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

[ExploderWizard]

The idea that somehow the game got "easier" with 3e is just so insulting. Like "real men" play AD&D and the rest of us are stuck in the kiddie pool. It's baseless and ludicrously easy to disprove.

The issue isn't one of easier or harder. In many ways 3E is much harder than B/X. So much to consider and remember rules wise make 3E a fairly complex game. So enough with the kiddie accusations. The game and objectives of play are different. In many ways the 'survive the gauntlet of encounters' mode of play is, if anything, harder on players.

 

[Balesir]

I don't know that I agree with "much better" - I quite enjoy the (obviously somewhat pseudo-) process-sim of games like RM, RQ and BW Fight!

But I agree with the first two paragraphs, and instead of "much better" option would go for "extremely viable option".

I think some "process-sim" games you can see in the mind's eye as not process-sim. What I mean is that you can view the steps of the mechanical process as not being linked to the game-world process at all, but as being merely steps to generate a random outcome that tells you the outcome you are to imagine of the in-world events without reference to the in-world process required to reach that outcome. The only disadvantage in doing this is that the assumption of step-to-step correspondance may exclude certain stochastic patterns of outcome (like "damage on a miss").

But I think it's highly doubtful that those decisions have to be realised in any sort of process-sim fashion. It can be about expressing local bits of intention, for example ("I want to move combatant X from here to there") and then having a resolution system that permits that.

Well, the line is very thin, here, I think. By "pausing" the process to allow player input, you are breaking the in-world process up into steps, each of which is modelled by the system - which is just what process-sim seems to entail. The difference is that what defines the size of each "step" is the points at which you are deciding that a "significant" character decision (i.e. one that ought to be reflected by a player decision) is made (or could be made).

I could go further and say that each of these decision points ought to be a decision that the players at the table are competent to understand the import of, but that almost goes without saying, as they are by definition in that they have selected the system for that very reason (one hopes).

The only real criterion to emerge so far is that it can be unhelpful if the game system process has steps that superficially map to the game world process but for which no player decision is possible (like "to hit roll" -> "damage roll"). Such systems can lead to the imposition of unnecessary restrictions on the game system due to players imagining some unnecessary correlation between system process and game world process.

This also prompts me to add a new hypothesis to the one in your OP: a certain number of RPGers seem to think that fictional positioning can't be relevant to resolution unless resolution follows a process-sim model. I think that's obviously wrong (I'm thinking, for instance, of 4e skill challenges I've run, or of Marvel Heroic RP), but it seems to be a reasonably widely held view.

This may well be one reason why some players regard correspondance between the steps of the mechanical system and the steps of the imagined in-world process as neccessary (or at least desirable, or maybe "natural"), but I honestly don't know. Are there any here who like/need such correspondances willing to do some soul searching and comment on this?

 

[Hussar]

The issue isn't one of easier or harder. In many ways 3E is much harder than B/X. So much to consider and remember rules wise make 3E a fairly complex game. So enough with the kiddie accusations. The game and objectives of play are different. In many ways the 'survive the gauntlet of encounters' mode of play is, if anything, harder on players.

But, even this is fairly rose coloured nostalgia glassed talking. Look at the number of steps you need to go through in a single round in Basic/Expert D&D. Everything is categorised. Ranged weapons first, melee weapons then spells. Oops, what happens if I change my mind and I want to throw an axe? Guess I missed my chance.

Comparatively, a 3e round is fairly simple. Each player takes his or her turn and passes the dice.

Where 3e gets ridiculously complicated is in special manoeuvres. Grapple, sunder, that sort of thing. And, I will freely agree that these rules are more complicated than they need to be. But, ignoring that for a second, 3e is a much more streamlined, simpler combat system than earlier D&D. The great slowdowns in 3e come with special manoeuvres or spells. Straight up combat? No terribly hard.

Although, that said, I have seen a player who would take almost ten minutes to resolve his turn with a 4th level dwarf fighter. Sigh. Makes me want to head desk.

 

[Derren]

Where 3e gets ridiculously complicated is in special manoeuvres. Grapple, sunder, that sort of thing.

So a rules with 2 lines instead of 1 is "ridiculously complicated"? All those rules are still very easy to remember, at least when you bother to learn them. The only people arguing otherwise are the ones who never did in the first place.

 

[pemerton]

Well, the line is very thin, here, I think. By "pausing" the process to allow player input, you are breaking the in-world process up into steps, each of which is modelled by the system - which is just what process-sim seems to entail. The difference is that what defines the size of each "step" is the points at which you are deciding that a "significant" character decision (i.e. one that ought to be reflected by a player decision) is made (or could be made).

Your whole post is very good and thoughtful. But I want to pettifog a bit more over this.

I think you can break up the action without modelling steps of an inworld process. 4e turn-by-turn initiative is an example of this, I think: the frame is frozen on a periodic basis, but this is regulated simply by reference to the action economy, and doesn't map to anything distinctive in the fiction. In Burning Wheel, the need to script again after every 3 exchanges is another example: the whole scripting technique emulates or evokes, at least for some players, the uncertainty of combat, but the actual timing of the scripting and the revelation of what has been scripted isn't modelling any step of an in-fiction process.

I don't think it's a coincidence that I'm focusing on initiative systems. Ron Edwards said of rolling for initiative that it "has generated hours of painful argument about what in the world it represents in-game, at the moment of the roll relative to in-game time", and I think that generalises to initiative mechanics, and related devices like the action economy, more generally.

As another instance of this, consider an arrow shot by a ranger in 4e. Whether it is done as an immediate action or as a standard action confers a different mechanical status in the game, and establishes different relations to other events within the action economy, but within the fiction all there is is this guy shooting arrows faster than the NPCs can dodge them.

A contrast would be way that Runequest handles attacks (taken from Ron Edwards again - he is talking about simulationist priorities in general, but I think RQ is one particularly clear example):

The causal sequence of task resolution [is] linear in time. He swings: on target or not? The other guy dodges or parries: well or badly? The weapon contacts the unit of armor + body: how hard? The armor stops some of it: how much? The remaining impact hits tissue: how deeply? With what psychological (stunning, pain) effects? With what continuing effects?​

Here, the breaking up into steps - with player input at those steps, if only in terms of rolling dice, but for some of them also a decision (eg dodge or parry) - is meant to correspond, I think, to the causal sequence in the fiction.

Sure, XP represents something in the fiction: the gaining of experience that leads you to being stronger, better, faster, etc. Your character at 100 XP is different in the fiction than your character at 10,000 XP. It's the Hero's Journey (or some other character development) as a point total! At the very least it represents the amount of story that has happened to the character.

That "story" comment will provoke disagreement from some anti-story gamer types if they read it. Neither Moldvay Basic nor Gygax's DMG gives me the impression that XP is a measure of "amount of story".

But anyway, that's somewhat orthogonal. XP is a marker used to signal certain changes in the fictional status/capability of the PC. But the earning of experience doesn't itself model any ingame process. For instance, in classic D&D you get XP for looting, but the award of the XP isn't measuring some ingame causal process that your PC as a result of looting. (Gygax says as much in his DMG.) And in 4e, get enough XP and you'll become a knight commander. Or a demigod. But the earning of XP isn't modelling the ingame causal process of being promoted up the ranks of a military order, nor of earning the favour of the existing pantheon.

Contrast encumbrance in classic D&D, which does correlate to an ingame causal process that results from looting (namely, being weighed down by loot). Or the buy-the-book treatment of enhancement bonuses in 4e, which correlate to an ingame causal process of wielding magic items of varying degrees of power.

And Initiative represents something in the fiction, too: who acts before who in the attempt to beat someone else to the punch.

Every minute? Every 6 seconds? And how do you explain the freeze-framing (in modern D&D) or the fact that archery always happens before swordplay (in classic D&D)? It's a transparent metagame device.

Yes, how fast and alert the PC is factors into the action economy in certain ways (eg ranger bonuses to surprise in AD&D; DEX added to init in WotC D&D and some versions of classic D&D; various powers that manipulate starting initiative in 4e; etc). But that doesn't mean we're actually modelling a process. What is the process? In a real fight, there is no process that has a regular cycle of 6 seconds or 10 seconds or 60 seconds. Yet our initiative systems and action economies are based around those ingame passages of time.

In basic D&D, this kind of "defeat" is equal to physical, corporeal death.

<snip>

If you wanna play with other defeat conditions at 0 hp, that's awesome

<snip>

As long as HP loss can kill you, things that cause HP loss need to be potentially deadly.

This is all true but strikes me as irrelevant. In Tunnels & Trolls you can only win a melee if you have a melee weapon - a toothpick or dandelion flower won't cut it. (Contrast Toon, perhaps.) But that doesn't make T&T a process-sim game: it's even loss process-sim than D&D!

I'm not talking about other defeat conditions, and I don't know what makes you think I am. I'm saying that when I roll my fighter's attack against an orc with a longsword, until the attack die is rolled and the result applied, and then any damage dice rolled and applied, the mechanics tell me nothing about what I'm doing in the fiction other than trying to beat this orc in melee using a sword. If I miss, the mechanics still don't tell me anything except that I didn't land a lethal blow. If I hit but don't reduce hp to zero, the mechanics tell me a bit more: I didn't land a lethal blow, but I did wear the orc down in some way. Only if I reduce the orc to 0 hp do the mechanics tell me that I dealt an injury - namely, a lethal one.

As I said in my earlier post, if you or your group want to embellish beyond the mechanically mandated minimum, nothing is stopping you indulging your tastes. (Though I think you're going to get the occasional corner case, like the orc wielding a polearm who takes a crit, is reduced to 2 hp, has that narrated as an arm being severed, but then through a change in die roll fortunes turns the tide to win the battle, and walks back to the tribe victorious. How does that work? And why can the orc be healed to full health without needing a Regeneration spell?)

Without action, there's no conflict.

But the resolution mechanics don't need to model the action. They just need to model the conflict. For instance: roll opposed dice. Whoever rolls higher wins the conflict. If one of the antagonists has a marked advantage due to fictional positioning, they get to add 3 to their roll.

This is a viable resolution system for a simple RPG. Robin Laws's HeroQuest revised uses a variant of it for most action resolution, though with slightly more fiddly win and loss conditions based on a more granular comparison of the roll results; and Marvel Heroic is more complicated then this, but uses an idea a bit like this as its starting point.

A system like this certainly involves the character's acting: including acting to improve their fictional positioning so as to get bonuses to rolls. But it doesn't model any ingame processes.

If the player hopes to defeat the goblin in melee, they best be doing something to accomplish that goal. Hoping at it isn't going to do squat.

The player is doing something: they're putting their PC into circumstances whereby the game rules permit them to make an attack roll. The character is doing something to - namely, engaging the goblin in melee combat - but more than that the core D&D rules don't tell us.

What does that engagement look like? What do you do, specifically, to engage the creature? What are you trying to do, specifically, now, in the moment, here with the goblin in front of you snarling and the sweat on your brow and the stink of its warren permeating your nostrils. Give me some concrete actiion.

It's a rule from improv: be specific. Be present. Make statements. Give detail. The more concrete things that people have to hang their vision of the scene on, the better anchored everyone is to make future decisions.

<snip>

I want to encourage my players at every turn to take definitive, discrete action, to do a thing, so that I can respond, and so that we can get on with it.

You can impose such a rule at your table if you like. It's not part of the game rules, though. The resolution of a D&D melee combat won't change depending on whether or not this extra narration is added. In mechanical terms, there is nothing for you to respond to. It's all epiphenomenal. The causal links you're asserting aren't actually there in the mechanics. You can narrate it however you like and the resolution won't change.

That's part of why 4e's combat mechanics are quite different from classic D&D (and perhaps 3E - I don't know the latter well enough): it has plenty of results of combat that aren't purely epiphenomenal: forced movement, condition infliction, etc. So by D&D standards 4e gives a comparatively large amount of information on what is happening in the fiction as a result of combat (though not as much as, say, Rolemaster).

But we can know that your PC tried to cut off the enemy's head. Just because we don't know the success of an action before dice are rolled doesn't mean we don't know what actions were taken.

You can narrate your attack that way. You can equally narrate it as "I go for the gut" or "I try to get an advantage - what openings are there?" or even "The orc parries badly, leaving an opening on the left side that I take advantage of." (Though presumably many would find the latter objectionable because it is "martial mind control".) I personally have no experience in melee fighting, but from what others say I gather that one of the latter two has more in common with the reality of fighting than "I go for the head" or "I go for the gut" which I gather is meaningless in the absence of more information about what sort of error (forced or otherwise) the opponent has made.

I've probably never played D&D As Gygax Intended. I'm not even 100% convinced that Gary played D&D As Gygax Intended. One of the big strengths of the game is that there's no One True Way!

Sure, but doesn't that mean that your way is not the One True Way? In other words, you might choose to narrate hit point loss as injuries whenever it occurs, but - given that nothing in the mechanics mandates that - why are you trying to assert that it is a default, or even a necessity?

There's also a marketing issue here - if you're telling me that D&Dnext doesn't have room for 4e-style hit point loss (which includes damage-on-a-miss), you're telling me I shouldn't buy it or play it. Luckily for WotC I think you're wrong, and that in fact there is very little in D&Dnext's treatment of attack rolls, damage and hit point loss that requires me to interpret in the way you are saying I must. (It's healing rules are another matter, but they can probably be rewritten.)

 

[Balesir]

I think you can break up the action without modelling steps of an inworld process. 4e turn-by-turn initiative is an example of this, I think: the frame is frozen on a periodic basis, but this is regulated simply by reference to the action economy, and doesn't map to anything distinctive in the fiction. In Burning Wheel, the need to script again after every 3 exchanges is another example: the whole scripting technique emulates or evokes, at least for some players, the uncertainty of combat, but the actual timing of the scripting and the revelation of what has been scripted isn't modelling any step of an in-fiction process.

This is a very good point, and shows that a system in which the divisions and steps of the mechanical process are driven by player decision points is not always divided up in a way that reflects the chronological progress of the game-world process being modelled.

I do think it is still reflective of the game-world process, however, since it is generally saying (at least implicitly) that the decisions that are resolved earliest have outcomes that cannot be influenced by those that are resolved later. We could say, though, that the linkage is "soft" or "loose".

But anyway, that's somewhat orthogonal. XP is a marker used to signal certain changes in the fictional status/capability of the PC. But the earning of experience doesn't itself model any ingame process. For instance, in classic D&D you get XP for looting, but the award of the XP isn't measuring some ingame causal process that your PC as a result of looting. (Gygax says as much in his DMG.)

This is all very true, but I still am reminded of my own views and assumptions when I started moving away from D&D back in the early 1980s. At the time, it seemed "obvious" to me that the AD&D experience system was "silly" and "nonsensical" since it "obviously" was meant to model character learning, whereas people clearly do not learn combat and adventuring skills from geting richer (ha - how naive!). Having xp awarded for beating foes and such "made sense" (lord how I have come to loathe that phrase!), but xp for treasure was just "ridiculous".

Of course, I eventually came to realise that this was total and utter hogwash - that xp for treasure did exactly what it was intended to do - but by then the water was under the bridge, down the river and out in the deep blue sea...

In other words, this is yet another area where people will be quite capable of seeing (and needing?) a "process-sim" resolution mechanic, even though such an interpretation is not really supportable upon careful consideration.

 

[I'm A Banana]

That "story" comment will provoke disagreement from some anti-story gamer types if they read it. Neither Moldvay Basic nor Gygax's DMG gives me the impression that XP is a measure of "amount of story".

's why I specified "at the very least." Plenty of games use XP for more than timekeeping.

But anyway, that's somewhat orthogonal. XP is a marker used to signal certain changes in the fictional status/capability of the PC. But the earning of experience doesn't itself model any ingame process.

Overcoming the challenges that give you XP is totally an ingame process. And your character overcoming those challenges is totally a process in the fiction.

For instance, in classic D&D you get XP for looting, but the award of the XP isn't measuring some ingame causal process that your PC as a result of looting. (Gygax says as much in his DMG.)

And in 4e, get enough XP and you'll become a knight commander. Or a demigod. But the earning of XP isn't modelling the ingame causal process of being promoted up the ranks of a military order, nor of earning the favour of the existing pantheon.

I've got no problem acknowledging that there's multiple ways to interpret it (while noting that the 4e example is totally debatable). That's kind of my point. When you say this:

For instance, many people doubt that writing down XP totals actually represents something in the fiction. Similarly, I don't think anyone thinks that initiative scores represent anything in the fiction (they're just a metagame ranking device for making the action economy work).

...it is dismissive of *plenty* of playstyles. Lots of people think that XP does represent something in the fiction. Plenty of people imagine that initiative scores represent something in the fiction. It's not an insignificant minority that view HP damage as a thing that happens in the fiction of the world. It's not insane to hold that view, and it's a view that arises naturally from how many people actually play the game.

Which means it's not a "problem" like the OP posits, anymore than not liking One Direction is a problem. It's not WRONG to play the game like this, it's not a flaw in need of fixing, it's a way the game is used and it shouldn't be ignored or dismissed as a mistake that needs to be fixed.

That's my intent when I point out that XP and initiative and HP and whatever can totally be a representatoin of something in-world. It doesn't NEED to be metagame.

Is it "better" if it is? That's something that's debatable in the specifics. But it should be clear that it's not a thing that is required, so this changes the conversation from "Is this the problem?" to "Why might someone think it is a problem at all?"

Every minute? Every 6 seconds? And how do you explain the freeze-framing (in modern D&D) or the fact that archery always happens before swordplay (in classic D&D)? It's a transparent metagame device.

Again, no, it needn't be. In my mind, those 6-second rounds are happening basically simultaneously (we essentially play through them in very slow-motion). One attack roll in a round represents what happens when one character performs their stated action over the course of their ~6 seconds, at a fairly high level of abstraction. If that stated action is "I try to cut off the orc's head!" then the attack roll helps me adjudicate if that attempt is successful. Initiative represents the fact that the player (with Init 16) got to seize the moment to try that before the orc (with Init 9) could react.

Again, that's not to say that it must be this way, either, just that you're wrong to presume that it must not be. So lets have a conversation about relative merits and not about who is even allowed to come to the table.

Yes, how fast and alert the PC is factors into the action economy in certain ways (eg ranger bonuses to surprise in AD&D; DEX added to init in WotC D&D and some versions of classic D&D; various powers that manipulate starting initiative in 4e; etc). But that doesn't mean we're actually modelling a process. What is the process? In a real fight, there is no process that has a regular cycle of 6 seconds or 10 seconds or 60 seconds. Yet our initiative systems and action economies are based around those ingame passages of time.

The process is that if all these things are happening at the same time, who has the speed and wherewithal to be a little faster at trying to achieve their goal than someone else? Initiative is a mechanic that resolves the question of: "If everyone tries to do their thing at once, who gets to go a little faster than others?"

This is all true but strikes me as irrelevant. In Tunnels & Trolls you can only win a melee if you have a melee weapon - a toothpick or dandelion flower won't cut it. (Contrast Toon, perhaps.) But that doesn't make T&T a process-sim game: it's even loss process-sim than D&D!

I'm not particularly interested in jargony labels, really. I'm not here under the tribal banner of "process-sim" (whatever the Ron that means), trying to lay claim to rulebooks as my territory. I'm just articulating why the playstyle that I use is worthy of consideration for 5e, and, in fact, may be a style well-suited to being a default 5e playstyle. Not a "problem." I'll leave it up to experts in the terms to determine if this falls under that umbrella, but given the OP, it seems like it might.

I'm not talking about other defeat conditions, and I don't know what makes you think I am. I'm saying that when I roll my fighter's attack against an orc with a longsword, until the attack die is rolled and the result applied, and then any damage dice rolled and applied, the mechanics tell me nothing about what I'm doing in the fiction other than trying to beat this orc in melee using a sword.

I'm confused here. What mechanics are in play before the attack die is rolled that would even tell you that much?

I don't think the mechanics need to tell you what your actions are. You tell the mechanics what your actions are, and the mechanics work out what that means. You say to the dice, "I'm going to try and hit that orc with my sword, you tell me if that works." It's the specific thing that helps the players see the action in their head.

Also, by "beat this orc," you must mean "beat the AC of this orc," which uses a value (AC) that explicitly represents how hard it is to physically hit the orc with a weapon. So there's a pretty obvious tie in the mechanics to actually injuring the orc with your weapon if you beat the AC with your weapon, and not injuring the orc with your weapon if you do not.

If I miss, the mechanics still don't tell me anything except that I didn't land a lethal blow.

They also tell you that the reason you didn't land a lethal blow was because you failed to beat the enemy's defenses when you tried to land that lethal blow. And before you even used the mechanics, you knew that you were attempting to land a lethal blow.

If I hit but don't reduce hp to zero, the mechanics tell me a bit more: I didn't land a lethal blow, but I did wear the orc down in some way. Only if I reduce the orc to 0 hp do the mechanics tell me that I dealt an injury - namely, a lethal one.

Since that HP damage came as a result of beating the enemy's defenses (AC) with your attempted lethal attack (attack roll), the mechanics are pretty much spelling out you that you injured, but failed to kill, the target when you tried to land that lethal blow.

As I said in my earlier post, if you or your group want to embellish beyond the mechanically mandated minimum, nothing is stopping you indulging your tastes. (Though I think you're going to get the occasional corner case, like the orc wielding a polearm who takes a crit, is reduced to 2 hp, has that narrated as an arm being severed, but then through a change in die roll fortunes turns the tide to win the battle, and walks back to the tribe victorious. How does that work? And why can the orc be healed to full health without needing a Regeneration spell?)

I'm not sure I was looking for permission.

You're free to determine action from result, too, but that's not going to determine what WotC should presume in the default game.

(and if you narrate an orc at 2 hp as a severed arm, you're looking at a narration that's totally OK with one-armed orcs who fight as fiercely as two-armed orcs)

But the resolution mechanics don't need to model the action. They just need to model the conflict. For instance: roll opposed dice. Whoever rolls higher wins the conflict. If one of the antagonists has a marked advantage due to fictional positioning, they get to add 3 to their roll.

Without an action, there is no conflict. Conflict doesn't exist in an unconnected vacuum from the events that precipitate it. There is no agon without a struggle, and a struggle comes out of a verb, a change, a dynamism, something happens, and then there is a result. A conflict is a process. Might as well work through it how causality does. Might as well say that the precipitating event that causes the conflict happens, and use the mechanics to help describe the fallout from that event.

Clearly, it isn't necessary. You can describe a conflict abstractly, without a need to reference what is driving it. You can look at a struggle in reverse chronology the way historians and archeologists do, in terms of figuring out how a certain condition came to be. Some might even prefer that for the flexibility it offers in terms of the story you tell (anything that arrives at the endpoint is a valid narration!). It sounds confusing and dull and dis-empowering to me, but I'm not the arbiter of how everyone has fun.

But is it better for default D&D to be a game where people declare actions and drive the game forward than where they abstractly resolve nebulous conflicts and figure out what happened to bring them to their present state? I'd certainly argue so. I'm not convinced that it's necessarily true, but I think there's a strong, strong argument in favor of it.

This is a viable resolution system for a simple RPG. Robin Laws's HeroQuest revised uses a variant of it for most action resolution, though with slightly more fiddly win and loss conditions based on a more granular comparison of the roll results; and Marvel Heroic is more complicated then this, but uses an idea a bit like this as its starting point.

A system like this certainly involves the character's acting: including acting to improve their fictional positioning so as to get bonuses to rolls. But it doesn't model any ingame processes.

Why not? Two opposed dice certainly can represent two individuals each trying to wound the other, or someone defending as another attacks.

The player is doing something: they're putting their PC into circumstances whereby the game rules permit them to make an attack roll.

The character is doing something to - namely, engaging the goblin in melee combat - but more than that the core D&D rules don't tell us.

"Engaging the goblin in melee combat" is what, specifically? What does that look like? What is different about it when Mary's character does it vs. when Billy's character does it? What are they trying to DO when they do that?

Give me something concrete, so that I can imagine the world in my head, and believe in this this world of elves and orcs because things are happening in it.

You can impose such a rule at your table if you like. It's not part of the game rules, though. The resolution of a D&D melee combat won't change depending on whether or not this extra narration is added. In mechanical terms, there is nothing for you to respond to. It's all epiphenomenal. The causal links you're asserting aren't actually there in the mechanics. You can narrate it however you like and the resolution won't change.

I think it may be better for the game to presume that players are saying that their characters do specific things. I'd bet that creates a more rewarding experience at more tables than abstract waffling. Which is still viable for those that have no issue with it.

That's part of why 4e's combat mechanics are quite different from classic D&D (and perhaps 3E - I don't know the latter well enough): it has plenty of results of combat that aren't purely epiphenomenal: forced movement, condition infliction, etc. So by D&D standards 4e gives a comparatively large amount of information on what is happening in the fiction as a result of combat (though not as much as, say, Rolemaster).

I mean, characters have been getting petrified by basilisks and killed by poison and grabbed by ropers since OD&D. I'm not sure I appreciate the distinction you're making here.

You can narrate your attack that way. You can equally narrate it as "I go for the gut" or "I try to get an advantage - what openings are there?" or even "The orc parries badly, leaving an opening on the left side that I take advantage of." (Though presumably many would find the latter objectionable because it is "martial mind control".) I personally have no experience in melee fighting, but from what others say I gather that one of the latter two has more in common with the reality of fighting than "I go for the head" or "I go for the gut" which I gather is meaningless in the absence of more information about what sort of error (forced or otherwise) the opponent has made.

Attack rolls are explicitly attacks. It's what it says on the tin.

Sure, but doesn't that mean that your way is not the One True Way? In other words, you might choose to narrate hit point loss as injuries whenever it occurs, but - given that nothing in the mechanics mandates that - why are you trying to assert that it is a default, or even a necessity?

Like I said above, I'm demonstrating that this reading of things is merely valid and important -- not a "problem." I would go on to argue that it's probably a better way for default D&D to go, but I haven't really launched into that yet.

There's also a marketing issue here - if you're telling me that D&Dnext doesn't have room for 4e-style hit point loss (which includes damage-on-a-miss), you're telling me I shouldn't buy it or play it. Luckily for WotC I think you're wrong, and that in fact there is very little in D&Dnext's treatment of attack rolls, damage and hit point loss that requires me to interpret in the way you are saying I must. (It's healing rules are another matter, but they can probably be rewritten.)

That's not really what I'm telling you. I mentioned in the "let us meat and morale come together under one HP model!" thread that all 5e needs to do to satisfy both camps at once is avoid default rules that can only be modeled one way or the other (injury mechanics, and morale-based healing, for two). Which isn't to say at all that everyone needs to envision these things the same way.

What I'm really telling you is that specificity and causality are really quite important factors to an enjoyable game for what I'd wager is a great plurality of players (if not a majority), and so to describe those things as "problems" is to miss the plot.

 

[pemerton]

This is a very good point, and shows that a system in which the divisions and steps of the mechanical process are driven by player decision points is not always divided up in a way that reflects the chronological progress of the game-world process being modelled.

I do think it is still reflective of the game-world process, however, since it is generally saying (at least implicitly) that the decisions that are resolved earliest have outcomes that cannot be influenced by those that are resolved later. We could say, though, that the linkage is "soft" or "loose".

I think this question of causal-temporal sequence, and the relationship between ingame causality and at-the-table causality, leads to other weirdnesses of interpretation/process-sim projection.

For instance: I regard it as pretty obvious that the function of off-turn actions in 4e is to introduce some dynamism into the resolution system, to reduce the "freeze frame" vibe that turn-by-turn initiative otherwise creates. So for me, the analysis goes like this: the gameworld is like the real-world, with everyone acting chaotically all-at-once, and the action economy is a type of approximation to that, using various devices like off-turn actions to try to model the "reality" of the ingame events.

But I've seen other posters look at off-turn actions in an opposite sort of way, that because they're different in the rules they're trying to model something different and distinctive in the fiction, leading to idea such as that reaction time has some sort of role to play in understanding or adjudicating off-turn actions in a way that it doesn't for on-turn standard actions; or even that resolving an OA or an interrupt actually involves a type of winding-back of time, as if the sequence of at-table action declarations corrresponded to the sequence of events in the fiction.

I still am reminded of my own views and assumptions when I started moving away from D&D back in the early 1980s. At the time, it seemed "obvious" to me that the AD&D experience system was "silly" and "nonsensical" since it "obviously" was meant to model character learning, whereas people clearly do not learn combat and adventuring skills from geting richer (ha - how naive!). Having xp awarded for beating foes and such "made sense" (lord how I have come to loathe that phrase!), but xp for treasure was just "ridiculous".

<snip>

In other words, this is yet another area where people will be quite capable of seeing (and needing?) a "process-sim" resolution mechanic, even though such an interpretation is not really supportable upon careful consideration.

I can relate to all this, though for me it was the late 80s, and especially 1990 - the year I first played Rolemaster. And RM does try to have an "XP as learning" model; a description I have used is "hard field training" (fighting, using your skills, coming back from the dead, etc - all events which help one learn in the "school of hard knocks"; it's a bit like adapting RQ's learning-by-doing system to a level-based game). Of cousre I'd read all the Gygax stuff in the DMG, but the general assumptions of the time (or at least as I encountered them, eg in Dragon magazine) hadn't succeeded in really explaining to me what Gygax was on about.

I had moved away from that sort of XP to goal-based XP by the late-90s, but without having a particularly good theory of what I was doing. For me, it was Ron Edwards rather than Gygax himself who actually gave me the conceptual resources and understanding to work out what was going on, and then to go back and finally make sense of what Gygax was getting at in his books. (Not that I personally want to play an XP-for-treasure game, or even really wanted to then - I put the treasures in to my old AD&D adventures in order to make sure the PCs levelled, but always preferred the adventuring to the looting as a focus of play - but at least I could finally work out what was going on with it!)

 

[ForeverSlayer]

I think the trick is finding the right combination of abstraction and simulation. I think it's funny how opponents of simulation style games seem to think those of us who like those games want everything simulation like real life. I can tell you from my own preferences that I don't want exact simulation in a game.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I think the trick is finding the right combination of abstraction and simulation.

I don't think simulation is opposed to abstraction. I think what simulation means is that the rules of the game are the laws of the game world, and that they are known and are consistent and logical to the people in that world. What isn't a simulation would be so-called metagame mechanics, rules that are in the game but do not have any meaning in the game world.

Conversely, I think that abstract is opposed to detailed. One could have a complicated health system with hit locations and permanent wounds, or a very simple hit point count. Both are simulations, but the latter is more abstract. By being abstract, it is inherently less good of a simulation, but that nonetheless remains the purpose.