And that is absolutely true. In real life, and at your table.
<snip>
If you insist that D&D is attempting to 'sim' the world as you understand it, then yes it is a miserable failure.
<snip>
D&D is not attempting to model your life, it is attempting to model a reality where elements that we would consider supernatural are common place parts of everyday life. Rather that insisting the system falls down because it fails to emulate what happens to you when you stub your toe, consider instead that it may be successfully emulating a world where people know that they will experince life after death with the same certainty you feel about tomorrows dawn. That they know that there is no wound short of death that cannot be healed with perfect recuperation with the aid of magic. It is a fictional reality and it follows fictional rules.
Sim, to you, seems to mean an attempt to model reality as we experience it. Which is fine but it's not the only meaning of the word. In fact that is a completely pointless exercise
<snip>
The sim-as-process joy that I get out of the game comes from not insisting that the rules are some kind of misbegotten tragedy that stand between me and my fun, but instead taking them at face value and seeing where they go.
This is an approach to simulationist gaming that I have never encountered except in the context of this forum. [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] is another proponent of it (I believe - of course I am happy to be corrected if I'm wrong).
Of course, almost
any RPG can be played as a simulationist game in this sense - for instance, on this approach there can be no objection to inspirational healing, because we are simply modelling a world in which "severed limbs can be shouted back on". (Those RPGs whose rules are
expressly meta-rules for regulating participant narrative authority - Prime Time Adventures is one example - are probably exceptions.) Interrupt actions literally correspond to modest time travel talents. Etc.
But this is not how D&D was designed. The features of D&D that [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] and I have called out as "non-simulationist" - hit points and healing; classes, levels and XP; pre-3E saving throws; etc - were not designed by Gygax to be treated as simulations. He expressly states the opposite in his DMG: hit points above 1st level are mostly meta; XP and levels are a game device, but we don't literally assume that,
in the game world, there is some magical connection between acquiring loot and increasing in prowess; and saving throws are explicitly given a fortune-in-the-middle interpretation, including the possibility of a successful save vs poison indicating a failure of the attack to penetrate the skin (which [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] already mentioned upthread, I think).
That's not a reason why you can't treat them differently: no one is saying that you have to follow the dictates of Gygax. But the classic simulationist games - Rolemaster, Runequest, Traveller, Chivalry & Sorcery, etc - were written by RPGers who took Gygax at his word. They accepted that, in the fiction of a fantasy RPG, we are to imagine causal processes to be unfolding in much the same way as they do in real life, unless magic is present. So, for instance, we are to assume that in-game humans learn much like real humans do; and then these games introduce PC build rules that require training or experience as a basis for acquiring and improving skills. We assume that swordplay and injury works much as it does in real life: so we introduce rules in which death and injury don't follow a logic of ablation, but rather follow a logic of attacking, parrying, and taking injuries that debilitate in various specific ways.
4E embraces and takes joy in anti-sim.
I (me, and me alone) hate it when a character gets beat up by ogres and then just bounces back with no recovery time or outside source of healing.
for example, a fighter could go through a day of adventure with nothing happening that crosses into the unfun elements as perceived by Bryon. (Some of these things probably would happen, but it certainly "could" be avoided for any given day). But if he ends up thrashed by Ogres and then that evening insto-recovers his HP then that is a big moment of intentionally designed and celebrated "asim".
That's no more non-sim than being beaten to 1 hp and receiving no penalties at all. D&D characters are unrealistically resilient, that way. Sure, in some eds, a dying character could 'stabilize' on his own get up, and be at full potential for all his attacks, checks, and so forth. That's just the level of abstraction - and, to some extent, of simulating genre - it went for.
In edition to Tony's point, there is the further issue - what does it mean to say "the fighter was thrashed by ogres"? Given that nothing in the game rules tells us the details of any injury suffered by the fighter, if we narrate ourselves into a corner and then complain about the outcome, to some extent we need to question our narrative practices. (The best practical advice I know of on this is found in Robin Laws HeroWars rulebooks.)
More generally, I don't think you can tell whether a game is "sim" or "non-sim" by looking at the fiction that it generates. From the ogre example, how do we tell whether the game was a sim one, in which the rules model really resilient fantasy warriors, or a non-sim one? We can't tell. All we can tell is that the game embraces certain genre tropes.
4e suggests that DC's be linked to level, although, they go a step further and suggest that the scenario reflect the level of the character. It's not that locks change DC depending on the level of the character but rather a higher level character will typically only find more difficult locks (or whatever it is you are trying to do).
I hate it when DCs can consistently and reliable be taken from a single page that covers almost everything.
Saying that 14 INT is not meaningful is a completely different matter to saying that a DC14 lock turns out to be DC 21 because a different character tried to open it.
If you are using the 4e DC chart in the way that Hussar described, then no DC14 lock turns out to be DC 21 because a different character tried to open it. Level-appropriate DCs are pegged to the fiction.
The game does take for granted that you won't have PCs of wildly varying levels adventuring together - if you do, then you can't really peg level-appropriate DCs to the fiction, because you can't pitch the fiction at a level of difficulty that is appropriate for both characters. The 4e rules deal with this issue by clearly advising that the game won't work very well if the PCs are of wildly varying levels - and it gives advice on the awarding of XP intended to prevent such a state of affairs accidentally coming up in game.
Of course, you don't have to always use the DC-by-level chart the way that Hussar describes. For instance, you might take the view that some particular task - say, successfully praying to a god for a certain sort of divine intervention - is just as hard for a high level PC as a low level PC. So you say that, for all characters, the DC is a level-appropriate Hard DC. In that case, a prayer that is DC 18 for one character might be DC 25 for another. But that is no different, as a mechanical feature, from the fact that being hit for 10 hp is fatal for some PCs but a mere scratch for others: as with the connection between the mechanical feature of hit points, and its meaning in the fiction, so the connection between the mechanical feature of the DC, and its meaning within the fiction, is relative to some other property of the character concerned (total hp, in one case; character level, in the other case).
Using the 4e DC chart in the way that Hussar describes need not be anti-sim at all: you peg certain fictional obstacles to certain DCs, and then you frame PCs of the appropriate level into those challenges. The 4e DMG actually takes just this approach to doors, portcullises and falling damage: it gives a chart of DCs by door type, and a rule for damage per distance fallen, and then advises for what level PCs it is appropriate to frame challenges containing certain sorts of door or certain heights of drop-off.
Using the 4e DC chart in a way in which DCs are character relative, though,
is anti-sim, in just the same way that hit points are. (For those who treat hp as sim, then of course the character-relativity of DCs could be similarly handled: there is some magical feature of the gameworld which means that higher level PCs encounter more heavenly "static" when they try to pray to the gods - perhaps their egos get in the way.)
I hate it when one brilliant move does not solve a problem then and there because the skill challange says 3 more successes are needed.
As I posted upthread, this is no different from the fact that no matter how brilliant a fighter's strike, it can't kill an ogre (or hill giant, or whatever) dead in a single blow. You noted the analogy but then said nothing further about it.
In D&D combat narration, as expounded by Gygax, the "solution" to the problem in the combat case is that there is a
reason, in the fiction, why the single blow can't kill the ogre. The fighter, despite (say) rolling a natural 20 to hit and maximum damage, nevertheless fails to strike the ogre in a vital spot. (Which the fighter could, of course, do with a minimally successful to hit roll and a 1 on the damage die, if the ogre has already been reduced to 1 hp.) In other words, failures and external complications are narrated in to explain why the ogre is not dead.
Narration of a skill challenge is no different. The player's conception of the move may have been brilliant, just as his/her conception of the strike against the ogre. But if the dice plus successes remaining dictate that the challenge has not been overcome, then the GM's job is to narrate in some sort of failure of external complication that accounts for that.
This is standard fortune-in-the-middle stuff. It's not simulationist, at least in process/purist-for-system sense. But it has been a part of D&D's combat system ever since the beginning. Which I think is [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s point: how can a game which is non-sim in such an obvious way (no matter how good a fighter's strike, s/he can't kill the ogre dead, simply because the ogre is in the metagame state of having full hit points) be put forward as a serious sim vehicle?
