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

[Zubatcarteira]

This conversation reminds me of this.

 

[Blue]

True, it was an omission on my part. I am a bit surprised that you would assume an unchanging standard as levels increase, but, hey, so it goes. Missed cues abounded.

Ah yes, I had given examples that precluded first level which never got called out but it was on me to divine that you were only speaking about first level.

And, of course, still wrong. If you stick with a single approach of genre emulation you never need to guess what parts - or at what level - you should be applying real world evaluations vs. genre expectations.

I'm sorry to disappoint you. Yesterday was ungodly busy for me- I was unable to give your thoughts the proper focus. I feel I have vexed Ovinomancer as well.

If you don't have time to put your thoughts in order, you may want to hold off until you do so there's no confusion about what you are saying or unforced errors on your side of the debate.

 

[Ovinomancer]

We are being consistent. The creature's body should roughly fit in the area, they should be standing in their squares. T-rex can do that for a 15 feet square, 120 feet long dragon cannot even remotely do so for a 20 foot square.

And yes, we can certainly quibble about whether 20 foot square would make more sense for a t-rex, but with giga dragons in 20 foot squares we are talking about an issue of a completely different magnitude.

But, please, go ahead and tell us how you imagine this working. Do dragons of the size of a passenger aeroplane just somehow stand in a 20 foot squares, perhaps even in a room they could no way fit in, and everyone just is supposed to overlook this?

Oh, I don't have any problems at all. Because I'm not trying to defend that dragons in D&D are remotely close to simulation. I'm perfectly fine with "look, actually massive footprints are a pain to play the game with, so we're going to arbitrarily make this fictionally massive things take up a convenient amount of space and just ignore that it would have to be wrapped up in a fetal ball to get anywhere close to that space." I'm also perfectly fine with the genre logic of going toe-to-toe with a dragon, and am not suggesting that this is remotely a simulation of anything other than a cool flight of fancy.

It's you that's making arguments that these things are simulation-y, and you that has the burden of reconciling all of these things. And I think the main thing happening is that there's post-hoc rationalization going on, where you imagine some details to reconcile the game events and then say that the game events were attempting to simulate those details. It's exactly backwards, and it shows in how you (and @Oofta) have approached this topic by finding a thing to support your current argument and then immediately abandoning it for the next if it's inconvenient. Like the evolution of the dragon thing, were it started by claiming that dragons are like mammoths, then when size came up it was dismissing the sizes, and then it latched onto 'it fits in a 20'x20' cube,' and then it was 'but it sticks out, really far, when it needs to.' Which, inconveniently, ends back up at the initial problem where dragons are actually really big, and it's ludicrous to compare them to mammoths.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Normally when I think of simulation in dnd, I think of world building rather than the small scale combat stuff. Things like how do different polities interact, what trade goes on, how does a town survive, or why does it even exist, based on nearby resources. I tend to not want to get too complicated though so nowadays I use keywords based on those found in dungeon world to quickly sort that sort of stuff out. I'm likely going to expand a bit on that based on the WoW d20 game that had rules for making settlements.

I've thought about defining things using the birthright campaign setting but I'm not sure that's really going to improve my game vs the amount of work that I'd have to put in. I've also looked at the becmi rules cyclopedia and their domain rules, but the most I do with those is think about the levels of nobility available in domains to get a number of barons, counts, and dukes with the kingdom.

I'm curious, so if basically any of these simulation options is 'not going to improve my game' and don't sound like you consider them very 'sim', what is gained by going there at all? I guess what I mean is, by contrast I have a long-established D&D world. It is a bunch of maps and descriptions of locations, and whatnot, as well as the history of things established during play in many previous campaigns. Now, none of this is really 'explained' anywhere. I mean, there's some histories and whatnot, but all any of it does is 'tell a story'. If your characters visit a certain city that is fairly nearby to a Dwarven enclave, you will encounter some dwarves selling metal goods. That's just color though, nobody can explain the 'trade relations' between these localities, because none exist! You can imagine some such exists, and you are going to imagine that the result is what you're told you see, but that's not 'simulation' it is mere color.

So, what would it take for that to be not just color but an actual genuine simulation? What would be gained by that exercise in terms of quality of play, or even any difference at all in play? And frankly, given how simulations of such things in the ACTUAL WORLD are fairly unreliable, even given a vast and dense set of data points and the understanding that there is an ACTUAL physical reality there which we are simulating, how can we even say it is possible to simulate an economic relationship like this when all we have are 2 dots on an imaginary map? Do we know how much labor is required to manufacture an axe head? What are the transport costs? Which commodities are in demand in dwarf land that they are willing to trade for (IE for which it is cheaper to trade an axe head than getting it some other way). I propose that in made up fantasy worlds we are so far from knowing realistic answers to these questions, simply do to the lack of definition of necessary facts, that any claim of 'simulation' is mere sophistry. Certainly we have a description of why an axe head costs 5sp, and I don't deny the plausibility of that description, but it is still mere color, it isn't based on necessary facts, which simply don't exist!

So, I FEEL like its color all the way down. People can call it 'simulation' until they're blue in the face, but IMHO we're talking about color. Maybe a particular shade of color, you would never say "oh, they just give away the axe heads for free." OK, right, I think its fair to say the color meets expectations and fulfills genre tropes, etc. by falling within a certain expected range of answers. I just don't think that range is set by any kind of actual model of economics or even anything close to one.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I've been mentally playing around with a broader maneuvers/superiority dice system, and a maneuver of "add a superiority die to your Strength check" is definitely in the mix.

Yeah, you could look at how HoML works as a kind of an implementation of basically the same idea. You have a pool of 'Power Points', and you can drop one on the use of a power, which will upgrade its outcome by one rank. So you could see powers as being like 5e BM maneuvers, and PPs are basically superiority dice (except the throw of the die is just folded into the attack or defense check). You can spend them on ANY sort of check too, so "add a superiority die to your STR check" becomes "use a power point to upgrade the results of your STR check from success to enhanced success." Its not always 100% clear what 'enhanced success' will do for you beyond a regular success (say in cases where you are just declaring an action like 'lift that gate') but there are ways to deal with that. The cool thing is, ALL classes have the same system, so wizards also employ power points, but maybe for them its going to be "Oh, I'll make this fireball especially nasty." While I'm not averse to things simply being 'plot coupons' PPs also are fairly easy for people to rationalize as a pool of magical power or 'Qi' or something similar.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This is not "simulationism" as per the OP, then, which is "presenting rules ina way that sort of look like how things actually work, if you squint." Captain America doesn't flip cars all day as a hobby; only at moments of drama or crisis.

The issue is not just about game balance. Or even genre.

In a lot of fiction, trying hard matters. People aren't always performing at their limit, but in moments of crisis they give it their all, and achieve results that are above their every-day performance. We see this in superhero fiction all the time. But also in Star Wars (eg Vader throwing over the Emperor at the end of RotJ; Luke calling his lightsabre to himself in the ice cave on Hoth, etc); in LotR (eg Sam vs Shelob; Pippin vs the Troll; Boromir defending Merry and Pippin to redeem himself for his attempt to take the ring; etc); in Earthsea (eg Tenar cursing Kossil; Ged sealing the breach between the Dry Lands and the mortal world); etc.

4e D&D is the only version of the game to have a systematic mechanical framework to permit trying hard to matter.

Are they? 4e has a lot of elements that push towards specialisation in build - eg feats that boost particular sorts of manoeuvres, secondary stats that boost particular sorts of effects, etc.

Mechanically, one power is separate from another in its recovery rules. But in the fiction, I think there is likely to be a good deal of cohesion for most characters.

The design reason for doing this in 4e seems identical to the reason that a 5e fighter's Action Surge and Second Wind and Indomitable are separate, and all are in turn separate from a Battle Master's manoeuvres. It reduces spamming, which makes the game more interesting, and it makes the game mechanically easier to balance, which also ends up making the game more interesting.

This is where we get a shift towards cooperative storytelling that I'm personally not such a big fan of. I would rather that the game system itself set the relevant limits, so that the players can then just lean into the play of their PCs.

I explicitly don't want the game system to set limits based on narrative beats. It was the biggest problem I had with 4th ed, that everything was designed that way.

 

[Micah Sweet]

But they could. And the simulation I'm talking about, and I believe OP as well, is simulating the fictional reality rather than emulating a story.


Hard disagree. It is not interesting to not be able to use most of your power budget, nor is it balanced. My example was not just hypothetical. I played a Whirlwind Barbarian (I think that's what it was called) for a good while, and every time there were fight against a single foe (which was quite often) most of his powers were unusable. I ended up rebuilding the character as a Slayer, which was hella boring, but at least I could use my Power Attack several times. A better solution than either would have been a character with varied powers that could have been used multiple times up to certain combined limit.

You know, like combat maneuvers in Level Up.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Oh, I don't have any problems at all. Because I'm not trying to defend that dragons in D&D are remotely close to simulation. I'm perfectly fine with "look, actually massive footprints are a pain to play the game with, so we're going to arbitrarily make this fictionally massive things take up a convenient amount of space and just ignore that it would have to be wrapped up in a fetal ball to get anywhere close to that space." I'm also perfectly fine with the genre logic of going toe-to-toe with a dragon, and am not suggesting that this is remotely a simulation of anything other than a cool flight of fancy.

So basically in your game things are just incoherent nondescriptive mush? Because that's what I am hearing. You cannot even answer super simple basic question about your world like roughly how large things are in even remotely coherent manner. How are people supposed to visualise a 120 feet dragon in a 50 feet room, occupying a 20 foot square? None of this makes nay sense.

It's you that's making arguments that these things are simulation-y, and you that has the burden of reconciling all of these things. And I think the main thing happening is that there's post-hoc rationalization going on, where you imagine some details to reconcile the game events and then say that the game events were attempting to simulate those details. It's exactly backwards, and it shows in how you (and @Oofta) have approached this topic by finding a thing to support your current argument and then immediately abandoning it for the next if it's inconvenient. Like the evolution of the dragon thing, were it started by claiming that dragons are like mammoths, then when size came up it was dismissing the sizes, and then it latched onto 'it fits in a 20'x20' cube,' and then it was 'but it sticks out, really far, when it needs to.' Which, inconveniently, ends back up at the initial problem where dragons are actually really big, and it's ludicrous to compare them to mammoths.

I have not abandoned anything. I have explained my position several times, I have been consistent from the get go. Please stop lying.

 

[Oofta]

Oh, I don't have any problems at all. Because I'm not trying to defend that dragons in D&D are remotely close to simulation. I'm perfectly fine with "look, actually massive footprints are a pain to play the game with, so we're going to arbitrarily make this fictionally massive things take up a convenient amount of space and just ignore that it would have to be wrapped up in a fetal ball to get anywhere close to that space." I'm also perfectly fine with the genre logic of going toe-to-toe with a dragon, and am not suggesting that this is remotely a simulation of anything other than a cool flight of fancy.

It's you that's making arguments that these things are simulation-y, and you that has the burden of reconciling all of these things. And I think the main thing happening is that there's post-hoc rationalization going on, where you imagine some details to reconcile the game events and then say that the game events were attempting to simulate those details. It's exactly backwards, and it shows in how you (and @Oofta) have approached this topic by finding a thing to support your current argument and then immediately abandoning it for the next if it's inconvenient. Like the evolution of the dragon thing, were it started by claiming that dragons are like mammoths, then when size came up it was dismissing the sizes, and then it latched onto 'it fits in a 20'x20' cube,' and then it was 'but it sticks out, really far, when it needs to.' Which, inconveniently, ends back up at the initial problem where dragons are actually really big, and it's ludicrous to compare them to mammoths.

I was the one that brought up mammoths, I never said they were the same size, or even that they are the same threat level. There is no real world analogy for dragons because they aren't real. We know a group of hunters with stone age technology could hunt and kill mammoths because of the historical record. We know PCs can fight and kill dragons because the rules and gameplay tell us we can. They are exactly as tough an dangerous as the MM says they are.

There's no contradiction, no post-hoc rationalization. We simulate the fact that people have always been good at killing each other and pretty much every animal (if you think dragons are big, blue whales that we've been practically hunting to extinction for centuries would make them look small) we can find.

Of course it's not perfect. Some artists exaggerate sizes. But neither @Crimson Longinus nor I are abandoning anything. If you don't want to follow the rules of the game, if you don't care for how they chose to represent space required, fine. Most people don't have a problem with it so stop making ludicrous accusations.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Throwing, flipping, hey, I responded to your use of dissociated in the spirit it was meant, so, howzabout we don't get too picky here ok?

But, that's the thing - is "flipping a car" a "magical" effect or not? It's obviously something that a normal person cannot do. So, can my 20th level fighter do it or not? Well, by D&D, currently, it doesn't matter if I'm 1st level or 20th level, the answer is no. A caster, OTOH, can do it once or twice at 1st level whereas at 20th level, they can (more or less) do it at will.

So, the trick is, how do we raise that bar for higher level non-casters to become more "fantastical" without the "fantastical" being always on and either being so depowered that it might as well not be there or being too powerful and a balance issue.

And that's the problem. Note, "flip the car" is just a placeholder for "feat that is impossible for a normal person to do but isn't necessarily so magical that it would require a CGI greenscreen to show it in the movie version". Do we allow the level system to simply allow this to be something that all characters of that class to do once they hit a certain level, or do we add it in as a sort of separate subsystem where the "flip the car" is a choice by the player to be able to do and it's balanced against the number of times it can be done.

Right, now we are simply recapitulating the line of reasoning that was taken to get from 3.5 to 4e! If we take the answer to be that there's no real reason not to let the player of a fighter spend a plot coupon to depict his character 'flipping a car', then why even have that be a different system from what the wizard uses to regulate how many spells he casts? It is all a very logical and really rather elegant solution!