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

[mlund]

Ideally, however, you want the player to say things like "I swing low in an attempt to disembowel the goblin". Then, once you've determined the results, the DM can come back with "You succeed in cutting deep and his entrails hit the floor" for a high damage hit or "The goblin jumps back far enough to avoid your slice" for a miss or "The goblin parries most of the attacks energy with his blade but winces in pain from doing so" for a low damage miss (high and low damage being dependent on how much of the goblin's hit points were taken by the damage roll).

My alternative view is that the idea situation is the player says, "Gongar attacks at the goblin!" while rolling Atk + Damage dice. When the dice turn up a successful attack and the damage is talley the DM says, "That's a hit and he's bad off, but still alive," to which the player says, "Gongar's series of windmill swings finally catches the goblin full in the shoulder, spraying blood and bone! Screaming in pain, its eyes show the feral desperation of a cornered beast."

Because ideally there is no absolute demarcation of "players describe character agency and DM's monopolize everything else."

It's even easier if monster AC and HP aren't hidden from players like it's some sort of competition between parties with incomplete knowledge.

- Marty Lund

 

[I'm A Banana]

But, KM, isn't that ultimately limiting? You can only state, "I attack with my axe" and the only result can be, "You hit with your axe" or "You miss with your axe". At no point can you say, "I attack with my axe" and have the result be, "You almost hit him, but, his buddy parries you".

Sure it can. That's a level of detail that comports just fine with "you miss with your axe."

It's especially enforced if, say, his buddy has an ability that increases the AC of those near him (either as a passive thing or as an interrupt or whatever).

When you insist that any player action must be directly linked to that player and nothing else (whether player or NPC), then you lose out on a lot of options.

Once you allow that other events can occur, then narration is a lot more free. It could be a straight line cause/effect, or it could be due to other factors.

I'm only insisting on character actions driving mechanical resolution rather than mechanical results dictating character actions. She tried to hit the goblin with an axe, but didn't because the goblin's friend parried the blow? No reason that doesn't work.

You roll an attack roll and miss and describe it as "Oh, my character decided to concentrate on defense and didn't really attack," and I start to raise my eyebrow.

 

[Mistwell]

Here, this solves it:

Great weapon fighter:

If you miss, make a second attack with a bonus to hit equal to your strength score (not your bonus, your score). If you hit with this second attack, it does your strength bonus as damage (and just your strength bonus) and cannot be modified by anything else.

There, same exact result, different process description.

 

[mlund]

I'm only insisting on character actions driving mechanical resolution rather than mechanical results dictating character actions. She tried to hit the goblin with an axe, but didn't because the goblin's friend parried the blow? No reason that doesn't work.

You roll an attack roll and miss and describe it as "Oh, my character decided to concentrate on defense and didn't really attack," and I start to raise my eyebrow.

But "My character couldn't find a good opening in the enemy's defenses this round (6 seconds) despite circling, jabbing, and feinting - maybe next round," works perfectly well to describe a failed attack roll. As does a series of blows the glance off ineffectually from armor, a shield, or parries.

And likewise when a sword blow "hits" a guy in plate mail for half his hit points (sucessful d20 roll and significant ratio of damage roll vs. HP) arms and legs aren't coming off. Flesh-wounds aren't being carved out either. Because that's not how plate vs. swords works. Someone just ended up bad-off in the fight - probably a visible combination of a series of blunt trauma and strain - possibly an invisible component of luck running out and fear or pain impeding their survival skills. Another dice-result like that is going to indicate they were felled in combat.

Two exactly identical dice results and action declarations prior to rolling, but two completely different narrative "cause and effect" descriptions due to the HP totals changing round-by-round.

- Marty Lund

 

[amerigoV]

Yeah, that kind of stuff really gets the eyes rolling. When injuries that are impossible to have occur in play and could be trivially healed if they DID happen get trotted out as plot devices, the integrity of the game world takes a huge hit. Its one of the reasons that a world in which there is nothing that can't be cured by a night's sleep make any scenario dependent on the incapacity of another next to impossible to implement.

To a degree, I can get by it if we are talking "normal" NPCs. But Adventurer-like NPCs should generally follow the same rules in principle (not necessarily to the letter of the law - that is too much work).

I got a chance to check which module. Its is Dead in the Eye, Levels 8-10 for 4e. We never get the stats for Arak "Broken Arm" Logan of the Black Arrows. The set up has a few other problems besides broken arms. His mission is to defeat the warped beholder "at all costs". Past encounters with the Far Realm has given him a "burning desire to destroy all aberrant creatures." We are not sure how many Black Arrows are around, but they are setting up fortifications around the cave opening. He is also "very concerned" about some other of his Black Arrows that have not returned from scouting the cave. But as soon as the PCs show up, he wants them to do the dirty work while they "hold the line". NPCs now are conveniently out of the way. You might as well just put a yellow "?" over his head

While the setup is classic in the sense of needing the PCs to be the heroes, the direction of the NPC's motivations and actions are very mixed. Its not just a D&D hp thing, but that was the first thing that jumped out at me when I read the set up.

 

[billd91]

Here, this solves it:

Great weapon fighter:

If you miss, make a second attack with a bonus to hit equal to your strength score (not your bonus, your score). If you hit with this second attack, it does your strength bonus as damage (and just your strength bonus) and cannot be modified by anything else.

There, same exact result, different process description.

That's more than just a different process description. That's a substantially different process that still preserves the potential to completely miss. As such, I think it would be a much better alternative to hitting on a miss.

 

[Gorgoroth]

That's more than just a different process description. That's a substantially different process that still preserves the potential to completely miss. As such, I think it would be a much better alternative to hitting on a miss.

It's still a hack.

Consider that Archery style gives +1 to hit. This gives +16 to hit for 1st level fighters.
Consider that the best fighter, a level 20 fighter, has a +14 to hit maximum, and that's WITH a legendary epic weapon.

The first level, apprentice fighter / gweefer with a broom handle gets +16 to hit. Why? Just because.

Why use strength score instead of strength modifier? Just because. I'm not trying to sound snarky here, but his proposal here elaborates PRECISELY why GWF violates bounded accuracy, common sense, logic. If you replace it with a mechanically identical version (in terms of damage output), but one with a different narrative, you still nevertheless have issues such as why first level fighters are given a fighting style which gives them 95% accuracy on every single attack of their entire career.

Yes, it's better than 100% success rate (or 0% miss rate) as the current version, but it's still quite terrible.

I read this thread and it occurs to me that several people do not grok why D&D gives agency to the dice to determine, in a binary fashion, the outcomes of success / fail trials, which are inherently binary. To damage a foe with your sword, is it a necessary (but not sufficient) condition that it made a physical connection. Tiring someone out is not referred to as "damage", in casual use of that word, and so that means you are forced to use game jargon which doesn't mesh with the narrative.

It's not that you need to think about how to interpret GWF, you have to use double-think to rationalize it, because it's clearly nonsense. And one cannot narrate nonsense in a consistent fashion without breaking something else, like ripples in the pond, the story will suffer and retconning will happen.

To wit: the failure of an attack can lead to the target of that attack's death. The goal of the attack is to injure or kill the foe, so if it succeeds in that, it could not have been a failed attack. I think these discussions go around in circles because people cannot accept that they are clearly, black and white wrong on a very basic logical level. At that point, it is more productive to argue that 2+2 = 5, or whether anthropomorphic climate change exists with someone who believes the earth is 6000 years old and that The Flintstones, humans co-existing with dinosaurs, was historically accurate. It's an exercise in pure futility.

 

[Gorgoroth]

I'd like to note that any time you have a model of a process, such as "An attempt to perform X action, with Y chance of success due to various factors such as your proficiency, the assigned difficulty, various other bonuses or penalties factored in", is not sufficient to make a simulation.

You need a model, AND random variables (in this case, Dice rolls. Those are the magic sauce that turns D&D into a simulation. Any time you lose the agency of the dice, you're no longer in a simulation, but a story on rails) and fed into the model and see what kind of patterns emerge. This is what we do when we analyze things like DPR. We assume that all faces of the D20 and W have equal likelihood of occurrence, and the plug that into to the various formulae to find expected values. That's not the same thing, at all, as saying "my character kills the ogre", which is precisely what GWF allows the player to do without any say of the D20. It is, in fact, reducing D&D from a simulation to a mere story where player fiat is used via Deus Ex Machina to determine the narrative. A player simply walks up to his foe and says "I hurt him", or "I kill him". And it happens. Period. No input from the dice. It's an affront to what D&D fundamentally is.

D&D combat is a simulation of a process (indeed, saying "of a process" is redundant"). Combats between humanoids of various sizes and strengths and heights and speeds and agility, occur in real life. D&D's model takes into account combat offensive/defensive proficiency, armor, strength, agility, weapon size and type, the opponent's health, effects of blocking or parrying (such as Protector or Defensive style) etc. One can easily substitute an orc for a strong, tall human, and say that two humans are fighting, one with a spear and the other with a sword and armor.

Saying something does not make it true or false. Asserting D&D is not a simulation does not make it so. I wonder how many on this forum have ever written an actual simulation and so would have any credibility to claim that they know how to identify one when they see it. Of course since our real life backgrounds are verboten here, we are left with people making bold statements without merit and have a very socialistic / communistic "all statements are true or mere opinion, and backgrounds are irrelevant when discussing credibility, because some people claiming expertise in certain areas is unfair".

 

[howandwhy99]

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.

Actually virtually every game in existence works this way. Games have fields of play. In D&D this is hidden behind the DM screen. Players decode through play and improvisation. In a storygame there is no field, but an emptiness filled by every participating author, including the "game" author, largely because no one actually "plays" in those "games" seeing as the latter is absent and without it play in a game is possible.

In D&D, The referee has the map behind the screen to add her in her imagining of what is actually happening in the game world. The other players are creating their own imaginary or drawn maps to help them to better understand it. What I believe you are doing here is denying the imagination as actual.

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.

RPG systems don't control the players they tell the referees what to relay to the players during play. Players are struggling to understand that system, but, yeah, hardcore gamers prefer more complex ones generally speaking to easier ones. Your key point is in denial of the very act of what people do when playing a game: deciphering its underlying code to best reach the game's objective(s).

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.

RPG Players should never, under any circumstances, have access to the game system the referee has selected prior to the campaign. To do so would potentially risk losing all game play and and turn into script following. "I saw the maze. Follow me." a.k.a. the walkthrough.

 

[Umbran]

Of course since our real life backgrounds are verboten here

Where did you get that idea?

Appeal to authority is weak rhetoric in that even experts can be wrong. If you *need* the claim of expertise to get people to accept what you say, then your argument really isn't all that sound. But there's no board rules preventing you from giving your background.

Of course, if you should lay claim to a relevant background, folks may ask you to prove you actually have that background. You can choose not to give them personal information, but then you can expect that your claims may be taken with a grain of salt. All the more reason to write as if you weren't going to assert authority.

we are left with people making bold statements without merit and have a very socialistic / communistic "all statements are true or mere opinion, and backgrounds are irrelevant when discussing credibility, because some people claiming expertise in certain areas is unfair".

Again, with the politics. Enough, already.