As I have been saying, I'm not categorically deprecating ALL use of the term simulation. Yes, a D&D fiction can be thought of, in some particulars perhaps, as a 'proposed scenario', though I think we need to be careful to say that is only possible to the extent your setting corresponds with reality (which is very likely for basic stuff like gravity and food). If we get into more 'systemic' stuff like economies, demography, geography, biology, etc. I think it becomes a good bit less clear we have A) the information needed to simulate anything, and B) that the world is meaningfully similar to ours at that level.
I'm not saying everything in D&D is simulation and never have. On the other hand I probably believe that quite a bit more of it can fall under that label than you do. Obviously some things such as initiative are purely game rules because we can't handle the truth ... umm ... can't handle simultaneous actions easily.
I think its very possible for video games to be illustrations of modeling reality and playing them could be considered a simulation. I doubt that very many games are realistic enough to be meaningfully simulations, but my understanding is the military itself has developed such simulations, using largely 'game tech'.
You've never played a driving sim. Race car drivers use them to practice.
Oh, I don't agree with that! One of the primary reasons for simulation is in order to understand the system being simulated. You build a model, and to the degree that the simulation mirrors the system's behavior you can then hypothesize that the model is representative, internally, of processes present in the actual system. This is the ENTIRE THRUST practically of climate modeling for instance. Same with simulations of industrial chemical processes, for example. I mean, sure, sometimes you don't care, often you REALLY REALLY DO. If the object is playing an RPG, OK, you are probably not that concerned with improving your understanding of reality.
You don't believe simulations have "black boxes"? How do you think they work? Simulations involve large number of people all the time and include behavior randomized based on averages. It's pretty core to many simulations. If you're testing how your emergency services respond to a fire in a skyscraper, you don't care how the fire started. If it's possible for there to be structural collapse or explosions, you don't care what causes those events, you care about how well the emergency services handle those events.
The simulation is not concerned with what triggers an event, it's concerned with the flow of the system and how it responds to events. In D&D "the system" is the PCs, how they respond to events. Not sure how else to say it, it's pretty clear to me. The DM sets the stage, the world and inhabitants the PCs interact with, the simulation is the actions and results of the PCs interacting with that world not the world itself. The events only have to mimic what the world would look like.
But we certainly do have a wide variety of situations that characters in a typical D&D game find themselves in where the speed and power needed to stand up to a dragon in melee combat would be a HUGE benefit, yet the character is just depicted as a (albeit fairly exceptional) normal human. Being strong enough to push back on a dragon when it decides to just walk over top of you, at 10 tons, certainly would have serious implications!
But again, this is just an outlier effect of simplified rules that doesn't really affect 99% of combats. In addition, no fighter can shove a dragon without magic or some supernatural ability. You can't normally shove someone more than 1 size larger than your PC. On the other hand, a huge or larger dragon (being 2 sizes bigger than your PC) can walk right over the top of you.
I think in D&D terms this is not an unreasonable position when talking about something like modeling athletic ability or similar stuff. If you move to something like simulating the market dynamics of a fantasy city? I think it simply doesn't work treating it like a black box. Those are really complex non-linear systems that IME (having done some of these things) require deeper modeling and analysis where you are going to want to know quite a bit about processes within the model, and it will really need significant iteration. I mean, there are some basic economic models that are THEORETICALLY supposed to give you something like a price as a direct output with certain inputs of costs and demand and information, etc.
If you're simulating a market economy, you're on your own in house ruling territory so I'm not sure how that applies. The game is silent on the issue. Also, good luck, economists have been trying to model economies for a long, long time.
Right, so this is a perfectly good topic of conversation that I would think addresses both the sense of what the OP poses, and relates that to the question about what do we mean by simulation. Honestly, I'm not sure why people are so invested in that word! I want to depict certain things, and your argument, which I mostly agree with, is that we don't care a whole lot about the NATURE of what we are depicting, we just want some results that give us a feeling of verisimilitude, or produce a sense of suspension of disbelief. I don't think 'realistic' itself even really enters into it so much, but it is more "which things do you want to mimic in order to get that."
Yeah, I want my game to give results that feel like the PCs are in a high fantasy game. Reality sucks at times, D&D is an escape.
Like with combat, for me, I'd like it to match up with my sense of what the character is generally capable of. So a reasonably consistent view of their physical abilities across various things, whether fantastical or maybe the character is just pretty mundane. In the later case I'd expect that combating things like large monsters would NOT involve getting into melee with them, as multi-ton (or even half ton, check out tigers) magical monstrosities are going to just rip up normal humans! I mean, speed could replace strength there, but without some supernatural level of ability in one or the other even melee with a bugbear is going to be dicey, and forget something ogre sized!
People have been hunting tigers, bears, mammoths without the Renaissance level tech PCs have for a long, long time. Put on full plate and a bear will knock you down, but it will have a hard time chewing through high quality steel. Eventually it will, of course. I don't think animals are particularly well modeled, bears for example are immensely strong. But I also understand that there are only so many options given how the math is set up. If a bear had a 30 strength, no hunter would survive an encounter with one but obviously they do. But again, that's just an indication that it's not a particularly accurate simulation.
Don't get me wrong, D&D combat is a bit over the top/silly at times for the sake of grand adventure. Some of that's simplification - if you're hunting wild boar you want a specialty spear designed with a cross guard for example. But it's just not worth the effort to put in that kind of fidelity. Some of it's just fun, our PCs are super heroic and beyond the human normal.
