D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Maxperson]

So DMs never factor in, for example, the party's stealthiness for what results might come up on a wandering monster roll? I can literally say I have seen more than one DM apply such a thing (e.g. the party scout's Stealth bonus reducing the result of a wandering-encounter roll so that lesser or even empty encounters are more likely). So like...even that isn't the absolute hard-and-fast line you seem to think it is.

This is conflating ideas. We're talking about an unrelated or distantly related skill roll determining that something bad will or will not happen. We are not saying that a party being stealthy as they travel might not be able to avoid some encounters through that skill.

Basically, we're saying that a lockpick roll shouldn't spawn a cook in the kitchen, and you're essentially responding with, "So DMs never factor in sleight of hand when picking locks?"

As for the bolded portion, I feel really bad for you with the DMs you've had. Myself and all the ones I've ever played with would have factored in the party trying to be stealthy.

 

[Faolyn]

Respectfully, there have been maybe a dozen comments clarifying that the issue is not the cook's presence in the kitchen in the abstract but the cook specifically being there on a failed roll but not a successful one. If the cook is always present, fine. If the cook is in the next room and comes because of the failed check, fine.

But if the cook comes to check things out on a failure and does not exist on a success, not fine.

You can put the cook there on a success as well.

Remember, the cook is one example of what can be done with a failed lockpicking check. If you think the existence of a cook in a kitchen is too far out for you, then pick a different consequence.

 

[pemerton]

but when the failure option presented wasn't 'the cook heard you and woke up' but 'the cook just so happened to be in the kitchen at X-AM in the morning' that's a little harder for us to swallow as the consequences of the thief's actions

If you don't like the fiction, don't narrate it.

I mean, you're coming up with fiction that you think is silly, then presenting it as an example of "fail forward" resolution, and then concluding that "fail forward" resolution leads to silly fiction! When I play and GM, I do my best to come up with fiction that's not silly, so I don't have the problem that you're worried about.

 

[pemerton]

Then take mine as challenging the arbitrariness of your comparative class.

It's hardly arbitrary for me to compare two sorts of GM-driven/GM-centred play to a well-known approach to RPGing which (i) is not GM-driven/GM-centred and (ii) is one that I adopt quite a bit in my own RPGing.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Bad things that has nothing to do with the lack of skill is a bit weird. Like the extremely unskilled cook somehow getting struck by lightning every time they burn the sauce.

How many times must it be stated that drawing attention is not a problem for most of us? It is conjuring the cook that is the problem. How do we know that the failure conjures the cook? Because it say in the example that we know there would be no cook on success.

This is a relevant point that got expanded on in my conversation with @EzekielRaiden


This doesn't make sense? We are not talking about dependencies between fictional characters at all? If you talk about why the probability of there being someone around to hear the lock picking being independent of the outcome of the lockpicking attempt the answer is that there are no obvious causal in-fiction mechanism that could connect these and hence the mind expect these to not be correlated. If the mind register that they indeed do correlate, it will start searching for causality mechanisms, like common cause for both events. Stopping the mind from doing so is called "suspension of disbelief" and is something we want to keep to a minimum in the kind of games many here like to play.

Ok, I think I now might have gitten sufficient understanding to have a shot at introducing a less inflammatory terminology. Instead of GM-driven or GM-centric play, I think GM-provided play covers this concept you seem to describe much better, while being much less prone for inflammatory interpretation. I think no trad GM will feel insulted by it being insinuated that they provide the toys the players play with. They will however be insulted by it being insinuated that they for instance take a driving position on how the players play with these toys or that somehow the play revolve around them personally rather than the player's interaction with the toys they have provided.

I'm really looking forward to @hawkeyefan 's response to this. We could end the whole thread with this.

 

[pemerton]

Every game has abstractions. Simulations do not recreate complex systems with 100% accuracy

<snip>

Granularity does not define whether or not something is a simulation.

None of this speaks to my point.

Hit-point based combat is (i) quite granular, and (ii) not a simulation of anything. It's a way of turning a weighted coin-toss (this being is tougher than this other being, so more likely to win) into a more protracted, intricate race between countdown clocks.

In the context of a 3-round fight between two PCs and two Orcs, let's pause at the end of round 2. Each Orc has lost 4 of 8 hp. Each PC has lost 5 of 10 hp. The table has been playing this out for, let's say, 5 minutes. What have they simulated? Nothing at all! They're part way through finding out who lives and who dies, and that's it.

 

[pemerton]

So you think people in the real world affect the world around them through competence and not just by what they say and do?

Huh? Competence is all about what a person says and does.

You seem to think that an amateur burglar is just as likely to blunder into a situation unprepared and unawares as a competent one. I don't agree.

 

[Micah Sweet]

None of this speaks to my point.

Hit-point based combat is (i) quite granular, and (ii) not a simulation of anything. It's a way of turning a weighted coin-toss (this being is tougher than this other being, so more likely to win) into a more protracted, intricate race between countdown clocks.

In the context of a 3-round fight between two PCs and two Orcs, let's pause at the end of round 2. Each Orc has lost 4 of 8 hp. Each PC has lost 5 of 10 hp. The table has been playing this out for, let's say, 5 minutes. What have they simulated? Nothing at all! They're part way through finding out who lives and who dies, and that's it.

Then why does one lose hit points through discrete effects? And why do those effects cause differing amounts of damage/hit point loss, much of which is distinguished from each other via types of damage?

Are we still simulating nothing?

 

[FrogReaver]

Perhaps I'm not being clear here. I'm not even talking about a narrativist case here, just purely 3/5e D&D. In basic operation of the game, if I make a normal physical attack, I miss if I do not beat the AC of my target with the sum of my attack bonus and die roll. If I convert saves to defences as per the 3e UA, if I attack a target's Reflex defence and do not beat the defence value, I have missed, but I still might do damage (with a fireball, for example).

The fireball can have save for half because it’s not calling that a miss.

And if we are concerned about the clear meaning of words, in 3e a miss that lands between the Touch AC and full AC has struck the target, just not effectively. In 5e we know that some results on attack will be a glancing blow of some sort, but the rules don't tell us how to determine this. I get that was your point, but in all D&D ever a "miss" doesn't mean "miss" in the clear meaning of the word, it's always been game jargon.

I’m not opposed to adding glancing blows that deal some damage in. I’m opposed to calling such things misses. On the same token I would call a glancing blow that doesn’t cause any damage a miss. So yea, glancing blow isn’t the best name either but I think it was enough to get across the idea.

 

[pemerton]

From discussion here and elsewhere, simulationism seems to label game play characterised by i) giving the imagined world precedence and ii) addressing it as if it were independently real.

Your second thing is a characteristic of all RPGing. It is what Edwards calls exploration. Your first thing is an overly narrow account of "simulationism": Pendragon is a RPG intended for simulationist play, and it doesn't lose that character if the participants in a game prioritise character and/or situation over setting.

Edwards characterises "simulationist" RPGing in terms of the priority that it gives to exploration:

the thing to do is to get as clear an understanding of "Exploration" as possible. It's our jargon term for imagining, "dreaming" if you will, about made-up characters in made-up situations. It's central to all role-playing, but in Simulationist play, it's the top priority. . . unlike Narrativist and Gamist priorities which are defined by an interpersonal out-of-game agenda, Simulationist play prioritizes the in-game functions and imagined events. . . .

The key issues are shared love of the source material and sincerity. Simulationism is sort of like Virtual Reality, but with the emphasis on the "V," because it clearly covers so many subjects. Perhaps it could be called V-Whatever rather than V-Reality. If the Whatever is a fine, cool thing, then it's fun to see fellow players imagine what you are imagining, and vice versa. (By "you" in that sentence, I am referring to anyone at the table, GM or player.) To the dedicated practitioner, such play is sincere to a degree that's lacking in heavy-metagame play . . .

Sincere shared creativity: all role-playing has to have it. For some, it's the whole point.​

"Simulationist" play is described by Eero Tuovinen, in a blog that you're referenced in earlier posts upthread, in this way:

Simulationist play attempts to experience a subject matter in a way that results in elevated appreciation and understanding. The Shared Imagined Space is utilized for intensely detailed perspectives that sometimes surpass the means of traditional, non-interactive mediums.​

Edwards and Tuovinen don't offer identical characterisations: sincerity is not the same thing as elevated appreciation and understanding in virtue of intensely detailed perspectives. What they have in common is that they exclude certain sorts of ways of establishing the shared fiction:

"Simulationist" RPGing, as described by these commentators, precludes altering the fiction on the basis of, or as a direct response to, our appreciation or engagement with it. This is not easy to state, and not easy to achieve. In a RPG, the fiction has to change. Necessarily, those changes occur because the participants engage with it - they describe fictional events, fictional causes, fictional effects. "Simulationism" is about trying to hold the fiction constant on its own terms while the RPGing happens.

Often (not always - consider some approaches to Tuovinen's "dollhouse play" or "substantial exploration") it is the job of the GM to hold the fiction "constant on its own terms", meaning that the GM is not really getting to engage in the sincerity and the elevated appreciation. They are labouring away, fully conscious of their authorial role, so that the players can enjoy the pleasure of simulationist play. I think it's actually rather common to see GMing described in this way, often using metaphors of "behind the screen" or "behind the curtain".