Why use D&D for a Simulationist style Game?

[evileeyore]

Personally I see no narrativist vs sim differences in those two descriptions at all.

And that's the problem.

D&D doesn't care if your hitting it with your axe, shoulder charging it, or kicking it in. "Make a Bend Bars/Lift Gates - STR DC Check" and you're done.

GURPS cares. Those differences inform the roll. And it's not a slight difference. Is the PC Charging? That's a bonus. Is he putting his shield into it? That's a bonus. Does he have a skill that aids? That's a bonus. And it's not a "simpel roll", it's damage whether striaght STR or a weapon (Shield Bash is a weapon). If the PC "fails" to burst the door, he's still damaged something (whichever the ST deemed was the weak point) and can apply more damage on the next try.

D&D - Pass/Fail. Nothing in between. The roll doesn't inform us of anything else. That the DM can create a narrative is meaningless, he can do so any time he wants, with out rolls. That the roll in D&D is a Pass/Fail is where is fails to be sim.


And HP. LOL. Hit Points are so abstract it's not funny. For those crying "HP are meat" they really should play GURPS, there HP is meat.

To claim that D&D is more abstract is disingenuous. It was a strength check to break the door, ergo it was a strength based activity that broke it open. Whether it was the left shoulder or right or even a kick is not specified. Nor is it in GURPS. So that looks like a wash to me.

A Kick deals damage differently than a Slam, Slams deal damage based on velocity and mass: (HPxvelocity)/100. If a Shield is involved you have make a Shield skill roll to properly set it between the PC and the target, if successful it adds it DR to the damage.

A Kick just deals Thrust +1 or 2 depending on the level of your Karate or Brawl skill. Unless you're using a Special Technique, which can increase the damage a bit.


So, yes the roll (which is informed by all these modifiers) can tell you whether the PC Slammed the door, hit it with his Axe, Kicked it, Punched it, etc... no DM needed to wave his hand and invent narrative.

Sorry if I didn't spell it out. But GURPS is vastly more sim than D&D has or likely ever will be. And as I've said, GURPS isn't even close to a "perfect" sim. Not even close.

I put it around the 60% Simulation mark. D&D is in the high teens, low twenties. IMO.

And frankly I've never played D&D with a GM that wouldn't give you a bonus to the roll if you supplied a more effective means to open the door, using the petrified dwarf as a battering ram for example, so that's a wash too.

No it isn't. GURPS builds the roll based on the narrative to simulate the events the PC is describing he's trying to do. D&D says "Roll the dice" and abstracts the results, the DM then narrates.

Is D&D completely abstract? No. And no one is making that claim. However D&D is a very poor sim game, it has almost no sim elements at all.

And I think that many gamers have internalised the fact that we aren't actually getting any information from the mechanics to the point where they no longer realise that they are making up the narrative largely whole cloth.

That's what I see happening here.

 

[Tony Vargas]

You can say that Hit Points are a metagame construct that don't actually represent anything within the game world,

He said "momentum of victory" even that's not nothing. I mean, can't you picture a duel where one duelist has that momentum? Sure, it's abstract, but it's not /nothing/. (I'm not sure which of you I'm arguing with here, BTW.)

but unless you've house ruled the game so far that they no longer control when you are unable to fight, then they do objectively represent your ability to not get stopped by attacks. When that orc attacks your wizard, it's the number on your character sheet which determines whether you have enough skill/luck/whatever in order to keep going.

You can deny it, but any number of in-game experiments would prove it. Even if you don't actually sit down and try to figure it out in-game, events will still always corroborate it, because it is true and because the truth is the thing that doesn't change based on whether you believe it or not.

Wild boars, barbarians, and a few other mechanics from several editions will confound that experiment a tad.

 

[evileeyore]

Well if an Orc with a sword killed my character I know he didn't burn to death, die from a spell, die from an arrow, die from acid... and so on so I don't see how you can claim we know nothing...

Did he chop off your arm? Did you bleed out? Did he decapitate you? Was it death by a thousand small cuts? Did he stab your left big toe and make your head explode like a blood fountain?

You don't know based on the rolls (okay, sure, if dealt 1 damage to you with each "attack roll" then death by a thousand cuts might be pretty accurate). All you can know is vaguely the speed at which you went from Perfectly Healthy to Dead. And that's right in the Gamist wheelhouse.

 

[pemerton]

You can say that Hit Points are a metagame construct that don't actually represent anything within the game world, but unless you've house ruled the game so far that they no longer control when you are unable to fight, then they do objectively represent your ability to not get stopped by attacks. When that orc attacks your wizard, it's the number on your character sheet which determines whether you have enough skill/luck/whatever in order to keep going.

This paragraph reveals it's own inconsistency.

As you say, when I am playing a game it is numers on the character sheet that determine whether or not the fiction contains element A ("My guy is alive") or element B ("My guy is dead, killed by an orc"). The character sheet doesn't exist in the game. A number of the things written on the character sheet - eg player name - don't exist, nor represent anything, in the game.

It is a further decision which is not mandated by the game rules, and which at least one edition of the rules - Gygax's AD&D - eschews, to decide that the hit point tally on the character sheet represents some ingame property of a character. It's your prerogative to make that decision in your game. I can tell you that in my game that decision has not been taken; and I think likewise at [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s table.

any number of in-game experiments would prove it.

This isn't true either, without introducing additional premises which I don't accept.

Here is a true counterfactual: if the players at the table declared certain actions, involving shooting blowgun darts into commoners; and if the outcomes of those declared actions were resolved using the combat mechanics; then the PCs in the gameworld might be able to formulate and even verify certain hypotheses about the gameworld.

But the first antecdent of the counterfactual is not true in my game: the players have never declared such actions. Nor is the second antecedent of the counterfactual true in my game: the outcomes of those declared actions would not be resolved using the combat mechanics.

Here is the relevant passage from the 4e DMG that explains why not (p 40):

When a power has an effect that occurs upon hitting a target - or reducing a target to 0 hit points - the power
functions only when the target in question is a meaningful threat. Characters can gain no benefit from carrying a sack of rats in hopes of healing their allies by hitting the rats.

When a power’s effect involves a character’s allies, use common sense when determining how many allies can be affected. D&D is a game about adventuring parties fighting groups of monsters, not the clash of armies. A warlord’s power might, read strictly, be able to give a hundred “allies” a free basic attack, but that doesn’t mean that warlord characters should assemble armies to march before them into the dungeon. In general, a power’s effect should be limited to a squad-sized group - the size of your player character group plus perhaps one or two friendly NPCs—not hired soldiers or lantern-bearers.​

In other words, 4e is designed to be played treating common sense and genre sensibilities as a constraint on the deployment of the action resolution mechanics. It is not designed with the intention that the action resolution mechanics are a general theory/picture of how things work in the gameworld.

Hence, if (contrary to my real-life expectations) the players in my game were to have their PCs declare the sort of "experiment" you describe, the combat mechanics wouldn't be used to resolve them - the commoners would simply be declared killed ("saying yes" rather than making the players roll the dice).

If you treat the game mechanics as a model of ingame processes, then the experiments you describe can be performed. But at that point you are affirming as a premise what you were hoping to prove, namely, that the mechanics are a model of ingame causal processes.

In other words, as I already posted upthread, the decision to treat the mechanics as a process is a choice. Even in RQ you could treat the mechanics as purely metagame if you wanted to; it's just that if that's how you wanted to play you probably wouldn't bother with RQ. Similarly, you could treat the 4e mechanics in a process sim way if you wantd to, ignoring the rules text that I just quoted. Though personally I'm not sure why you'd bother - there are much better process-sim games out there.

 

[pemerton]

He said "momentum of victory" even that's not nothing. I mean, can't you picture a duel where one duelist has that momentum? Sure, it's abstract, but it's not /nothing/. (I'm not sure which of you I'm arguing with here, BTW.)

I agree that "momentum of victory" is not nothing. But it's very very abstract when what we're trying to picture, in our minds' eyes, is the back-and-forth between these two fencers. As I've said upthread, you can't tell if it looks like Flynn vs Rathbone, or a Tarantino bloodfest, or something else.

One part of 4e that is much more process oriented is its positioning and movement rules (though there is the stop-motion element which is a bit weird from a sim point of view). It's therefore no surprise, to me at least, that some of the wonkier parts of 4e resolution come into play when the non-metagame combat positioning mechanics bump into the more metagame parts of the system, like the skill challenge rules.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

The mechanics of HP and combat do not model any event. They don't tell you anything other than a combatant is alive or dead.

Unless they do. If you use HP as a model of how close someone is to falling, then it represents that and it tells you how injured someone is. This allows it to interact meaningfully with the rest of the system, and particularly the healing rules. If you look at someone, and the character sheet says HP = 3/70, then you can say that this person is beaten nearly-to-death. If you opt for the HP-are-meaningful solution, then the character knows to cast a powerful healing spell, or run away, or defend or go all-out offense if the enemy can possibly be dropped with the next attack.

Or you can go with the HP-are-meaningless view, in which case nobody has any idea whether they can take another hit or not (however you choose to define hit, or not), and nobody has any reason beside superstition to drink a healing potion because it has no visible effect. At which point, I don't even know how you would play that game.

A simulation model has to tell you how something happened. Otherwise it's not actually simulating anything. I could flip a coin and decide the outcome of a battle. Is that a simulation?

Yes, it is. It's not a very satisfying one, though, since it only includes random factors and does not take into account any of the characteristics of either side.

Same goes with the Profession skills. Nothing is told about how you made that money. Who gave you that money? What did you do? All we know is you spent X time, and made Y money. That's not a simulation of anything. That's pure gamism. There's no model there. Spend time, add ranks (which can be added even though you've never actually DONE anything related to your skill) and you make more money.

I'm pretty sure that they do actually explain that you need to be able to ply your trade in order to get that roll. Maybe it's in the PHB, rather than the SRD, but it should be obvious.

If you are a sailor, then you need to be able to get a job on a boat in order to make that money. If you have Profession (masseuse), and there's nobody in the city who is willing to let you touch them, then you don't get a roll and you don't earn money. If you have Profession (bartender), then you don't get a check unless you actually have a somewhere to work where you can tend bar.

It seems like you're being deliberately obtuse about this, but maybe I'm taking for granted how obvious it is that anything involves actually doing what it says it is. Profession generally represents the service sector, so the money you earn comes from your customers; if you do your job well, and are fortunate in circumstances, then you can earn more money than if you don't do your job well and your services aren't in great demand that week.

And you shouldn't add ranks in a skill that you've never used. Your skill ranks are supposed to represent the skills that you've actually used. They do go over that in the DMG, though enforcement is optional as an aid to simplify gameplay.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

As you say, when I am playing a game it is numers on the character sheet that determine whether or not the fiction contains element A ("My guy is alive") or element B ("My guy is dead, killed by an orc"). The character sheet doesn't exist in the game. A number of the things written on the character sheet - eg player name - don't exist, nor represent anything, in the game.

Exactly! The character sheet doesn't exist in the game, but the distinction between A and B does rely on it. In order for causality to hold, that number on the sheet must then correspond to something which exists within the game world.

In other words, 4e is designed to be played treating common sense and genre sensibilities as a constraint on the deployment of the action resolution mechanics. It is not designed with the intention that the action resolution mechanics are a general theory/picture of how things work in the gameworld.

Right again. Most people agree that 4E was designed toward genre conceit rather than rules-as-physics. That's the major reason why I don't play it. Trying to play it as process-sim would require a lot of effort, and I would say that it's more trouble than it's worth. That's why I play 3E, which works incredibly well as process-sim.

 

[Andor]

And that's the problem.

D&D doesn't care if your hitting it with your axe, shoulder charging it, or kicking it in. "Make a Bend Bars/Lift Gates - STR DC Check" and you're done.

GURPS cares. Those differences inform the roll. And it's not a slight difference. Is the PC Charging? That's a bonus. Is he putting his shield into it? That's a bonus. Does he have a skill that aids? That's a bonus. And it's not a "simpel roll", it's damage whether striaght STR or a weapon (Shield Bash is a weapon). If the PC "fails" to burst the door, he's still damaged something (whichever the ST deemed was the weak point) and can apply more damage on the next try.

D&D - Pass/Fail. Nothing in between. The roll doesn't inform us of anything else. That the DM can create a narrative is meaningless, he can do so any time he wants, with out rolls. That the roll in D&D is a Pass/Fail is where is fails to be sim.

That is NOT sim vs narrative. It is a sim at a different level of granularity. In any meaningful sense GURPS gives me exactly as much nothing as D&D.

Fantastic I used my foot and so I did statistically .7 more damage then the shoulder bash, I opened the door! Yay. Now I turn and look at the door. Which component failed? Was it the hinges, the latch, the frame, the structure of the door? If it was the latch did I break the bolt or did the strike plate fail? If it was the hinges does the break reveal crystalline fracturing or perhaps a void left as a manufacturing flaw? If the door suffered a structural failure what is the fracture pattern? Did you take into account the differing grain structures of Sitka spruce vs Yellow pine? If it was a solid door, what it the salvage value of the remaining wood?

At any level of sim, I can utterly break your pretense of system based verisimilitude by insisting on asking a question the rules don't cover and forcing the GM to invent a narrative. The whole point of a rules system is to provide a resolution mechanic which is more rigid than "Because I said so." and less effortful than calculating it out using hard physics right down to the Higgs field and Planck time. And therefore any level of sim, short of that will have some point where the system uses shorthand and the GM must wing it if you peer closer.

GURPS vs HERO vs RQ vs D&D (except for 4e) is not sim vs narrative, it's just different levels of granularity.

Runequest vs HeroQuest? Now THAT is sim vs narrative. Because in HQ when you beat the badguy you do not know how you beat him until after the fact. Once the resolution system is finished you have to go back and fill in the narrative because you have no clue whether he fell to your swordblade or to your relentless logic the system draws no distinction between them. RQ and HQ by the way are both explicitly designed to portray the same world, and given that it's a mythic reality it's an open question which system portrays it more accurately.

 

[pemerton]

I could flip a coin and decide the outcome of a battle. Is that a simulation?

Yes, it is. It's not a very satisfying one, though, since it only includes random factors and does not take into account any of the characteristics of either side.

How do you know that it is a simulation? Until you know more about the game rules, you can't tell.

The only RPG I know of that uses a coin toss resolution system is Prince Valiant, but it is not a "single toss" system. So instead, here are the action resolution rules for Paul Czege's RPG The World, The Flesh and The Devil:

[T]ake a blank six-sider and allocate sides to the World, the Flesh, and the Devil, creating your character's W/F/D die. The way you allocate the sides determines the comparative significance of the three forces in your character's life . . .

The only requirement is that you must have at least one World, one Flesh, and one Devil side. . . .

The game also requires that the GM have a set of five dice with different allocations of plus and minus symbols on them . . . in black and red . . .

When a player has stated intent for the character to do something where the outcome is in question, the GM will give the player one of the conflict resolution dice with the plus and minus symbols on them. Which one depends on his assessment of the difficulty of the situation and the character's ability to accomplish what the player intends. . . .

The player rolls both his W/F/D die and the one the GM gave him. If the result is a Devil+, it means the victory was one in which the character transcended some aspect of the Devil, and the player narrates the outcome. If the result is Flesh-, it's a failure of the flesh and the player narrates the outcome. . . .

There are no opposed rolls, and the GM never rolls. However, if a player rolls a red plus or red minus it means the GM narrates the outcome, rather than the player. This give the GM power to introduce bittersweet victories and dramatic, crippling failures.​

There's also a re-roll mechanic, based on invoking character descriptions.

This is an RPG that is very close to a coin-toss resolution system. (Whether it is good RPG or not is another question; per Ron Edwards, "Is there such a thing as Fortune-at-the-beginning? Playtesting so far indicates that it's not very satisfying for Narrativist play; see discussions at the Forge of Human Wreckage and The World the Flesh and the Devil.")

And the resolution system is not modelling or simulating anything. It is, quite overtly, a system for distributing among real, flesh-and-blood game participants certain obligations to develop the content of the fiction in certain ways. Someone who sat down to play this RPG, and who said of the resolution system that it is a simulations, but not a very good one because it only models random factors, has simply failed to understand the mechanics of the game. Such a person needs to re-read the rules!

The character sheet doesn't exist in the game, but the distinction between A and B does rely on it.

Not in my game. The distinction between A and B is the result of the participants in the game agreeing that one or the other is true of the shared fiction. They reach that decision by reference to the hit point tallies, but the hit point tallies are not themselves indicative of anything in the fiction. (For instance, in the fiction there is no difference between defeating a minion giant, who mechanically has 1 hp, and defeating a standard giant, who has 200 hp, except that one turned out to take a bit longer than the other for some reason. Nothing in the system obliges that reason to be narrated as "because the standard one was tougher". It could be narrated as "the minion got unlucky, and parried when it should have thrust."

In order for causality to hold, that number on the sheet must then correspond to something which exists within the game world.

My whole point is that Hussar and I do not play a game that satisfies you "causality" requirement. We play a game in which the ingame causation is one thing (imaginary processes in an imaginary world) and the method for determining the content of the fiction is something else (a series of rules that authorise various participants in the game, at various points during the play of the game, to introduce new content into the fiction, or change existing content.

You, personally, may not enjoy playing such a game, but that doesn't change the fact that other people, out here in the real world, are doing it.

Most people agree that 4E was designed toward genre conceit rather than rules-as-physics. That's the major reason why I don't play it.

Obviously. My point is that you are mistaken when you deny that Hussar and I are playing the game as I have described it.

For instance, upthread you said, of hit points, that "unless you've house ruled the game so far that they no longer control when you are unable to fight, then they do objectively represent your ability to not get stopped by attacks". Presumably by "you" you mean "my PC" rather than me - what represent my personal ability to not get stopped by attacks is my own (rather limited) skill at fighting and running away.

But in my game (and Hussar's) a PC's or other character's hit points do not "objectively" represent that character's ability to not get stopped by attacks. They regulate the conditions under which the participants in the game are obliged to say "that character just got stopped by an attack" or are permitted to say "that character hasn't yet been stopped by any attacks". And this didn't require a house rule. It's just playing 4e as it comes out of the box. The hit points are part of a really existing set of rules that constrain the players. The ingame causal processes are imaginary laws of nature that constrain imaginary people. And the two sets of rules - the real ones and the imaginary ones - are not in any sort of correlation.

If you use HP as a model of how close someone is to falling, then it represents that and it tells you how injured someone is.

<snip>

If you look at someone, and the character sheet says HP = 3/70, then you can say that this person is beaten nearly-to-death.

Unless the hit point loss was all inflicted by Phantasmal Killer, in which case the person looks white as a sheet though otherwise physically hale.

There are additional complications, too. For instance, in my 4e game you can't tell from the fact that a person looks badly hurt how many hp s/he has. For instance, in my last session both of the defenders - each of whom has somewhere over 150 hp - took around 300 hp damage, the paladin from falling down a cliff and then being swallowed by a remorhaz at the bottom, the fighter from being beaten up by giants. But between in-combat healing (second wind, lay on hands, healing word etc) and a short rest, they are both at full hp. But obviously there injuries haven't been healed by 5 minutes of rest. They still look terrible. It's just that they're no longer close to falling.

For a cinematic analogue, think of Aragorn returning to Helm's Deep after his fall. He still looks terrible as he throws the doors open, but he is not at all close to falling. His injuries are no longer affecting his ability to fight with full vigour.

in HQ when you beat the badguy you do not know how you beat him until after the fact. Once the resolution system is finished you have to go back and fill in the narrative because you have no clue whether he fell to your swordblade or to your relentless logic the system draws no distinction between them.

That's not really accurate. If you generate the points needed for victory by using your Swordsman ability, you can't retrospectively declare that you defeated your opponent with your Relentless Logic.

Even the much looser RPG The World, The Flesh and The Devil still puts some constraints on the content of the narration of resolution, based on the result of the W/F/D die. I've never heard of an RPG in which resolution can be completed, and have generated no constraints on narration beyond the basic ones derived from genre and scene framing. (Which is not to say that such a game doesn't exist - I haven't heard of every RPG. But HeroWars/Quest is not it.)

 

[Tony Vargas]

I agree that "momentum of victory" is not nothing. But it's very very abstract when what we're trying to picture, in our minds' eyes, is the back-and-forth between these two fencers. As I've said upthread, you can't tell if it looks like Flynn vs Rathbone, or a Tarantino bloodfest, or something else.

Sure. That just makes a very abstract system like hps more readily adaptable to a variety of styles and sub-genres.

Really, hps is one of the little jewels of the D&D sacred-cow collection. Along with, clunky though it is, leveling. They're things that those 'fantasy heartbreakers' trying to 'improve' D&D often ditch - and end up with death spirals and static, boring characters, instead.