Why use D&D for a Simulationist style Game?

[Hussar]

The damage types existed in 1e and 2e.

I don't have access to my 1e PHB so I can't say one way or the other if it specifically makes any mention of damage types. I wouldn't be surprised if the weapon vs. armor table was taking damage type vs armor via the bonus and penalties to hit.

However, different damage types mentioned with different effects do appear in the Monster Manual skeleton entry:

Skeletons "suffer only one-half damage from sharp and/or edged weapons (such as spears, dagers,swords). Blunt weapons such as clubs, maces, flails, etc. score normal damage)".​

For 2e: Weapons are listed with a Damage Type (or multiple types) in the PHB" B=Blunt, P=Piercing, and/or S=Slashing. The damage type could alter a weapon's effectiveness against different armor types if using the optional weapon type vs. optional type.
Despite the optional effectiveness vs. armor, the damage type again has varied effectiveness against some monsters. From the 2e Skeleton entry:

"The fact that they are mostly empty means that edged or piercing weapons (like swords, daggers, and spears) inflict only half damage when employed against skeletons. Blunt weapons, with larger heads designed to break and crush bones, cause normal damage against skeletons."​

So even if people ignored the weapon vs. armor table in 1e and the optional weapon type vs armor rule from 2e, certain monsters were affected differently by different weapon damage types in the 20 years before 3e.

So, yup, rock paper scissors vs damage reduction. Note, oozes also had differing effects based on what you hit them with.

Damage was never affected by damage type though otherwise.

Note, I'm looking at the 1e PHB right now, and nope, no differentiation by weapon type. And it was an optional rule in 2e which had zero affect on damage, which is what we're discussing. At most, it gave you a bonus or penalty to hit. IME, it was a rule that was not used, much like the weapon vs armour table in 1e. But, to be fair, I didn't realise that they added this in in 2e. Learn something new.

But, we were discussing an orc hitting a PC. So, since he's already hit, the modifiers don't matter do they? The orc did 7 points of damage. What damage type was it? You can't actually tell until you name the weapon, but, in any case, makes absolutely no difference mechanically. 7 points of piercing damage has an identical effect as 7 points of bludgeoning damage. They heal at the same rate, they have the same impact on the character, everything is identical. Again, it's rock-scissors-paper. At best, we're talking a pretty thin veneer of simulation on a model that is a black box as soon as initiative is rolled.

Ok, since we're talking about models, explain this. Fighter one takes 30 points of damage in a single hit. Fighter two gets hit 5 times for 6 points each. Why do they heal at exactly the same rate? It's not like the body heals in serial. Shouldn't fighter 2 heal faster?

And, again, I'll ask, why can't both characters have simply lost morale HP? What in your model precludes that? Or entirely "God touched" HP? I mean, if you have a simulation, you should be able to tell me, definitively, that some things didn't happen. A model should exclude some results shouldn't it?

 

[The Crimson Binome]

The orc did 7 points of damage. What damage type was it? You can't actually tell until you name the weapon, but, in any case, makes absolutely no difference mechanically.

It was blunt trauma, because the armor you are wearing spreads the impact of either a sharp or bludgeoning weapon over a larger area.

Ok, since we're talking about models, explain this. Fighter one takes 30 points of damage in a single hit. Fighter two gets hit 5 times for 6 points each. Why do they heal at exactly the same rate? It's not like the body heals in serial. Shouldn't fighter 2 heal faster?

The body needs to spread its effort out over a larger area, in trying to recover from multiple wounds simultaneously. All six wounds heal at the same time, but at one-sixth of the rate of the single large wound.

 

[Hussar]

It was blunt trauma, because the armor you are wearing spreads the impact of either a sharp or bludgeoning weapon over a larger area.

The body needs to spread its effort out over a larger area, in trying to recover from multiple wounds simultaneously. All six wounds heal at the same time, but at one-sixth of the rate of the single large wound.

ROTFLMAO. Now, how did I get poisoned then? After all, all I took was blunt trauma. Andor has gone to considerable lengths to claim that damage type matters because of poison. Also, how does that work with a piercing weapon? Or are you now claiming that a character in armour never actually takes any wounds other than bruising or blunt force trauma?

And, why am I healing slower? Really? And you have no problems with this? That's your believable justification? And, anything with regeneration heals slower if you cut it more times than if you just cut it once?

That's some pretty straws you're grasping there.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Or are you now claiming that a character in armour never actually takes any wounds other than bruising or blunt force trauma?

An unarmored combatant who gets hit by a greataxe would just die, and that makes for a poor game. Fortunately, as Gygax pointed out, even Conan wears armor in combat.

And, why am I healing slower? Really? And you have no problems with this? That's your believable justification?

Do four cracked ribs heal at the exact same rate as one cracked rib, or does it take longer? I'm not a doctor, so the concept isn't immediately intuitive, and I could be convinced either way.

 

[Hussar]

An unarmored combatant who gets hit by a greataxe would just die, and that makes for a poor game. Fortunately, as Gygax pointed out, even Conan wears armor in combat.

Do four cracked ribs heal at the exact same rate as one cracked rib, or does it take longer? I'm not a doctor, so the concept isn't immediately intuitive, and I could be convinced either way.

Unarmored combatants get hit by greataxes all the time in D&D though. Or are you now saying that a "hit" is not necessarily a physical impact?

One cracked rib is hardly as serious an injury as four though. We should be comparing 4 relatively minor wounds of equal severity (since HP damage doesn't get worse as we lose HP - does it? Do we take a more serious wound if we've already taken previous wounds, even if the HP loss is the same) to a single, very serious wound. Compare four fractured ribs to a five inch deep stab wound. After all, our 30 point wound is enough to kill a horse, so it should be considerably more severe than a 6 point wound, shouldn't it?

See, this is my point. The black box abstraction of D&D combat doesn't actually tell us the answer to any of this. Not even a hint. We really have no idea what a 20 point wound looks like. We don't even know what a 1 HP wound looks like. It's when we try to reify the abstraction, to make it real, that it falls apart. A model, virtually any model, would tell us some of these answers. Distinguishing between types of damage is a granularity issue, really, because it doesn't really matter what killed you, you're still dead. But, we cannot even definitively say if a hit really makes physical contact or not. Thus the whole Damage on a Miss thing. To be fair, we also can't definitively state if a miss is a complete miss or just a non-damaging strike or something else.

The mechanics simply don't tell us this. I just can't understand why you and others are claiming that the mechanics do tell us these things. At best, at the very edge of things, you might have circumstantial evidence - the character was poisoned, so, he must have been injected somehow, but, then, even that's not necessarily true. Maybe some of the poison flew off the weapon and into the target's mouth. Maybe the weapon wiped some poison off on the target, dealing no damage, but, when the character touched the spot, he became poisoned through the open wounds on his hand. I don't know.

But, the point is, neither do you.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

The mechanics simply don't tell us this. I just can't understand why you and others are claiming that the mechanics do tell us these things.

The thing that you're missing is that the mechanics can tell us this, if we want them to. Because the players (and mostly the DM) are in charge of actually detailing the narrative, they can entirely decide that X mechanic corresponds to Y situation in the game world. The game doesn't require that you do this, but since the rules are consistent, you have that option to do so.

For some people, it is very important that the rules are consistent enough to allow for that.

 

[pemerton]

I'm not sure whether it's meta-gaming, but I still think it's weird.

Two RPGs that I know of in which a PC's prospect of success depends on the emotional stakes of the situation are HeroWars/Quest and The Riddle of Steel.

In TRoS, in an appropriate situation a player can invoke his/her PC's Spiritual Attributes, which confers bonus dice. The game is mechanically balanced such that PCs will tend to lose conflicts unless SAs are in play.

In HW/Q, relationships are rated just like any other ability, and can be used as augments just like any other ability. So when a PC is fighting his/her father's killer, for instance, "Revenge against my father's killer" rating can be used to add a bonus to the "Fighting" rating which otherwise wouldn't be available.

The idea is to give the player an incentive to take his/her PC into situations in which the emotional stakes are higher.

as Gygax pointed out, even Conan wears armor in combat.

The first counter-example that comes to mind is Tower of the Elephant, in which Conan fights a lion, among other things.

As [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] points out, a lot of damage is dealt in D&D by deadly attacks against unarmoured PCs. And poisoning occurs, too.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

The first counter-example that comes to mind is Tower of the Elephant, in which Conan fights a lion, among other things.

I think Gygax's point was that the rules should be designed to work for the majority of situations, and merely hope to not fail catastrophically in those off cases. If the game rules don't work so great when modelling axe v bare flesh, then that's because they weren't designed to.

Which is fine, because it's not something that comes up much. Have you ever noticed how most of these arguments, on both sides, go down to corner-case examples? No model is perfect, and if we're going to make compromises for playability, that's where I'd want the sacrifices to be.

 

[Hussar]

The thing that you're missing is that the mechanics can tell us this, if we want them to. Because the players (and mostly the DM) are in charge of actually detailing the narrative, they can entirely decide that X mechanic corresponds to Y situation in the game world. The game doesn't require that you do this, but since the rules are consistent, you have that option to do so.

For some people, it is very important that the rules are consistent enough to allow for that.

Oh, sure, you can. I accept that. But, that's not the rules. That's entirely on you. Essentially are free forming. The table has a gentlemen's agreement that narration will follow a particular route. However, that's not the mechanics doing that, that's you.

It's not consistency though since the consistency also comes from the players, not the rules. It is 100% consistent to narrate a hit as a near miss. You might not like that narration, and that's fine, but it is still consistent with the mechanics.

 

[Hussar]

I think Gygax's point was that the rules should be designed to work for the majority of situations, and merely hope to not fail catastrophically in those off cases. If the game rules don't work so great when modelling axe v bare flesh, then that's because they weren't designed to.

Which is fine, because it's not something that comes up much. Have you ever noticed how most of these arguments, on both sides, go down to corner-case examples? No model is perfect, and if we're going to make compromises for playability, that's where I'd want the sacrifices to be.

Wait, what? Axe vs unarmored happens all the time. Unless all you use in your game is armoured humanoids. What happens when you hit a Mind Flayer, Minotaur, Medusa or Mummy with an axe? After all, none of those are remotely armoured and a Minotaur especially is basically just a human. The vast majority of monsters don't wear armour and most of them don't have much in the way of "natural armour" either. What blunt force trauma am I doing to a Harpy? And, note, that "natural armour" is a 3e only element as well.

Hits vs unarmored opponents are hardly corner case.