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

[Ruzak]

...
The problem with damage on a miss is that you have to think about it in order to make sense of it. ...

This really hits it on the head for me. DoaM, as well as many 4e (which I like) mechanics, make you think about the process simply because they are a little outside the norm. This is what I love about some of these mechanics and dislike about others. Adding a little narration is a good thing, but I sometimes feel I am rationalizing an awkward outcome. For me DoaM crosses the line.
(This means I think anyone who likes it is a bad person, right? Is that how this works? I don't post much...)

 

[Ahnehnois]

(This means I think anyone who likes it is a bad person, right? Is that how this works? I don't post much...)

Actually, it means that you are unable to see outside of your own "narrow" experiences and are excluding the "playstyles" of the "vast majority" of people who think all these mechanics are not only perfectly fine but absolutely necessary, representing the greatest advance to mankind since the invention of the microwave.*

*I'm kidding, but this isn't far from the response one occasionally gets around here, FYI.

 

[mlund]

The rolling of dice is an answer to the question, "What happens when I try to hit the goblin with my sword?"

Without that try, there's no roll of the dice. There's no outcome to resolve if there is no cause that creates the potential outcome.

Defeating the critter is just one possible consequence of trying to hit the goblin with your sword.

Frankly, "hit the goblin with my sword" doesn't cut the mustard if you're particularly sensitive to narrative or simulation. A lot of the "damage" in terms of HP in sword fights involve people avoiding getting skewered or gutted at the expense of being bludgeoned, put off-balance, and exhausted until they can't defend themselves properly anymore. Then sharp things go through soft things that scream and bleed and someone is hors de combat (or even more realistically in armored fighting, someone gets knocked on their can, loses their helmet, and get's their face bashed in / throat cut).

"Hit" and "Miss" are game terms / "gamist constructs" in the context of "rolling to hit." Characters aren't just trying to hit enemies in a literal sense (armor doesn't stop you from being hit literally), they are trying to defeat enemies by any means and opportunities that present themselves.

That looks backwards to me. Mechanics exist to adjudicate results, not determine characters' actions.

Mechanics exist to adjudicate what can and can not happen. What people do physically (actions) is a matter of resolving their intentions against their opportunities.

A player can say "I move 30' to the end of the room," but when they move over the pit trap 10' away their character's action is actually "Move 10 feet and fall in a hole."

The player announces what her character *does*.

A player announces what she wants her character to do. In a risk-based situation (like encountering combat, stunts, antagonists, and hazards) the dice will determine what is possible and then the DM and the player can figure out what it means. Sometimes it means you swing your sword a few times and draw the enemy's shield upwards, letting you sock them in the jaw with your gauntlet when your original intent was to split their skull. Sometimes it means you try to find an opening to stab them with your rapier and don't find one. Sometimes it means you glance off their armor or they parry your weapon aside. It's very open ended if you didn't already fence yourself in unnecessarily.

That's why "I disembowel him with my great ax" isn't something you narrate your character as doing if you're making an attack roll (at least, if you don't want the roll's result to contradict you). The attack roll is an attempt. You can try. There's going to be resistance. A chance of failure. If there wasn't, we wouldn't roll the dice in the first place.

Exactly. You say, "I attack with my Great Ax." You roll dice and possibly subtract HP to see what your boundaries are. Then you describe what just happened on the table-top in terms of what just happened in the fantasy realm. Maybe someone's head came off their shoulders. Maybe someone blew out their quad avoiding being decapitated. Just have fun with it within the navigational buoys.

That's one of the reasons rolling the attacks and damage together isn't just good for saving time at the table. It can also help with coherency / continuity in narrating combat.

- Marty Lund

 

[Lwaxy]

And not once do any of these characters think "You know... maybe being burned alive like that wasn't really worth the 500 copper pieces I found."
.

Speak for your own characters. Happens all the time and I've seen players change PCs because of it.

And grizzly deaths and such happen a lot less in many simulationist games for exactly that reason.

 

[innerdude]

I think you're doing a little conflating lack of abstractness with process simulation issues here. The issue I'm seeing, and that I think forms a significant contrast between players like me and pemerton (who has been known to point out process simulation as an element of how I describe my preferences) isn't the level of detail. I don't and have never had an issue with how detailed D&D combat is or isn't with respect to misses and hits. That's all part of the narration. What I see is the issue is the issue of root causality. What caused the PC to damage his target? He successfully hit the target number with his check - it doesn't matter exactly how he did so. The axe may have connected with the target's body and drawn blood, it may have hit his shield hard enough to cause pain, it may have glanced off the armor or shield but the target's ankle buckled under the strain. In any event, the task required to achieve the result was met. On the flip side, if the PC failed to achieve the target number for success (and, let's be honest, this could be many other game systems other than D&D, including Call of Cthulhu, Champions, Villains and Vigilantes, etc), he failed to achieve the conditions necessary to ablate the target's hit points. Maybe the target deflected the blow safely with his shield, maybe it glanced off the armor without injuring the target, maybe it was a clean miss because the target dodged effectively or the attack was ill timed. We can hash that out in the narration, no problem. The point is the root causality is contained within the event itself and can, often, be affected in the future. If the attack failed to cause damage, it was insufficient to the task of doing so. What can I do to make it sufficient in the future?

Here's where I see where I and pemerton differ the most - the success or failure is owned by the acting player (whether via the PC or an NPC). He is the source of the causation and, knowing that, can act on it in a rational way. If in a fight, can he come up with a tactic to give him a better chance at the attack? Maybe he can - that's up to him to find it. In a skill check, whether he is pursuing a foe on horseback or trying to engage the local ruler for help with his diplomatic skills, success or failure is because his attempt was sufficient or insufficient to the task at hand - not because some outside complication, uncontrolled and uncontrollable by the character, intervened. The example I'd bring up here is rain starting up and spoiling the diplomacy attempt. Any attempt to rationalize the cause of the failure is obscured because the chain of causality is irrational. There's nothing the PC can do in that situation to improve on that skill check - no lesson to be learned from the mistake. No alternative tactic other than "I guess I'll try on a sunny day" that can be taken away from that situation. The player's ability to predict the outcome of his actions becomes obscured and so does his ability to make meaningful choices.

So it's not really a question of the system producing a specific or unspecific level of detail. It's the system preserving the causality of the player doing something, observing the result, and understanding how the character got from point A to point B.

That's my general view. There are exceptions to the approach - saving throws being the most prominent I can think of that get really weird. But then saves have, as far as I'm concerned, always been a (near-)miraculous, last ditch attempt to save one's self from an otherwise unavoidable negative effect (not simply a defense to be hit).

Bingo, especially the bolded parts. This was always my problem with non-process sim in general. It's not just about the player learning to be a better "player," it's about the player learning how to be a better player as it directly connects to the character he or she is playing. If there's a connection between "process sim," and "immersion," it's in this part of the game.

 

[I'm A Banana]

If the hit roll represented a single swing of a weapon then Joe couldn't have done that because he is only entitled to one attack per round

It doesn't usually represent a single swing of the weapon, it helps describe the effect of the character trying to hit the goblin during their turn (which might involve a lot of feints and jabs or a sweep-to-a-stab, or whatever). The level of detail need not exist at the level of individual sword-swings, and I'm not arguing that it should.

Frankly, "hit the goblin with my sword" doesn't cut the mustard if you're particularly sensitive to narrative or simulation

"I try to hit the goblin with my sword" works as both narrative and simulation. It tells a story, and it represents an action. Unless you're using some Forge-specific jargony meaning for these terms perhaps?

"Hit" and "Miss" are game terms / "gamist constructs" in the context of "rolling to hit."

They are also constructs of the fiction ("I try to hit the goblin with my sword") and constructs of the world the fiction takes place in (The character is trying to hit the goblin with her sword).

Characters aren't just trying to hit enemies in a literal sense (armor doesn't stop you from being hit literally), they are trying to defeat enemies by any means and opportunities that present themselves.

Armor does stop you from getting hit (instead, the blow hits the armor, and since the armor isn't part of you, that doesn't hurt).

And characters are trying to hit enemies in a literal sense: literally, they say they try to hit the thing, and that's what happens.

Mechanics exist to adjudicate what can and can not happen.

Disagree. Especially in a game of shared imagination, mechanics aren't there to give or deny players permission. This is one of the functions of the DM. The mechancis are there as a tool to help the DM resolve what happens because of the actions the characters take. The actions the characters take depend on what the player states that they do.

What people do physically (actions) is a matter of resolving their intentions against their opportunities.

A player can say "I move 30' to the end of the room," but when they move over the pit trap 10' away their character's action is actually "Move 10 feet and fall in a hole."

Actions can be interrupted, yes. But I still know that moving the first 10' is what happened before the interruption occurred (Character does X, Y happens), and the rules tell me to adjudicate the action of moving 30' by telling me to interrupt it after 10 and have a trap happen.

A player announces what she wants her character to do. In a risk-based situation (like encountering combat, stunts, antagonists, and hazards) the dice will determine what is possible and then the DM and the player can figure out what it means.

A player announces what her character *does*. In a situation where there is a potential for failure, she cannot announce success -- it is not within her control to dictate. Instead, she announces the attempt at success, and we all find out together if that attempt was successful or not. In a situation where the action is interrupted, the interruption gets resolved before the action continues (or not, if the interruption stops it).

Sometimes it means you swing your sword a few times and draw the enemy's shield upwards, letting you sock them in the jaw with your gauntlet when you're original intent was to split their skull. Sometimes it means you try to find an opening to stab them with your rapier and don't find one. Sometimes it means you glance off their armor or they parry your weapon aside. It's very open ended if you didn't already fence yourself in unnecessarily.

Nothing in what I'm saying prohibits you from doing any of that.

Exactly. You say, "I attack with my Great Ax." You roll dice and possibly subtract HP to see what your boundaries are.

And one of those boundaries is also that your character tried to hit something with a great ax. It is the cause that the mechanics are finding out an effect for.

 

[Hussar]

But, KM, isn't that ultimately limiting? You can only state, "I attack with my axe" and the only result can be, "You hit with your axe" or "You miss with your axe". At no point can you say, "I attack with my axe" and have the result be, "You almost hit him, but, his buddy parries you". When you insist that any player action must be directly linked to that player and nothing else (whether player or NPC), then you lose out on a lot of options.

Once you allow that other events can occur, then narration is a lot more free. It could be a straight line cause/effect, or it could be due to other factors.

 

[amerigoV]

But see... even that's not enough to even get close to "process sim". Because we still completely skip over the psychological impact of combat in D&D.

Try to visualize actually getting shot in the chest. Or having your arm cut off. The pain and suffering of experiencing and going through that brush with death. Now visualize someone coming over and completely healing you of that wound... to the point that you jump up, travel 50 down another corridor and experience that exact same excrutiating pain and agony AGAIN as you run into another band of orcs and lose "damage points".

And in D&D, this stuff happens ALL THE TIME.

As an aside, this always impacts the versimidmultudismnist of a D&D world. I think this was from a FreeRPG day (it was a free 4e adventure I got from somewhere) - Wizards gave out a 4e module that had the PCs come in to finish off some special beholder infused with shadowfell/fey whatever flavor of the day plane stuff. The NPCs involved were powerful enough to have "cornered" the beholder in some cave complex, but were too beat up to finish it off. The leader NPC had broken an arm or leg as their excuse not to join in with the PCs for the final push.

My first reaction was "what? this guy is tough enough to take on a beholder but there is no one to cast Cure X wounds? Shouldn't s/he be at full HP after an extended rest?" I am not a 4e-er, but in 3e terms I wondered why Restoration was not available. From a D&D perspective, it really messed up the premise for me. Plus, the authors missed an opportunity to do something cool like have part of them turned to stone and another part disintegrated - ironically something more "believable" plus a chance to mess with the players minds. "Ooooh, an arm breaking beholder!" is not going to scare many players.

 

[ExploderWizard]

As an aside, this always impacts the versimidmultudismnist of a D&D world. I think this was from a FreeRPG day (it was a free 4e adventure I got from somewhere) - Wizards gave out a 4e module that had the PCs come in to finish off some special beholder infused with shadowfell/fey whatever flavor of the day plane stuff. The NPCs involved were powerful enough to have "cornered" the beholder in some cave complex, but were too beat up to finish it off. The leader NPC had broken an arm or leg as their excuse not to join in with the PCs for the final push.

My first reaction was "what? this guy is tough enough to take on a beholder but there is no one to cast Cure X wounds? Shouldn't s/he be at full HP after an extended rest?" I am not a 4e-er, but in 3e terms I wondered why Restoration was not available. From a D&D perspective, it really messed up the premise for me. Plus, the authors missed an opportunity to do something cool like have part of them turned to stone and another part disintegrated - ironically something more "believable" plus a chance to mess with the players minds. "Ooooh, an arm breaking beholder!" is not going to scare many players.

Yeah, that kind of stuff really gets the eyes rolling. When injuries that are impossible to have occur in play and could be trivially healed if they DID happen get trotted out as plot devices, the integrity of the game world takes a huge hit. Its one of the reasons that a world in which there is nothing that can't be cured by a night's sleep make any scenario dependent on the incapacity of another next to impossible to implement.

 

[billd91]

But, KM, isn't that ultimately limiting? You can only state, "I attack with my axe" and the only result can be, "You hit with your axe" or "You miss with your axe". At no point can you say, "I attack with my axe" and have the result be, "You almost hit him, but, his buddy parries you". When you insist that any player action must be directly linked to that player and nothing else (whether player or NPC), then you lose out on a lot of options.

Of course you could say that his buddy parries you - assuming his buddy has been involved in the action and has the ability to intervene. You're not limited to saying "You hit" or "You miss" if the player says "I attack". Ideally, however, you want the player to say things like "I swing low in an attempt to disembowel the goblin". Then, once you've determined the results, the DM can come back with "You succeed in cutting deep and his entrails hit the floor" for a high damage hit or "The goblin jumps back far enough to avoid your slice" for a miss or "The goblin parries most of the attacks energy with his blade but winces in pain from doing so" for a low damage miss (high and low damage being dependent on how much of the goblin's hit points were taken by the damage roll).

I don't see how that narration isn't quite free.