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

[ExploderWizard]

Also, if we want simulation of real injuries, 1st AD&D "natural healing" won't do it. No amount of natural healing will regrow a severed digit or limb, will set a bad fracture, will reinsert entrails and reseal the tissue of the abdominal cavity, etc.

Specific injuries in most cases were never part of the abstract game to begin with, thus hit points.

Somewhere along the way, the decision was made to treat hit points as a tactical resource rather than a strategic one. This has the side effect of making them appear more as superhero stun points than anything else. The longer healing times weren't more "realistic" or anything like that. Realism headed for the door at the mention of hit points.

In the early game, taking the risk of hit point loss was a more strategic decision. Combat was very lethal and those that hurled themselves into such activity relentlessly would often spend more time rolling up new characters than playing. At some point someone thought it would be a good idea to feature thoughtless charges into combat as a winning strategy. In order for that to happen, hit point pools needed to get larger, and recovery of such easier and and faster. Thus the hit point as a more tactical resource.


This of course brings about its own set of problems. Why won't the PCs talk to anyone or negotiate? Why are they such bloodthirsty savages? Why do they charge into a fight without considering any options?

Quite simply, because they can. The rules of the game determine what is or isn't a good move. A game rewards the type of action its rules support. Therefore as long as hit points are an easily replenished tactical resource expect players to treat them as such.

 

[Alzrius]

If people are suspending their process-sim inclinations at that point, what is their principled objection to others being willing to suspend them at different points - eg not to worry that (under the current approach) the gamerules don't make room for a GWF who is unable to wear down a foe given 6 seconds of melee contact?[/i]

First things first, I don't think anyone has an objection to "others being willing" to do anything; the debate is about what the game rules are suggesting, not that anyone is having badwrongfun. That's a small distinction to make, but an important one.

Secondly, regarding not worrying about rules that don't make room for being unable to...to...

Triple-negative! Unable to follow! Abort! Abort!

Okay, presuming I'm understanding the second half of that sentence correctly, you want to know why I have no problem suspending disbelief - or rather, suspending any expectation of simulationism - with regards to natural healing, but not with damage on a miss?

That's a multi-part answer. The first part is "screen-time." Natural healing is a comparatively rare thing, in terms of how often it happens to the PCs. Most healing tends to be magical spike-healing, whether via a (divine) spellcaster or from magic items. Admittedly, some natural healing does still happen, but nowhere near as often (to say nothing of how it will often take place after magical healing has commenced - to cover any remaining hit point loss after the cure spells have been used - and so can be hand-waved as taking care of what few bruises and scratches are left).

In other words, natural healing is a corner-case, and simply doesn't happen often enough to seriously hurt my sense of immersion-via-simulation. (Notice also that I mentioned how often this applies specifically to the PCs. That this is more common for background NPCs doesn't make it happen any more often "on screen," and hence isn't any more directly noticeable, and so doesn't impact that suspension of disbelief).

Damage on a miss, on the other hand, is happening in every single fight. In fact, it's happening multiple times in a given fight. It's hard to ignore something that impinges on your sense of simulationism when it's going on constantly. Rarities can be ignored, but commonalities must be addressed.

The second part is that I think that the expectation of "process-sim as realism" is (rather ironically) an unrealistic expectation. D&D's simulationism isn't trying to model the real world so much as it is trying to model the real world as portrayed in an action movie. The PCs are expected to operate not on the same logic that applies to you or me, but to that of Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or Sly Stallone in any of their action flicks. Hence, major wounds are never so serious that they can't "play through the pain."

The problem with damage on a miss is that doesn't apply towards that action movie mentality. The bad guys don't go down because you've near-missed them often enough to tire them out, let alone punched them in the luck so many times that now you can finally hit them directly. Likewise, if you want to say that "damage on a miss" means landing a very light blow, then that's fine; just don't give it the counterintuitive moniker of "damage on a miss"!

Also, if we want simulation of real injuries, 1st AD&D "natural healing" won't do it. No amount of natural healing will regrow a severed digit or limb, will set a bad fracture, will reinsert entrails and reseal the tissue of the abdominal cavity, etc.

Hence why we don't want simulation of real injuries (that's leaving aside the obvious solution of "don't narrate the physical damage of hit point loss as specific severe injuries that we know require serious medical attention and long-term rehabilitation"). Rather, I was saying I'd prefer slightly more realism...maybe enough to go from "action movie" to "gritty action movie" in that one particular area, but no more.

 

[Hussar]

Specific injuries in most cases were never part of the abstract game to begin with, thus hit points.

Somewhere along the way, the decision was made to treat hit points as a tactical resource rather than a strategic one. This has the side effect of making them appear more as superhero stun points than anything else. The longer healing times weren't more "realistic" or anything like that. Realism headed for the door at the mention of hit points.

In the early game, taking the risk of hit point loss was a more strategic decision. Combat was very lethal and those that hurled themselves into such activity relentlessly would often spend more time rolling up new characters than playing. At some point someone thought it would be a good idea to feature thoughtless charges into combat as a winning strategy. In order for that to happen, hit point pools needed to get larger, and recovery of such easier and and faster. Thus the hit point as a more tactical resource.


This of course brings about its own set of problems. Why won't the PCs talk to anyone or negotiate? Why are they such bloodthirsty savages? Why do they charge into a fight without considering any options?

Quite simply, because they can. The rules of the game determine what is or isn't a good move. A game rewards the type of action its rules support. Therefore as long as hit points are an easily replenished tactical resource expect players to treat them as such.

What version of D&D are you talking about? Because, even by Moldvay Basic D&D, it was perfectly reasonable to treat HP as a tactical, rather than strategic resource. The lethality of AD&D is way overblown IMO. Good grief, by the time your character was 3rd level, you could pretty much blow through any similarly HD opponent. Groups were presumed to be small armies - you had 6-8 PC's, plus easily a half dozen henchmen plus another half dozen hirelings plus assorted pets and whatnot.

The monsters were so pitifully weak pound for pound, that you had to double or triple team PC's just to give a significant threat. There's a reason those encounters in Keep on the Borderlands feature twenty or so humanoids in a single encounter. Smaller groups were just a speed bump.

Look, a 1st level Basic Fighter has a 3 AC (plate mail was easily affordable). The baddies have a THAC0 (yes, I know it wasn't called that in B/E) of 19 or 20. That means the fighter is getting hit about 1 in 4 attacks. The baddies are averaging about 3 HP of damage per hit (all weapons do d6 damage). Three fighters can stand toe to toe with 10 orcs and have a pretty darn good chance of winning that fight.

By the time 1e comes around, with clerics starting with (generally) 3 1st level spells at 1st level, suddenly healing isn't that big of a deal. Move forward into 2e and your 2e group is cakewalking the Caves of Chaos.

The idea that somehow the game got "easier" with 3e is just so insulting. Like "real men" play AD&D and the rest of us are stuck in the kiddie pool. It's baseless and ludicrously easy to disprove.

 

[I'm A Banana]

The loss of hit points is represented most viscerally by a notation on a piece of paper. That is caused by a die roll mediated through someone's brain and thereby interpreted as a certain sort of "move" in a game. The die roll is in turn triggered by an action declaration, typically "I attack it".

Whether or not that notation on a piece of paper also represents something in the shared fiction of the game is a further question. Many people take the view that not all such notations do represent something. For instance, many people doubt that writing down XP totals actually represents something in the fiction. Similarly, I don't think anyone thinks that initiative scores represent anything in the fiction (they're just a metagame ranking device for making the action economy work).

Sure, XP represents something in the fiction: the gaining of experience that leads you to being stronger, better, faster, etc. Your character at 100 XP is different in the fiction than your character at 10,000 XP. It's the Hero's Journey (or some other character development) as a point total! At the very least it represents the amount of story that has happened to the character.

And Initiative represents something in the fiction, too: who acts before who in the attempt to beat someone else to the punch.

Given that reducing the hit point total does move the target closer to defeat, we can confidently say that a hit point loss represents that much, namely, that the opponent who made the attack - ie who engaged the target in combat - has pushed the target closer to defeat. Whether the hit point loss corresponds to any discrete injury is not a question we can answer just from considering the mechanical situation (unless of course the hit point loss reduces the target to 0 hp). It seems to me largely a matter of taste.

In basic D&D, this kind of "defeat" is equal to physical, corporeal death. Something that defeats a creature by reducing its HP is something that can kill that creature. It's not a matter of taste: the rules dictate what happens at 0 hp, and it is exactly one kind of defeat, and that is death (or, depending on how gentle your dying rules, damn close to it).

If you wanna play with other defeat conditions at 0 hp, that's awesome, but it's clearly giving up the claim of being basic/traditional/classic D&D. Which is fine (that label can do more harm than good), but it probably be something you want to enable as an option, not something you assume everyone is doing just by playing D&D. In designing D&D (as opposed to any other RPG), death is what you need to assume is at risk of happening at 0 hp in pretty much everyone's game (and an option to change that is certainly worth consideration).

D&Dnext seems to default to the assumption that if you're not bloodied yet, then hit point loss does not correlate with injury, but if you are it does. That doesn't particularly suit my taste, and I think it can cause some other wonkiness, but it's not an obviously flawed approach. Others who want to argue that every hit point loss event at the table corresponds to an injury event in the fiction are of course free to take that approach, but I don't think the mechanics in any way mandate, or even speak in favour of, that approach rather than the D&Dnext default or (what I take to be) the 4e default that the only injuries are those which correspond to condition infliction (including "bloodied" and "dying") as opposed to simple hit point loss.

As long as HP loss can kill you, things that cause HP loss need to be potentially deadly. Playing around with other "conditions" can be cool, but by that point you're giving up claims of being traditional D&D. Which is awesome, but not something that should be expected of every group.

The mechanic only exists to resolve the question of "I do X. What Y happens?" The mechanics do not resolve the question of "Y happened. What X did I do?"

Says who? (Other than you, obviously.)

Causality, mostly. With a dash of player empowerment.

Gygax clearly had a different view, in relation to attack rolls: you don't know exactly what you did until attack and damage are resolved; and in relation to saving throws, where again you don't know exactly what you did until the saving throw is resolved. And it's not as if Gygax didn't know a thing or two about how D&D mechanics might work!

I've probably never played D&D As Gygax Intended. I'm not even 100% convinced that Gary played D&D As Gygax Intended. One of the big strengths of the game is that there's no One True Way!

You can treat it that way. I think it's most neutrally interpreted as answering the question, "As I engage the goblin in melee while wielding a sword, who is being worn down?"

That doesn't sound like a game of action and adventure, to me. It sounds like what happens during a tough day at the office.

Without that try, there's no roll of the dice. There's no outcome to resolve if there is no cause that creates the potential outcome.

You can treat it that way. Or I could say: without that conflict, there's no roll of the dice. Nothing in the mechanics speaks in favour of your treatment over mine.

Your treatment is a subset of mine. Without action, there's no conflict.

The player announced what his character hopes for - say, defeating the goblin in melee - and the resolution tells you to what degree, if any, that hope was realised.
...
Sure, the player does a thing. That may or may not correspond to the character doing a thing at the same time that correlates in any meaningful way. The player can declare "I roll an attack". In the fiction, that corresponds to "My guy engages that guy in combat and tries to defeat him", but in D&D at least it's hard to be much more specific than that until the action is resolved.

If the player hopes to defeat the goblin in melee, they best be doing something to accomplish that goal. Hoping at it isn't going to do squat.

What does that engagement look like? What do you do, specifically, to engage the creature? What are you trying to do, specifically, now, in the moment, here with the goblin in front of you snarling and the sweat on your brow and the stink of its warren permeating your nostrils. Give me some concrete actiion.

It's a rule from improv: be specific. Be present. Make statements. Give detail. The more concrete things that people have to hang their vision of the scene on, the better anchored everyone is to make future decisions. The less detailed and specific and realized a given action is, the more nebulous and wobbly it all is, the less you suspend your disbelief, the less "real" it feels, the closer we all are to realizing we're grown adults sitting around a table pretending to be magical elves.

Hey, maybe some groups have a lower threshold for that suspension of disbelief, or prefer to play the game at a higher level of remove, or whatever. But I don't think the rules can presume that most people can live with nebulous general goal statements. Certainly an audience at an improv show wouldn't be able to live with "I hope to defeat this opposition!" for very long before they just want to see someone do something.

I want to encourage my players at every turn to take definitive, discrete action, to do a thing, so that I can respond, and so that we can get on with it. If the player can't pass the Journalism 101 test when they declare their action (Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?), it's not useful to me. It doesn't give me anything specific to work with to inform my response.

This seems to presume that the output is determined before the input, that we know the effect before we know the cause

Correct. Unless your PC is wielding a vorpal sword, until you roll the damage roll, and we thereby learn whether or not the enemy has been reduced to 0 hp, we can't know whether or not your blow struck his/her neck with enough force to sever it.

But we can know that your PC tried to cut off the enemy's head. Just because we don't know the success of an action before dice are rolled doesn't mean we don't know what actions were taken.

But nothing in either the general idea of RPG mechanics, nor in the particular design of D&D mechanics, pushes in favour of your preferred approach. You might wish that D&D was a different sort of system (perhaps more like Runequest, say). But it's not. Gygax's way isn't the only way, but it's not like he was wrong about how his game system was meant to work.

The only points I have in my favor as a default are points of psychology and D&D history: Injury makes you die, and specific is more interesting and grounding than general.

Which isn't to say that's what it's always tethered to. That's just probably what the game should embrace as a default, IMO.

 

[TwoSix]

Chess and Go aren't D&D. They are finite games with no hidden information, but they are still designed to enable game play.

Yes! That is the heart and soul of gaming the game in D&D. Not just determining AC of course, but you get the idea.

Which is why you're not looking to play an RPG, but a storygame. Those lines are standard dialogue in D&D because they are basically what actually happens when the game is ran and played.

Except this example doesn't include any game play in it. Not to mention the player is declaring attempted actions that actually would alter his odds for the roll after he has made his roll. Not cool. Read my first post. There are no narrative resolution mechanics in D&D as it is designed like any standard game. Not a storygame.

Except the DM tracks everything behind screen so the players can improve their game play by logging what they want to on their side of the screen. This is basic D&D stuff. What you're talking about is shared storytelling, which has never been part of games.

Just out of curiosity, is there a convention where all the people who formulate exclusionary definitions go to together? Or do you just meet up for pizza?

 

[TwoSix]

This of course brings about its own set of problems. Why won't the PCs talk to anyone or negotiate? Why are they such bloodthirsty savages? Why do they charge into a fight without considering any options?

Quite simply, because they can. The rules of the game determine what is or isn't a good move. A game rewards the type of action its rules support. Therefore as long as hit points are an easily replenished tactical resource expect players to treat them as such.[/QUOTE]
I think it causes a conflict in older games, where the goal of the adventure is to either obviate or endure encounters to achieve the desired outcome of acquiring treasure and experience. In newer games, the experience and treasure are simply pacing mechanisms on the true goal, which is to play through encounters. Hit points became a tactical resource because people wanted to play through a tactical encounter. Because for many of us, combat is fun. Dramatic confrontations and negotiations are fun. Logistics and strategy? Not so fun.

 

[Alzrius]

Just out of curiosity, is there a convention where all the people who formulate exclusionary definitions go to together? Or do you just meet up for pizza?

If you're not a member, you're not allowed to know.

 

[Balesir]

What is completely implausible to me, is that this sort of argumentation leads to a better game for the majority of people. It leads to complications that for the vast majority of people is tedious if not outright repulsive.

You're totally entitled to like that stuff, and I might like it too under certain circumstances. But with that approach, any model you come up with can be subject to similar criticism.

The last sentence, here, is kind of/sort of what I have come to think and why. No model will not be subject to such criticism as long as you keep trying to model the process.

The same prediliction is what will lead to complication. The process in the game world must, to be in the slightest bit plausible, be complicated. If you want to model that process by stepping through it, the system you create will be complex.

There are two obvious ways around this. The first is to plump for a simple but highly implausible process as "what happens in this game world" and then argue endlessly over the bizarre implications that has for the game world. The second is not to try to model the process.

To me, the second approach seems like a much better option, but that leaves a conflict with a signififcant number of people who seem to feel that they need the process to be modelled step-by-step for some reason.

Consider this "system":

We model a fight by listing the outcomes. We might settle on this list:

- One combatant is dead, the other is fine.

- One combatant is dead, the other is wounded.

- Both combatants are wounded and exhausted, but neither is dead.

Now, we simply define a range of die rolls that corresponds to each of these outcomes.

This would be a very simple system. We could even make it moderately realistic by examining real fight outcomes, and we could give a nod to the "game" elements by stipulating how the die roll will be modified for the combatants' respective skills and physiques, their tactical position and whatever else takes our fancy. We have a "simulation" that simulates for us the outcome of combats in our imaginary world. It has the advantage that everyone witnessing the simulation in action can imagine for themselves the process that led to the outcome; no complexity or handwaving of unconvincing elements is needed - everyone can come up with a process that satisfies their needs for verisimilitude and/or faithfulness to genre.

But, this method has one big weakness. If the combatants are played by participants as is normal in an RPG, then they have no "locus of control" - they can make no decisions during the simulated fight that might influence its outcome. They miss the fun of "playing the game".

My own conclusion from this is that breaking down the system into "steps" is useful only in so far as it allows the players to make decisions about their character's actions. In this light, breaking out a step that determines if an attack "hit" and then separately determining "damage" is unhelpful - possibly, as in the case of the DoaM "debate", counterproductive. A single step of process - or a multi-step process that is clearly divorced from the "fighting" process going on in the imagined game world - might be more helpful. That way, "damage on a miss" would not even be a consideration, since there would be no such thing as a "miss".

 

[pemerton]

Somewhere along the way, the decision was made to treat hit points as a tactical resource rather than a strategic one.

<snip>

In the early game, taking the risk of hit point loss was a more strategic decision.

I agree with this. [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION] and I, on a thread last year (? or thereabouts) observed that in 4e in particular this change in the function of hit points makes quite a difference to how the GM can narrate improvised consequences in terms of hit point loss.

even by Moldvay Basic D&D, it was perfectly reasonable to treat HP as a tactical, rather than strategic resource. The lethality of AD&D is way overblown IMO.

I think the lethality at 1st level could still be pretty high - I remember killing off lots of 1st level Basic PCs - though AD&D was more generous with its -10 back door.

But I think the "strategic not tactical" issue is more about the availability of healing than the severity of damage. In Basic, for intance, a 1st level cleric doesn't even have a cure spell: s/he is a slightly weak fighter who can turn undead.

The idea that somehow the game got "easier" with 3e is just so insulting. Like "real men" play AD&D and the rest of us are stuck in the kiddie pool. It's baseless and ludicrously easy to disprove.

I didn't read the post that way, though maybe I just missed some subtext.

I haven't played enough 3E to comment, but I don't find 4e "easier". But it is different. I strongly prefer it, myself. There are the change in the dynamics of hit points for improvised consequences: for instance, at 1st level I could throw in 1d6 or 1d10 of psychic backlash damage for a failed skill check to identify some magical effect and it works to convey stakes and flavour without making the character have to cower at the rear during the next combat. And there's also the fact that I find combat with significant swings - PCs being pushed to the edge but then roused by the inspiration of their friends - more dramatic both at the story/thematic level, and also at the practical/tactical level. AD&D doesn't tend to deliver that same experience.

 

[pemerton]

The process in the game world must, to be in the slightest bit plausible, be complicated. If you want to model that process by stepping through it, the system you create will be complex.

There are two obvious ways around this. The first is to plump for a simple but highly implausible process as "what happens in this game world" and then argue endlessly over the bizarre implications that has for the game world. The second is not to try to model the process.

To me, the second approach seems like a much better option

I don't know that I agree with "much better" - I quite enjoy the (obviously somewhat pseudo-) process-sim of games like RM, RQ and BW Fight!

But I agree with the first two paragraphs, and instead of "much better" option would go for "extremely viable option".

Consider this "system":

We model a fight by listing the outcomes. We might settle on this list:

- One combatant is dead, the other is fine.

- One combatant is dead, the other is wounded.

- Both combatants are wounded and exhausted, but neither is dead.

Now, we simply define a range of die rolls that corresponds to each of these outcomes.

This would be a very simple system. We could even make it moderately realistic by examining real fight outcomes, and we could give a nod to the "game" elements by stipulating how the die roll will be modified for the combatants' respective skills and physiques, their tactical position and whatever else takes our fancy.

I think you just described Burning Wheel's "Bloody Versus" quick melee resolution system.

this method has one big weakness. If the combatants are played by participants as is normal in an RPG, then they have no "locus of control" - they can make no decisions during the simulated fight that might influence its outcome. They miss the fun of "playing the game".

My own conclusion from this is that breaking down the system into "steps" is useful only in so far as it allows the players to make decisions about their character's actions.

But I think it's highly doubtful that those decisions have to be realised in any sort of process-sim fashion. It can be about expressing local bits of intention, for example ("I want to move combatant X from here to there") and then having a resolution system that permits that.

This also prompts me to add a new hypothesis to the one in your OP: a certain number of RPGers seem to think that fictional positioning can't be relevant to resolution unless resolution follows a process-sim model. I think that's obviously wrong (I'm thinking, for instance, of 4e skill challenges I've run, or of Marvel Heroic RP), but it seems to be a reasonably widely held view.

(The connection between the above two paras: it can make a difference that I move combatant X from here to there - ie change the fictional positioining - even if the resolution is not itself process sim resolution. For instance, "over there" might be inside the teleport circle, in which case on his/her next turn the player of the mage can declare "I activate the teleporter".)