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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8677969" data-attributes="member: 82106">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 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'.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.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!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.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." 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!</blockquote>

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