D&D General D&D isn't a simulation game, so what is???

[Charlaquin]

Well, in the case of hit points, pace of decision. You can argue its also a substitute for defense, but if so, its about as baroque a simulation of that as you can get.

Well, certainly not a realistic simulation, but it works pretty well for simulating action movie combat, for instance.

 

[TheSword]

I would say WFRP 1st, 2nd or 4th current) is much more simulationist. Some of these have been mentioned earlier but I’ll expand the list.

• Armour reduces damage
• Skill of the opponent affects whether you hit them
• Hit locations with their own armour points
• Wounds are represented as critical wounds which take time and sometimes intervention to heal
• Classes represent a whole society of renaissance archetypes. You can play a physician, a nun or a rat catcher (with a small and aggressive dog) just a easily as a wizard or a rogue.
• You can improve healing with a wide array of herbs and poultices.
• You have status which represents standing in the community, affects influencing others, and how much coin you make from plying your trade.
• In 4th Ed, outnumbering makes it much easier to hit
• In 4th Ed shooting at someone closer to you is much easier
• In 4th Ed you can choose to parry an attack with your weapon, parry it with a shield, dodge it altogether or even use a skill to represent a distraction.

 

[SJB]

Codex Martialis is a HEMA-inspired RPG running off the d20 OGL. There is a quickstart pdf for £2.50. The core game has various supplements for world-building, “realistic” magic, etc. The default setting is based on the fifteenth century Baltic.

 

[Hussar]

Well, certainly not a realistic simulation, but it works pretty well for simulating action movie combat, for instance.

Except that it isn't.

Since the mechanics cannot actually tell you anything about what happened in a combat, there's no movie action being simulated. All you know, after running the mechanics, is that X are alive and Y are dead. How they got there is a complete mystery that is in no way actually resolved by the combat mechanics.

We pretend that they do action movie combat because, well, we can pretend that it does anything really. It fits action movie combat better probably because of the quicker recovery. But, again, that's really not using the mechanics to derive that answer. It's all freeform.

And most of the mechanics are purely in service to the game and have nothing to do with actually trying to inform any sort of narrative. If you aren't trying to inform some form of narrative, you aren't simulating anything.

 

[Unwise]

As @Hussar said, if you want gritting dark ages realism, then Harnmaster is the way to go. Be warned that it is not 'fair'. PCs start with STDs, fleas or even leprosy. If you are a woman, you are shorter and weaker than men, and that matters. If you are born under the wrong star sign you will never be a magically gifted etc. If you are born poor, your own career options might be to be a sailor or waggoneer, while somebody else from a priveliged background is a magician or huscarl.

As for Rolemaster, it is great at representing the deadliness and unpredictability of combat. A goblin can kill a level 20 warrior in one shot if they are lucky enough. As you fight, you will collect injuries that make you more likely to lose fights and collect more injuries. Healing such injuries is very difficult. Losing limbs is a real possibility, but you will likely die from blood loss before that happens. Rolemaster is great for individualising characters. Your stats set how many points you have to spend each level. Your class dictates how much it costs to increase each skill (and there are hundreds). So a wizard 'could' buy up their skill in greatsword, but are paying 9 our of their 40 points to do so, a fighter could do that for 1 point. Just becoming higher level does not make you better at climbing, swimming or riding etc. You need to actually put effort and points into everything. The system gets a lot of flak for being overly complex. It is to make up characters, but in play it is not.

 

[clearstream]

I am still looking for a fantasy RPG, not a game that deals with the realities of the players' real life.

Do you mean in terms of choice of focus for the session? Focus on day-to-day rather than heroic events?

A simple example is the concepts in the thread about what a STR 20 represents. Because 5E is not a simulation, it doesn't do a good job of modelling what people can do IRL. We've seen numerous threads on this. Using 5E's movement rules, you would need a Speed of over 100 to run a world-recorder 100-meter sprint. Now, a 17th-level monk using Step of the Wind could do this, but to imply all professional sprinters are tier 4 monks is ridiculous of course!

One approach is to take the game as simulating a world different from our own. One where the implications are taken sincerely.

Generally, one then ends up tweaking for just-sufficient self-consistency. For example, part of why I use much longer rests is the moderation of the spell economy that produces.

Rather than ask - does Strength 20 plausibly simulate our world, one can ask - what world is simulated by Strength 20?

 

[pemerton]

We could simply flip a coin for combat. Heads you win tails you lose. Now, no one would call that a simulation. Why not? After all, it has all the same results as D&D combat. The only difference is granularity. In D&D combat, you have a few more coin flips (with a rather funny looking coin ) but, you arrive at the same level of information as a simple coin flip. Nothing in the system actually tells you anything about what happens.

<snip>

when you enter the D&D combat mini-game, from the time initiative is rolled to the time the combat ends, every character in that combat, PC or NPC, exists as a sort of cloud of possibilities without any real form. No narrative can be generated during play that can't be immediately contradicted in the next round. There's nothing actually being simulated.

D&D combat actually has a second feature that helps drive the phenomenon you are identifying here.

It's not only that the mechanics, in themselves, don't generate fiction (contrast, say, the RM crit tables). Also, action declarations in D&D combat do not generally take the fiction as an input. So no one has to narrate fiction coming out of one round in order to feed into the resolution of the next round.

This contrasts with (say) 4e skill challenges, which are as abstract in resolution framework but require the fiction to change so as to support action declarations down the track. Or with AW or DW, which uses non-simulationist resolution but requires the input of fiction both to determine of a player-side move has been triggered, and to support the GM's narration of soft and hard moves.

 

[pemerton]

what's frostbite in D&D? There's no rules, AFAIK, for frostbite in D&D.

There's a further weirdness here. In 5e it shows up in the Exhaustion rules.

Why can a 10th level PC shrug of dragonfire, and giant clubs, that would destroy a 1st level one, and fall 100' without dying, but is just as vulnerable to starvation?

In more general terms, what is the coherent basis for filtering some threats through the mediator of level (ie improved saves, improved hit points) but not others? In fact, in all versions of D&D since the Wilderness Survival Guide was published this seems basically ad hoc (4e is a bit of an exception because it hooks a lot of this stuff onto the healing surge framework).

(It's also how Tucker's Kobolds work - D&D filters weapon damage through level, but not the prospect of being stuck in a net.)

Part of the sign of a simulationist ruleset like RQ or RM is that it tries to answer this stuff consistently (eg in RM the Grapple crit table just sits there right alongside the Piercing crit table, depending on whether a kobold tries to snare you in its net or stab you with its spear).

 

[pemerton]

"How close a person is to death" is a meaningless statement. It carries no information outside of the game state of HP. It doesn't tell us ANYTHING.

I would find it odd if people in 5e who say they are meaningless play that way. If you are hit for 95% of your base HP in the first round by a single attack, does your character react differently than of the hot had been for 1%? If you're down to 10hp do you not use different tactics than if you were at 90hp?

No one thinks that losing hp carries no game play information. Hussar's post directly acknowledges that it does!

The point is that it tells us nothing about the fiction, and in that sense is no more of a simulation than having your king put into check in a game of chess.

Because of the gameplay information, a player might change their tactics. Likewise, because my king is in check I might choose a different move from what I would otherwise perform.

But that doesn't mean that any information is being established about the fiction.

In my 4e game, Miska the Wolf Spider, who started with around 1000 hp, is now getting close to double-digits (or might even be there - I haven't checked my notes). What does this tell us, in the fiction, has happened to Miska?

Contrast how the same thing would resolve in RM, where there would be records of bruising, injuries suffered, etc. There would not just be a gameplay state, but an associated fiction.

And of course, as @DND_Reborn has posted, the lack of a fiction that correlates to the gameplay state, in the case of hp loss, becomes clear when we look at other aspects of the fiction. For instance as is notorious, even if Miska is reduced to 1 hp of his starting 1,000, that has no implications for how he performs other physical actions. Which fairly strongly implies that, in the fiction, he's not been hurt at all. Yet he's "close to death"! This is not a framework for simulating anything.

 

[pemerton]

A system with -1 for each 20% hp loss might work, for example, or it might not.

In RM (and HARP is similar though not identical at every point), PCs have a score called Concussion Hits. It is built up by purchasing the Body Development skill. It represent two main things: how much generalised bruising and blood loss can you take before falling unconscious? And how much more before dying? Most PCs have a 50 to 100 threshold between unconsciousness and death, but the threshold between full health and unconsciousness can vary from 10 to 20 (feeble scholars and magicians) to 150+ (Conan-esque warriors).

There is a penalty to all actions that flows from losing concussion hits as you head from max to the unconsciousness threshold (-10 per 25%; RQ is a percentile system).

When a hit is suffered in combat, when someone suffers falling damage, etc, there is generally both a deduction of concussion hits (2 or 3 is a small number; 30 is generally a big number) and a crit roll, which can yield additional concussion hits of damage but also bleeding, stun, and wounds (debuff conditions - eg bruised ribs, -10 to all actions or muscles and tendons in should severed, arm usesless - for stuff that can be done without absolutely needing the arm, there is generally a rule that sets the penalty for having an injured limb while attempting it).

You can see that this makes resolution rather time-consuming compared to rolling a damage die and tracking a hp total. But it is a bit more visceral.