D&D 5E Do NPCs in your game have PHB classes?

[Maxperson]

You seem to be using "simultaneous" to mean "non-discretized; analog".

Sent from my SM-G355M using Tapatalk

Nope. I'm using simultaneous to mean simultaneous. You know, happening at the same time. If everyone in combat isn't acting at the roughly same time and reacting to one another's actions and reactions, it's not a simultaneous combat.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

The issue with turn-by-turn initiative is not "finite resolution". It is the treatment of every person's movement and action as causally discrete - insulating each from the effects of the rest - when the most salient feature of the actual in-fiction situation is that these things are occurring more-or-less simultaneously and are able to affect one another.

That's a perfectly valid method of constructing a model! It just depends on your initial assumptions. You seem overly-concerned with the ramifications of simultaneous action, which honestly doesn't seem that important to me. If two people are going at each other with swords, then it doesn't matter how either reacts to the other reacting to their actions; what matters is which side is the first to land a blow, and that corresponds directly enough to the initiative process. Any more complicated system would gain very little from its added complexity, given that the processes we are modeling are not themselves overly complex. The chances of them successfully stabbing each other at the same time is sufficiently small enough that it can be ignored.

Consider character A whose turn comes first in the turn order. Suppose that s/he movesso that s/he escapes the fireball, although s/he only leaves the AoE on her last 5' of movement. At least notionally in the fiction, the fireball is cast sometime in the same 6 seconds but not in the last 1 of those seconds - especially if, after casting the spell, character B then moves his/her full movement. So how did that work?

Arguing that it's a poor model is not the same as arguing that it isn't a model. If you want to poke holes in how accurately a given game system can reflect particular situations, then that's a topic for a different thread.

We know that person A is effectively somewhere within a designated area of 25 square feet during a designated time interval of six seconds, and that they are somewhere within another area during the subsequent time interval. We know that. It's actually a true fact, within the game world. And if an explosion occurs at a given location within a nearby area, over the course of a slightly-offset period of six seconds, then person A will either be close enough to be injured, or they will not. Whether or not they will be injured depends on certain factors - how quick they are to react, how quickly they move, the time offset between their movement and the spell being cast, etc - and we know all of those factors with some degree of precision. That's what initiative and move speed and whatnot actually represent.

Again, contrast 1st ed AD&D's initiative rules which actually do have some process-sim elements (in the rules for spell interruption and simultaneous weapon attacks).

It's weird that you think simultaneous actions are important, when your rounds are a minute long. It seems much more likely that each person would have time to finish doing their own thing, and then someone else is mostly waiting around looking for their own opportunity to do a thing, when they have entire an entire minute during which those actions might take place.

It's certainly a valid model that you could use, but in spite of its own foibles and eccentricities, it's no more valid as a process-sim model than anything used in a later edition.

But if you think a game cannot be serious in which providence, hope, effort, etc are factors in action resolution, I find that very odd. How else do you expect events like Wormtongue throwing the palantir out of Orthanc, or extraordinary accomplishments like the three companions running across Rohan to rescue their friends, to take place in a game?

John Tolkien was telling a story, and playing an RPG is not the same as telling a story*. It is a poor GM who relies on contrived coincidence to steer the game in a certain direction. He could get away with divine providence in a novel, but a game that relied upon the same would be distasteful, and discerning players would shout him down as a no-good dirty railroader (or just roll their eyes heavily, depending on how polite they wanted to be).

*Unless you're playing one of those new-age hippie-RPGs that is based on story-telling rather than role-playing.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Nope. I'm using simultaneous to mean simultaneous. You know, happening at the same time. If everyone in combat isn't acting at the roughly same time and reacting to one another's actions and reactions, it's not a simultaneous combat.

But you also imposed an additional requirement on top of simultaneity. "...then with each square moved, every other creature on the field would be able to react, and then react to the reactions, and so on. You wouldn't be able to move and attack, since that would take too much time and people could react to your movement before you could attack."

That is, in addition to simultaneity you want a very high level of granularity; and when you claim that "simultaneity" is infeasible what you are actually demonstrating is that a per-square level of granularity and reactivity is infeasible, which has nothing at all to do with simultaneity, as demonstrated by the fact that simultaneous games exist which don't exhibit that level of granularity and reactivity. For example, the Prisoner's Dilemma is a simultaneous game which features zero reactivity.

 

[pemerton]

AFAIC, for a simulation to actually be a simulation, it has to describe what is happening during the event that is being simulated. So, if I'm playing a computer flight simulator game, I know exactly why I crashed into the ground, for example.

But, D&D combat doesn't do that. It's abstract. The only thing D&D combat tells you is that opponents are alive or dead, and that's about it. For example, PC A attacks Monster B and rolls a modified roll high enough to hit the monster. The monster takes 10 points of damage. What happened in the fiction? Again, IMO, you could narrate what happened a million different ways.

Now, using the mechanics of the game, prove it. Prove that your interpretation of what happened actually happened that way. After all, a simulation should be able to tell you exactly, or at least even approximately what happened. But, D&D has never actually allowed you to do that. Did you hit the target? Did the target simply get scared? Did the target shift back and twist an ankle? Where did you hit the target? Etc. Etc. None of these questions get answered by the D&D combat resolution mechanics.

Yes, this is the point that I was making upthread. The system doesn't simulate the combat - the outcomes it delivers round-by-round are described in purely mechanical terms (hit point loss), and at the end of the process what you know is (i) whether or not someone is dead, and (ii) about how long it took to get them to that state. All the internal stuff (action economy, changes in hit point totals) isn't correlating to anything in particular. It just constrains narration.

(Again, there's nothing stopping adoption of a uniform narration, like [MENTION=6787650]Hemlock[/MENTION] has described in this thread. But the mechanics don't mandate that in order to be used.)

There are tons of systems out there that actually do tell you what happened in the fiction. AFAIC, that's what a simulationist system is supposed to do. It's supposed to tell you what happened during the simulation. If it doesn't, then it's not a simulation.

Absolutely!

Systems like RQ, RM, BW - they tell you whether or not contact was made, they factor in the shield as a blocking manoeuvre and also parrying ("active defence"), they tell you the nature of the wound and (more-or-less roughly) which body part was hurt. There are no dice rolls that have processes and consequences defined in purely mechanical terms in the way that D&D hp loss is.

I'm not saying that one approach is better than the other. At the moment I'm GMing a 4e game and a BW game, and enjoying both. But only one is a candidate for being simulationist in its combat mechanics!

But you also imposed an additional requirement on top of simultaneity. "...then with each square moved, every other creature on the field would be able to react, and then react to the reactions, and so on. You wouldn't be able to move and attack, since that would take too much time and people could react to your movement before you could attack."

That is, in addition to simultaneity you want a very high level of granularity

One feature of 3E/4e and default 5e-style initiative and turn-by-turn resolution is that it tries to be more simulationist than AD&D as far as positioning is concerned - in AD&D position is often just "engaged in melee", and typically if it's more specific than that (eg surrounded by X foes) then the specifics are established by more-or-less free narration rather than reading results off the mechanical resolution.

But in the 3E/4e approach you get this rather specific spatial positioning combined with a stop-motion treatment of time. It's actually quite odd! 4e compensates by having lots of off-turn actions which reintroduce, via metagame devices, a greater feel of continuity/simultaneity in the fiction. 5e has less, I think, partly because one of its goals was to speed things up.

 

[Maxperson]

But you also imposed an additional requirement on top of simultaneity. "...then with each square moved, every other creature on the field would be able to react, and then react to the reactions, and so on.

No, that's not an additional requirement. That's just how simultaneous works. When acting simultaneously you can adjust to what others do in real time. When everything is happening at the same time, you can see what is happening and react to it.

That is, in addition to simultaneity you want a very high level of granularity; and when you claim that "simultaneity" is infeasible what you are actually demonstrating is that a per-square level of granularity and reactivity is infeasible, which has nothing at all to do with simultaneity, as demonstrated by the fact that simultaneous games exist which don't exhibit that level of granularity and reactivity. For example, the Prisoner's Dilemma is a simultaneous game which features zero reactivity.

Anything less than what I described is not truly acting in a simultaneous manner. It's little better than turn based.

 

[pemerton]

You seem overly-concerned with the ramifications of simultaneous action, which honestly doesn't seem that important to me. If two people are going at each other with swords, then it doesn't matter how either reacts to the other reacting to their actions; what matters is which side is the first to land a blow, and that corresponds directly enough to the initiative process.

If D&D combat was nothing more than this, then it would be non-issue. But you wouldn't really need initiative either, would you? You could roll your attacks simultaneously.

But D&D combat is not just two people tocking one another with swords. I gave an example upthread: A goes, moves 30', the last 5' takes her out of zone X (so presumably she leaves zone X in the last second or two of the round); then B goes later in the initiative order, casts a fireball that fills zone X, then moves a full 30' (so presumably the fireball was cast in the first second or two of the round). How come A is not affected by the fireball?

I don't see any answer to that question which is consistent with treating the die rolls and action resolution as modelling any ingame causal processes.

Any more complicated system would gain very little from its added complexity

You don't need anything more complicated. Classic D&D side initiative isn't particularly complicated, but is less likely to produce these results (in part because there is very little tracking of movement in melee).

We know that person A is effectively somewhere within a designated area of 25 square feet during a designated time interval of six seconds, and that they are somewhere within another area during the subsequent time interval. We know that. It's actually a true fact, within the game world. And if an explosion occurs at a given location within a nearby area, over the course of a slightly-offset period of six seconds, then person A will either be close enough to be injured, or they will not. Whether or not they will be injured depends on certain factors - how quick they are to react, how quickly they move, the time offset between their movement and the spell being cast, etc - and we know all of those factors with some degree of precision. That's what initiative and move speed and whatnot actually represent.

I thought one of your principles is that everything is modelled exactly one way. Now you have initiative and Reflex saves modelling the same thing! - namely, whether or not a character can jump out of the fireball.

But on the issue of the model: at the table, we don't just stipulate "A is somewhere in this zone somewhere in this time interval". That's how 13th Age does it, but it's not how D&D does it. In 3E, 4e and default 5e we also stipulate that A moves through each particular square at a certain time. We adjudicate pit traps, oppy attacks, etc, all on the presmise that A is at a particular place at a particular time in his/her movement - all while treating everyone else as stationary at that time.

It's not an abstraction or an approximation. It's very granular (as far as positioning is concerned) yet wildly inaccurate as far as time is concerned.

It's weird that you think simultaneous actions are important, when your rounds are a minute long.

I don't run or play AD&D. I run 4e - which has 6-second turn-by-turn rounds, but uses a bunch of mechanics to try and reduce the freeze-frame feel and doesn't really pretend to be a simulation. And I run Burning Wheel, which uses continuous resolution based on a fairly complex system of blind declaration with limited take-backs - and so doesn't rely on an initiative system at all.

 

[pemerton]

John Tolkien was telling a story, and playing an RPG is not the same as telling a story*. It is a poor GM who relies on contrived coincidence to steer the game in a certain direction. He could get away with divine providence in a novel, but a game that relied upon the same would be distasteful, and discerning players would shout him down as a no-good dirty railroader (or just roll their eyes heavily, depending on how polite they wanted to be).

*Unless you're playing one of those new-age hippie-RPGs that is based on story-telling rather than role-playing.

It seems to go without saying that my players lack discernment and that I'm a poor GM. So I'll leave that to speak for itself.

As far as railroading is concerned - my game is not a railroad. I posted a link upthread to a report of my session yesterday. Nothing that happened in that session - the players' decisions on what actions to take, one of the PCs learning the Raven Queen's true name, the existence in the mausoleum of a Chariot of Sustarre, the PCs getting to borrow that chariot, etc - was pre-planned.

Consider the chariot. The player's PC is in a mausoleum of a mighty sorcerer queen. He asks if there are grave goods - I answer yes, and decide (on my previously underpopulated map) where they are and explain that to him. (His character is looking around the appropriate part of the mausoleum). He then asks "Is there a magical flying chariot?" I answer yes, there is. We then resolve the PC's request to the tomb guardians to be allowed to borrow it.

I suppose someone somewhere regards that as a railroad and as a removal of the players' agency. I'll await the explanation.

Fate and destiny contradict the notion of free will, within the game world

<snip>

Where a game is supposed to be a series of meaningful decisions, those decisions are no longer meaningful if the DM is (for example) actively framing the party into a scene.

Because telling a player "You see your mother in the goblin cell across from your own" precludes meaningful decision? Because telling a player "With you new-found divine sense, you sense a terrible abomination waking from its slumber deep in the earth and rising to the surface" precludes meaningful decision? Again, I await the explanation.

(Perhaps you're not familiar with the difference between pre-scripted "scenes" ie an Adventure Path, or the Alexandrian's "Node-based design" variant, and a "scene framed" game in the way that phrase is normally used.)

As for fate and destiny: these are preeminent themes of fantasy film and literature. And you can have destiny as a very significant feature of the game without railroading: what the destiny actually is emerges via play.

Here's a simple example. First, you run a scenario in which the PCs travel back in time. While they're back in time, they find an apprentice wizard trapped in a mirror. They free her and befriend her, but then leave her behind when they return to the present.

Some time later, the PCs are going to visit a baron and you (as GM) are wondering what the action might be. So you come up with the idea that the baron is descended from the apprentice, and that his niece is her doppelganger. And when the PCs turn up at the castle to dine you narrate the wall of family portraits, where they can see a portrait that resembles the apprentice, but aged; and another portrait that surely is of the apprentice, but is clearly painted more recently than the first-mentioned one.

Now the players have a sense that, somehow, their fates are interwoven with those of the apprentice and the niece; though they don't yet know how. (And nor does the GM.)

No railroading. And meaningful choices - for instance, if it turns out that the niece is missing (say, that gets narrated by the GM as part of the playing out of the dinner with the baron), then the players (in person, and in character) feel that her fate matters to them in a way that it otherwise probably wouldn't, because she is somehow connected to the apprentice they rescued from the mirror. And so the choices that they make - whether to rescue her, what to do if it turns out that she is an evil necromancer, etc - matter more than they otherwise would.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

It seems to go without saying that my players lack discernment and that I'm a poor GM. So I'll leave that to speak for itself.

I thought we'd established that you don't override the consequences of your players' choices the way Iluvatar overrides Frodo's/Aragorn's/etc. You said something about how your players shape fate at the metagame level. Presumably at your table, Gollum's involuntary sacrifice would have been player-instigated and not DM-arranged. Ergo, Saelorn isn't aiming at you with his remarks on railroading.

Do I misunderstand your style?

Your example with the mirror, or the mother in a goblin cell, is a bit different because you're using offscreen actions to CREATE problems instead of solving them. Tolkien was solving problems through Providence instead of creating them. One of these things is much more railroady/agency-killing than the other, to the point of being advised against even in novels much less games.


Sent from my SM-G355M using Tapatalk

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

No, that's not an additional requirement. That's just how simultaneous works. When acting simultaneously you can adjust to what others do in real time. When everything is happening at the same time, you can see what is happening and react to it.




Anything less than what I described is not truly acting in a simultaneous manner. It's little better than turn based.

I see. No True Scotsman.

Sent from my SM-G355M using Tapatalk

 

[Maxperson]

I see. No True Scotsman.

Sent from my SM-G355M using Tapatalk

I don't care if you're a true Scotsman or not. If you had ever been in a fight, you would know that on a fight combatants react second by second to what is happening. Often in less than a second.

What you are describing are robots that just act without regard to any external input that round. That's not a simultaneous combat, even if they are moving simultaneously.