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

[Ovinomancer]

I never said everything in D&D was simulation of the real world. Magic, and dragons, do not exist. On the other hand we can simulate what it would be like to fight one using the same knowledge we have for how we've fought existing creatures for millennia. D&D is also an imperfect simulation for a lot of reasons. Being imperfect does not make it not a simulation.

No, but not being a simulation does. There's nothing being simulated by dragons in how they work in the fiction. Instead, we have some arbitrary things that are made up (perfectly fine, required even) and then some game rules made up (again, perfectly fine) that have no intent to do anything to model what a airliner sized, flying, most armored things in the game, powerfully strong, powerfully tough, and possessing an extraordinary level of dexterity for it's sheer size actually works when a human in armor, no magic, steps up to fight it. That's not at all what's happening.

That we get in the simulation by having that same human be completely limited to non-world-class professional athleticism, but imagine that he suddenly erupts in superhuman athleticism to fight the dragon shows that 5e's attempt at simulation is terribly flawed and jarring. If you're okay with it, then say that -- you don't mind the sudden shift. But you might want to tell @Crimson Longinus that you're in the same boat I am when it comes to running 5e.

It's not post-hoc because dragons are not real, therefore the simulation aspects of a fight against dragons (their AC, HP, attacks and so on) are complete fiction. What else is new?

The facts here aren't about real dragons, but about the game rules. You read the game rules, and then rationalized how that looks. After the fact of reading the game rules. That's the post hoc. Surely you don't intend to say that you're version of dragons were set ahead of reading the game rules?

As far as HP for the fighter, we know that if you put two people of similar size and musculature in a cage and have them fight until one goes down, in general the person with better skill and training will likely win. It will near certainty if you have a trained MMA fighter vs someone who's only fighting experience comes from a video game. That's reflected in attack bonus and HP. It's crude, it's not granular, but it is simulating a real thing.

Wait, what? Are you seriously trying to explain a professional martial sport in game rule terms? That's... well, it's something.

And, no, hp and attack bonus are not simulating anything real. They're made up ways to play a game. You cannot simulate a real MMA fight with hp and attack bonuses. Doesn't tell you anything. Instead, this is the post-hoc justification you've created. The game gave you attack bonuses and hitpoints, and you've created this story. And it's pretty clear this is the case because each edition has done this very differently (how hp are given out, how attack bonuses are) and yet the continuation line of what D&D is supposed to be simulating has remained the same.

Nobody's moving the goalposts.

Okay, pull the other one. You went from arguing simulation to arguing not following game rules. Those are completely different targets. But you tried to dismiss my argument about simulation with one about game rules. That's moving the goalposts, whether or not you throw a shrug emoji at it.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

The game says that the 120' dragon fits in a 20'x20' square. I dunno what to tell you, that's what the game says.

Citation needed. Where does it list the physical sizes of the dragons? Also, Gargantuan is 20x20 or larger, so you can indeed give creature a 80x80 square or whatever if you want to describe them as that big.

Um, no, and we can all scroll back up and see where mammoths entered the discussion.

Well, I'm pretty sure that's the context in which I mentioned mammoths.

And yes, Reign of Fire is MORE REALISTIC than D&D fighters going toe-to-toe with dragons. At what point does this claim that it's very, kinda or even sort realistic? It's MORE realistic that the silliness that D&D does.

Then I feel your sense of realism is so skewed that is hard for me to comprehend. To me it is blatantly obvious that it is far more plausible for a group of renaissance humans to kill megafauna, than said megafauna being able to bring down nations with modern tech. Like these things are not even close.

"A bit." You said, specifically, overhangs "a bit." Your image now is 50% overhang. As in, the Dragon in your image is more than 60' long but fits in a 40' space. I wouldn't classify that as "a bit."

I would. In any case, the logic was the same in both instances.

I dunno, doesn't really make much sense because you're only that big in the instant you attack, and that size has no other meaning. I can't ready an attack outside my reach for you to attack from yours, for instance. That extra size exists only to enable the reach mechanic, and not to describe the fiction. The fiction you're using to describe how reach works is post-hoc -- it comes after you see the rules and need to find a way to rationalize them.

You simply refuse to accept perfectly reasonable reading by which the rules and fiction align. The writers do not put things in the game for random, reach property tends to simulate some sort of physical reach the creature has.

I didn't start the argument that dragons are just fine simulation. I started with they are not. You've argued the point. If you didn't mean to argue that point, what are we doing?

That the rules are more simulationistic than you think, and you're intentionally inserting nonsensical interpretations.

Can you point out the specific misinterpretations? That way I can be sure to avoid those, as asked, instead of having to guess what it is you mean. I've taken the time to lay out the sequence twice, so it should be fairly easy.

I have already corrected you several times, and you keep repeating the same strawmen. I don't think there is much point in continuing.

 

[Oofta]

Because, otherwise calling it a simulation is just empty words! If your simulation process cannot tell you HOW and WHY something came to pass, then it is nothing more than a random generator of outcomes! Calling it a 'simulation' is thus meaningless, it is just as equally valid to call it a "random generator of genre-appropriate results."

What would justify how and why? Why does the "how and why" matter? The "how" of climbing a cliff is that it's not automatic, it's at least a bit risky for some reason. The "why" is that it's not automatic. The details don't matter. If I try to climb a cliff, I don't know those details in real life, why would it be required in game? If you want to have a game that includes climbing cliffs I can't imagine what level of detail you would need to include for you to consider it a simulation.

I would talk to some physicists about that... Yes, we don't have a complete description of ANYTHING in the Universe at some 'final cause' level, but we have a DEEP understanding of how gravity actually works! No physicist needs a rubber sheet, they can use the full equations of GR (if they really want to do a lot of math) and tell you very accurately what any system of masses will do. While I cannot speak for @Hussar's intended meaning, I am highly skeptical that he is proposing your maximal interpretation. There is an excluded middle here. In order to do a simulation we need to be able to construct some sort of model, which takes as inputs the relevant conditions in the simulated system, and produces as outcomes some new state of that system or additional facts related to it, and where there is some kind of either A) actual verification that the outputs resemble the simulated system, or B) a formal description of the causes and effects within the system which can be shown to relate to known laws. Absent A or B, we have really nothing. Since A is impossible in relation to a game world, we are left to conclude that any meaningful definition of simulation must include that it incorporates a formal description of the causes and effects that it models.

So you rate it on a scale? Who decides when it's "good enough"?

No, I can simply say that when I describe things in D&D I describe them as being largely analogous to things in the real world. I don't have a REASON for why they are like the real world. I don't actually care! It is not a 'simulation', I am simply following a convention that says I do this thing this way. Its perfectly fine if I construct some tables or whatever that spits out plausible descriptions of things too. It isn't 'simulating' anything, it is simply a "generator of plausible things." I'm all for plausibility and the resulting comprehensibility and verisimilitude of settings. I just don't honestly believe that there's any possibility of approaching this in terms of simulation (except in possible a few very restricted and specific cases, like I'm sure you could make a table that told us how long it takes to fall X distance that is based on Newtonian Gravity and I will grant that using it in a specific situation is 'performing a simulation', for all that's worth).

So your game world mimics the real world, acts like the real world unless there's magic? That's almost as if it were ... what's the word I'm looking for ... a simulation of the real world. Not all, of course, the real world doesn't have magic.

If y'all want to use some definition of simulation that is not required for many, if not most, simulations, feel free. I just disagree. It's also kind of a pointless academic argument.

 

[Oofta]

The game says that the 120' dragon fits in a 20'x20' square. I dunno what to tell you, that's what the game says. If you think it's poor GMing to use what the game says, I'd say you really need to send a letter to WotC about this. In the meantime, maybe don't tell other people they're bad GMs because they don't do it like you do?

Um, no, and we can all scroll back up and see where mammoths entered the discussion. And yes, Reign of Fire is MORE REALISTIC than D&D fighters going toe-to-toe with dragons. At what point does this claim that it's very, kinda or even sort realistic? It's MORE realistic that the silliness that D&D does. As in, Duck Tales is MORE realistic than, say, Road Runner.

Reign of Fire dragons are stupidly overpowered IMHO. But why are those dragons more accurate than the dragon in Dragonheart that a lone warrior could defeat? Or the dragon that St George was stabbing with a lance? They're fictional creatures, the fiction can be anything we want.

 

[pemerton]

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.

<snip>

Now we've moved from discussion of simulation as making things feel real to following the rules of the game.

I commented on this a few hundred posts ago:

All this seems to amount to is we used the rules to find out what happens. If that's the threshold for a simulation, what RPG isn't? Eg 4e D&D would obviously count as a simulation by these lights. So would Marvel Heroic RP.

What benefit is gained by relabelling playing a RPG according to its rules as simulation?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Wouldn't the same problem come up, in 5e D&D, for a Horde Breaker ranger?

Yes, it would, though it is just one feature. But I don't think Hunter's Prey options are particularly good design. (Nor are favoured foes in general.) But basically larger the part of your power budget that is locked to such situational things is, larger the problem becomes. Some small amount of such features is fine.

 

[pemerton]

hp and attack bonus are not simulating anything real. They're made up ways to play a game. You cannot simulate a real MMA fight with hp and attack bonuses. Doesn't tell you anything. Instead, this is the post-hoc justification you've created. The game gave you attack bonuses and hitpoints, and you've created this story. And it's pretty clear this is the case because each edition has done this very differently (how hp are given out, how attack bonuses are) and yet the continuation line of what D&D is supposed to be simulating has remained the same.

Yep. I noted this a few hundred posts back too, though with reference to STR rather than "to hit" and hit points:

It seems to me that the changes to carrying rules, bend bars rules, how to hit and damage are handled (+3, +6 for the 18/00 AD&D Ogre; +4, +4 for the 5e 19 STR Ogre) have had no appreciable affect on the extent to which STR in D&D works as a simulation. That suggests to me that the point of those rules is not to simulate anything very much, but to serve other game play purposes.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

A lot of things are yes/no. I mean "no" we will never agree on this topic seems a fair assumption. Either I catch the bus or I don't. Either I can climb El Capitan or I can't. But there's no way any game could truly satisfy simulation of the latter. For that matter, it seems like all physics simulations ever made are bogus by your definition because we don't really understand the interaction between particles at the quantum level and the macro level.

Virtually all simulations simplify complex realities. It's just a matter of scale.

I think the whole problem here is simply that we're all getting off into the weeds. In scientific terms EVERY description of some process in nature is a 'model' (certainly all the quantitative ones are). So, for instance we can use Newton's law of gravity and calculate how far a rock falls from a standing start in 3 seconds, its velocity at the end of that period, etc. This is not particularly considered a 'simulation' in most cases, but there isn't some clear line here either! The model describes the relationships between 2 masses and the resulting functions in Delta T that apply to their velocities. We can now construct a scenario and run these functions, producing outputs and call that a simulation. OTOH when scientists discuss simulations, they generally mean fairly complex models that involve several or many parameters, possibly many discrete elements, etc. They generally also mean a process in which the outputs of the model are fed back into it as inputs and stepwise evolution of the system being simulated takes place.

Now, its not necessary, more informally, to insist on the later. We can admit that a simple calculation of the velocity of a rock under gravity, given certain inputs of starting positions, velocities, and masses, is a simulation, and that's not inaccurate. However, the model we are using needs certain inputs. Lets imagine that we are modeling movement of objects under earth-like conditions. We can ignore air resistance, and our simulation will still work fine within certain bounds. So we can still call it a simulation, and it could even ignore mass and not bother calculating the movement of the Earth, but only of some much smaller mass, this is still a simulation in that if we actually plug in numbers and then carry out a real-world experiment, the outcomes will be pretty similar for a useful range of actual conditions (IE where the object's mass is not on the order of the Earth's, velocities are small, etc.). But even so, the simulation MUST incorporate velocity, it cannot work without that, and it cannot work without the mathematical model of Newtonian Gravity. Without those critical factors it isn't a simulation at all anymore, it is merely at best a rule of thumb. D&D's traditional damage from falling is of this character, a rule of thumb. It is in no way a simulation of anything at all, as it internally lacks any sort of model that embodies the causal relationships involved in objects falling in Earth gravity (or fantasy world gravity as you will).

 

[Ovinomancer]

Citation needed. Where does it list the physical sizes of the dragons? Also, Gargantuan is 20x20 or larger, so you can indeed give creature a 80x80 square or whatever if you want to describe them as that big.

Oh, sorry, I was using your numbers. I don't care how big dragons are in my game, because I'm not trying to simulate anything. D&D presents them as stupendously big, though. I mean, I know you've completely discarded art, but WotC keeps picking big pictures of dragons, and keeps making massive miniatures of them that are bigger than the 20'x20' space they tell me they take up.

Well, I'm pretty sure that's the context in which I mentioned mammoths.

Silly thing to do. Dragons fighting tanks makes way more sense than Neolithic hunters killing mammoths by scaring them over cliffs with torches.

Then I feel your sense of realism is so skewed that is hard for me to comprehend. To me it is blatantly obvious that it is far more plausible for a group of renaissance humans to kill megafauna, than said megafauna being able to bring down nations with modern tech. Like these things are not even close.

Oh, no, my sense of realism is perfectly fine. My need for it playing 5e is different. It's not really more plausible for renaissance humans to kill megafauna with hand weapons, actually. Steel polearms are marginally better, but getting hit by angry bull mammoth tusk while wearing plate armor isn't going to have a much different outcome than getting hit without it. I'm not sure why you think some steel overcomes mass and inertia -- Neolithic hunters weren't killing by mammoths using human strength and hand weapons, and so armor designed to defeat human strength and hand weapons isn't gonna make much difference. And I'm getting accused of having bad realism sense!

Now, if you want to move the discussion to crossbows, then, yeah, very different story! Megafauna doesn't really have much of a chance. Still a group effort, as one bolt would have to be very lucky to do the job, but a salvo of 20-30? Safe distance, good likelihood of a kill.

I would. In any case, the logic was the same in both instances.

Well, then, that's a good thing to know. For you, a bit means 'up to 50% more.' That's a fairly non-standard use of the phrase, by the way, unless you're intentionally going for litotes. Litotes is a good word, almost like the reverse of hyperbole, but it's actually meant to be understatement for the purpose of negating. Like, 'is it a lot bigger?" And you answer, "a bit." But what you mean is, "yeah, a lot bigger!" That's litotes.

You simply refuse to accept perfectly reasonable reading by which the rules and fiction align. The writers do not put things in the game for random, reach property tends to simulate some sort of physical reach the creature has.

No, I really don't. I, in fact, told you that this is what I do - I don't care about simulation and just go with what the game rules say. You told me this was terribad. I don't believe that there's a simulation of anything going on here, I just narrate something that fits well enough with the game rules to not cause a stop in play and don't care about it past that. There's no attempt to model reality, or simulate anything. Dragon is 20'x20'. It can attack 15' past that with some attacks. Okay, I describe a thing after the fact and am done with it. I'm not trying to conceive of some coherent ur-simulation of this.

That the rules are more simulationistic than you think, and you're intentionally inserting nonsensical interpretations.

I've seen zero evidence of this. I've seen evidence that they are less simulationist that I really paid attention to before. You certainly haven't presented anything new, just kept telling me that the simulation is there, I'm just a horrible person for not agreeing.

I have already corrected you several times, and you keep repeating the same strawmen. I don't think there is much point in continuing.

Is this like the simulation in the 5e rules -- you say it's there but I can't see it?

 

[Ovinomancer]

Reign of Fire dragons are stupidly overpowered IMHO. But why are those dragons more accurate than the dragon in Dragonheart that a lone warrior could defeat? Or the dragon that St George was stabbing with a lance? They're fictional creatures, the fiction can be anything we want.

I'm not comparing them to other dragons, I'm comparing them to D&D, and they're more realistic than how dragons are portrayed in D&D according to what D&D says about dragons. There's no way a human survives against a D&D dragon as presented in the fiction -- even at 20'x20', it weighs tons and the sheer physics of it's physical size and speed make no sense that a normal human could effectively dodge it long enough to kill it with a sword. But, good news! The game doesn't care about making sense, it makes for cool.