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

[Micah Sweet]

Right, now we are simply recapitulating the line of reasoning that was taken to get from 3.5 to 4e! If we take the answer to be that there's no real reason not to let the player of a fighter spend a plot coupon to depict his character 'flipping a car', then why even have that be a different system from what the wizard uses to regulate how many spells he casts? It is all a very logical and really rather elegant solution!

It is, but to many it was also boring and all the classes feel the same. And that's assuming you like the mechanics emulating story beats explicitly, which many don't.

 

[Oofta]

It is, but to many it was also boring and all the classes feel the same. And that's assuming you like the mechanics emulating story beats explicitly, which many don't.

That was my issue as well, I wanted variations in how classes played but just as important I want some classes to not be as "preloaded". We have a bit of that with action surge and second wind for fighters, I'd rather have them associated to some sort of stamina pool, possibly tied to proficiency bonus*. But at least the vast majority of time they can just do what they do without having extra capability because plot demands it.

The reason Captain America doesn't run around flipping cars all the time is because there's no reason for him to do so.

*In my ideal system PCs could exceed their stamina pool at the risk of exhaustion and/or HP loss. Same for all classes for that matter, the more you push beyond normal limits the bigger the risk. Kind of like lifting weights to the point that you pass out.

 

[Ovinomancer]

So basically in your game things are just incoherent nondescriptive mush? Because that's what I am hearing. You cannot even answer super simple basic question about your world like roughly how large things are in even remotely coherent manner. How are people supposed to visualise a 120 feet dragon in a 50 feet room, occupying a 20 foot square? None of this makes nay sense.

Yes! Your attempt to strawman has failed, because you've managed to hit the nail on the head! Dragons are really big in my world. They fit in 20'x20' grid spaces. I don't bother reconciling these things because one I'm using for narrative purposes and the other after the combat swoosh has happened and we're in game mode for combat. I mean, that's exactly how 5e presents itself, yes?

To drop the big Forge stuff, 5e is incoherent. I embrace it. Works a champ.

I have not abandoned anything. I have explained my position several times, I have been consistent from the get go. Please stop lying.

I can go back and get quotes. You started by saying fighting dragons on foot with hand weapons makes sense because people killed mammoths (without noting anything about what actually hunting mammoths looks like -- not going toe-to-toe, but that was handwaved away and not addressed). This got challenged by noting that dragons are far bigger, tougher, and meaner. That got waved away, eventually landing on the fact that they're only slightly bigger because of gargantuan grid size assignment. Then T-Rexes got brought up as being actually larger than their grid size, and that got dealt with by 'well, sometimes their bigger (when they attack only) but mostly their still that size.' This then got ported to dragons, and it was also offered that dragons change size the same way. That this meant changing size was ignored. And now were at least at a point where an attacking gargantuan dragon is, what, 20'x20' most of the time, but when it attacks it's 35'x35'? This doesn't push anyone away, it's only that big for purposes of attacking and not occupying space on the battlefield, or something. However, this bring up that the attacking gargantuan dragon is freaking huge compared to mammoths, so we need to go back to the beginning and look at how that works, again. Unless the plan is to only have argument be valid for that particular step, and then they cannot be challenged ever again, so that we can go dragons are like mammoths-->dragons are not like mammoths but never have to return to the first step. I mean, okay -- you can absolutely say "don't bore me with the details, I like what I like, shrug emoji' but that kinda undercuts the argument that you're really, really into the simulation thing. I don't know why you feel you need to be, 5e is a terrible game for simulation.

Also, challenging you is not lying. Let's not do that again.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

In any case, I made a quick scale shot of a large, huge and gargantuan dragon.

Gargantuan is 20x20 or larger, so bigger creatures are of course perfectly possible.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I was the one that brought up mammoths,

@Crimson Longinus repeated it, and carried it forward.

I never said they were the same size, or even that they are the same threat level. There is no real world analogy for dragons because they aren't real. We know a group of hunters with stone age technology could hunt and kill mammoths because of the historical record. We know PCs can fight and kill dragons because the rules and gameplay tell us we can. They are exactly as tough an dangerous as the MM says they are.

Getting somewhere!

This is exactly the post-hoc rationalization that isn't simulation. There's no attempt to create a thing that aligns the play with what someone might understand about the real world, instead we have that these events happen in the game, so we craft individual and specific stories for each instance to explain how it did happen. That's not sim, that's weaving a narrative after the fact to make sense of the game results.

And that's 100% perfect! I don't really know how else you could approach 5e.

There's no contradiction, no post-hoc rationalization. We simulate the fact that people have always been good at killing each other and pretty much every animal (if you think dragons are big, blue whales that we've been practically hunting to extinction for centuries would make them look small) we can find.

Well, yes, it's absolutely post-hoc because this didn't start with 'simulating dragons' and then coming up with rules systems to do so. Instead, we start with the facts that the game presents in it's mechanics, and after we read those (post-hoc, after the fact) we come up with ways to weave a narrative around it. We know that the fighter didn't lose all his hitpoints in the fight, so after the fight (or after each blow that doesn't kill the fighter) we make up a story to explain the facts that have already happened -- the fighter ain't dead, so here's how that happened. This is 100% post-hoc. And, again, 100% perfectly fine.

Of course it's not perfect. Some artists exaggerate sizes. But neither @Crimson Longinus nor I are abandoning anything. If you don't want to follow the rules of the game, if you don't care for how they chose to represent space required, fine. Most people don't have a problem with it so stop making ludicrous accusations.

Now we've moved from discussion of simulation as making things feel real to following the rules of the game. Can we pick a stable set of goalposts?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

But they could. And the simulation I'm talking about, and I believe OP as well, is simulating the fictional reality rather than emulating a story.


Hard disagree. It is not interesting to not be able to use most of your power budget, nor is it balanced. My example was not just hypothetical. I played a Whirlwind Barbarian (I think that's what it was called) for a good while, and every time there were fight against a single foe (which was quite often) most of his powers were unusable. I ended up rebuilding the character as a Slayer, which was hella boring, but at least I could use my Power Attack several times. A better solution than either would have been a character with varied powers that could have been used multiple times up to certain combined limit.

I'm a bit confused on this. So, 4e has a WIDE array of ways to deal with this situation. You could acquire some sort of item or feat that might make one of your at-wills more effective against a single target. You might MC into another class, Ranger for instance springs instantly to mind, and get access to one or two good single-target powers (IE Twin Strike is excellent for a dual wielding fighter). Heck, you can simply take ANY fighter power, most of which are intended to work well against single targets (admittedly you might not perform like an optimal fighter with that power, but it should work OK). Your defenderish abilities shouldn't be hampered at all against single targets either, so maybe taking a feat or some armor class enhancing option or something that makes that work better is also an option.

Honestly, I never had anyone play the particular build you are talking about, and it was never, AFAIK, really considered some sort of highly optimizable one either. Still, it gets at least middle-of-the-road marks and 4e has SO MANY rich build options that I kind of feel like you were not really exploring them very hard if you just gave up and made a Slayer. I don't think the fault here is the A/E/D/U system at any rate! If we want to criticize 4e in this case IMHO the better criticism would be that 4e's options are so diverse and fine-grained that producing a really good build without access to CB is rather tedious and requires a pretty fair amount of exposure to the possible options. I've always felt that 5e's level of option granularity is a bit of an improvement on 4e, overall, since this kind of thing is easier for players to navigate. I think that factor more than any other is responsible for the differentiation in popularity between the editions. 4e POTENTIALLY at least, put a lot of work on a player's shoulders at build time. 5e puts less. In every other respect (except advantage!) I find the 4e solution is better, personally, though.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The issue really is that some absolutely want the fighters to be just normal people. But I don't believe this can really work at the higher levels, considering what the casters can do and what sort of foes the characters are expected to face. So I think they should just outright say that past level ten or so the characters start to become mythic heroes and are not necessarily anymore bound by normal mortal limits. And if you want your fighters to be mundane, then just level cap your game to level ten. Most people don't play much past that anyway.

Yup, 4e, Heroic, Paragon, Epic, or even more explicit HoML, Heroic, Legendary, Mythic. Your character literally IS a myth at 17th level, its right on the tin! lol.

 

[Umbran]

If you don't have time to put your thoughts in order...

Mod Note:
And if you don't have time to soften your adversarial position before giving "advice", please be aware that it looks like a condescending insult, which may get you the hairy eyeball from a moderator.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

D&D had a very low positioning system; you had to have an idea who was near each other for area effects, you had to know if you could close, and you had to know if you were in archery range. Other than that it did not really care about position at all.



It doesn't only depend on that, but on your ability to internalize the description. Even if I had a GM who was good at that, he'd probably get awfully tired of me constantly asking for a refresher on it. And this gets worse the more important positioning is in the combat system.

AD&D didn't actually have ANY coherent notion of position at all. In some places it showed a diagram of a hex or square ruled area and how various relative positions had various game effects, and then if you read the actual text of the melee combat rules the letter of the rules was every melee combatant is all just swished together in one big 'pool' and every round you randomly determine which attack goes against whom! Technically the game doesn't even mention the possibility that there might be different distinct disjoint physical locations where fighting is going on! I mean, clearly you can build some sort of process out of all that, but it is impossible to run 'bog standard AD&D combat' as no such thing exists! Even in 2e's rules it is still pretty vague!

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Yes! Your attempt to strawman has failed, because you've managed to hit the nail on the head! Dragons are really big in my world. They fit in 20'x20' grid spaces. I don't bother reconciling these things because one I'm using for narrative purposes and the other after the combat swoosh has happened and we're in game mode for combat. I mean, that's exactly how 5e presents itself, yes?

No. You simply have intentionally describe thing in nonsensical manner. I don't know why, the game certainly doesn't demand this. "This 120 foot long dragon occupies this 20 foot square" is a thing that a person can say. It however is not a thing that can be visualised, because it is logically impossible. Personally I wouldn't consider making things intentionally unvisualisable good GMing practice.

I can go back and get quotes. You started by saying fighting dragons on foot with hand weapons makes sense because people killed mammoths (without noting anything about what actually hunting mammoths looks like -- not going toe-to-toe, but that was handwaved away and not addressed). This got challenged by noting that dragons are far bigger, tougher, and meaner.

No mate. The mammoth example was brought up because you thought that it would be more realistic for giant lizards to be able to bring down the modern world full of tanks and supersonic jetfighters than a group of late medieval people killing said giant lizard. This of course is blatantly laughable. It was never claimed that dragons are as easy to kill than mammoths, merely an example that it is possible for humans to kill animals far larger than themselves even using simple sticks. One would expect renaissance tech help quite a bit, and of course with modern tech it is not worth even contemplating.

That got waved away, eventually landing on the fact that they're only slightly bigger because of gargantuan grid size assignment. Then T-Rexes got brought up as being actually larger than their grid size, and that got dealt with by 'well, sometimes their bigger (when they attack only) but mostly their still that size.' This then got ported to dragons, and it was also offered that dragons change size the same way. That this meant changing size was ignored.

This again is not what happened. I had mentioned before the t-rex size was examined that I'd expect dragon extremities overhanging their square. So I was using a consistent model the whole time.

And now were at least at a point where an attacking gargantuan dragon is, what, 20'x20' most of the time, but when it attacks it's 35'x35'? This doesn't push anyone away, it's only that big for purposes of attacking and not occupying space on the battlefield, or something.

How do you think the reach works? The dragon can attack a foe 15 feet away without leaving its square, because it's neck and tail can reach that far away.

However, this bring up that the attacking gargantuan dragon is freaking huge compared to mammoths, so we need to go back to the beginning and look at how that works, again. Unless the plan is to only have argument be valid for that particular step, and then they cannot be challenged ever again, so that we can go dragons are like mammoths-->dragons are not like mammoths but never have to return to the first step. I mean, okay -- you can absolutely say "don't bore me with the details, I like what I like, shrug emoji' but that kinda undercuts the argument that you're really, really into the simulation thing. I don't know why you feel you need to be, 5e is a terrible game for simulation.

Like I have said several times, I'm fine with pretty broad strokes simulation. Just some basic sensemakery is fine. And yeah, I'd prefer 5e to have a tad more of it. But I don't think what is gained by being intentionally obtuse and interpreting things that actually make sense in nonsensical manner.

Also, challenging you is not lying. Let's not do that again.

You have several time misinterpreted what has been said and when, in order to attack some strawman version of my arguments. Call it what you want, but stop doing it.