Working towards clarity here.
<snip>
(No axe to grind here - I just want to see the term get defined better.)
That's clear.
I
do have an axe to grind - I think that an RPG can be an excellent RPG without being a sim RPG (and I also think some sim RPGs are excellent RPGs too) - but I think that I can put that particular axe to one side for this fragment of the conversation!
So: a system in which two armies clash and casualties assessed is not sim.
A system in which two fighters stand toe to toe, some dice are rolled and one fighter is declared dead is not sim.
I want to say: from what you've said, we can't tell. We need more information about the games in question.
Before you say "Bloody hell, he's just weaseling out of things", let me explain. (At length, sorry, with detailed examples.)
In a wargame, the elements of the fiction on which we are focusing, and hence the causal processes that we are trying to simulate, are probably not individual soldiers. We are probably focusing on units, on commanders, on logistics, on relatively high-level tactics.
So to work out whether or not the game is sim, we need to know whether or not it generates descriptions of the ingame fiction
at the level of description on which we are focusing in playing the game. So if the game tells us all about the logistics of the two armies, factors in the qualities of their commanders, has regard to unit-level tactics, etc, then there is a good chance it will count as a sim game. In summary, the use of its mechanics to resolve action declarations also generates descriptions of the fiction that we care about in the playing of the game (eg we can tell how logistics made a difference, or how the holding back of strategic reserves turned out to be an error, or that it was the charisma of the commander holding the troops together that turned the tide of battle).
By way of contrast: you might adapt Risk to resolve a wargame component of an RPG. That could be a completley fine resolution system, but it would in no way count as sim, because from the resolution in risk you can't work out what happened in the fiction at the level of logistics, unit-level tactics, command decisions, etc. It's all just a black box.
Turning now to your two fighter who stand toe-to-toe, some dice are rolled, and one is dead and the other not. To know whether or not this is sim, I want to know how the dice were worked out. For instance, what you describe can happen in RQ: the attacker rolls an attack, and succeeds; the defender rolls a parry, and fails; the attacker then rolls hit location and damage; the defender subtracts armour, and N points go through; and let's suppose it's N points to the head and is enough to be fatal.
That's sim. We know what happened; one guy swung at the other guy's head, the other guy failed to parry, and was therefore killed by the blow.
Burning Wheel has a different style of one-roll combat resolution, called Bloody Versus. Each player splits his/her weapon skill into two pools: attack and defence. Armour and shields add to the defence pool. Superior weapons add to the attack pool. Speed advantages can be added to either pool (player's choice). Then each pool is rolled, and for each combatant if the attack roll beats their defence roll they take an appropriate amount of damage (and there are injury and hit location rules as part of this). There is also a (notional) 2x2 grid that tells you what happens overall: if both fighters hit, mark of the injuries, and the one who delivered the better hit gets to decide what happens next; if both miss, the one who got the better defence gets to decide what happens next; if one hits and the other misses then that one is the winner - the loser doesn't suffer any additional damage beyond that already applied in comparing attack and defence totals, but is also treated as knocked down, temporarily dazed/disabled, or otherwise at the mercy of the winner.
Now Bloody Versus isn't perfect sim: for instance, when you look at the grid and work out the overall outcome, some narrative injection is required. But it has strong sim elements. For instance, although the outcome on a draw (both hit, both miss) is the same, we can tell from the procedures of resolution whether the character who has the initiative (and so whose player gets to decide what happens next) got the initiative by succeeding through stronger offence, or got the initiative by succeeding through more skillful defence. And although, when there is a clear winner, the winning player is free to narrate exactly how the loser is at his/her mercy, that is still constrained by the fact that the procedures of resolution tell us what sort of injury it was that defeated the loser.
So I would say that this is still moderately sim. From the procedures of resolution, you can get quite a sense of what happened in the fiction at the level were are interested in (ie between these two fighters), although some narrative injection is required.
Now consider as a one-roll resolution system a coin toss. That is not sim at all. The result of the coin toss isn't affected by discernible features of the characters (who is stronger, faster, better armed or armoured, etc). And the process of tossing the coin and reading the outcome off the result doesn't fill in any details at all of what happened in the fiction to produce that result. No sim at all.
It doesn't become more sim, either, if instead of a single coin toss we do a series (say, best of 3). Even though we are keeping a tally of coin tosses, nothing in the procedures correlates that tally to anything definite in the fiction about the two fighters we are focusing on. At best we have a sense of momentum - which way is the tide of victory flowing at this particular stage of the resolution - but we don't know whether that is because one is fighting really strongly, or one is defending with great skill, or one is badly hurt, or has failing morale, or whatever.
At some point, two fighters stand toe to toe and, in the middle of the fight, wounds are assessed and one person penalized for bleeding is sim?
Yes, assuming that the assessment of wounds is itself an upshot of the process of resolution used up to that point. But if the rules just say "After 3 rounds, roll a die for each participant who is still alive and apply a result from the random wounds table" then we don't have sim, even though that fits your description. Because in this latter case, the wound outcome isn't a result that is determined simply by the process of resolution of the declared actions. It's a type of narrative injection, although determind by die roll rather than participant choice.
At what point does the line into "sim" get crossed? I mean, you say things like "attacks modeled in the fiction" but even in complex systems like Rolemaster, you're not comparing, say, your high-line thrust with their low guard, or rolling for my attempt to disengage my blade and continue the thrust.
Is it just that HP don't count as sim?
The issue with hit points is that they are very close to the sequence of coin tosses. When my guy hits your guy and your guy loses 5 hp, we don't know: whether my attack was strong, or your defence poor, or a bit of both; we don't know where I've hit you, nor what the nature of the injury is (although perhaps we can infer it's minor, from the fact that your performance is not debilitated in ay way); although, at the table, we may have spent a minute or more resolving the attack, and will have to repeat the procedure several times before the outcome of the combat is known, we really have no insight into what is happening in the fiction except a general sense of which way the tide of victory is flowing from round to round.
It's not quite as divorced from the fiction as the sequence of coin tosses: for instance, STR and weapon properties factor in to the attack; armour worn and DEX factor into the defence. But even there, we can't tell - when an attack is actually made and hits - whether it was the quality of the attacker, or the deficiencies of the defender, which resulted in the hit. If we want a richer fiction, during the course of the fight, than simply "It's going A's way; woah, B just made a big comeback and now it's going B's way", that all has to be injected.
(Contrast, say, RQ with its attack and parry rolls, or Bloody Versus with its attack and defence pools. It's true that RM or RQ doesn't give us as much detail as a serious student of martial arts might want to know, but it at least picks out the difference between an Errol Flynn -style swashbuckling duel and a Tarantino-style mutual gorefest. At the level of the fighters, it gives us descriptions of the fiction "He dodged!" or "He failed to dodge and got skewered through the thigh", though it doesn't give us descriptions at the level of their individual body parts or weapons. This relates back to what I said about the wargame example: part of judging something as sim is working out what level of description is salient. For a wargame it is units, logistics, commanders etc but not individual soldiers; for a typical RPG it is individual fighters, but most players don't worry about those fencing details that you call out.
If you did want a system that went into even more focus, then of course nothing is stopping a design going down that path (and I believe that The Riddle of Steel does something along those lines).
The reason that I think RM, RQ, C&S etc clearly count as sim, whereas D&D with its hit points doesn't, is becaue there is a level of description which makes sense for an RPG - simple descriptions of what this guy, in the fiction, did or suffered - which their resolution systems generate. But D&D's hit point system doesn't generate those sorts of descriptions. This is the point that [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] is getting at with his (mostly rhetorical, I think) challenge to explain, simply by reference to the mechanics, why a D&D fight is not FF. He's making the point that any descriptions of what the individual fighters are doing - even at the relatively non-granular descriptive level of dodging, parrying, being struck in the leg, etc - has to be injected by the participants, and won't be generated simply by applying the mechanical procedures for combat resolution.
(I haven't talked at all about issues around initiative, action economy and "stop motion"; nor about classes, levels and XP. But the same sorts of differences are in play between D&D and the sim games in respect of these: a much tighter correlation of mechanics and fiction, so that you can read the fiction off the mechanics, and vice versa, without the need for "narrative injections. And for completeness: I'm not complaining about narrative injections. At the moment I'm in my 6th year of GMing a system - 4e - that relies very heavily on narrative injections. I'm just saying that what characterises a sim game is that you get a relatively complete description of the fiction, at a reasonable if not perfect level of granularity, without the need for narrative injections.)
