I'd like to note that any time you have a model of a process, such as "An attempt to perform X action, with Y chance of success due to various factors such as your proficiency, the assigned difficulty, various other bonuses or penalties factored in", is not sufficient to make a simulation.
Any simulation that generates as its only potential outcomes "success" or "failure" is a limited and weak simulation to begin with. Seldom do real interactions break down so simplistically; in combat this is especially so. When we design chemical plant, for example, we have whole processes designed to identify as many of the possible outcomes as can be found; if we limited ourselves only to considering "success" and "failure" of even each step of the process, we would create hopelessly poor simulations of how the final process might be expected to perform. Such a design process would, in fact, be exceedingly dangerous.
You need a model, AND random variables (in this case, Dice rolls. Those are the magic sauce that turns D&D into a simulation. Any time you lose the agency of the dice, you're no longer in a simulation, but a story on rails) and fed into the model and see what kind of patterns emerge.
Stricly speaking this is not so, but in practice it's usually best to treat it as so, yes. If the situation of the simulation were known down to subatomic level with complete precision the outcome would be theoretically deterministic; such knowledge is not really achievable, though, so we substitute random variation for unknowns (since they are functionally equivalent).
This is what we do when we analyze things like DPR. We assume that all faces of the D20 and W have equal likelihood of occurrence, and the plug that into to the various formulae to find expected values. That's not the same thing, at all, as saying "my character kills the ogre", which is precisely what GWF allows the player to do without any say of the D20.
DPR is a highly limited analysis of the "meaning" of the game system for the nature of the game world, sure. A more complete analysis would take into account the stochastic patterns generated as well as the mean outcomes.
Nevertheless, the disputed DoaM mechanic does not allow the player of a GWF character to make any statements such as you suggest and have them be true. The random factor generated by the dice accounts for information not "known" ("generated" might be a better term, since we are talking about an imagined situation, not a real one) by either the GM or the player, but there is other information that is not known by the player, such as the target's hit points, damage reduction and so on. All it makes certain is that the target's hit points will be diminished, but since it's far from clear what hit points are, that is hardly any stipulation as to the in-world causality at all.
It is, in fact, reducing D&D from a simulation to a mere story where player fiat is used via Deus Ex Machina to determine the narrative. A player simply walks up to his foe and says "I hurt him", or "I kill him". And it happens. Period. No input from the dice. It's an affront to what D&D fundamentally is.
But there
is input from the dice; they determine whether a great amount of hit point reduction is done or a little. There is still a stochastic pattern of outcomes, even if none of those outcomes is "the character's actions had no effect on the world whatsoever". There is no very apparent reason why such an outcome should ever be a required entry in the "possible outcomes table". If a character attempts to walk from one side of an inn common room to another, there is a range of outcomes that we might imagine from such an attempt, but "the character is frozen in position and does not move at all" need not be one of them. To stipulate that "your attempt has no practical effect at all" must be a potential outcome for every action ever attempted in a "simulation" seems to be bizarre at the very best.
D&D combat is a simulation of a process (indeed, saying "of a process" is redundant").
You seem to be reading too much into the "simulation" bit of "process-sim", here.
What happens in the game world will be a process, sure.
What happens in the real world will be a process, also.
But there is
no reason at all why those processes should have any similarity in form, or that they should have any step-to-step correspondances. The
only requirement for a good simulation, in fact, is that
the range and stochastic pattern of the outcomes predicted by the simulation should match well with those observed in the "real" process. Since we cannot know what the "real" range and pattern of outcomes is for a purely imagined process, D&D (or any other RPG)
cannot literally be a simulation, because it's not simulating anything that can be observed and compared to the simulation.
Combats between humanoids of various sizes and strengths and heights and speeds and agility, occur in real life.
Indeed they do - and if they tell us anything at all they tell us that D&D combat is nothing like real combat in the slightest.
D&D's model takes into account combat offensive/defensive proficiency, armor, strength, agility, weapon size and type, the opponent's health, effects of blocking or parrying (such as Protector or Defensive style) etc. One can easily substitute an orc for a strong, tall human, and say that two humans are fighting, one with a spear and the other with a sword and armor.
Right, but to simulate fights between D&D characters by simulating real combat would not give us a system that devolves down to "I swing my sword, do I hit or miss?" The
range of outcomes is vastly wider than "hit" and "miss", and is not under the control of any single participant in the fight (unless one of them is vastly more skilled than all the others combined). Not just the actual outcome, but the
range of possible outcomes is determined by the actions of
all parties in a combat. The very tempo of D&D combat is wrong for any simulation of real world combat (the "I go/U go" pattern of moves is fundamentally at odds with how fights work - especially between trained combatants).
So, sure, real world combats happen (and have happened for a long time), but D&D combats look nothing whatsoever like them.
Actually virtually every game in existence works this way. Games have fields of play. In D&D this is hidden behind the DM screen. Players decode through play and improvisation. In a storygame there is no field, but an emptiness filled by every participating author, including the "game" author, largely because no one actually "plays" in those "games" seeing as the latter is absent and without it play in a game is possible.
I'm having difficulty with understanding what assumptions you are making, here; do you mean that the DM has a map for exploratory play that the players aren't privy to? Because I'm not really considering "system" at that level, here. Or do you mean that the DM's vision of what is happening in the fiction is the only "real" or "valid" one, and that the players' visualisations are all "wrong" to a greater or lesser degree?
The second assumption places a huge onus of communication on the GM, and even then I don't believe (as mentioned in my OP) that they could ever nail down every conceivable nuance of the scene such that everyone's vision of "what just happened" was identical to his or hers. Indeed, I might even argue that in the wider sense the "game system" consists of everything that is communicated about the situation in the imaginary world - both everything the players communicate about what their characters do, and everything the GM communicates about what happens in the world thereafter. Unitl something is communicated, it's not part of the shared imagined reality.
In D&D, The referee has the map behind the screen to add her in her imagining of what is actually happening in the game world. The other players are creating their own imaginary or drawn maps to help them to better understand it. What I believe you are doing here is denying the imagination as actual.
*snip*
RPG Players should never, under any circumstances, have access to the game system the referee has selected prior to the campaign. To do so would potentially risk losing all game play and and turn into script following. "I saw the maze. Follow me." a.k.a. the walkthrough.
So the players play characters who have literally no understanding of how the world they live in works until they experiment with it?? That seems an alien and curious way to play, to me. Indeed, it's not really a "game" at all, since the players are ignorant of the rules of it (quite literally, apparently). Furthermore, it's likely to be a very long winded affair, since the players will need to explain what their characters are trying to do very carefully and attend to the outcomes minutely in order to even start making sense out of the game at all.
I commonly play games where all the players know the rules, and I find they work far better than those where the players don't know the rules. The rules form a sort of "code" for communication - a shorthand, if you like - so that character actions and outcomes can be communicated swiftly and unambiguously. Knowledge of the rules also acts as a proxy in the player for the knowledge their character has of broadly how the world they grew up in works.
I do, I suppose, draw a clear distinction between the "rules" and "game elements". Game elements, which includes player characters but also includes other creatures and items in the world, are defined in terms that call off the "shorthand" of the rules
but are not rules themselves. As a result, the players need know nothing about the game elements outside their own characters; the creatures they fight and the items they find, for example, will (at least to start with) be completely mysterious to them. But the *rules* - the definition of how those game elements interact with each other - will be openly available to everyone playing.
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".
I think I would disagree. It would - or at least could - be "process-sim" in that it describes the steps in a process. The problem is that the process has no similarity to anything that might happen in any sort of believable world. Without the "slack" available to interpret the outcomes in a way that takes into account all the things to which our own view of the world is sensitive, the process that is described risks becoming unbelievable in the extreme. The first response of some (me, for example, back in the day) to this process-sim --> unbelievable process is to start trying to build a "realistic" process (i.e. one that models all the things that the people one plays with are sensitive to or knowledgeable about). Eventually, however, it becomes obvious that this is a fools errand and a never ending quest; no system can cover
everybody's sensitivities. Eventually, I came to the realisation that "less could be more"; that building a system with a plausible range of outcomes without defining the process that leads to them works far better than any attempt to model the process step-by-step ever will.
I think the sweet spot generally falls much closed to an association than a disassociation. "Hit" is a word that in common language pretty much implies contact. A game that pretends to be attached to a story set in a world where the common laws of physics are the same as ours, must abide to any expectation that the players have when using those words. If you need a 100-words explanation of what "hit" means in the game compared to what it means in normal language, then the game has already failed at support narrative.
The problem with that is that the division of possible outcomes into "hit" and "miss" is completely implausible. The very concept of a "sword swing" that either finds its mark or misses, with no further consequent result or variation in outcome, is alien to any plausible concept of "combat".
Just a few examples of why this model fails:
- A trained fighter will never "swing" with any expectation of striking with the first move (unless their enemy is ignoring them or unaware of them). They will never, in fact, undertake a move that is either purely attack or purely defence. The first swing might be designed to draw the opponent's weapon in a certain direction or make them shift balance, but it would hardly ever be expected to "hit".
- No move in a combat is just "an attack". What you see are "defensive attacks" or "offensive defences". Holding your shield close by your side and swinging a weapon is practically a written invitation for the opponent to maim or disable your weapon arm. Offence and defence are one action - the move is intended to do both.
- Flowing from the above, the tempo is never ONE (strike) - TWO (block/parry). The tempo is just ONE (simultaneous move to block or deflect the enemy's weapon and strike at the same time). "TWO" is taken up with an attempt to counter the opponent's counter to your "ONE"; if you have not made an attack on "ONE" then you aren't going to get one, and if you haven't made a defence on "ONE" then you may well be dead or disabled. A fight instructor might well say "Forget one-two - there is no 'two', it's never going to happen".
- Rarely, when starting a move, will a fighter know where their blow might land. Counter will follow counter will follow counter, until one side or the other leaves an opening where their defence fails and an opportunity to cause hurt is seized. Whether this opportunity is for a stab to the gut, a pommel to the face, a kick to the 'nads or a slice to the arm you simply don't know in advance. If the opportunity arises, a fighter will learn to just follow their instincts and take it - wherever and however it might arise.
- There will always be "contact" in melee combat - lots of it. In fact, skilled fighters will try to keep in contact with their opponent (or their weapon) as much as possible, because that way you can feel where the opponent is trying to shift and gain warning of their next move. The idea that "contact" happens only when one side successfully "attacks" another is simply flawed when any recognisably "animal" combatants are fighting.
In short, you will model
a process this way, but it won't be one that resembles in the slightest any plausible form of combat between animate, sentient beings with vulnerable bodies.
