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

[Hussar]

Does it come down to sufficient granularity of results on matters we care about?

No. it comes down to the results ACTUALLY defining any narrative. Your narrative of ant bites is 100% on you. The system in no way needed it or even encouraged it. You decided that that's the narrative. Fine and dandy. There's no problem with that. But, you can't point to the system doing this.

Adding horsey noises when my knight takes a queen doesn't make chess a simulation of an actual knight kidnapping or killing a queen. Your narrative, at best, is inspired by the mechanics, but, in no way is actually tied to the mechanics because any other narrative can be substituted and it is equally valid.

In a simulation, you can't do that.

 

[Hussar]

/snip

I don't want a death spiral ala Mech Warrior because it would add so much complexity. So is HP simulation? I don't really care. Does it tell me anything? Of course it does, just not "fluff" that some people insist is necessary. What level of fluff would do it? How accurate would a simulation have to be to be considered a simulation? Why does it matter?

*Yes, I'm sure there are exceptions for games that I've never played. Aiming at specific location such as the head can lead to more damage, but it's still just generic damage.

Couple of things.

#1, it's not HP sucks. That's a canard. It's that HP aren't simulationist. That doesn't mean they suck. HP are fantastic. They are fast, easy and easy to understand. For a game where you want speed of play, HP are the way to go. Absolutely. I certainly don't want to play D&D with a death spiral. I totally agree with you here.

#2 Yes, the "fluff" or narrative is kinda necessary for something to be a simulation. A simulation that does not generate any "fluff" isn't a simulation. Which is fine. D&D is not, nor has it ever been intended as, a sim game. As far as "what level of fluff would do it?" goes, well, ANY would be a good start.

 

[Hussar]

Sure. That's why I proposed that an RPG is simulationist if

1. it intends our real world as a reference, excluding fictions and beliefs,

mmm, not really. Well, I suppose, you're always going to have the real world as some sort of reference because most games take place in worlds that are pretty close to the real world. It would be really hard to play a 4th dimensional RPG after all since most of us aren't mathemeticians. Or a 2D flatworld RPG would also be difficult. Fun, but, difficult. So, yeah, you're always going to have to baseline to something and the real world tends to be it.

1. it is granular and prescriptive enough on all included real-world phenomena that interest us,

Not necessary. I'm tripping over the "all" in that sentence. That's a level of granularity that isn't necessary. Change that to any and we're on a good start.

1. the results of the mechanics of that RPG include granular descriptions of what we must imagine in the fiction,

This I agree with. Or, at least enough granularity that we can exclude some descriptions in any case. If the character dodged the attack, for example, the exact narrative wouldn't be up to the mechanics, but, any narrative where the character actively avoided the attack would fit while any narrative in which the character did not actively avoid the attack would be excluded.

1. we find ourselves able to suspend disbelief in respect of the results and descriptions of the included phenomena

This I agree with.

1. a reasonable player has and needs no alternative to imagining what is described

Not sure I agree with this one. After all, as above, we don't need the mechanics to explain exactly what happened - just explain enough that we can definitively say This did and That did not happen. What This is is pretty broad though.

This puts the burden on the game system to supply descriptions as output along with numbers, but I think we want to go further than that. I think we probably want to say that the descriptions shape future choices and resolutions otherwise they're empty fluff, which we might as well provide ourselves.

No, I don't think that follows. Again, using the dodge example, you don't need any follow up to that. The character dodged the attack, avoided all harm, and now can act in any fashion.

Like I keep repeating, the difference here is not full knowledge vs some knowledge, it's the mechanics guide the narrative vs the narrative is entirely divorced from the mechanics. As you say, empty fluff might as well be provided by the players. Which is generally what we do in D&D because the narrative is almost always empty when it comes to combat.

 

[Thomas Shey]

As I stated above - I'm basing my observations on popular video games. Video games bypass the "D&D is the 800 lbs gorilla" argument, there's plenty of competition in the AAA video game market. Video games should be able to be much more accurate about these kind of things but with a couple of exceptions for Fallout and mech games I can't think of any.

I don't want a death spiral in my game and I don't think it works well because D&D can be far too combat oriented. Based on observation of the market I'm not the only one that doesn't care for it.

All that says is that most people don't want simulation, at least to any significant degree, which I believe I acknowledged at least two pages ago now.

You're having an entirely different discussion than I am.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I get that, but it is of limited value to me. Sometimes things just go bad fast.

And the more you want a simulationist approach, the more you have to accept that at least as a potential--but that's probably way a lot of people don't want a simulationist approach.

 

[Hussar]

As I stated above - I'm basing my observations on popular video games. Video games bypass the "D&D is the 800 lbs gorilla" argument, there's plenty of competition in the AAA video game market. Video games should be able to be much more accurate about these kind of things but with a couple of exceptions for Fallout and mech games I can't think of any.

I don't want a death spiral in my game and I don't think it works well because D&D can be far too combat oriented. Based on observation of the market I'm not the only one that doesn't care for it.

Phoenix Point has location wounds, no mechs. XCom famously has these. Again, no mechs. Gears Tactics also has them. There's three that are sitting on my hard drive right now. PubG, one of the most popular shooters ever has body damage locations.

There are tons of games that track damage locations in video games. Get shot in the leg and your character moves slower. This isn't some weird corner case thing.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Ah yeah, here I meant "a reference" as in "among" them. Maybe that needs spelling out? It gets tricky, because how do you say that there can be exceptions without letting in another doubt as to how much can be exceptional? What if corporality is one of those things that are exceptional so that injury and death work the way the bare mechanice for hit points works in DnD? Should there be a preference for beliefs that reference real world beliefs, even if they're about things that aren't real? Those kinds of questions arise.

Actually, I don't think they're a problem at all if you're willing to acknowledge them as an in-setting reality. Consider Earthdawn: it reifies a rather large number of D&D tropes, but they're things that actually exist as referenced in-setting. To pick the example we keep going around, people do have enhanced hit points above what a human can take, because all characters are magical adepts and their bodies are supernaturally reinforced; they can absolutely be meat points because they aren't supposed to be in any sense normal people.

But people get soggy about doing that in D&D; a normal fighter is supposed to be just a highly trained guy for many people, so you can't just define his hit points as superhuman durability.

(Now, a setting like that may be too weird for some people of a strongly simulationist bent, but its not violating their ethic here; it is what it says on the tin, and if something is resolved a particular way, its generally just what it appears to be).

Hmm, a lot of interpretation to one person is a bagatelle to another. All game systems have ridiculous edge cases, or cases that can be narrated ridiculously.

Yeah, but its usually not the most straightforward interpertation of the mechanical process. You can't use the most straightforward interpretation of hit points without it looking weird. As soon as you zoom in on it as anything but a high-order abstraction, it starts thowing problem areas fairly commonly (parts of its use can only be resolved as a gamist and secondarily dramatist construct. ) Other than genre convention support mechanics (which I've argued before fundamentally can't be simulationist as I see it, because you can't normally have characters in the setting acknowledge them and have them work as conventions), that's not intrinsically necessary with any set of mechanics It just requires extra work that may be viewed as either unnecessary or undesirable.

That last I can't agree with, because the point - the joy - of TTRPG is extending beyond what we've been told. I feel folk often overlook this because we are so used to looking at things through a normalised set of filters. Every game system has a myriad of points where we have to join things up by extending beyond what we've been told. Once we're glossing over at all we lose any claim to an objectively more realistic or true narrative. Oh, an abrasion. Is that on my knee? No? My shin? Just anywhere on my leg? One can make sense of it, and one must nearly always extend beyond what one is told.

It can be desirable to do those things, but it shouldn't be necessary just to have them make sense. If I'm using a very vanilla BRP hit point model (no hit locations, no effect until half hits, no further effect until zero) it may well be desirable to narrate more color than that--but if I don't, I'll still know someone took actual injury, and approximately how serious it is. The system won't actively avoid telling me that.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Couple of things.

#1, it's not HP sucks. That's a canard. It's that HP aren't simulationist. That doesn't mean they suck. HP are fantastic. They are fast, easy and easy to understand. For a game where you want speed of play, HP are the way to go. Absolutely. I certainly don't want to play D&D with a death spiral. I totally agree with you here.

To be fair, I don't think D&D style hit points are a very good mechanic, but its largely because I see other mechanics I think can even do the same job from a game and drama view better. But that's separate from its failure as a simulation mechanic, because as I've said, simulation matters to me far less than it used to--but I still see it as an almost non-existent simulation over and above the general issues I have with it.

#2 Yes, the "fluff" or narrative is kinda necessary for something to be a simulation. A simulation that does not generate any "fluff" isn't a simulation. Which is fine. D&D is not, nor has it ever been intended as, a sim game. As far as "what level of fluff would do it?" goes, well, ANY would be a good start.

That's been my argument; D&D was built very heavily on a gamist mode, with some theoretical nods to dramatist and simulationist urges that never survived the sniff test. Over time, they strengthened both the gamist and dramatist elements, while almost completely abandoning the simulationist ones (but again, the amount of their market that really cares about that is almost certainly trivial and has been for a long, long time).

 

[Hussar]

Something that should be clarified here too.

Saying that D&D is not a simulation is not in any way an indictment of D&D. It's not. It's not a negative thing in any way. It's no different than saying chess isn't a simulation. That's not an indictment of chess. It's just that D&D isn't really a simulation game and generally doesn't work like one. And, frankly, has never been intended to be one.

I know we've been going on and on about HP and combat, but, let's step to the left into the skill system. It's all pass/fail. There's no real narrative generated here at all. We don't know how you did anything. When you succeed on a climb check, you climb half your speed. Ok, fair enough - but, if you fail that check, what happens? All we know is you don't move forward. That's it.

And, where it gets really weird is in social skills. You want to make the bartender friendly so you can pump him for information. So, Diplomacy check. There's no real narrative generated there. What did you say? How did you do it? No idea. And, not only that, but, any narrative you do before the check can be invalidated by the check itself. In one way, it's kinda/sorta simulationist in that you shouldn't narrate anything until after the check - but, again, any narrative you come up with is valid, the fluff doesn't matter, to use the terms in this thread.

Imagine a more sim approach. The two characters set goals for the interaction, the bartender wants to upsell his wares and the PC wants to pump him for information. Each character has a pool of "social HP" that are ablated by successful checks by the opponent. So, in the first round, the bartender wins, the PC loses some "Social HP" and has to buy a more expensive drink. In the second round, the PC wins, rolls well for his "social damage" and wins the encounter.

There, now we have a narrative that is generated by the mechanics, although with lots and lots of room to come up with various narratives, but, some narratives are off the table because now we have some information to work with.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You can easily do it by modeling it after d20 SW. I did it a long time ago and the system translated perfectly to 5E.

Summary for modified 5E version we used for a while:

Vitality Points (VP) = hit points (HD + CON bonus)
Wound Points (WP) = Constitution score (if you want a more "forgiving" game since 5E can have some very high damage foes, add your character level to your Constitution score. Creatures can add CR to Constitution as well if you want).

• All damage is dealt to Vitality Points. When Vitality Points = 0, remaining damage goes to Wound Points.
• Critical hits go directly to Wound Points. On a critical hit, Armor provides DR (equal to AC value - 10, so chain mail 6, chain shirt 3, plate 8, etc.)
• If you have lost any Wound Points, you are fatigued (-2 to STR and DEX scores) until you recover/heal all lost Wound Points. You must also make a CON save, DC equal to 5 + the Wound Points taken in the round, or you fall unconscious whenever you suffer Wound damage.
• At 0 Wound Points, are are disabled but can still be conscious. If you remain conscious, you can take an Action or use your speed to move, but you cannot take any bonus actions or reactions. If you take an Action, you loss another Wound Point.
• At Wound Points -1 to -9, you are dying and unconscious. You lose 1 Wound Point at the end of each round until you become stable or die.
• At Wound Points = -10, you are dead.
• Stabilizing requires a DC 10 Constitution save, or you continue to lose a Wound Point each round. Once you are stable, you must make the Constitution save at the end of each hour or you lose another Wound Point. If you succeed in the Constitution save, you regain consciousness.
• A dying character can be stabilized by a DC 15 Wisdom (Medicine) check or if they regain any Vitality Points.

I may very well steal this. Thanks!