrow enough to focus only on objective claims and thus not apply to subjective opinions like mine?

Thanks!

You're not getting tangled up because you're not even entering the discussion. You have no problem with what is offered, or no problem sufficiently strong to be worth discussing.

It would be like someone saying "there are all these problems that come from people trying to critique French cuisine, that basically everyone runs into" and then you saying, "well, I've dined at Petit Provence several times, and while the food wasn't always 100% perfectly what I would want, I enjoyed what I ate. So...where am I getting tripped up with these problems?" You aren't, because you aren't critiquing the food in the first place. Likewise, you aren't critiquing the realism of 5e; you're accepting it at face value.

As soon as you start actually digging in and voicing what concerns you do have, though, you're going to start falling prey to at least one of the above things, almost surely. E.g., if you would find it utterly unacceptable to add a Warlord class because you consider martial healing "unrealistic" ("insufficiently verisimilitudinous," "poorly grounded," however you wish to call it), well, that's precisely inviting at least one of the aforementioned issues, because that invites questions like "well if that's okay why are hit points in general okay when they have so many unrealistic(/ungrounded/etc.) characteristics to them?" etc.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

At a guess, that poster is going off the idea that one attack roll =/= one swing of the sword or one shot from a bow. Rather the attack roll is meant to represent all the action, the feints, parries, lunges, and various other maneuvers that a person would or could do in 6 seconds of a fight to the death. Some editions make this explicit, others do not. 5E is unclear on the topic. Likewise people who see hit points as a disassociated mechanic likely think of hit points more as an abstracted luck or energy rather than actual meat and harm.

It's a combination of this and the disconnect between the attack roll and the damage roll. You must intentionally withhold your description of what you're doing when you attempt an attack roll, because your damage roll could contradict it, even though that dissociates your choice from the act itself, forcing the choice to wait until after the mechanics resolve. And yes, that's the general issue I have with HP not being called "dissociated" when they pretty clearly are, though more accurately it would be that HP are often implied to be "actual meat and harm," but repeatedly function in decidedly not meat-and-harm like ways, e.g. you "cure wounds" when you heal (something many, many, MANY "HP are meat" advocates cite as key to their argument), yet a night's rest restores them (and has since the beginning of D&D--at different rates, to be sure, but even in very early D&D, a week's rest was usually sufficient to sleep off what were previously nearly-mortal injuries, with zero lingering side-effects.)

 

[Hriston]

So oddly worded. The use of "including" seems to suggest (grammatically, at least) that two-handed swords are pole-arms.

Yes, the zweihander was used as such. For example, they seem to have been used against pike formations at the Battle of Kappel in 1531.

 

[Greg Benage]

The biggest problem is the disconnect between damage roll and attack roll though.

You can roll "effect dice" (e.g. damage) with the "action dice" (e.g. attack) to associate the player action with the character action. RAW 5e still leaves dissociated critical hit damage, so you might want to use max damage instead of doubled damage dice. In practice, I think most players have so internalized damage rolls that they don't even notice the dissociation.

 

[Thomas Shey]

You can roll "effect dice" (e.g. damage) with the "action dice" (e.g. attack) to associate the player action with the character action. RAW 5e still leaves dissociated critical hit damage, so you might want to use max damage instead of doubled damage dice. In practice, I think most players have so internalized damage rolls that they don't even notice the dissociation.

That's the issue with a lot of things Ezekiel is talking about, though; most people don't consider D&D style hit points disassociated because they're so used to them. If you're used to games with fixed hit point (and hit points that are often handled much more consistently) or some other damage mechanic, D&D style hit points can sometimes be profoundly jarring because of how, well, odd they are.

 

[Greg Benage]

most people don't consider D&D style hit points disassociated because they're so used to them.

I mean, "hit points" in themselves aren't dissociated. Definitely a lot of people who don't understand the difference between "abstraction" and "dissociation," though, and Alexander didn't always make the distinction as clear as it could have been.

 

[Mordhau]

Because people are complicated and so are our stories and our preferences.

So this applies to many works of fiction throughout a wide variety of genres. Let's take zombie entertainment like The Walking Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead, or even Juan of the Dead. Each of these stories involve a very fantastic element, namely that the dead rise and feast upon the flesh of the living. There is no plausible scenario where the dead can be ambulatory, react to stimuli, or take a bite out of their neighbors when they're feeling peckish. It's simply impossible. But you have to accept this premise in order to enjoy zombie entertainment. And I know some people who don't enjoy it simply because they can't accept the premise. So there's the binary part.

For most zombie entertainment, other than animated cadavers, the world works pretty much the same as ours. This is where the sliding scale comes in. Just because we accept the impossible premise that the dead can walk doesn't necessarily mean we'll accept other fantastical elements. If Rick Grimes can punch a hole through a zombie's skull with his bare fist or jump from five stories up without hurting himself that's too much for me. And on the surface that seems silly. If I can accept walking corpses why can't I accept someone punching holes in skulls with their fists or jumping 50 feet with no problems?

And the truth is, what I can accept is highly dependent on genre. When I watched the Avengers, I don't complain about the Hulk making conservation of mass a joke, that Captain America's shield does not obey the laws of physics, or that Hawkeye and Black Widow can make meaningful contributions to a team that includes Thor on it. And likewise, I can accept a lot of things in fantasy. But it still needs to have some elements that are grounded in reality, or, as I prefer, the impression of realism for me to enjoy.

Yes. This all makes sense, and I said pretty much the same thing earlier in the thread.

It's not an answer to my question. In fact you're demonstrating my point that it doesn't make any sense at all to treat realism as a binary state. I was calling for conceptual clarity. At worst realism as a binary is just wrong, at best it's a short hand for unstated assumptions that are not clear.

 

[pemerton]

Take HP as an example. It's crap. You're perfectly fine until you go unconscious. But it's also easy to grasp and simple to implement. Playing a death spiral would be more realistic but would be more overhead and probably not as much fun for most people based on how widely it's been implemented in other games.

The "fun" judgment I'll leave to others.

But as far as implementation is concerned, it's not hard at all. In the Prince Valiant version, for instance, checks are opposed dice pools, and the loser loses dice from their pool equal to the winner's margin of success. Unlike hp it doesn't even require writing anything down - you just literally set aside dice from your pool!

 

[pemerton]

It literally mentions the laws of gravity. Not just falling. The LAWS of gravity. That's a reference to the whole enchilada.

What does it even mean to reverse the laws that govern the moon's orbit of the earth in a 50' radius, 100' high cylinder?

Does D&D have atoms, and particles within them? If it does, what happens when the gravitational force that contributes to their interactions is reversed? D&D has never tried to answer that sort of question.

Reverse Gravity is the poster child for "gravity" in D&D being nothing more than the tendency of things to fall to earth.