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

[Micah Sweet]

In practical terms, how does that look different in the mechanics?

Say you are running a superhero game. How do the mechanics alter if you are simulating a world that supports superhero genre stories, as opposed to supporting the superhero genre directly?

Bonus question: Do these additional points add any complexity to the game that isn't needed for your genre?

No narrative or story game mechanics. Or minimal; some of this stuff can't be avoided. The genre is very secondary to the process sim I want for world building.

 

[chaochou]

Your benchmark. That doesn't mean that's the sum total of all that could reasonably be grouped under simulation.
Unpacking the dragon weight issue - if you imagine that the dragon is of a decent size category (like, say, bigger than a tractor), reasonably strong and solid in makeup, and then have things around it behave accordingly based on our understanding of reality (like flattening a relatively small hut under its weight), then you have engaged in what most people would call a degree of simulation.

Are you trying to take issue with the fact that I stated front and centre what I view as simulation? Lolz!

So what's your benchmark? It's a substitute for your view on the plausibility of your own make-believe, right?

On the dragon, we're not simulating anything. There's a plausibility test for the make believe which everyone is judging for themselves, going 'yep that sounds about right' or 'oh wow, cool' and that's it. Weights and joist diagrams and age of beams and materials could be made up and would still be immaterial. It would still all be made up, it would still be authorship, not simulation.

But since you're now substituting 'subjective plausibility' in as the benchmark for simulation, my comment would be that it's a trivially low bar. In 40 years I've yet to play in, or run, a game with any complaints about the internal consistency or plausibility, including completely improvised games without a system and lots of no-myth narrativist games.

So I'd really love to hear about all these inconsistent and implausible games which have been fixed by Wizards of the Coast selling people the weights of dragons. Those are going to be a fascinating read.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Are you trying to take issue with the fact that I stated front and centre what I view as simulation? Lolz!

So what's your benchmark? It's a substitute for your view on the plausibility of your own make-believe, right?

On the dragon, we're not simulating anything. There's a plausibility test for the make believe which everyone is judging for themselves, going 'yep that sounds about right' or 'oh wow, cool' and that's it. Weights and joist diagrams and age of beams and materials could be made up and would still be immaterial. It's would still all be made up, it would still be authorship, not simulation.

But since you're now substituting 'subjective plausibility' in as the benchmark for simulation, my comment would be that it's a trivially low bar. In 40 years I've yet to play in, or run, a game with any complaints about the internal consistency or plausibility, including completely improvised games without a system and lots of no-myth narrativist games.

So I'd really love to hear about all these inconsistent and implausible games which have been fixed by Wizards of the Coast selling people the weights of dragons. Those are going to be a fascinating read.

Lack of player complaints is not a metric i use to determine how much simulation i want in a game. At least not directly.

 

[chaochou]

Lack of player complaints is not a metric i use to determine how much simulation i want in a game. At least not directly.

Lack of player complaints is not a metric I use to decide which washing powder to buy

Glad that's cleared that up.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Lack of player complaints is not a metric I use to decide which washing powder to buy

Glad that's cleared that up.

Very snippy. What are you trying to say?

 

[Blue]

No narrative or story game mechanics. Or minimal; some of this stuff can't be avoided. The genre is very secondary to the process sim I want for world building.

I'm not sure how you mean this - we're just talking simulation aspects in this thread. Narrative or story game mechanics aren't part of the scope of what we are talking about, unless they are also providing simulation.

You said you would want to simulate the world the genre stories could be told in, as opposed to simulating the genre. I don't really understand the difference, and the only examples I can think of would be simulation of part of the world that aren't needed for the focus on the adventures of the characters.

Help me understand what the difference is to you.

 

[Blue]

I can think of at least one aspect of simulating world versus genre for Supers: Aberrant. It was a rules system that allowed you to simulate a world in which super hero stories could happen, but did not itself simulate super-heroes (as most people would define them). I learned this the hard way when the good guy PC punched the bad guy Nazi the first time. Mega strength (or whatever Aberrant called it) was a pretty good simulator of "the Boys" style super powers...

This goes back to more wanting to simulate the genre - seeing something like The Boys as an outlier, most superheroic settings may or may not be filled with collateral damage, especially in the terms of urban renewal, but most are not filled with widespread super-on-normal bloody violence.

To me though that just reinforces that I'd rather simulate the genre than simulate a world the genre's stories could be told in. Unless I specifically want to explore that, I'd rather keep wholesale death of civilians as dastardly plans the characters are stopping, not the inevitable result of any supers fight.

 

[Oofta]

I know this is explicitly a D&D thread but I'll just mention very quickly that right now my favorite approach to what you're talking about is how some PbtA and FitD games do XP triggers. These are explicit rewards for players doing specific things, that they decide whether they deserve based on play, rather than hoping for the GM to approve. In Brindlewood Bay, for example, at the beginning of each session you pick from a list of End of Session Questions, such as:

-Did you dote on someone?
-Did you show someone that you’ve “still got it?”
The XP triggers directly encourage you to find opportunities to do certain things, which in part reinforces the premise (that you're playing old lady investigators). It's the kind of mechanic some would consider too "gamey," but the result (from my experience) is players getting into more narratively interesting and entertaining interactions. And, more important, not focusing on efficiency.

Blades in the Dark does a similar thing, based on playbook. So for the Leech, your per-session XP triggers are:

You addressed a challenge with technical skill or mayhem.
You expressed your beliefs, drives, heritage, or background.
You struggled with issues from your vice or traumas during the session.

Now you could imagine someone being a certain kind of someone and always tossing out some tidbit about their personal code, and also moaning about their addiction for 10 seconds, and then happily checking off those boxes. But the game trusts that perhaps that person won't stay so shameless throughout, in the face of eye-rolls from fellow players, and also even if you think you're gaming the system, you're at least doing more interesting or surprising things than you might have, particularly if you're compelled to unleash mayhem but the score demands subtlety, or you're desperate to use your technical skills despite the need for speed. The XP triggers can encourage you to act in ways that aren't always in your best interest. That's about as close to pushing people to play to their characters' humanity as I've seen.

Different strokes for different folks and all, I've done a couple of one shots here and there with things that were similar (it's been a while) and it just didn't work for me.

I have no problem getting into character without explicit carrots and sticks and I found them to be intrusive. In part that's because my characters emerge during play, I generally only have basic ideas of who my character is at the start. It's also one of the reasons I don't pay a lot of attention to traits and whatnot, they're too generic and don't grow with the character.

So if I'm simulating a character I'll think about their history, general outlook on life and some core beliefs and motivations. Belief and motivations can easily (and usually do) change as the campaign progresses.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

Different strokes for different folks and all, I've done a couple of one shots here and there with things that were similar (it's been a while) and it just didn't work for me.

I have no problem getting into character without explicit carrots and sticks and I found them to be intrusive. In part that's because my characters emerge during play, I generally only have basic ideas of who my character is at the start. It's also one of the reasons I don't pay a lot of attention to traits and whatnot, they're too generic and don't grow with the character.

So if I'm simulating a character I'll think about their history, general outlook on life and some core beliefs and motivations. Belief and motivations can easily (and usually do) change as the campaign progresses.

That's my approach in most games, too, but the post I was responding to was about wanting "a reasonable set of rules that promote characters behaving in a manner I consider consistent with what mortal humans care about: surviving, eating, having a bath, maybe getting frisky." One answer to that is to say "rules can't help there." What I was relaying was one way they maybe can.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Being one of the "middle schoolers" that started as a lad in the mid 80s with the Basic set and eventually discovering 1E right before it got replaced with 2E (which was my preferred D&D for many, many years), I have a strange relationship with "simulation."

NOTE: I am using the term in its most natural definition, not necessarily in its jargon definition. I am talking about, loosely stated, "presenting rules ina way that sort of look like how things actually work, if you squint."

Anyway -- because I started with a version of the game that at least sometimes nodded in the direction of this kind of simulation, my tendency is to continue to do so, even after it has not only fallen out of fashion but also out of the rules almost entirely. Part of me wants the game rules to reflect the reality within the game (and to some degree, the reality outside my window) even when doing so might not be the most efficient or "fun" way of doing things. That's a tall order, of course, and I am not interested in truly rigorous simulation. But even so, I would love to see rules for shields that reflect their absolute dominance in ancient combat, along with rules that take into account how demanding and horrible bending space and time to create magical effects could be. Some of these desires are similar to earlier editions, while others are not. Some other game systems that appeared early in the hobby were direct attempts to simulate history or fiction ina way D&D did not, of course, so we can talk about those games too.

But overall, let's have a friendly discussion about when and how to use simulation in D&D, and also why.

My opinion is that we need some degree of 'comprehensibility' in the game world. So things should normally work as people would generally expect, gravity works, people need food, falling 100' is generally a bad thing, etc. Beyond that, I generally play games that model characters and situations more than physical reality. I've no real interest in elaborate rules which tell us how far we can 'march in a day' or whatever. Instead, describe it in a way that makes sense, and have it be dramatic and thematic.