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

[AbdulAlhazred]

You'd be surprised how much modern houses can hold, especially with supports every 12-16"!

I think a lot would depend on the size of the house. A 2000-sq ft could support about 40,000 (or even more!), but that is over its entire surface, and of course the weight of the T-Rex would be focused on its feet. I would imagine it falling through on its footfalls, but its bulk would probably be supported.

Regardless, I am sure if such a creature thrashed around on top of the roof, trying to free its feet/legs, it would break the supports and probably fall through eventually.

Yeah, a modern house could support 20 tons if it was VERY carefully distributed and didn't move. I don't even think it would offer much resistance to a T-Rex though, that baby would just stroll clean through your house without even barely slowing down! I mean, some idiot in our neighborhood went out and chainsawed a 100' douglass fir. It promptly fell on top of his neighbor's house, completely crushing it flat instantly. I doubt the part that fell on the house weighed more than a couple tons, maybe 5 or so. It still just went clean through without even slowing down, lol.

 

[jmartkdr2]

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.

What's HoML?

 

[Hussar]

. You certainly can't tell me what I think the word simulation means.

.

Well now that I totally agree with. I absolutely can’t tell you what you think the word means.

 

[pemerton]

It is, but to many it was also boring and all the classes feel the same. And that's assuming you like the mechanics emulating story beats explicitly, which many don't.

That was my issue as well, I wanted variations in how classes played

"Feel the same" and "variation" here seem to refer to differences in the mechanics. As opposed to differences in the fiction.

That seems at odds with simulation as an impetus, which presumably prefers consistency of handling, feel etc. It seems much more to be a concern with what makes for good game play!

 

[Hussar]

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.

Then why were you ever good with 5e? Half the classes have limits based on narrative beats. All the “short rest” classes. And almost all classes have some powers that refresh on a short rest.

 

[pemerton]

This is exactly the post-hoc rationalization that isn't simulation. There's no attempt to create a thing that aligns the play with what someone might understand about the real world, instead we have that these events happen in the game, so we craft individual and specific stories for each instance to explain how it did happen. That's not sim, that's weaving a narrative after the fact to make sense of the game results.

<snip>

Now we've moved from discussion of simulation as making things feel real to following the rules of the game.

All this seems to amount to is we used the rules to find out what happens. If that's the threshold for a simulation, what RPG isn't? Eg 4e D&D would obviously count as a simulation by these lights. So would Marvel Heroic RP.

What benefit is gained by relabelling playing a RPG according to its rules as simulation?

Another comment on this.

I think that the best sense I can make of the idea that D&D combat is simulationist is that most of the time the combat rules will produce results that don't require anyone to make a decision beyond declaring an action for a combat participant - which can, at least loosely, be treated as something that happens in the fiction.

There is a contrast here with, say, Apocalypse World, which requires the GM to make further decisions.

But there is no contrast with most of what happens in the resolution of a combat in 4e D&D - yet that seems to be regarded, uniformally, as not a simulation!

Which leaves me a bit puzzled.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I see it not infrequently, and I'm playing with people I've been playing with for a minimum of a decade, and sometimes four times that. And it doesn't matter whether the mechanics are sim or not, the issue is once they've been accepted, they've been accepted; people may not like it but they're not liable to suddenly expect things to work out in a way different than the mechanics tell them. You can argue how frequent that is, but I've seen it enough over the years I'm going to believe its common until given resounding evidence to the contrary.

With sim its an issue of people not always seeing how things actually work the same way, and nothing about playing RPGs for a while will automatically change that. The difference between the impressions people get about how free climbing works and how it actually works can be pretty different, and all it needs is a little variance in actual experience to make this jarring. For someone who gives a damn about simulation its nice for it to actually at least resemble reality here, but honest, any common metric is better than none.

OK, but I would argue that, if it is a sim in any meaningful sense, you could GO THROUGH IT with another person and they would have to agree that, modulus some things that might be elided or simplified, that the logic of what was produced was sound, and that the outputs are the logically consistent and expected outputs that match in some sense to real world results of carrying out the simulated activity/of the simulated system (say the economy of a town). I don't really think that things like skill checks to climb cliffs and the price table from the 5e PHB are going to do that. Certainly anyone who has climbing experience is likely to object to climb checks as matching with ANYTHING in reality (@Manbearcat being our go-to on this one). Likewise no one who has ever been in a retail business will agree that the market place in Fallcrest represents any touchpoint with reality at all beyond "there are goods and prices."

I guess about as far as we can go with this is that there's something of a subjective nature about it. So some people might agree that it seems kinda 'simulationistic' and other people might scoff at the notion because they're more knowledgeable about the subject in question.

 

[Oofta]

I'm not comparing them to other dragons, I'm comparing them to D&D, and they're more realistic than how dragons are portrayed in D&D according to what D&D says about dragons. There's no way a human survives against a D&D dragon as presented in the fiction -- even at 20'x20', it weighs tons and the sheer physics of it's physical size and speed make no sense that a normal human could effectively dodge it long enough to kill it with a sword. But, good news! The game doesn't care about making sense, it makes for cool.

So Reign of Steel dragons are a good model for D&D dragons because you say so. Because you've established this, it follows that fighters affecting dragons makes no sense.

You really don't see the self-justified circular logic here?

 

[Oofta]

"Feel the same" and "variation" here seem to refer to differences in the mechanics. As opposed to differences in the fiction.

That seems at odds with simulation as an impetus, which presumably prefers consistency of handling, feel etc. It seems much more to be a concern with what makes for good game play!

To be clear, I was just commenting on the AEDU structure, not simulation as it regards to 4E. I have thoughts on that, but talking about 4E and what I liked or disliked and why tends to lead to edition wars, so no thanks.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

IIRC, 1e giants were about 10 feet tall. 5e giants start at 16 for the shortest of them, and range up to 24.

I can see how picturing a 4 foot dwarf fighting a 24 foot storm giant with a battleaxe can be difficult.

1e Hill Giant is 10.5' tall, and a Storm Giant is 21' tall. Titans are described as 18'+ in size, but they represent more a whole category of highly variable individuals than a uniform monster race, at least in 1e terms. In fact later books move them into a more god-like category, and even the 1e MM description is pretty open-ended. So, yeah, overall 1e giants are a couple feet shorter than 5e giants, but the difference isn't really much.

Honestly though, in terms of REALISTIC ideas of combat, its hard to imagine a 6' human fighting a 12' 1e Fire Giant. It would be similar to a toddler fighting in a full-grown man, proportionately. You just shouldn't be able to get and STAY close enough to effectively attack without being subject to brutal reprisals that would be almost impossible to avoid. A 12' giant would weigh on the order of a ton, so imagine a 1000 pound foot stomp or kick. The strength, in absolute terms, of this giant would need to be 8x that of a human, so no force you could apply would even come close to matching what the giant could exert. Parrying a fire giant axe blow with your shield could only possibly end one way, with the axe embedded through the shield, your arm, and your breast plate, and sticking out your back! Sure, you might use agility to avoid SOME blows, but judging from real-world creatures of similar size, this giant would not be all that slow or awkward. After all it has to cope with the same 9.8m/s^2 gravity field we do, so its reaction speed can't be that much less than ours or it would not be able to stand on 2 legs.

The best you would seemingly get here would be to dodge some attacks and maybe, at great risk, get inside the things reach now and then and poke at it, or slice at a leg or something. I don't think defeat is 100% guaranteed, but you better be so fast that you almost never get hit, and strong enough to make serious wounds on something a LOT bigger (and with proportionately thicker skin, etc.) than you. Giants are pretty mundane, and actually rather small compared to the more extreme monsters, so the whole idea of fighting the smaller types seems barely feasible. The idea of ANYONE of human size even thinking about fighting a Storm Giant? Forget it! The thing weighs 20 tons, at least, and is thus 100x your strength. He just steps on you, flat out, squish, you are dead, a pancake, roadkill. Sure, you might give him a nasty lower leg wound, just before he crushes you flat, but that's hardly going to win any fights...

And I can certainly see how ways to defeat really large creatures could be developed, but they would be nothing like matching with them in battle. It would involve cliffs, traps, pits, huge deadfalls, lots and lots of missiles, and probably poison or magic. It would be a super dicey proposition too! If you ran into one of these types of things in an uncontrolled situation, abject flight would be the only viable option! Even then someone would probably buy the farm. Its just not an interesting genre-appropriate RP scenario, so its more reasonable to assume that fighters are actually TOTALLY SUPERHUMAN at the levels where they mess with things like big giants.