D&D General On simulating things: what, why, and how?

[Manbearcat]

The dragon issue just kills D&D stone dead (which chao is talking about) in terms of preoccupation with simulation:

* Dragons have endoskeletons that do the work of tendon/muscle attachment et al.

* While not having an actual exoskeleton, their armor plating effectively provides them with one of the primary points of exoskeletons; protection from predation. With that “not-exoskeleton-exoskeleton” should come all the size/movement/respiratory constraints that arthropods must deal with…which dragons possess precisely zero!

And they can freaking fly naturally despite all this!

But does it stop there?

NONONO

6’2” 220 lb (or less) D&D martial heroes clash in melee with these colossal beasts that somehow also possess internal causality defying omnidirectional explosiveness and athleticism!

You know, the same martial heroes that can’t broad or vert jump more than humans!

So any call for naturalistic internal causality has been MURKED by the quintessential D&D creature from the word “go.”


It’s a game folks.

We’re playing a game and you make a dizzying array of sim-compromises (dragons, the quintessential D&D creatures, and the ridiculous constraints on the martial heroes that clash with them is just surface-scratching) just to play it at all.

Embrace it.

 

[overgeeked]

This goes back to more wanting to simulate the genre - seeing something like The Boys as an outlier, most superheroic settings may or may not be filled with collateral damage, especially in the terms of urban renewal, but most are not filled with widespread super-on-normal bloody violence.

To me though that just reinforces that I'd rather simulate the genre than simulate a world the genre's stories could be told in. Unless I specifically want to explore that, I'd rather keep wholesale death of civilians as dastardly plans the characters are stopping, not the inevitable result of any supers fight.

It comes down to preferences and suspension of disbelief. Some want Superman to carry a jumbo jet via holding it by the nose and for the plane to stay whole as he carries it. Others want the physics of the situation to roughly match reality and when the whole weight of the jumbo jet is supported by two small points, Superman's hands on the fuselage, they want the skin to buckle and/or the nose to tear off the plane. Neither is wrong. It's a matter of preferences. If we're playing superheroes, physics be damned. If we're playing faux-medieval fantasy, I'd rather the world match reality as much as possible, chosen-one characters, destiny, and genre conventions be damned. I want emergent story from D&D. But I want genre and superhero-story emulation from a superheroes game.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'm not sure how you mean this - we're just talking simulation aspects in this thread. Narrative or story game mechanics aren't part of the scope of what we are talking about, unless they are also providing simulation.

You said you would want to simulate the world the genre stories could be told in, as opposed to simulating the genre. I don't really understand the difference, and the only examples I can think of would be simulation of part of the world that aren't needed for the focus on the adventures of the characters.

Help me understand what the difference is to you.

I want to avoid mechanics specifically designed to simulate a genre as much as possible. High Concept Sim, to jargon-up for a moment. I want to simulate the world the PCs adventure in, not necessarily the PCs as main characters in a story.

 

[chaochou]

My point is the gameplay principles are the same, even if there’s no real-world counterpart. You may not want to call it simulation (that’s also verbiage), but fundamentally both approaches are ultimately about using the game mechanics to abstract more complex processes in order to reproduce the expected outcomes with a similar degree of probability. It’s just more hypothetical in one case than the other.

Okay, this is interesting, and something I said in my opening post. Even in wargaming circles, the test for simulation is open to interpretation and ranges of acceptance for plausibility.

However, your example assumes that 'game mechanics' can be written absent of the real world and still be used for simulation. This is, at best, highly contentious.

Models for wargaming are bespoke, depending on whether its Napoleonic, or World War One pre-trench or trench or post-trench, or War of the Roses or US Civil War or 100 Year War or Roman Civil War or Vietnam. There is no universal 'game mechanics' which you just plug numbers into and they simulate D-Day. D-Day has to be very, very carefully scripted. Totally seperate from the Korsun Pocket. Totally seperate from El-Alamein. And these are all conflicts within World War 2.

So unless you have a real-world model for combat what are your hypothetical units doing? What is your 'game system' created in a vacuum telling you? All your 'game system' can ever do - without real world benchmarking - is run made up numbers through a set of made up operations. That's not producing a hypothetical outcome, unless by 'hypothetical' you mean 'entirely make-believe'.

A hypothetical outcome - in wargaming terms - uses knowns (like the makeup, deployment and technical specifications of the Warsaw Pact and Western armies) to speculate about unknowns (like the Cold War goes hot in 1985 under different circumstances). That's using the idea of hypothetical in its proper sense - a proposition to be tested based on limited evidence.

That's entirely separate from making up fantasy units and a fantasy combat system and seeing who wins between a hydra and frost giant. That's not hypothetical. There is no evidence, and there is no test. The answer changes depending on how you change the numbers and the system - it's all invention. It's no different from the dragon landing on the roof. Made up creatures, made up situation, made up outcome. What happens? Whatever I say happens.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This goes back to more wanting to simulate the genre - seeing something like The Boys as an outlier, most superheroic settings may or may not be filled with collateral damage, especially in the terms of urban renewal, but most are not filled with widespread super-on-normal bloody violence.

To me though that just reinforces that I'd rather simulate the genre than simulate a world the genre's stories could be told in. Unless I specifically want to explore that, I'd rather keep wholesale death of civilians as dastardly plans the characters are stopping, not the inevitable result of any supers fight.

Also, I'm not talking about a supers game, and am not sure why it was brought up. I actually relax my genre issues around supers anyway, as I'd prefer more 4 color in those games and less The Boys.

 

[overgeeked]

That's my approach in most games, too, but the post I was responding to was about wanting "a reasonable set of rules that promote characters behaving in a manner I consider consistent with what mortal humans care about: surviving, eating, having a bath, maybe getting frisky." One answer to that is to say "rules can't help there." What I was relaying was one way they maybe can.

The issue I have with rules for things like that is it removes/reduces player agency and it still leads to weirdly unrealistic results.

We have an infinitely better understanding of physics than we do of psychology. And even the rules in games that are meant to simulate physics are wonky and produce often laughably inaccurate results. Unless the designer of the game is a world-renowned psychologist, any rules for how characters must/should/would/could behave will more than likely be wildly, laughably terrible. The games that I've seen try things like this only reinforce that belief.

The best worst example I know of is Monsterhearts and the Turn Somone On move.

"When you turn someone on, roll with hot. On a 10 up, take a String against them. • On a 7-9, they choose one: give themselves to you*, promise something they think you want, give you a String against them."

Now, PbtA games are meant to be fiction first. Meaning in order to even make a roll for a move, your character must do the thing in the fiction first, and once that's done, then you get to roll for it. So it should be: do something you hope turns on the character, ask the player if that would turn on the character, if yes then roll, if no then no roll. Yet, in a weird paradox, this move violates that rather explicitly. This is even explained in the move itself.

"We don’t get to decide what turns us on. When you make a move to turn someone on (with a character action or with scene description), the other player doesn’t get to exclaim, “Wait, my character is straight! There’s no way that’d turn them on.” That’s a decision that we as players can’t make for our characters. The dice are going to be the ultimate referees of what is and isn’t sexy for these characters."

So the player that wants to make this move simply gets to decide for you what turns your character on. They can literally describe anything and reasonably ask for a roll as a result.

*But hey, at least the player still get to choose consent. That's nice.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The dragon issue just kills D&D stone dead (which chao is talking about) in terms of preoccupation with simulation:

* Dragons have endoskeletons that do the work of tendon/muscle attachment et al.

* While not having an actual exoskeleton, their armor plating effectively provides them with one of the primary points of exoskeletons; protection from predation. With that “not-exoskeleton-exoskeleton” should come all the size/movement/respiratory constraints that arthropods must deal with…which dragons possess precisely zero!

And they can freaking fly naturally despite all this!

But does it stop there?

NONONO

6’2” 220 lb (or less) D&D martial heroes clash in melee with these colossal beasts that somehow also possess internal causality defying omnidirectional explosiveness and athleticism!

You know, the same martial heroes that can’t broad or vert jump more than humans!

So any call for naturalistic internal causality has been MURKED by the quintessential D&D creature from the word “go.”


It’s a game folks.

We’re playing a game and you make a dizzying array of sim-compromises (dragons, the quintessential D&D creatures, and the ridiculous constraints on the martial heroes that clash with them is just surface-scratching) just to play it at all.

Embrace it.

Would have liked to see this expressed more as the opinion it is than as some kind of truism, but you're certainly welcome to feel the way you do.

Part of the problem here is something I've discussed elsewhere. Simulation is a spectrum. You don't have to throw it out entirely because you run into something like the dragon issue. Yet time and again I see people attack simulation because it can't be perfect. Of course it can't! The concept isn't meaningless because there are examples where it doesn't work.

Another point I've mentioned before: magic breaks the rules. That includes the inherent magic if a multi-ton flying tank. If magic is involved, its magic and doesn't have to mesh with physics or anything else. If it's not magic, in my opinion effort should be made to keep within at least the action movie realm of reality. I know this angers the "fighters are underpowered" crowd, but the narrative space of magic simply has fewer limits.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Okay, this is interesting, and something I said in my opening post. Even in wargaming circles, the test for simulation is open to interpretation and ranges of acceptance for plausibility.

However, your example assumes that 'game mechanics' can be written absent of the real world and still be used for simulation. This is, at best, highly contentious.

Models for wargaming are bespoke, depending on whether its Napoleonic, or World War One pre-trench or trench or post-trench, or War of the Roses or US Civil War or 100 Year War or Roman Civil War or Vietnam. There is no universal 'game mechanics' which you just plug numbers into and they simulate D-Day. D-Day has to be very, very carefully scripted. Totally seperate from the Korsun Pocket. Totally seperate from El-Alamein. And these are all conflicts within World War 2.

So unless you have a real-world model for combat what are your hypothetical units doing? What is your 'game system' created in a vacuum telling you? All your 'game system' can ever do - without real world benchmarking - is run made up numbers through a set of made up operations. That's not producing a hypothetical outcome, unless by 'hypothetical' you mean 'entirely make-believe'.

A hypothetical outcome - in wargaming terms - uses knowns (like the makeup, deployment and technical specifications of the Warsaw Pact and Western armies) to speculate about unknowns (like the Cold War goes hot in 1985 under different circumstances). That's using the idea of hypothetical in its proper sense - a proposition to be tested based on limited evidence.

That's entirely separate from making up fantasy units and a fantasy combat system and seeing who wins between a hydra and frost giant. That's not hypothetical. There is no evidence, and there is no test. The answer changes depending on how you change the numbers and the system - it's all invention. It's no different from the dragon landing on the roof. Made up creatures, made up situation, made up outcome. What happens? Whatever I say happens.

At this point I have to ask what game systems you enjoy playing, since you seem to be largely against mechanics in general.

 

[chaochou]

At this point I have to ask what game systems you enjoy playing, since you seem to be largely against mechanics in general.

This is your third attempt at a snide little one-line drive-by. Since you can't engage meaningfully with anything I've said in some quite lengthy posts, I'm inviting you to stop now.

Bye bye.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

The issue I have with rules for things like that is it removes/reduces player agency and it still leads to weirdly unrealistic results.

We have an infinitely better understanding of physics than we do of psychology. And even the rules in games that are meant to simulate physics are wonky and produce often laughably inaccurate results. Unless the designer of the game is a world-renowned psychologist, any rules for how characters must/should/would/could behave will more than likely be wildly, laughably terrible. The games that I've seen try things like this only reinforce that belief.

I'm similarly iffy on the Monsterhearts move you mentioned, though probably for different reasons--I don't think game designers are trying to simulate human (much less supernatural human) psychology with those kinds of mechanics, but rather trying to add meaningful mechanics to PC-to-PC interactions, and make those doable in a game with fewer hurt feelings or awkwardness. I'm just not into those kinds of moves because they're a little navel-gazey to me. I'm a pretentious GM, but not that pretentious.

But I think that example is very different from the ones I gave, which aren't proscribing how someone has to respond to another PC, or to anything. They're just XP rewards, and the PCs have tons of leeway re: how they get them. And like I mentioned, it's supposed to be the player who decides if they get the reward--all hail precious player agency!

But also the games I mentioned aren't interested in realism. Brindlewood Bay is a game that's not only steeped in a combination of unrealistic genres (cozy mysteries and cosmic horror) but has a core mechanic that lets you turn a failure into a success after the roll, and after the player has seen the related consequence, effectively rewinding their own death or worse for a do-over. And Blades in the Dark is gritty and all, but it's a setting filled with ghosts and demons, and mechanics that also let you avoid or mitigate consequences once you know the full impact, turning a ruined reputation into troubling rumors, or a dead ally into a wounded one.

Realism isn't the goal in either case, but especially not psychological realism. Any player-nudging mechanics they have are about reinforcing genre and premise.