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

[Campbell]

In Monsterhearts the ultimate decision as to whether a move applies or not is up to the MC's read of the situation.

 

[Oofta]

The dragon issue just kills D&D stone dead (which chao is talking about) in terms of preoccupation with simulation:

* Dragons have endoskeletons that do the work of tendon/muscle attachment et al.

* While not having an actual exoskeleton, their armor plating effectively provides them with one of the primary points of exoskeletons; protection from predation. With that “not-exoskeleton-exoskeleton” should come all the size/movement/respiratory constraints that arthropods must deal with…which dragons possess precisely zero!

And they can freaking fly naturally despite all this!

But does it stop there?

NONONO

6’2” 220 lb (or less) D&D martial heroes clash in melee with these colossal beasts that somehow also possess internal causality defying omnidirectional explosiveness and athleticism!

You know, the same martial heroes that can’t broad or vert jump more than humans!

So any call for naturalistic internal causality has been MURKED by the quintessential D&D creature from the word “go.”


It’s a game folks.

We’re playing a game and you make a dizzying array of sim-compromises (dragons, the quintessential D&D creatures, and the ridiculous constraints on the martial heroes that clash with them is just surface-scratching) just to play it at all.

Embrace it.

Dragons fly and breath fire because they have magic. Just like zombies and animated skeletons are real things in D&D even though they're physically impossible.

As far as fighting a dragon, yeah. It's not like people have been hunting animals much larger and more dangerous than humans often using sticks with (maybe) a sharp rock stuck on the end.

Oh, wait

 

[DND_Reborn]

Concerning the old-school label: my view is "old-school" is pre-WotC. For me, it is that simple, whether you started in the 70's, 80's, or later....

 

[MichaelSomething]

There's always GURPS or maybe Hackmaster??

 

[pemerton]

Certainly to some extent this is true. But in many ways we're still inevitably going to apply our Invisible Rulebooks.

If the stat block for the dragon says it weighs five tons, and the DM describes it as such, then when it lands on the roof of the house, the players' minds are generally going to process "thing that weighs five tons perched on roof top", with likely some impact on how they react to the scene.

I think that a description of a dragon that says it weight five tons - whether that is in a paragraph of text, or broken out into a "stat block" format, or whatever - is not the same as the sort of stat block we see in a wargame that actually feeds into a set of rules procedures and resolution mechanics. It's just a description.

Will a five ton dragon sitting on top of a house collapse the roof/building? How strong is the roof, and how much load can it take? Answering those questions doesn't seem like a simulation - it's just doing some engineering calculations. My guess is that, at most tables, people would just make something up.

I don't understand people who say they hate simulation. What exactly are they objecting to?

Do we need a rules system to determine whether or not creatures destroy buildings that they land on - say, a system that takes some sort of Size statistic, feeds in an Architectural Strength statistic, and generates an outcome? Rolemaster has various rules in this neighbourhood, but most people find RM too rules heavy! Which is to say, they don't like simulation-type mechanics and prefer to make things up.

A D&D example: the Wilderness Survival Guide is full of charts and tables that allow determining things like how much food someone might find if they forage in such-and-such an area, with such-and-such a skill, for such-and-such a time. I doubt those tables have seen much use, relative to the whole extent of D&D gameplay in which they might have been used. Again, because many people just prefer to make things up than filter it through a system that models (or purports to model) the process in question.

But you could also imagine such details of invented units and then play out a hypothetical engagement between them. That would be a high concept simulation - the principles of modeling real properties and using the system to “simulate” the interactions between them are the same, you’re just simulating imaginary parameters.

My point is the gameplay principles are the same, even if there’s no real-world counterpart. You may not want to call it simulation (that’s also verbiage), but fundamentally both approaches are ultimately about using the game mechanics to abstract more complex processes in order to reproduce the expected outcomes with a similar degree of probability. It’s just more hypothetical in one case than the other.

I basically agree with @chaochou's reply, but want to add something.

I don't think the gameplay principles are the same. The rules for a simulationist wargame, or the rules for jumping chasms in a system like Rolemaster or RuneQuest, have correctness conditions: we can see whether or not the rules, when applied, produce a spread of results that more-or-less conforms to the real world outcomes that our system is meant to produce. If they don't, we can improve our rules (eg by adjusting paramters, or making room for further inputs, or whatever). At least in my play of RM, this sort of correction-by-reference-to-real-world-constraints is a meaningful part of play.

But in the case of invented units and hypothetical engagements, there are no correctness conditions. The "expected outcomes" are just imaginative preferences. If the 4th level fighter (a Hero, in the Chainmail/classic D&D parlance) is able to handily defeat a 4 HD Ogre in a typical engagement, does the mean I have to adjust my inputs and parameters, or is that the system working as intended? There's no answer other than one's aesthetic preference for Hero vs Ogre fights!

Further, as @chaochou mentioned, to satisfy correctness conditions for wargames we need lots of different rulesets even when we make relatively small variations: eg a system used to resolve clashes of Napoleonic infantry, cavalry and artillery will probably not be usable, without significant changes, for a conflict featuring tanks, machine guns or modern artillery.

But D&D uses the same system to resolve a fight between two mercenaries, a fight between one mercenary and five others who surround them, a Hero vs an Ogre, a Hero vs a Dragon, etc. What's it simulating? It's a mechanical process for answering some questions, like Who wins the fight?, but it's not simulating anything, even hypothetically.

 

[pemerton]

At this point I have to ask what game systems you enjoy playing, since you seem to be largely against mechanics in general.

This seems like a pretty ridiculous comment.

It's obvious (for instance) that the mechanics in AD&D of determining whether or not a Type VI demon survives being lightning bolted by an archmage aren't simulating anything.

Nor are the mechanics in Agon for determining whether or not a hero is able to stop the kraken destroying a temple.

But that wouldn't stop someone enjoying AD&D or Agon.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This is your third attempt at a snide little one-line drive-by. Since you can't engage meaningfully with anything I've said in some quite lengthy posts, I'm inviting you to stop now.

Bye bye.

Honest question, but whatever. Either I don't understand what you like, or it's so alien to my preferences I can't understand it. Probably that second one.

Either way, I'll honor your request an cease responding to you.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'm similarly iffy on the Monsterhearts move you mentioned, though probably for different reasons--I don't think game designers are trying to simulate human (much less supernatural human) psychology with those kinds of mechanics, but rather trying to add meaningful mechanics to PC-to-PC interactions, and make those doable in a game with fewer hurt feelings or awkwardness. I'm just not into those kinds of moves because they're a little navel-gazey to me. I'm a pretentious GM, but not that pretentious.

But I think that example is very different from the ones I gave, which aren't proscribing how someone has to respond to another PC, or to anything. They're just XP rewards, and the PCs have tons of leeway re: how they get them. And like I mentioned, it's supposed to be the player who decides if they get the reward--all hail precious player agency!

But also the games I mentioned aren't interested in realism. Brindlewood Bay is a game that's not only steeped in a combination of unrealistic genres (cozy mysteries and cosmic horror) but has a core mechanic that lets you turn a failure into a success after the roll, and after the player has seen the related consequence, effectively rewinding their own death or worse for a do-over. And Blades in the Dark is gritty and all, but it's a setting filled with ghosts and demons, and mechanics that also let you avoid or mitigate consequences once you know the full impact, turning a ruined reputation into troubling rumors, or a dead ally into a wounded one.

Realism isn't the goal in either case, but especially not psychological realism. Any player-nudging mechanics they have are about reinforcing genre and premise.

Wow. All the stuff you just described is so far out of my gaming comfort zone. The community really does cast a wide net. I'm glad those things exist for you.

 

[Deset Gled]

It's obvious (for instance) that the mechanics in AD&D of determining whether or not a Type VI demon survives being lightning bolted by an archmage aren't simulating anything.

Except for the equally obvious fact that the archmage is using magic to simulate lightning.

 

[Campbell]

Damn near everything found within the pages of any edition's Monster Manual flies in the face of both physics and physiology. Unsustainable amounts of muscle mass, skeletal structures that could never hold their weight, energy requirements that would decimate local ecologies, etc. Unless everything except Fighters are magic and magic means gravity, inertia and energy systems don't affect them as physics would suggest. Not to the mention the aforementioned fighters fight these impossible things with a little bit of metal or leather strapped to them and tiny little metal pokey things on a regular basis. Not through guile either. By facing them on an open field, multiple times a day.

I'm not really sure when physics are supposed to start mattering.

There's nothing wrong with the ridiculousness of all this, but it is ridiculous and glorious.