D&D General On simulating things: what, why, and how?

[Grendel_Khan]

I think an important factor in all of this, that I haven't really seen discussed yet (apologies if it is) is whether the PCs in a given D&D campaign are supposed to be relatively unique in the world. Or are all of the rules that pertain to their level-based progression just an attempt to simulate what anyone can do, provided they kill some number of kobolds during their adventuring career?

I think this is relevant because it gets at questions like:

-Are the rules simulating how just anyone fights a dragon, or how the literal greatest heroes ever to walk the planet (for the last hundred years or so, at least) fight a dragon?

-When putting on our simulation hat as well as our worldbuilding goggles, do we need to think about how widespread magic effects the world? Or is the wizard PC in your campaign more like Gandalf--one of so few wizards you can basically count them all on one severely injured hand? If the PCs are unique, and magic is extremely rare, you can set aside a lot of simulation questions, and treat magic as something more mysterious and outright miraculous.

-Is it an explicit part of the fiction that the PCs are violating Newtonian physics, much like the monsters they deal with, because they're inherently supernatural beings? That includes the fighters and barbarians. How else do you explain so many of the feats in 5e, and the Flash-like flurry of greatsword attacks a higher-level PC can dish out, momentum and gravity be damned?


To me, the idea that 5e is just passively modeling or simulating the entirety of the world, with no differentiation between the PCs and everyone else, seems ludicrous. No matter what you're playing, you're doing Earthdawn stuff by 3rd level, just without the premise to explain why. And it's not like 5e provides you with some sort of chart (that I've seen) showing how a typical NPC progresses through levels over the course of their life, and it doesn't do the previous-edition thing of assigning levels to blacksmiths and such. It's a game filled with rules that pertain to what amounts to superpowered individuals, without really explaining how those superpowers strain or break the larger simulation. It's a game about the PCs as ubermensches. That it steadfastly won't provide a default setting that makes that clear doesn't change anything.

To me, that breaks any simulation approach in half. It's as realistic as a cape comic, meaning as realistic or unrealistic as the genre tropes and traditions you feel like applying during a given story arc. You know how people argue endlessly about whether Batman can beat Superman, trying to combine comic book lore and logic with real-world back-of-the-napkin calculations? Same thing here. 5e is wild, superpowered mayhem that emulates its own, oddly unique genre, and spits on your attempts at simulation. If you want fantasy simulation, try something else.

ETA: @AbdulAlhazred addressed this, and more efficiently, while I was writing this, by referencing 4e's framing. But I think the question stands: What do you think 5e is simulating? If you think it's simulating a generic fantasy setting, I disagree.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think it's more "why would I do this with D&D, which has so many discontinuities to sim?" I mean, there are Conan games that do a better job of the sim stuff, but they also don't have the dragons or giants. It's a more a matter of 'why use a high-fantasy setting to do gritty sim?'

Literally no.one likes the argument, "Why don't you just play another game?". It is not helpful, and can easily be turned around.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

ACKS. Best worldbuilding rules in the industry, IMO.

Why aren't you running this?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yeah, this is one of the places where D&D kind of conflicts with itself. Under the rules in 5E, even a 20 Strength 20th level Fighter's ability to jump distances is bounded by a rough approximation of real world human jumping. Honestly less far than real world Olympic jumpers can get with optimal conditions, but I get that it's a rough approximation.

But at the same time that D&D is telling us that the human Fighter, even the very highest level one, is still bounded within real life human achievements as far as the athletic feat of jumping goes, it's telling us that he can effectively fight and defeat a giant dinosaur in melee with a sword. :/

I will say that whether or not a humanoid without magic can effectively fight an enormous flying treasure lizard is not the be all and end all of simulation and/or verisimilitude, despite the inordinate amount of attention that particular example is getting in this thread.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Not to disagree with you in the sense of 'what works' in your average fantasy campaign. OTOH I don't think anyone can really model the effects of things like magic on a society. We don't even know the parameters of how it works well enough to say much about that. I mean, lets imagine clerics. How much time and effort does it take to become one? Can anyone do it? What fraction of people can do it? Is there some sort of gated resource someone controls, like a holy altar or something, that you have to access to become a cleric? Is there a lesser NPC version of a 'cleric' that can cast some spells? Which ones? All of this would be critical to understanding how much access to clerical magic a town of 1000 people, lets say, has. The answer to this question probably has a huge impact on the social structure, demography, etc. of said town. D&D has basically zero answers to any of this, and thus there's nothing like a 'simulation' of a town that can happen WRT clerics! And this is only a small example!

I mean, what DOES HAPPEN is that the contents and whatnot of this town is laid out in terms of what the genre expectations for a D&D town of 1000 people is, mixed with some setting derived stuff, etc. It is then simply assumed that this town 'makes sense' in terms of the 'laws of nature' that exist within the game and the setting. This is fine, its exactly what has to happen so we can play, and it is what creates the expected genre elements and all of what follows.

I mean, you can go back to the early days of D&D and there were debates, even articles in various magazines and such, plus various amusing anecdotes and whatnot where people debated this stuff, or it was pointed out how ridiculous the genre assumptions were from any kind of practical standpoint (I seem to recall there were any number of Wormy, Snarfquest and Fineous Fingers strips that played on these themes). So I'm happy when a DM might answer "well, its this way because that's just how things are supposed to work in D&D!" Hey, great! I can even see why it can be desirable. At worst who has any business critiquing anyone else's genre assumptions in a totally made up self-referential genre like D&D?

I have those debates, and look at old articles, and research the best ways for me to handle those issues, and I incorporate them into my game. I still use 5e as the base because that's what my players like and understand, so obviously compromises have to be made. That the main reason I love Level Up. It has a lot of what I want, on a 5e base.

 

[Gammadoodler]

I will say that whether or not a humanoid without magic can effectively fight an enormous flying treasure lizard is not the be all and end all of simulation and/or verisimilitude, despite the inordinate amount of attention that particular example is getting in this thread.

Certainly a fair point (though in fairness, that treasure lizard is pretty archetypal for the game... like the name is on the tin and all that).

But it does get to maybe a better question/set of questions.

1. What activities/processes/etc. do you think should be simulated?
2. based on what reference points/exemplars (i.e. min vs. max performance level)?
3. for which types of characters (it ain't all human fighters after all),
4. and within what range of character level (assuming there is one)?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Well, to answer this, and addressing @Reynard's questioning the good faith of my original post, I think it is a genuinely more rewarding way of looking at things. Instead of filling our minds with some odd notion that there's some 'right way' for the physical behavior of a dragon to be portrayed, we are acknowledging that the very idea of the physical behavior of a dragon is absurd, as it could not exist. Then we become free to talk about what is really interesting about dragons, which is our IDEAS of them and how we want our FRPG play to work! What are we actually after? What questions and issues might we run into?

Frankly I got really tired of all the people telling me that my D&D fighter could only do thus or such and not some other thing 'because realism', when there was nothing realistic whatsoever about the situation. The whole thing seemed to be nothing but a thin facade of words pasted over what the real situation was, which is what people saying these things like "you cannot jump 30 feet" were actually doing in their brains. It wasn't an objection based on physical reality, it was an objection based on their mental model of GENRE EXPECTATION. The trouble was a DIFFERENCE in genre expectation. I read the 1e PHB and it said I could be Beowulf, but when I tried to act like Beowulf, someone told me that wasn't 'realistic'. lol. Obviously we had different genre expectations! If I could talk about that, in plain words, as what it is, instead of being stonewalled by this nonsensical talk of realism and simulation in a mental activity where neither has any meaning beyond "what my taste is" I'd be much happier.

So there's no bad faith, nothing like that. Quite the contrary, I want open discussion of the actual issues in plain words that connect reasonably with their dictionary definitions! I think that's a reasonable goal, myself.

That's fine, and there's nothing wrong with enjoying the gamism and genre emulation of the game. But if you participate in a friendly discussion about how you use simulation with the idea that you don't like it/ or don't think it exists, you're basically rejecting the premise of the thread. That can certainly be construed as bad faith, if unintended.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Not really? Lances, arrows and swords aren't fireballs.

Sure, fighting magic with magic makes sense, but then we're outside the bounds of simulation, as @AbdulAlhazred and @Manbearcat have pointed out. There's no longer any common reference point in reality for us to refer to and say we're simulating.

I personally DO like to try to simulate SOME parts of reality. Again, I've often played in games where, presented with a load of treasure weighing X, or a dragon corpse weighing Y, that needs to be extricated from some place and transported back to town, we plan out those logistics with reference to real world measures and objects and wagon capacities and so forth. And that can be a fun game (assuming people in the group don't find it tiresome and boring), and feel grounded. And my impression is/was that this is the same kind of thing you're talking about.

But the other guys do have a point that some stuff in D&D just defies attempts to connect it to reality, and on that stuff, we have to acknowledge that we're no longer simulating reality, we're doing genre emulation, I guess.

The tricky bit, I think, is to kind of consciously figure out where our boundary lines are, and make sure we're on the same page with our group about them. Because if the DM's ideas conflict with the players' about what's realistic and what we're glossing over or writing off as magical, we get clashing expectations and loss of fun.

Right, I'm totally on board with things like say "Oh, if you don't have water for 3 days, bad things happen to you (queue rules that define bad things in roughly realistic terms)." Likewise you can have rules for how many miles you march in a day, and what happens if you push it. We could all go on and on, and there's no reason why these cannot or should not exist.

The breaking point I have is when I am playing the fighter that just bested a 4000 pound magical flying beast with heavy natural armor, teeth and claws as long as my arm, and a flaming breath. No actual human, no mortal bound by anything close to the natural limits of human performance, could have accomplished that. I must be superhumanly fast, strong, athletic, and have nerves of high grade titanium alloy (the hell with steel!). So, why, if I can dodge fast enough to survive in close ranger combat with this beast, do I even have to bat an eyelash at climbing a 400 nasty difficult cliff? Obviously we can and do simply ignore these issues, but then we need to simply acknowledge that we are not working with consistent models of ANYTHING, and we should therefor be willing to engage in discussions of what will be allowed in the fiction on the basis of things other than a 'realism' that wasn't really ever present to start with.

Anyway, this kind of 'why are we doing it this way?' thinking can lead to a lot of fun results! I can go without water for 7 days because I'm a master of internal body magic (you can call it 'Qi' if you like, though that term might not be found in your genre lexicon). Heck, maybe now you've learned that 'Qi' is actually a part of your world! Like, I looked at what was going on in my 4e (and now HoML) games and I said to myself "gosh, much like people in ancient times believed, clearly magic runs everything!" So it does! Food is magical, poison is magical, disease is magical, etc. etc. etc. Huh, now we know what it means that the gods run everything! Yup, literally. We can even reason about that. A disease is a curse sent by a malevolent spirit/deity to curse you. This actually matches super well with folklore and myths! I'd also note that folklore/myth generally have heroes that are TOTALLY superhuman in every dimension (to varying degrees). 'Normalcy' is a useful concept here, but nothing is bound to it, its just a baseline starting point.

 

[Gammadoodler]

One thing I'm curious about regarding the preference for "simulationist" play is how much those who value it feel they are actually achieving "realistic" results, and how much of it is based on wanting to avoid "absurdities".

IME on this board, this almost always comes up in the context of an isolated instances of circumstances someone feels is ridiculous

Climbing centaurs
Gnolls v. Halflings
Barbarian casts "fall off cliff"

I've yet to see this approach presented as a "fully modeled authentic fantasy medieval society based on D&D rules" or anything. Perhaps it's confirmation bias.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Why aren't you running this?

Is 5e your favorite game? If not, why aren't you running whatever that is?

Seriously though, my players like and are familiar with 5e, and largely don't want to learn another system. So I start with a 5e base I like (like Level Up) and build from there as much as I can.

As I said before, asking another poster to play a different game is never helpful.