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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Oofta" data-source="post: 8678169" data-attributes="member: 6801845">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.You've never played a driving sim.  Race car drivers use them to practice.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 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.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. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />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.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.</blockquote>

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