D&D 5E Bounded accuracy and more mundane heroes

[Tony Vargas]

Achieving "works intuitively without fiat" usually involves mechanical complexity, because simulating real processes usually involves a lot of granularity and special cases.

That also sounds like it would stop being intuitive pretty fast, but OK, I think I get it.

Elegance is the opposite of mechanical complexity. Something is elegant if, despite lacking mechanical complexity it can achieve broad or powerful results.

I could quibble with that definition. An elegant solution will often be less complex than a heavily-kludged one, but not necessarily, each kludge might be very simple, and the flawed/inelegant system being kludged might need it because it is too simple for what it's doing. While an elegant solution may be more complex than any one of those things, though ultimately simpler in execution than the whole of them taken together.

The core D20 system is elegant

Well, it's simple, but it doesn't achieve broad or powerful results. So I'd stick with just "the core d20 dice mechanic" is simple.

The DM is the active party in your imagined relationship. Only the DM can validate when the PC is allowed to shine. As such, the PC is forced into a "mother may I" role, where he knows he cannot reliably make propositions about the fiction.

True enough, but also largely a matter of perception on the players' part. The DM can craft the illusion that he's not being arbitrary, for instance, by concealing details of the resolution and exagerating degree of preparation that has gone into the situation.

 

[Celebrim]

That also sounds like it would stop being intuitive pretty fast, but OK, I think I get it.

Yeah, I think we are stuck on the difference between "intuitive to use the system" and "the system produces results that are intuitive". In the case of the D20 jump check, a simple pass/fail check makes for something intuitive to use, but the results if examined in context don't actually resemble what we'd intuitively expect if we tested a real athlete in a series of jumps.

I could quibble with that definition. An elegant solution will often be less complex than a heavily-kludged one, but not necessarily...

Elegance in my opinion is "ingenious simplicity". As such, whenever I'm saying something is elegant, I am always saying that it is simple. Elegance is one of those hard to define things that nonetheless plays a big role in what I do for a living. You know when a solution is elegant because what is a solution has some concrete test of correctness, and you can generally tell that it is elegant because it requires less man hours to implement, or less code to implement, or whatever. When you are using a less elegant approach, and someone suggests a more elegant one, then you recognize it.

Proving elegance in the general case or describing it is hard, but it's a real thing in my experience.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Yeah, I think we are stuck on the difference between "intuitive to use the system" and "the system produces results that are intuitive". In the case of the D20 jump check, a simple pass/fail check makes for something intuitive to use, but the results if examined in context don't actually resemble what we'd intuitively expect if we tested a real athlete in a series of jumps.

I'd just go ahead and call that 'realism.'

Realistic results may be intuitive if you're really into track & field, less so if you're into anime.

Elegance in my opinion is "ingenious simplicity". As such, whenever I'm saying something is elegant, I am always saying that it is simple. Elegance is one of those hard to define things that nonetheless plays a big role ...Proving elegance in the general case or describing it is hard, but it's a real thing in my experience.

I agree that elegance is a real - and hard to define/describe/achieve thing that's, almost paradoxically, obvious once you've done it. It's just not as, well, simple as always being simple. Things are often described as both elegant and simple, because elegant doesn't always mean simple, for instance.

 

[Celebrim]

I'd just go ahead and call that 'realism.'

Realistic results may be intuitive if you're really into track & field, less so if you're into anime.

No, it has very little to do with "realism", and you've more or less explained why in the next sentence.

If we are playing an Anime RPG, and we are testing how far a character can jump, then we might intuitively expect them to leap over buses or off 3 story buildings. What we would not intuitively expect, and be surprised to discover if it worked this way, is that the range of distances that they could jump all other things being equal mapped to a linear function where each distance was equally likely. We would not expect someone whose best distance was a 25 foot long jump to be just as likely to jump 5 feet as 25. And this would be true of the Anime character as well. If the Anime character averaged a superheroic unrealistic jump of 40', we would expect that the distance they could jump would rather tightly group around that.

 

[Tony Vargas]

If we are playing an Anime RPG, and we are testing how far a character can jump, then we might intuitively expect them to leap over buses or off 3 story buildings.

If you're familiar with anime to a certain degree, sure.

Why would we have expected characters in a fantasy game to adhere to RL track & field records, though, anymore than we'd expect it of the anime?

Expecting the game to produce results in line with reality is only intuitive if the game is, say, historical, rather than fantastic. It's "realism." Something that had a lot of cachet in the wargames that preceded D&D, and which D&D has long struggled with in several senses.

Getting your anime-inspired PC to jump like an anime character, OTOH, is something I'd call "genre fidelity" or "genre emulation" or "modeling genre." The key word, obviously, being genre, the conventions of which step in and take the place of realism.

The fantasy genre is pretty broad, reaching back to myth/legend, including S&S and High Fantasy, shading into sci-fi, and arguably including some of those crazy-jump'n anime characters.

What we would not intuitively expect, and be surprised to discover if it worked this way, is that the range of distances that they could jump all other things being equal mapped to a linear function where each distance was equally likely. We would not expect someone whose best distance was a 25 foot long jump to be just as likely to jump 5 feet as 25. And this would be true of the Anime character as well. If the Anime character averaged a superheroic unrealistic jump of 40', we would expect that the distance they could jump would rather tightly group around that.

Guess that simple d20 isn't so elegant.