D&D 5E Is the Real Issue (TM) Process Sim?

[Ahnehnois]

My character scores a 25 on a jump check and jumps 25 feet. What's his bonus? What level is he?

Well, if he jumps a hundred times and his average is 25 feet, I'd say his bonus is around +15. Level is a more sophisticated story, but I imagine this character is well aware that he's significantly better than when he started.

It's not a given that characters in a fantasy world even know what a "foot" is since standardized measurements are a fairly modern concept. More practically, I think the character would simply have a good idea of how far he can jump, and a sense of how that's changed over time. If his Jump modifier started at +0 and is now +10, he's probably aware that all his training has resulted in him roughly doubling his average jump distance. If he's staring at a chasm that would require him to roll a 10 to clear based on his modifier, he probably knows he has roughly a 50% chance of making it cleanly.

I hit a horse for 10 points of damage and it has not died. How many HP does a horse have? Without referring to any game rules, explain how you would determine the HP of a horse.

Well, if I was really sadistic, I'd stab it using a very small weapon until it died (presumably restraining it very well). Then I'd get another hundred horses and repeat. I'd quickly get a pretty good idea of how many hits a horse can take. Thus "hit points".

As twisted as that is, it isn't all that different from actual animal research. LD50 for drugs is basically determined by doing this to rats. Determining the hit points of a person is probably not going to happen ethically, but again, if you're running d20 Modern that's probably part of what Josef Mengele and Shiro Ishii were doing. In a fantasy setting, I wouldn't put it past some really evil necromancer to experiment on people to find out how tough they are.

Taking out the experiment part, if I was someone who was around horses in combat a lot, I'd be paying attention to how long it took them to die. Could I give you an exact number of hit points? Probably not. But I'd have a rough idea of how much damage most horses seem to be able to handle. I'd probably be aware that it's roughly three times as tough as a decent sized dog, or that it's half as tough as my friend Ragnar the barbarian who scares the crap out of the commoners.

How can you claim that you want immersion when everything is determined by game mechanics?

Did I claim that? I don't recall doing so and it doesn't seem all that pertinent. But isn't that the whole point? What happens "on-screen" as it were is basically determined by the DM; the rules are more useful in allowing us to understand how the world works in general, most of which has nothing to do with the players or their actions. The d20 system is what your characters are doing when you're not playing them. It's what their ancestors were doing. It's what mermaids are doing under the waves.

I suppose you could say immersion comes from the sense of knowing that the cleric you see for your healing spells has a pretty good idea of how much damage you have just by looking at you and how much his spells will cure from experience. The cleric surely is aware that his cure light wounds will heal a commoner from the brink of death, but will barely produce any noticeable effect on the wounds of a seasoned warrior. If he doesn't know these things, then that's going to beg some questions. He probably wouldn't know the exact numbers, but then a lot of what we do cognitively is about doing complex math that we aren't consciously aware of.

 

[pemerton]

Sure it does. And it's still fundamentally different then a game where the DM flips a coin, the player calls it, and if the player wins he gets to narrate an event of his choice.

That second thing hardly seems relevant to the discussion.

Here is a possible RPG resolution mechanic: the player declares an action and intention for his/her PC, and the GM then tosses a coin which the GM calls. If the player wins the toss, the PC's action takes place achieving the previously stated intention. If the player loses the toss, the GM gets to narrate the way in which the declared action fails to achieve the declared intention.

As I've mentioned upthread, there are RPGs whose mechanics are roughly comparable to this (typically more complex versions of this). They are fine RPGs. But the coin toss (or die roll or whatever it is) does not simulate or model any ingame causal process. It's just an arbiter of outcomes.

This absence of process simulation is reinforced by the fact that, in this sort of game, you can use exactly the same resolution technique to resolve a single second of combat (in which case you're going to have to deploy it multiple times if you want to resolve a whole combat); or a duel; or one purchase; or one exchange of haggling within the context of a purchase (again, this will then require multiple deployments of the technique to resolve the whole shopping expedition); or a year's farming. The reason you can scale the ingame time frame, and the ingame causal scope of the declared action and intention, up or down without having to change the resolution method, is precisely because it is not modelling any ingame causal process.

What happens "on-screen" as it were is basically determined by the DM; the rules are more useful in allowing us to understand how the world works in general, most of which has nothing to do with the players or their actions.

This is a 180-degree reversal from how I play RPGs, and I think [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] is much closer to me than you. Obviously your playstyle is your prerogative, but you have a tendency to be very cavalier in imputing it to others and/or asserting that it is typical or default.

All fiction is this way; it all takes place in an alternate reality that reflects creative decisions made by the author, practical limitations of the storytelling process, and most importantly the sheer limitations of the author in observing and rendering reality.

This is an extremely contentious account of how "all fiction is".

 

[Hussar]

My character scores a 25 on a jump check and jumps 25 feet. What's his bonus? What level is he?Well, if he jumps a hundred times and his average is 25 feet, I'd say his bonus is around +15. Level is a more sophisticated story, but I imagine this character is well aware that he's significantly better than when he started.

Really?

1st level half Orc with 20 Str, max ranks in jump and skill focus jump has +12 in jump. He could easily be a 1st level character with no improvement.

And explain how killing goblins makes me better at jumping. After all there's no reason that I have made a single jump check prior to scoring 25 and have nothing to compare it against.

 

[Lokiare]

Really?

1st level half Orc with 20 Str, max ranks in jump and skill focus jump has +12 in jump. He could easily be a 1st level character with no improvement.

And explain how killing goblins makes me better at jumping. After all there's no reason that I have made a single jump check prior to scoring 25 and have nothing to compare it against.

Well I'd love a game where individual ability scores and class features got xp and leveled up separate. Every time you make an attack, you'd give the ability score you used some xp. Every time you took damage or got healed you'd give your hit points some xp. Every time you used a maneuver or spell you'd get xp toward improving it or learning the next one on a kind of maneuver or spell tree. Every time you used a skill or feat you would get xp toward the ability score used as well as the skill or feat tree.

Of course this is way too granular and it wouldn't be D&D for a large group of players.

 

[I'm A Banana]

What I have tried to explain is that this "model" of how the fight works just fails to work for me. If you like, it "shatters my suspension of disbelief". The idea that one combatant might swing their sword (or whatever weapon) in a great arc trying to "hit" their opponent is just so at odds with how sword fights and such work that I hardly even know where to begin.

So, that's useful. We recognize the validity of each others' playstyles and know that they are pretty much mutually exclusive: if you have to imagine events in basically chronological order, that breaks your experience. If I have to imagine events as basically outcomes and figure out the reason that outcome happened after we figure out the outcome, that breaks my experience. We can probably make the leap that we don't just speak for ourselves, but for dozens of people like us.

We've also got some supporting evidence. For me, lessons from improv and the flow of causality and the empowerment of character action over mechanical resolution. For you, lessons from actual combats where the input is only figured out in reverse and the flow is much less deliberate. While hypothetically one of us could be persuaded to see the game the other way, if both of our styles are valid, this persuasion is unnecessary. I don't need to convince you to play my way, you don't need to convince me to play your way.

Now we come to what D&D should actually do.

The neutral ground scenario is that default D&D does what I propose it do with HP: just not be monolithic.

There is nothing inherent in the "roll a dice and compare against a target number" core mechanic that mandates it be one or the other (Gygaxian saving throws!). One can say what they're doing and chuck a d20 or chuck a d20 and then say what they did and it's really up to individual tables (or even individual players) and it's not really a problem.

All that D&D needs to avoid are default rules that can only work in one way or the other. So, for example, they can't include a default rule that says "roll the die and if it's 5 more than is needed to hit, you can choose to make the target surrender instead," since it is impossible for me to use that rule and enjoy it, because it would involve declaring the action after the die was rolled. A rule that said "the prone condition can apply to any creature, it doesn't always mean that something has been knocked off its feat. An ooze can't be knocked off its feat, but it can still be prone!" would also fall into that camp, because then I can't always say that the Prone status represents something in the world.

I'm not sure what a rule would violate your style, but I'd be surprised if D&D couldn't exclude those kinds of rules, too.

Which isn't to say that they can't be added back in. Just that our basic, simple game needs to avoid them.

 

[pemerton]

Well I'd love a game where individual ability scores and class features got xp and leveled up separate.

Just checking that you know this game exists: Runequest is the original version (for every skill you use in an adventure, make a check at the end of the adventure: roll over your current rating to boost that rating), and Burning Wheel also uses a slightly more complex version of this.

 

[TwoSix]

In D&D, the culture is less advanced and there is less scientific methodology, but I still think that a character with 100 hit points knows roughly how far he can fall and survive, how much damage he has at any given time, and how long it will take to heal. I think a character with 40 ft. speed knows that he is roughly a third faster than everyone else. A character with 14 Cha knows that he is more charismatic than the average commoner. Given that all of these correspond clearly to outcomes that are observable to the character and which occur reliably according to the rules, it's hard to believe that the character does not reach some common sense conclusions about his competencies relative to the tasks he does.

If you're suggesting that this creates a bizarro world that doesn't work like the real world, this is of course true. It's fantasy. There are dragons and magic and alternate planes. That's part of the fantasy. It's also part of the fantasy that no one ever really gets hurt, or that probability distributions are usually linear rather than normal. All fiction is this way; it all takes place in an alternate reality that reflects creative decisions made by the author, practical limitations of the storytelling process, and most importantly the sheer limitations of the author in observing and rendering reality.

Wow, it's like Polaris on RPG.net has an ENWorld twin!

 

[Ahnehnois]

Wow, it's like Polaris on RPG.net has an ENWorld twin!

I'm not on RPGnet but I'll take that as a compliment.

 

[TwoSix]

I'm not on RPGnet but I'll take that as a compliment.

It's definitely not an insult. I don't usually agree with him (or you), but I respect that you both have coherent, defined arguments.

 

[Ahnehnois]

1st level half Orc with 20 Str, max ranks in jump and skill focus jump has +12 in jump. He could easily be a 1st level character with no improvement.

True. I'm not suggesting that the character can divine his own level solely from his jumping ability. He can, however, notice when it gets better. Thus if it starts at +12, the character sees that as his baseline. Whether or not he notices every 5% improvement is somewhat questionable and depends on how perceptive he is and how much he uses his abilities. However, if he, say, gains 5 levels and his Jump improves by 5 due to spending max ranks in it, he definitely knows that he is much better at jumping than he was when he started adventuring.

And explain how killing goblins makes me better at jumping. After all there's no reason that I have made a single jump check prior to scoring 25 and have nothing to compare it against.

All of us have (or should have) intuitive ideas of our own capabilities. They are certainly not 100% accurate, but they're usually good enough or we wouldn't be here.

As to why killing goblins makes one better at jumping, no one really knows the answer to that; I'd call it one of life's mysteries (from the character's perspective). Of course, as parallel threads are currently noting, that statement, while true by the XP rules, does not apply to most people's games (around here anyway), perhaps for that very reason.

It's also fair to assume that a character that spends ranks in athletic skills also spends time training them (and is suggested, but not required, by the book). If you want to play a character who has never attempted to jump in his life but has max ranks in Jump for some reason and has ostensibly gained them through massacring the indigenous goblinoids of the region, I guess you can. It's an example of pushing the rules to create a ridiculous outcome, which can certainly be done.