D&D General D&D isn't a simulation game, so what is???

[Oofta]

I think it is best modeled by traits. I was fairly athletic. In HS I ran a sub 2 min half-mile and was consistently one of the fastest players on the soccer field. However, my max speed topped out at 12-15 mph. Usain bolt hits 22+ mph. That is huge difference and it is not even taking into account the "common" person. I just don't think there is any simple way to simulate that without specialized traits.

Which is the problem I have with people talking about how D&D is "broken". I don't think it's worth investing in more complex rules to get closer, there are just too many variables. Mr Bolt is amazing, but he's also a one in millions and a specialist in one thing: running under nearly ideal conditions to achieve maximum possible speed.

Without a supercomputer running simulations you're never going to get all that close to reality, there are simply too many variables.

 

[Oofta]

I think cheetahs tend to reach their highest speeds "in battle" ie when bringing down prey. Don't they?

They achieve their best speed when hunting down prey. Most D&D battles are more complex than that. Could I see a cheetah (if there was an entry for cheetahs) having a special dash action that can be used a couple of times a day, or perhaps as a recharge? Sure.

Your point? We're talking general rules here. If you add exceptions for everything - like a hawk's speed while diving or overland flight - you're adding a level of complexity to the game that I'm not certain is justified.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Sadly true, but this unfortunately is the failing of skills in general in 5E, and especially Athletics.

Very few people who would have proficiency in Athletics would be equally adept at climbing, lifting, jumping, running, sprinting, swimming, etc.--everything this cluster-skill does, which let us not forget also is involved in combat with grappling (wrestling) and shoving. Why have it be so many different aspects of physical ability? Couldn't you just give martial classes two more skill proficiencies and let them pick their specialty? After all, wouldn't Strength be the better indicator of "general" ability in Athletics? You have 4-5 skills for the mental abilities, so why not have 4-5 for Strength: Athletics (climb/jump/swim), Brawn (lift/shove?), Grapple, Run (jog/run/sprint) or something??

After all, they didn't group deception, intimidation, and persuasion together? Yet all of those skill are really just a single skill: Influence if you look at it like Athletics, with a different method of how you influence someone-- lie to them, threaten them, or convince them.


This emphasizes the above point. You might be fast, but I was faster. Yet you had better endurance (despite my efforts at cross-country in the fall season) so would beat me in the 800 (maybe even the 400? My best was only 52.5, so decent but not great...).

In short, I was a better sprinter in all likelihood, but you were a better runner. I also did long jump and had a best of 20.5 feet in high school, but I KNOW I didn't have a STR 20!!! Heck, back then I could barely do a single pull-up, but I could leg-press over 1,000 lbs. yet I weight just 145!

In general, for "Athletics" I was a decent climber, poor lifter (upper body) but great lifter (lower body), good jumper (my best high jump was 5'9" and I am just under 5'8" tall), good jogger (sub-5-min mile) and runner (52.5 400-m), great sprinter (10.9 100-m), and a decent swimmer, not to mention decent grappler/shover maybe...

A trait or feat for speed alone could be the good way to go, after all we have the Powerful Build trait for lifting, but I would rather see the rules/mechanics and skills be more robust to reach the goal because I don't want traits for every aspect of "Athletics".

It is one reason why I liked the skill web in Shadowrun (2e and 3e) with general skill/ specialization/ and concentrations.

Level Up uses expertise dice and skill specialties to handle this granularity problem.

 

[Micah Sweet]

They achieve their best speed when hunting down prey. Most D&D battles are more complex than that. Could I see a cheetah (if there was an entry for cheetahs) having a special dash action that can be used a couple of times a day, or perhaps as a recharge? Sure.

Your point? We're talking general rules here. If you add exceptions for everything - like a hawk's speed while diving or overland flight - you're adding a level of complexity to the game that I'm not certain is justified.

How justified that complexity might be is a huge variance point. Certainly, however, WotC is on your side.

 

[Thomas Shey]

So, so far from it being necessarily false that this sort of simulationism is unattainable, it is fairly easy to attain it: just pick up a copy of RQ, RM or HARP! (Or Hero, I guess, but I don't know it anywhere near as well.)

The Hero case is a little complicated..

Hero was originally made to be a superhero game. It has some (but only some, which is often a critique aimed at it) rules for genre emulation baked into the rules, and I've argued before that though Forgite thought wants to toss that into simulation, it sits very uneasily there, and looks to me more like it really feels more like what in the RGFA days was setting up the overstructure for a fundamentally dramatist concern (even back then when genre emulation came up there was no great agreement as to where it went--but most of the hardcore simulationists felt it didn't belong there because the rules it worked under where normally things that explicitly were not things characters in the setting could acknowledge without damaging that very genre support. Yes, that usually meant they didn't think high-genre games like superheroes and a couple others could be really be played in a simulationist fashion.)

But once you get away from the specific genre support elements, a lot of other mechanics are really pretty simulationist in intent (though some, like how movement is handled, are pretty clearly gamist). This becomes more clear when you get to later support for non-superhero genres like modern adventure or fantasy, where a lot of mechanics are pretty clearly process simulation.

 

[Thomas Shey]

This is an interesting idea, but IMO it doesn't simulate reality. As a really strong person, trained in Athletics could in theory reach Usain bolt speeds rather frequently, and conversely Bolt would fail quite a bit. Yet, that is really not the case. The Mountain, though incredibly strong and athletic, likely couldn't catch me in a foot race, let alone Bolt. IMO, you need a specialized trait / feat (s) to do it justice. Which sounds right to me. Bolt is not only strong (but not really much stronger than me in HS - I could squat over 600 lbs) and Athletic, he is particularly gifted to run fast (additional training and/or natural talent). That isn't really covered by a broad skill check IMO.

I started with the 200 - 400, and then moved up to the 800. That was my sweet spot. I had always had better endurance than most and better speed than most and that is a good combo for the half-mile. I only trained for it one year in HS and walked-on in college, but a heart condition sideline me and then life (aka girlfriend / partner).

Yeah, a lot of failure states in older simulationist-oriented rules is usually because of skill or attribute lumping problems, and lacking the tools to work around them.

 

[Thomas Shey]

How justified that complexity might be is a huge variance point. Certainly, however, WotC is on your side.

Well, that just shows that among other things, simulation is pretty low on the priority list of things they care about. As I noted, few modern games not directly derived from older designs put any priority on simulation worth mentioning; they're all about dramatist or gamist choices or a combination of the two.

 

[Campbell]

Which is the problem I have with people talking about how D&D is "broken". I don't think it's worth investing in more complex rules to get closer, there are just too many variables. Mr Bolt is amazing, but he's also a one in millions and a specialist in one thing: running under nearly ideal conditions to achieve maximum possible speed.

Without a supercomputer running simulations you're never going to get all that close to reality, there are simply too many variables.

The idea that this is about complexity is pretty flawed in my experience. Mongoose's Legend (the version of RuneQuest I play) is 242 pages in a much smaller form factor. Its base combat system is roughly as involved as 5th Edition. It also lacks long lists of special exceptions like you see in D&D classes. Overall, I consider it far less complex than any version of D&D. It does care about various differences in weapons and armor and is tailored to man to man medieval combat but is not fundamentally more complex.

If anyone want to check out Legend it is currently $1 on drivethru

DriveThruRPG

www.drivethrurpg.com

 

[Oofta]

The idea that this is about complexity is pretty flawed in my experience. Mongoose's Legend (the version of RuneQuest I play) is 242 pages in a much smaller form factor. Its base combat system is roughly as involved as 5th Edition. It also lacks long lists of special exceptions like you see in D&D classes. Overall, I consider it far less complex than any version of D&D. It does care about various differences in weapons and armor and is tailored to man to man medieval combat but is not fundamentally more complex.

I was specifically talking about things like how much you can lift/carry, how far you can run while taking into account sprint vs marathon but also what you're wearing, what surface you're running on and so forth. Can you make more detailed rules for some aspects? Sure. But it's a never-ending rabbit hole to try to make a rule for everything.

 

[Oofta]

How justified that complexity might be is a huge variance point. Certainly, however, WotC is on your side.

There's always going to be compromises to how complex a game is. If I were to rank recent editions of D&D I'd say 3.x tried to be most simulationist, 4E the least and 5 is somewhere in the middle. Many of the simulationist aspects in 3 just meant we had to constantly flip through books to find the "correct" answer when it was all just an illusion anyway (i.e. finding DC to climb a brick wall) depending on who was playing. With 4E we had clear rules but often illogical results like fire squares.

Now? Since the construction and quality of a wall is pretty arbitrary anyway, the DM just decides a DC because the specificity of 3.x was an illusion anyway. So you care that two people, one moving in a straight line, the other running a diagonal should advance different amounts in a specific direction? Use the rules in the DMG for the 1-2-1 movement. Use a grid but don't care? Just say 1 square is 5 foot of movement.

Some people may not like the level of specificity and flexibility that 5E went with, but I think it's one of the reasons it's the most popular version ever.