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

[clearstream]

Traveller always had a "pocket computer" on it's equipment list, which is basically a mobile phone.

I can't say I ever saw any cars in Traveller, air/rafts were pretty ubiquitous.

For me, the greater failings in realism were around economics, motives for war (why war?) and if war is to be assumed, the (im)possibility of defence.

I felt Traveller offered space opera, not futurology. It mapped well to sci fi I'd been reading.

 

[clearstream]

@Hussar wasn't just referring to rolling twice, but to choosing to roll twice. As he said, what you want isn't part of a simulation. But it is if you're simulating magical/preternatural luck.

In the case of advantages more generally, roll twice is an alternative to adding a bonus, but it wouldn't depend on anyone's choice.

Oh right. I was in agreement with you. As you say, choosing is more like luck, for example I think all the cases you can choose to roll twice in 5e have preternatural causes.

And rolling twice in the absence of choice is either just another way to produce advantage, or it could represent some other entity's luck.

 

[pemerton]

Traveller always had a "pocket computer" on it's equipment list, which is basically a mobile phone.

Air/Rafts and weather control are TL 8. The hand computer is TL 11. Nuff said!

 

[Oofta]

That isn’t what is happening here Oofta.

No one cares if you like fire balls (the kind that 4e has) vs fire cubes (the kind that no version of D&D has).

The problem is when you arbitrarily map a game artifact exclusively meant to facilitate functional play onto the actual shared imagined space of play…then use that to decry a thing (in this case 4e) citing your incorrect mapping of a game artifact onto the imagined space as an objective truism (rather than a peculiar, and arbitrary…because you don’t do it for dozens and dozens of other game artificacts…autobiographical footnote of Oofta of ENWorld) and therefore a bug of the game engine/design.

And it becomes a million times more fraught when this exact phenomenon and dozens just like it were perniciously weaponized during a many-year period to make the culture of play of D&D utterly insufferable and hostile to newcomers, old heads, and engaged onlookers (in ENWorld’s case, folks who were insightful and interesting commenters who didn’t play D&D but had relevant things to say) alike.

I only mentioned fireballs that filled a cube of space as an example of a spectrum of simplification that all games have. It was not a criticism of 4E, I [don't] care about 4E one way or another. Several people seem to assume that any mention of preference different from how 4E handled thing is an attack. That any comment that even casually mentions 4E is "perniciously weaponized". It wasn't intended that way.

Every edition of the game has taken different approaches to a wide variety of things. For 3.x there was the veneer of more simulation that, to me, just gave the illusion of accuracy. With 4E, there was less attempt at simulationist accuracy (hence fireballs that were resolved as cubes). With 5E it's tried to strike a balance, giving people a lot of options and leaving a lot of things in the hands of the DM and group to decide how to run things.

I happen to like 5E's general approach and I think it has made reasonable compromises on level of detail and ease of play. Different people are going to draw that line at different levels based on personal preference.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Air/Rafts and weather control are TL 8. The hand computer is TL 11. Nuff said!

Whenever you try to predict the future you are going to get stuff wrong. In the 1970s the technology behind mobile phones was just as much a fantasy as antigravity. No way to tell which was achievable and which was fantasy.

For me, the greater failings in realism were around economics, motives for war (why war?) and if war is to be assumed, the (im)possibility of defence.

If you look at the way the Traveller Basic set was structured, it assumed the PCs where career military trying to make their way in civilian life. If you look at when it was written, the authors where coming home from the Vietnam. I think it reflects the life experience of it's creators.

I felt Traveller offered space opera, not futurology. It mapped well to sci fi I'd been reading.

Undoubtedly true, did someone suggest otherwise?

 

[pemerton]

Whenever you try to predict the future you are going to get stuff wrong. In the 1970s the technology behind mobile phones was just as much a fantasy as antigravity. No way to tell which was achievable and which was fantasy.

When my players laugh at (and complain about) the incredibly terrible IT in Traveller, I tell them to imagine that all the resources that in our world have been devoted to IT were, in the Traveller universe, devoted to quantum gravity research that led to fusion power sources, anti-grav and jump drives. That calms them down for about 30 seconds!

EDIT: I can't try and explain or justify the weather control. How would that even work? Although it's on the TL charts, in our game it's never come up.

 

[pemerton]

For 3.x there was the veneer of more simulation that, to me, just gave the illusion of accuracy. With 4E, there was less attempt at simulationist accuracy

I had trouble following this sentence, because it starts with illusions of accuracy but ends with accuracy. Which one did 4e get rid of?

EDIT: The same remark applies to this post:

Many of the simulationist aspects in 3 just meant we had to constantly flip through books to find the "correct" answer when it was all just an illusion anyway (i.e. finding DC to climb a brick wall) depending on who was playing. With 4E we had clear rules but often illogical results like fire squares.

<snip>

Since the construction and quality of a wall is pretty arbitrary anyway, the DM just decides a DC because the specificity of 3.x was an illusion anyway.

Why is the use of a square grid to resolve fireball any more "illogical" than the "arbitrary" DC in 3E? I mean, the GM just decides the precise location of all the potential targets, and they're either in the area or they're not. (I think @EzekielRaiden made the same point upthread.)

And I don't think @Manbearcat was questioning your preferences, but rather was saying that the following descriptions are false:

But if you want square fireballs go for it.

For me non Euclidean geometry is too far.

That is, the fiction of 4e does not contain square fireballs, nor non-Euclidean geometry (other than in the Far Realm). The squareness is a resolution device, not a characterisation of the fiction.

You seem to be able to deploy the distinction between resolution device, and contents of the fiction, in these posts:

There's always going to be compromises to how complex a game is.

We're talking general rules here. If you add exceptions for everything - like a hawk's speed while diving or overland flight - you're adding a level of complexity to the game that I'm not certain is justified.

I was specifically talking about things like how much you can lift/carry, how far you can run while taking into account sprint vs marathon but also what you're wearing, what surface you're running on and so forth. Can you make more detailed rules for some aspects? Sure. But it's a never-ending rabbit hole to try to make a rule for everything.

So you care that two people, one moving in a straight line, the other running a diagonal should advance different amounts in a specific direction? Use the rules in the DMG for the 1-2-1 movement. Use a grid but don't care? Just say 1 square is 5 foot of movement.

No one who "doesn't care" and who therefore says that 1 square is 5 foot of movement thinks that the world of 5e D&D contains non-Euclidean geometry.

I think it's your toggling between recognising the design imperatives that drive 5e in contrast to 3E, or a hypothetical system with more complicated rules for fast-moving animals or for athletic endeavours, while making fun of exactly the same things in relation to 4e, that @Manbearcat was responding to.

 

[Oofta]

I had trouble following this sentence, because it starts with illusions of accuracy but ends with accuracy. Which one did 4e get rid of?

I'll pick on 3.x's handling of climb DC because it's simple. They gave DCS for climbing different types of walls, a rough stone wall versus a brick wall for example. It seems like that is more specific, more accurately depicting reality right? Well ... I'm not so sure. All brick walls are not the same and it's the DM who decides what the wall is made of in the first place. What really happened in my experience was that the DM had an idea of how hard the wall should be to climb based on the desired challenge level and then looked up the wall chart to reverse engineer what wall was needed to get that DC.

EDIT: The same remark applies to this post:
Why is the use of a square grid to resolve fireball any more "illogical" than the "arbitrary" DC in 3E? I mean, the GM just decides the precise location of all the potential targets, and they're either in the area or they're not. (I think @EzekielRaiden made the same point upthread.)

And I don't think @Manbearcat was questioning your preferences, but rather was saying that the following descriptions are false:
That is, the fiction of 4e does not contain square fireballs, nor non-Euclidean geometry (other than in the Far Realm). The squareness is a resolution device, not a characterisation of the fiction.


You seem to be able to deploy the distinction between resolution device, and contents of the fiction, in these posts:



No one who "doesn't care" and who therefore says that 1 square is 5 foot of movement thinks that the world of 5e D&D contains non-Euclidean geometry.

I think it's your toggling between recognising the design imperatives that drive 5e in contrast to 3E, or a hypothetical system with more complicated rules for fast-moving animals or for athletic endeavours, while making fun of exactly the same things in relation to 4e, that @Manbearcat was responding to.

With 4E we went from 3.x's measurement of counting every other diagonal as an additional 5 feet to just saying diagonals didn't matter. While 3E was a closer simulation of reality, 4E was easier. That affected not only spheres being represented as cubes, but how people's movements were tracked. Let's say you have 2 people moving exactly the same speed down a football field towards the goal line. One is moving diagonally from one side of the field to the other and back, the other is moving straight down the center. Both reach the goal line at the same time.

Maybe using simplified diagonals never crossed your mind as an issue. But it visibly and clearly broke how things work in a world that works similar to ours. There were other examples, but I really don't want to get into edition wars. Every game makes compromises on their simulation of reality, for me there were parts of 4E that just took it too far. With 3E they tried to more accurately simulate reality but it was a never-ending rabbit hole of clarifications and layers of rules that ultimately (for me) did not add much to the game while adding an unnecessary level of complication.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I

On reflection, I feel that the above is probably better identified as immersionism rather than simulationism. Taking the latter to want realistic feeling, detailed mechanics and results (where real is grounded in our real world, and the details are those we expect from life).

Simulation is married to gamism in games (more broadly) that aim for the highest possible realism (e.g. Harpoon or Advanced Squad Leader.) Possibly the roots of simulationism are thoroughly entwined with gamism. Albeit as you noted gamism traditionally demands an even playing field and a determined commitment to simulationism would not (presumably, although that could be more an immersionist concern). In any case, I believe there is scope in future for more sophisticated players to set that requirement aside: asymmetrical games, and those of unequally distributed challenge, can be even more gamist.

Just a note that back in the RGFA days, most of the simulationism proponents were also immersives; and a number of them claimed not to be gamists (as I recall there were only two of us in the heyday of the old Threefold discussion period that set claim to that leg). Their position seemed to be that it didn't matter to them how much mechanics were involved so much as the input producing the sort of output they expected in a consistent way (and weren't at all sanguine about a GM being able to do this without mechanical support).

Just for what its worth.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Luck, definitely. And it can just be another mathematical method for simulating an advantage. The real world contains +5s no more than it contains roll twice and choose highest. (In fact, as we know at the most fundamental level the real world explores every path: much closer to rolling twice than adding +5!)

You can also have the case of things like TORG where the expended resource to get that represents an actual in-setting thing.