But no matter how injured my character is, as long as they are not dead, they can by mundane means fully recover to fighting trim within a day. This is a big kick in the pants for a simulationist style of play. However, hit points in D&D have always been weird. A way of dealing with this (from a simulationist's point of view) is to separate the hit points (representing the capacity to avoid or turn damage, divine influence, luck etc.) and physical damage. Hit points are restored quickly while physical damage is healed at a much slower/normal rate. 4e is designed more for fun than representing the "ickiness" of damage and infection - and this is most certainly not a bad thing.
I agree. I remember d10 games being good at simulating damage. I didn't play vampire long, but I remember I only had like 5 HP, and each point of damage gave massive penalties to everything. Very realistic, not very heroic. It wasn't my thing.
And separating HP and physical damage is a good trick. I like to think of the first solid hit as being the one that bloodies the target. Everyone has their own HP. The wizard is deflecting blows with magic, the rogue is twisting and rolling with hits, etc. I'm surprised you suggested this. Most simulationists I know hate the idea of abstracting HPs.
Yes I would, and as I say, this is the biggest simulationist gripe for me. In 4e the "puny" wizard "recovers" from being poisoned at a rate equal to or better than the "tough" barbarian 69% of the time! This is completely and utterly at odds with the mental picture I have of fantasy and the various tropes we include in a typical campaign. I accept this as part of streamlining the game but it still bothers me and would be the first thing ejected when creating a new edition.
Well poison is a bad example. Lethality of poison generally relies on body mass, dosage, and immunity from prior exposure or antivenom. The poison leaves your system at a rate determined by its own properties and the dosage (many drugs have half lives). The health of the recipient has little effect on resistance or duration. Granted someone with a bad health condition might suffer complications, but in general a marathon runner stands no better chance than an overweight person (the overweight person might be better off thanks to their increased body mass).
Poison is an exception, I understand your point. Someone adept at throwing off an effect ought to throw it off faster. It is more simualationist for saves to be affected by level, ability scores, etc. I think the reason they don't is that non-AC defenses already confer an advantage, and the system designers figured one advantage was enough. A case of balance > sim.
Not always true. A major trope of fantasy fiction is the physical effect of casting powerful magic. This is a very easy limiting factor to introduce. The other factor that can be addressed is the high rate of spellcasting compared to more mundane attack forms. If the rate at which a spellcaster can blast out a fireball is scaled back a little, then martial classes do not end up being penalized, particularly if those martial classes are empowered to get more out of their attacks than hp damage.
Which is fine if you want a "mysteriously" powered non-mundane fighter. And I can certainly jive with such variants from a Primal perspective (even though chi in my fantasy game still illicits that rice in the haggis issue I personally have). I still would want such restrictions explained more fully than encounter/daily - although my simulationist issue here is most definitely related to the mechanics of such things.
But why would a spell be physically exhausting while a physical maneuver isn't? I think our main difference here is that you don't see martial characters as fantastical and impossible, and I do.
Some things that get the half-level increase such as perception are generally well deserved as a character increases in ability and level (although an exception to this is easily enough crafted). I think it was KarinsDad on a different thread that highlighted the importance of this "adventuring experience" be hard-coded into the rules and how 3e's skill points failed to do this. Initiative is another area where the half-level bonus is suited and well earned compared to 3e initiative. However, why is my puny wizard getting significantly stronger as he increases in level? Why is my dumb-fighter getting so much more intelligent? Why are they getting better at skills they have likely never used? 3e does not give enough weight to this adventuring experience while 4e values and applies it too loosely. I would prefer a happy elegant medium between the two.
I again agree. This is an example of sacrificing detail and realism to achieve simplicity. You can explain away many things, perhaps the wizard is augmenting his strength checks with some magic, and your dumb fighter would probably learn a few tricks from experience. At some point you are going to great stretches to explain why your level 15 barbarian who has never seen a lock before can pick it with ease, but it's a sacrifice I make
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Why is that silly. For me, this is the very important aspect of separating the magical from the mundane. If even the non-magical characters can do magical things, then not only does it dramatically downgrade the mystery-level for me, it completely loses it.
I really disagree with this. There are a lot of mundane ways that a fighter can affect the battlefield that are powerful and effective. 4e opened the door here for some really good stuff but there are some examples that go a little too far for my "simulationist sensibilities". For me if you have ever read David Gemmell's books and characters such as Druss the Legend, then you have the perfect blueprint for high level mundane fighters. It is possible and it can be done. Again, if you could mix the best of 3e/4e on this, I think you would really have something good.
I think this is the one point where we disagree most. If you were to bind fighters by the laws of reality and disallow them any magical explanation for their abilities, they wouldn't last. There's no sensible reason a high level fighter should be able to soak 150ft of falling damage. If a first level commoner stabs a sword through the fighter's neck in his sleep, he gets up, bludgeons the commoner to death, and goes back to sleep to get his HPs back. A 30th level fighter, (or 20th, in 3e, etc...) can survive 8 doses of poison that would kill a level 1, even if he hasn't built resistance to that particular poison. That's impossible. It could only happen in a fantasy world. It could only happen if something outside of phsyics, chem, and biology were on the fighter's side. And without these things, the fighter can't compete with the wizard, so these things are necessary to have the game.
It is not the size of the numbers that bothers me or the bookkeeping (which as you can imagine is an important and intrinsic part of the game for me - I produce 14-20 page character sheets for my player's in my 3e game). It is the exponential difference between +1, +2, +3, +4, +5 and +6 items that bothers me. It is unimaginative, differentiates far too much in terms of coin and hearkens back to the previous point of relative mathematics versus absolute. It fails to make any quasi-realistic economic sense - something D&D has never been good at but gets a huge fail on in 4e. I suppose the designers thought. "well we're not doing and have never done a good job at economics in D&D; so let's just forget about it completely and just focus on relative value to a party of level x. Not my preference is all.
Sorry, the remark about the textbook made me thing you were struggling with the math. I'm not sure what a realistic market for magic items would look like. 3e used a squared function to calculate costs, and 4e uses an exponential with an error term to produce round numbers. This does mean you can guess the next level's cost given only this level's cost, without knowing which level you are. In 3e you would have to know which level you are and the current cost in order to guess next level's cost. That's one way in which it's relative instead of absolute...
But if you're saying that the wealth a high level PC carries makes most economies look trivial, and that such a world wouldn't function, then you have a point.
Anyway, my point in all of this is to give some insight into a simulationist's perspective and to attempt to answer the thread title - something which seemed to get sidetracked on the "craft [basketweaving]" mode of discussion that has little if anything to do with a simulationism. In the end, they are just my preferences and certainly not a true or correct way to play the game. If you are having fun playing, then you must be doing it right.
Best Regards
Herremann the Wise
Yeah, there's generally two debates in this thread. The debate of simplicity vs simulation, and a debate over whether increasing simulation actually gives you a more accurate picture. No edition of D&D simulates reality well at all. We can tweak the system to bring about the expected result in a situation, but in general we are only getting a few feet closer to a target that is miles away.
It's very eerily reminiscent of the way we construct math models at school. We can add more parameters to a model to make it behave how we would expect in some situations, but it doesn't make it better. We are just overfitting the model to the data.
So I'm on the simplicity side of the argument. And not because it's my own personal play-style. I think most changes intended to make a game more simulationist don't do so in a measurable way. They only increase bookkeeping.
