D&D 5E Is the Real Issue (TM) Process Sim?

[pemerton]

Reading through (as much as I could bear of) the Damage on a Miss "debate", the strident demands (as opposed to the simple statements of preference) being made seemed to hinge on an underlying assumption: that the game mechanical system should dictate not just the outcome of an adjudicated action, but also the in-game-world process by which that outcome came about.

In general, these things only "make sense" in this way to those who have become habituated to them. And it's quite possible to de-habituate yourself (I've done it - again, long ago). Players who started out with White Wolf systems have far less trouble with it, for instance.

I think process-sim preferences are part of the explanation, but cannot be the whole of it, because if you really want process sim in your game then you need to abandon D&D combat resolution for some other system (RQ, RM, presumably Harn, Burning Wheel, etc) that actually correlates the outcome with a process. Wheres in D&D combat losing hit points is not itself any definite outcome in the fiction until the combat comes to an end. (Robin Laws is the first designer I know of who actually articulated this idea, in his advice on the narration of action point loss in HeroWars, but Gygax seems to have been implicitly aware of it in his remarks on hit points and abstract combat resolution in his DMG. How it fits in with ranged attacks has always been a bit mysterious - I don't think it's a coincidence that D&D-style RPGs tend to present melee combat as the core case and ranged attacks as secondary or derivative in various ways.)

Furthermore, many players seem willing to leave their process-sim preferences at the door if they otherwise enjoy the play of a game element. On the current "Mirror Image in 3E" thread I think it's been established that correlating Mirror Image with the fiction is no easier, and in some cases perhaps harder, than correlating Come and Get It with the fiction. In response to this point I've been basically told to suck it up, apply the spell rules and play the game! Where's the process sim in that? And if it's good enough for Mirror Image, why not for CaGI? I think that a lot of the apparent process-sim preferences, in the context of D&D at least, are connected to other preferences like tradition, familiarity, habit etc. The real objection to DoaM is that it is different. The process sim objection - which, as I say, bites just as hard in Mirror Image adjudication, or in any hit point loss short of death - is in many cases, I think, a post facto rationalisation because people have the mistaken belief that "I don't like it" is not a good enough reason. Whereas I would have though that in hobby gaming "I don't like it" is in fact an excellent reason not to include a certain element (mechanical or story) in your game!

So in terms of hit points and game mechanics... to "realistically" represent it, the combat should really be miss/miss/miss/miss/1 HP damage/ miss/miss/miss 2 HP damage/miss/miss/1 HP damage/miss/3 HP damage/ miss/miss/miss/75 HP damage!-- unconscious or dead.

But almost no D&D player would want to play a game like that.

That's because all the people who like that style of play are already playing RQ, or RM, or Harn, or BW, or . . . !

This is why I regard the process-sim objections to abilities like DoaM or CaGI it as essentially red herrings. No one who loves D&D can be a purist for process-sim, because it's core resolution mechanic does not simulate any process! Until you lose all your hit points, the rules haven't actually specified any outcome within the fiction, let alone any process whereby that outcome eventuated. Hit point loss on its own is a purely metagame state of affairs!

The example I'd bring up here is rain starting up and spoiling the diplomacy attempt. Any attempt to rationalize the cause of the failure is obscured because the chain of causality is irrational. There's nothing the PC can do in that situation to improve on that skill check

I don't see why not. Cast Control Weather. Or offer the mayor an umbrella . . .

The roots of D&D are in abstraction. IMHO so long as we want to leave the core assumptions of the game intact then abstraction should be fully embraced. This means that HP are kind of nebulous and that an "attack" roll is NOT a swing of a weapon per se.

I agree with this. As I see it, this therefore leaves design space for DoaM. And it also leaves design space for no DoaM. But the reasons for including or excluding wouldn't be abstraction vs process sim. They would be questions like "Do or don't we want mechanics like DoaM that reduce uncertainty and mitigate failure in rather definite ways?" Because the answer to such questions seems to be quite varied across different players, perhaps a suite of options from which different groups can pick and choose is in order . . .

 

[Hussar]

i guess my issue with [MENTION=44640]bill[/MENTION]91's point is that he's drawn an arbitrary line in the sand. Why does a success HAVE to come from the player who rolled it? Conversely, why do all failures start and end with the character that failed? Why can there never, ever be outside circumstances which cause me to succeed or fail?

I get the preference argument. Sure. But, that's just it. It's a preference thing. Fine and dandy, but, "I like it this way" isn't really a strong argument.

In other words, why can a failed attack never be caused by an ally of the target sticking out his shield?

 

[Lokiare]

But to business...

To business! Oh wait, I thought we were toasting...

Reading through (as much as I could bear of) the Damage on a Miss "debate", the strident demands (as opposed to the simple statements of preference) being made seemed to hinge on an underlying assumption: that the game mechanical system should dictate not just the outcome of an adjudicated action, but also the in-game-world process by which that outcome came about. For instance, if "damage" was to be caused, then that will be because an in-game "sword swing" must have "hit" the creature taking "damage", or otherwise some similar eventuality must be described by the system to justify in in-game-world terms why and how that "damage" arose.

Now, if one is making a CRPG I can see that this argument is valid; at the end of the game mechanical process you have to generate a physical depiction (on screen or whatever) of what happened. The swinging sword must either impact upon the target or it must not. But tabletop RPGs don't work the same way.

Let's look at what does happen in a TTRPG. The system generates some result - lost hit points or whatever it might be. The system may also present some cues concerning how this result came about. And then - here is the critical bit - each player generates a picture in his or her own imagination of what exactly has happened in the game world.

No physical depiction of the action has been generated at all. The "movie scene" of what just happened exists only in the minds of the players playing the game - and those movies will all be different in minor or not-so-minor ways. No system, however detailed or stringent, will ever control completely the imaginations of the players as they generate their personal pictures of what has happened in game. This is a key point to understand, because it points to the reason and purpose of the game rules and mechanics.

Now, let's consider the degree to which a system defines the "how" of what happens in game.

Not defining the "how" at all seems immediately to be problematic, for two reasons. Firstly, it gives the players no clues at all about how to envision the scene - it presents a totally blank canvas (which begs the question why we are playing this game as opposed to any other). Secondly, and perhaps more seriously, it gives no clear guidance concerning the implications of the result of the outcome generated by the mechanics. It runs the risk of failing to communicate key features of the outcome that are due to the nature of the process that generated that outcome.

At the other end of the scale, defining in huge detail the process that leads to the outcome - for instance, detailing the exact path of the sword and evaluating its capability to pierce armour and skin, to slice flesh and break bones and determining which blood vessels it severs as it passes through* - generates at least two problems. Firstly, the sheer effort and volume of words required to write such a system for the majority of action types involved in even a quite focussed roleplaying game would be quite prohibitive. Secondly, the more detail is given about the process, the more likely it becomes that some players - especially players with knowledge pertinent to the subjects treated by the rules systems - will find the systems' outcomes hard to believe. Plausibility actually suffers with too much definition of process. As an example, talk of "swinging swords" and the very idea of such a thing as a hard divide between a "hit" and a "miss" are things that make no sense to me given the level of knowledge I have of medieval swordsmanship. Tell me an outcome and I can imagine a plausible route to that outcome no problems, but tell me about "misses" being so poorly directed as to "swoosh over the target's head" and I'm wondering what the bejeezus these guys are playing at.

I agree, anyone who knows anything about combat knows that most combatants are trading blows and blocking them, very rarely they completely whiz past without making any kind of contact at all.

So, given that these two ends to the scale are problematic, we are dealing with a point somewhere in the middle. It's similar to the "meat-to-chutzpah" scale for hit points in this sense - the ends of the continuum make no sense, so we pick a point in the middle. But that middle is a big place.

I pointed out above that TTRPG systems don't have to produce a physical representation of the action they adjudicate. No animation or similar representation is generated. That removes the neccessity for detailed process descriptions - but some folk nevertheless like them. This is, I think, the real difference of taste at issue, here. All that the actual play of a TTRPG requires is sufficient detail of outcome that clashes between what the players severally imagine to be the current situation in-game are minimised. This should be the baseline minimum any game system undertakes to provide. How much detailing of the process that leads to that outcome is provided is an aesthetic choice, but we should be aware that some players who like and even need that sort of thing will read such detail in apparently incidental words - let alone in such action-specific words as "hit" and "miss". The use of such words will be taken by some (many?) as the provision of process detailing, even if none is intended; such use ought, therefore, either (a) be avoided or (b) be used in such a way that they do, indeed, detail a process that is being dictated by the system.



*: Just as an aside, yes, I do know of a system that actually did this...

Which is why my thread was supposed to be about how we can get all groups into the same game by avoiding rules that pander to any single group (like straight up damage on a miss with a melee weapon).

 

[Balesir]

I think process-sim preferences are part of the explanation, but cannot be the whole of it, because if you really want process sim in your game then you need to abandon D&D combat resolution for some other system (RQ, RM, presumably Harn, Burning Wheel, etc) that actually correlates the outcome with a process.

Actually, in the case of Hârn I think you might be surprised. There is the possibility, for example, to get "Damage on a Miss"* in HârnMaster. If you roll a Marginal Failure and your opponent rolls a Critical Failure (which will happen, on average, 20% of the time she/he/it rolls a failure), there are several circumstances (attack-defence combinations) where you will inflict a potentially damaging strike. It's not very likely to result in a particularly serious wound, but it might conceivably render your opponent hors de combat. The system cross-references attack and defence roll results on a small (4x4) matrix to give a result - it doesn't really follow the physical process at all.


*: Although, interestingly, HM doesn't use the word "miss" for the die roll result at all - it uses "Critical Failure (CF), Marginal Failure (MF), Marginal Success (MS) and Critical Success (CS).

Wheres in D&D combat losing hit points is not itself any definite outcome in the fiction until the combat comes to an end. (Robin Laws is the first designer I know of who actually articulated this idea, in his advice on the narration of action point loss in HeroWars, but Gygax seems to have been implicitly aware of it in his remarks on hit points and abstract combat resolution in his DMG. How it fits in with ranged attacks has always been a bit mysterious - I don't think it's a coincidence that D&D-style RPGs tend to present melee combat as the core case and ranged attacks as secondary or derivative in various ways.)

Whilst I agree with you in finding that there is no coherent way to connect hit points to the fiction directly, there are clearly some folks that find a way in their mind to do so - at least, to do so well enough for them to shove the "problem" into a deep, dark recess from which it seldom emerges. This is a form of the "habituation" I was talking about, I guess. The "HP as meat" thread contains ample evidence of this - [MENTION=8461]Alzrius[/MENTION]' "scaling damage", for example, kinda-sorta reach a point where you could ignore the problems with hit points in process-sim for most of the time.

I think this links to why hit points (or their functional equivalent) are used in so many RPG rule sets - even ones that deliberately aim for process-sim support. Hit points may, when examined deeply, not work with process-sim activity, but they work well enough (if you squint) to get a pass most of the time, and, yay, we don't have to design an alternative system for wounds and recovery (or non-magical fear, or extreme mental stress, or pain, or...).

Furthermore, many players seem willing to leave their process-sim preferences at the door if they otherwise enjoy the play of a game element. On the current "Mirror Image in 3E" thread I think it's been established that correlating Mirror Image with the fiction is no easier, and in some cases perhaps harder, than correlating Come and Get It with the fiction. In response to this point I've been basically told to suck it up, apply the spell rules and play the game! Where's the process sim in that? And if it's good enough for Mirror Image, why not for CaGI?

Well, yeah, I don't pretend that all the criticism of 4E is based on anything rational - but I do think that D&D players who, for whatever reason, value process-sim and manage to rationalise/habituate themselves to the parts of D&D that do not jive with this are real. The question is, what to do about them?

The process sim objection - which, as I say, bites just as hard in Mirror Image adjudication, or in any hit point loss short of death - is in many cases, I think, a post facto rationalisation because people have the mistaken belief that "I don't like it" is not a good enough reason. Whereas I would have though that in hobby gaming "I don't like it" is in fact an excellent reason not to include a certain element (mechanical or story) in your game!

"I don't like it" is a perfectly good reason not to include something in your game, but what is (in general) being discussed, here, is "what should WotC designers include in the game they publish?" That's a very different question.

 

[pemerton]

what is (in general) being discussed, here, is "what should WotC designers include in the game they publish?" That's a very different question.

To which the answer is, surely, "Whatever their market research indicates will help them move the most units."

Which means that issues of market habituation are more important than (say) principled elegance of design.

 

[Balesir]

To which the answer is, surely, "Whatever their market research indicates will help them move the most units."

Maybe - it depends how long-term their planning horizon is and how thoughtful their strategists are. Granted, if they 'attain' the same level as a plurality of modern companies, that will mean "execrable" in both cases.

 

[Alzrius]

Whilst I agree with you in finding that there is no coherent way to connect hit points to the fiction directly, there are clearly some folks that find a way in their mind to do so - at least, to do so well enough for them to shove the "problem" into a deep, dark recess from which it seldom emerges. This is a form of the "habituation" I was talking about, I guess. The "HP as meat" thread contains ample evidence of this - [MENTION=8461]Alzrius[/MENTION]' "scaling damage", for example, kinda-sorta reach a point where you could ignore the problems with hit points in process-sim for most of the time.

I think this links to why hit points (or their functional equivalent) are used in so many RPG rule sets - even ones that deliberately aim for process-sim support. Hit points may, when examined deeply, not work with process-sim activity, but they work well enough (if you squint) to get a pass most of the time, and, yay, we don't have to design an alternative system for wounds and recovery (or non-magical fear, or extreme mental stress, or pain, or...).

That seems like a pretty good summary of what I was stating in the other thread. The idea of hit point loss as physical damage isn't perfect with regards to process-sim, but it holds up at a casual glance in the majority of the instances where it comes into play...at which point you can say "good enough," ignore the issues that come with examining the idea more deeply, and simply not bother to reconcile the comparatively few instances where that explanation doesn't work prima facie.

I've only skimmed this thread, so I may be wrong, but the idea of process-sim seems like a nod towards simulationism (hence the name), which I think a lot of people take too far, and in doing so reject a necessary level of gamism. Simulationism, at least where hit points and damage are concerned, is best served by being a new coat of paint, rather than a sturdy foundation (I think).

 

[Ahnehnois]

I don't think that any approach that doesn't fall under this vague and broad idea of process sim will ever be understood by enough of the gaming populace to make a real issue out of it. It's fun to play around with rpg mechanics and try different things, but virtually impossible for someone who isn't already an rpg scholar to wrap their head around them.

 

[billd91]

i guess my issue with bill91's point is that he's drawn an arbitrary line in the sand. Why does a success HAVE to come from the player who rolled it? Conversely, why do all failures start and end with the character that failed? Why can there never, ever be outside circumstances which cause me to succeed or fail?

I get the preference argument. Sure. But, that's just it. It's a preference thing. Fine and dandy, but, "I like it this way" isn't really a strong argument.

In other words, why can a failed attack never be caused by an ally of the target sticking out his shield?

They can but that would adjust the requirements of the trial, not be bandied about as an ad hoc reason for why the original trial failed to achieve success. Armed with reasonable feedback, the player whose attack failed can adjust his tactics to possibly prevent that from recurring. With arbitrary ad hoc interference, how meaningful are his choices? He may maneuver the target away from the guy with the shield in order to stop that from happening again, but it gives him no improvement in his chances of success. He's responding to the situation, but by responding to the ad hoc interference rather than anything really affecting his chances, he hasn't actually improved his chances and thus his efforts to respond have been rendered meaningless. There's no predictability to his choices.

 

[Obryn]

This also means doing away with 2 "attacks" simply because one is holding two weapons. If an "attack" is not mapped to a swing then it follows that allowing 2 "attacks" due to the presence of 2 weapons is sheer folly.

I just wanted to pick this out, because it's been one of my pet peeves for about 20 years now, and I agree 100%. The apex of this kind of silliness is double-sided weapons, imo.