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

[Ovinomancer]

I mean the knights could harm other knights with their weapons... Look, you're first inventing fiction in which dragons are ludicrously more resilient than any other animals, then you're posing that a film in which they can defeat tanks and fighter jets is realistic, and then complaining that it is unrealistic that knights could defeat these things can take down a modern military. All this is completely circular. If we instead don't assume that dragons are absurdly resilient, and that they can be harmed with normal weapons like all other animals, the issue really doesn't exist (or at least is way less blatant.)

I'm doing what now? Dragons have the some of if not the highest ACs of everything. They're at the top end in their CR bands for hitpoints. They have additional resistances and abilities to mitigate damage. And that's 5e. If we step back to 3.x, only recently after 2e, which is when Reign of Fire came out and took it's inspiration, dragons are vastly tougher than other animals!

The claim that dragons aren't supernaturally tough -- the toughest things around, matching demon lords -- is the strange claim!

Next edition perhaps? I said I agreed with you that D&D is inconsistent in how it models the fictional reality and I wish it could be improved.

Any edition other than 4e, so probably not next edition, either.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I mean rules designed to simulate actual things in the real world as much as is practical, and do the same with fantasy stuff based on a consistent depiction of what that fantasy stuff is. So if I create a town, I want that town to have everything it would make sense for it to have, based on my best understanding of what that would be. If a character is not supposed to be magical, I want them to be no more fantastic than action movie physics allow. And I want to model those people and places as close to reality (or whatever rules have been determined for fantasy elements) as possible.

5e does not really do that, but Level Up does most of what I want, and I can and do houserule whatever else I need, subject to player buy in.

That being said, verisimilitude in worldbuilding matters more to me than PC verisimilitude. That's why my favorite fantasy RPG is actually ACKS. That game care a lot about accurate worldbuilding.

To answer your second question, I do run into conflict sometimes. I prefer the game to be fair to both sides, even to my detriment as a PC, and prefer to err that way when necessary.

Not to disagree with you in the sense of 'what works' in your average fantasy campaign. OTOH I don't think anyone can really model the effects of things like magic on a society. We don't even know the parameters of how it works well enough to say much about that. I mean, lets imagine clerics. How much time and effort does it take to become one? Can anyone do it? What fraction of people can do it? Is there some sort of gated resource someone controls, like a holy altar or something, that you have to access to become a cleric? Is there a lesser NPC version of a 'cleric' that can cast some spells? Which ones? All of this would be critical to understanding how much access to clerical magic a town of 1000 people, lets say, has. The answer to this question probably has a huge impact on the social structure, demography, etc. of said town. D&D has basically zero answers to any of this, and thus there's nothing like a 'simulation' of a town that can happen WRT clerics! And this is only a small example!

I mean, what DOES HAPPEN is that the contents and whatnot of this town is laid out in terms of what the genre expectations for a D&D town of 1000 people is, mixed with some setting derived stuff, etc. It is then simply assumed that this town 'makes sense' in terms of the 'laws of nature' that exist within the game and the setting. This is fine, its exactly what has to happen so we can play, and it is what creates the expected genre elements and all of what follows.

I mean, you can go back to the early days of D&D and there were debates, even articles in various magazines and such, plus various amusing anecdotes and whatnot where people debated this stuff, or it was pointed out how ridiculous the genre assumptions were from any kind of practical standpoint (I seem to recall there were any number of Wormy, Snarfquest and Fineous Fingers strips that played on these themes). So I'm happy when a DM might answer "well, its this way because that's just how things are supposed to work in D&D!" Hey, great! I can even see why it can be desirable. At worst who has any business critiquing anyone else's genre assumptions in a totally made up self-referential genre like D&D?

 

[gamerprinter]

Of course, I care nothing about canon. If I need a different take on some mechanic to accommodate a campaign concept (if not a mechanic replacement, if it turns out good and reasonable in reflection to the rest of rules - whatever impact it may have) and I create it. For example, as if I wanted to improve the feel for ancient shield fighting, I might do something like this. Treat weapon and shield combat the same as two weapon combat, with the shield serving as the second weapon, used in concert with the first weapon. You could even do a shield bash as an attack, but normally, the shield is used for defensive maneuvers. Perhaps add your DEX modifier to your Shield Attack Roll, as an alternative to AC. (If that didn't work, I'd try something else, until I found something effective and not overly rules impactful).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It seems weird to say that you can only simulate what exists in reality, since games can simulate genres and genres are not discrete real world things, but abstract categories with lots of slippage - and yet, if something is completely outside of the genre within a given gaming context we would be able to say something like "That simulation of slapstick comedy in TOON doesn't work if the results are dead baby animals." Now if the genre it were simulating was "Dark Comedy" those same dead baby animals could be made to work.

While I agree with you, I just think that we would be better off not to use the word 'simulate' in this context. Not that anyone in this thread is responsible for that, its a sin that was committed long before many of you were even born!

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I'm doing what now? Dragons have the some of if not the highest ACs of everything. They're at the top end in their CR bands for hitpoints. They have additional resistances and abilities to mitigate damage. And that's 5e. If we step back to 3.x, only recently after 2e, which is when Reign of Fire came out and took it's inspiration, dragons are vastly tougher than other animals!

The claim that dragons aren't supernaturally tough -- the toughest things around, matching demon lords -- is the strange claim!

Yet people with swords and spears can kill them. Just like they can kill mammoths. (Albeit with more difficulty.) This is not super weird. If you stop assuming that the dragons are cruise-missile proof super animals that can eat Challenger tanks for breakfast and instead assume that they're basically kinda tough dinosaurs with some magical addons, then humans with weapons being able to defeat them moves from "absurd" to "improbable but conceivable."

Any edition other than 4e, so probably not next edition, either.

We'll see I guess. And I would prefer always-on supernatural might over 4e's 'powers' that are often hard to explain from simulationistic angle.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Are you saying that there is no simulation (in the common sense of the word) in fantasy RPGs then? If so, again this seems an odd thing to assert in a conversation about simulation if you don't want to end the discussion. If not, what would be simulation in such a game?

Well, to answer this, and addressing @Reynard's questioning the good faith of my original post, I think it is a genuinely more rewarding way of looking at things. Instead of filling our minds with some odd notion that there's some 'right way' for the physical behavior of a dragon to be portrayed, we are acknowledging that the very idea of the physical behavior of a dragon is absurd, as it could not exist. Then we become free to talk about what is really interesting about dragons, which is our IDEAS of them and how we want our FRPG play to work! What are we actually after? What questions and issues might we run into?

Frankly I got really tired of all the people telling me that my D&D fighter could only do thus or such and not some other thing 'because realism', when there was nothing realistic whatsoever about the situation. The whole thing seemed to be nothing but a thin facade of words pasted over what the real situation was, which is what people saying these things like "you cannot jump 30 feet" were actually doing in their brains. It wasn't an objection based on physical reality, it was an objection based on their mental model of GENRE EXPECTATION. The trouble was a DIFFERENCE in genre expectation. I read the 1e PHB and it said I could be Beowulf, but when I tried to act like Beowulf, someone told me that wasn't 'realistic'. lol. Obviously we had different genre expectations! If I could talk about that, in plain words, as what it is, instead of being stonewalled by this nonsensical talk of realism and simulation in a mental activity where neither has any meaning beyond "what my taste is" I'd be much happier.

So there's no bad faith, nothing like that. Quite the contrary, I want open discussion of the actual issues in plain words that connect reasonably with their dictionary definitions! I think that's a reasonable goal, myself.

 

[el-remmen]

While I agree with you, I just think that we would be better off not to use the word 'simulate' in this context. Not that anyone in this thread is responsible for that, its a sin that was committed long before many of you were even born!

There is not much point is losing sleep about how words come to be used and no "we" can convince to go back, so we literally* have to accept that and in arguments where precision matters acknowledge those different uses.

That said, I see no problem with the use of simulate and simulation as I did in my post. Just like I think a style of D&D can be "simulationist" (leaning towards simulating an understanding of a fantastic reality) without actually needing to be a simulation of anything actual or anything in total.



*The literal final nail in that coffin for me, and by "literal" I, of course, mean figurative.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Not change what you like, no. But you either play with an ever shrinking population who shares your preferences or embrace the fantasy superhero game people seem to want. Because trying to get the new game or new players to accept the older style is all but impossible. I’ve been banging my head against that wall for years.

Right, but then D&D was always kind of undecided on this. I mean, certainly it falls on the side of "a first level fighter is pretty much a mundane person subject to mundane laws of physics, act accordingly" but then you get to a bit higher levels (mid-single-digits even) and people have items, and the monsters start to become completely fantastical, and just fighting them at all is sort of 'super heroic'. Beyond that there's casters out there and they're emulating most of the things you'd see in comic books, albeit maybe only once a day or only with specific constraints.

So, even early days there wasn't really a consensus about the 'style'. I know what you mean when you say 'older style', but it was never easy to find a like-minded group to play with! I mean, as soon as D&D was released in 1974 some people ran off and did it COMPLETELY different and much more fantastic in style than EGG and his crew. They wrote all their weird stuff down in a book and called in 'Arduin Grimoire' remember? There were practically wars fought over that horrible 'west coast gaming' thing. But even EGG's campaign had high level PCs doing completely nutty fantastical stuff. Obviously you could tone down the game, not give out magic items, end at level 9, whatever, but bog standard D&D really doesn't do ONE style consistently. I'd almost say that was part of its success formula, that the genre itself kind of evolves around you.

Now, I sure understand when you say you cannot get that anymore. 5e can't deliver that, nor 4e, nor 3.x, nor any flavor of PF, 13a, etc. As to if you can ever find 5 players to run through 'Temple of the Frog' old school, I agree, that's not likely to happen nowadays.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Yeah, I'm MOSTLY with you on this, except for the definitional question on the word simulation, here.

AA and MBC have pointed out/opined that to simulate something, you need to be able to point at the real thing that you're simulating, so you have that concrete reference point and can gauge "how well have I simulated this thing"? But if there's no real thing to point at, can you really make a fake (simulated) version of it?

Yes. You merely need to decide the parameters of what it is you're simulating.

I think this is one of the longstanding confusions from the GNS model, right? Does "simulation" cover simulation of reality and real things only, or does it include simulation of fictive concepts? Or is it clearer if we call the latter "genre emulation" or some other term, to keep them distinct?

I think genre emulation is different. I think @Thomas Shey articulated it pretty well in some recent thread. I try to remember how it went... Basically the difference is is whether the thing being modelled that has existence in the fictional reality. Whether it is something the people living in that setting would acknowledge. Supernatural things, scifi elements, superpowers etc all can 'really' exist in the fictional reality and the people living in that setting would acknowledge those things. These things can be simulated. But genre conventions such as dramatic conveniences, plot armour etc are different. They're part of the narrative, but not part of the fictional reality. Mechanics that support those would be genre emulation.

 

[Reynard]

So there's no bad faith, nothing like that. Quite the contrary, I want open discussion of the actual issues in plain words that connect reasonably with their dictionary definitions! I think that's a reasonable goal, myself.

I'm pretty sure I opened with that, and reiterated it repeatedly, yet you're still talking about not being able to have climbing rules in a game with dragons in it.