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

[Faolyn]

Then what are other, better options for a D&D game? I found this one because people were only providing examples from other games which use different assumptions and approaches.

At the risk of being snide (-r than usual), google it. Seriously: "fail forward D&D" gives tons of websites, blogs, reddit posts, etc.

One site references the Suspicion mechanic from the Keys from the Golden Vault 5e adventure compilation. I don't have that so I don't know exactly what it does; the blog indicates that the more you fail, the more the guards will get suspicious. One bad roll won't stop you, but multiple will call in the big guns. It also talks about "accumulated failures," by which it means skill challenges a la 4e.

A thread here from '21 referenced the "Success with a Cost" and "Degrees of Failure" sections from the 5e DMG (pg 242), which I had forgotten about.

There's tons of stuff out there. We've talked about a lot of options here already.

 

[Lanefan]

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

Exactly - the presence/absence of a cook is unrelated to the success/fail of the door being opened.

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.

I would. Absent other pre-narrated considerations, "nothing happens" would be by far the most likely.

 

[Gimby]

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

I think @Maxperson covers this, but I'm talking about the case when reshuffling saves to attacks on defences. This is nearly identical mechanically, takes precisely the same fictional inputs and delivers precisely the same fictional outputs. The only mechanical difference is who physically rolls the die. I can equally well swap AC into a save equivalent that works the same way by changing an attack roll into a defence roll.

This should show (hopefully!) that the only difference between damage on a miss and save for half is semantic as attack rolls and saves (in 3/5e era D&D at least) are essentially the same thing.

 

[Lanefan]

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!

Sure they have - they've simulated the feeling-out process where combatants size each other up and see what the other is made of, and now they're about to get to the part where each significant blow really hurts or even kills outright.

Even more so in a 4e paradigm where your example puts everyone exactly at the "bloodied" threshold.

 

[Lanefan]

See, from the point of view of common sense, this doesn't make sense to me.

Either the sword cuts me, or it doesn't. (But even if it doesn't cut me, I might hurt or strain myself avoiding it.)

From the perspective of the abstracted gameplay, however, it doesn't matter if you dodged the swing completely and took no damage or blocked the swing with your shield and took no damage.

Now, one could argue that these two outcomes should be mechanically different; that the shield itself, for example, should have its own "hit point" number that erodes each time the shield blocks a swing until on hitting 0 the shield falls apart. D&D doesn't fine-tune things to this degree, however.

Either the fire burns me, or it doesn't. (But even if it doesn't burn me, I might hurt or strain myself avoiding it.)

Here, though, the fire doesn't in fact miss you. You're caught in it, with the only question being just how badly it happens to burn you and-or how lucky you are in what cover (if any) you're near or whether you happened to be facing toward or away from the center. Resolving that "how badly did it burn you" question is what the save is for (and, in 1e, the save also determines whether everything you're carrying also has to save).

Here too the abstraction could use some fine-tuning; and a different, though perhaps more cumbersome, way of modelling the same thing might be to roll damage separately for each individual caught in the fire instead of having everyone take the same amount (or half), while skipping the save-for-half piece. For 1e purposes, if the damage roll for an individual is above average then whatever that individual is carrying also has to save; if below average, it does not. And fire-resistance devices and spells will also, of course, have their say.

 

[Lanefan]

Quantum ridge! Quantum wind! (On top of the regularly-scheduled quantum wolf.)

@Maxperson, @AlViking: notice how the ridge is introduced here by the GM as part of narrating the encounter. The ridge was not noted on the map. The players weren't told about the ridge prior to the roll of the wandering monster dice, so as to have the option of trying to go around it or stay in cover from it.

Someone has to write a song now: "The Lone Wolf of Quantum Ridge".

 

[Lanefan]

The DM narrated the rough and rocky terrain, which obviously includes ridges.

Maybe; but in fairness my in-the-moment example didn't go that far back. But unless the area is known to be almost dead flat, an occasional low ridge or valley would seem reasonable.

 

[Hussar]

/snip
Those random encounters weren't because he screwed up some roll. Skill can mitigate to an extent, but it can only mitigate from stuff that's there, not keep stuff from being there in the first place.

Y'know, you are right. The random encounter isn't there because he screwed up some roll. That's absolutely true.

However, the random encounter is generated because of a failed roll. Exactly the same completely arbitrary way that a random encounter is generated because the DM picked a completely arbitrary time on a clock to roll a check. The checks have NOTHING to do with anything the players are doing. We are simply using the checks as a means of randomizing potential encounters.

IOW, there is no difference.

 

[Hussar]

/snip
Agree with @AlViking above. To satisfy 'simulationism' in the sense I'm interested in, the important thing is that characters are able to interact with an external world in the way we do in reality. This is different than the rules accurately simulating reality. I think the use of simulationism for both muddies things.

You're missing the point of simulation.

At it's base, a simulation, in order to actually BE a simulation, must tell the person simulating something, information about whatever is being simulated. Urg, that's a horrible sentence.

My point is, if you have a simulation about how a yo-yo works, that simulation must actually answer basic questions about how a yo-yo spins and is able to go up and down the string. If the simulation is a black box that only tells you that you start with the yo-yo in your hand and then finish with the yo-yo in your hand, that's not a terribly useful simulation. It's not really a simulation at all.

So, let's apply that to D&D. You attack an enemy with a sword. The enemy has a shield and is wearing chain armor and has a Dex bonus of +2. You roll an attack and miss the target by 1. What happened? For D&D to actually be a simulation, it has to tell you what happened. But, it doesn't. All it tells you is that your attack failed. You have no idea why it failed. Did you bang off the shield? Was it dodged? Was it parried? Did you whiff entirely? Did you actually make an attack or just a feint?

You have absolutely no idea. And D&D is full of this sort of thing. At no point does D&D actually tell you anything about how something works. You know that you succeeded or you failed and that's it. The idea that D&D is some sort of simulation game is ludicrous. It's this pernicious meme that has been repeated for years without anything to actually back it up. Even going back to the whole sandbox "living world" stuff, none of it is actually based on the mechanics of D&D. Those Living World supplements are pretty much system neutral. You could use them in any system and they would still work.

If you could take every Forgotten Realms supplement and run it in FATE without actually changing anything, how in the world is D&D simulating anything? See, if you actually have simulation systems, they don't work in other systems. You can't take a Harn supplement and run it in another system without massively reworking it. Because HARN is a heavily simulationist game that ACTUALLY tries to simulate something.

D&D, at no point in its history, has ever claimed any simulationist leanings. That is something that, for some unfathomable reason, people have added. Well, actually, the reason is pretty clear. The only reason that people try to claim D&D as simulationist is to block any and all changes to the mechanics that they personally don't happen to like. It's pretty much the beating heart of conservatism in D&D. It has nothing whatsoever with actually trying to simulate anything and everything with trying to force others to only play one kind of game. It's the ultimate in onetruewayism and has been used as the blunt weapon to force the fandom to reject changes that people happen not to like.

 

[The Firebird]

You're missing the point of simulation.

At it's base, a simulation, in order to actually BE a simulation, must tell the person simulating something, information about whatever is being simulated. Urg, that's a horrible sentence.

My point is, if you have a simulation about how a yo-yo works, that simulation must actually answer basic questions about how a yo-yo spins and is able to go up and down the string. If the simulation is a black box that only tells you that you start with the yo-yo in your hand and then finish with the yo-yo in your hand, that's not a terribly useful simulation. It's not really a simulation at all.

So, let's apply that to D&D. You attack an enemy with a sword. The enemy has a shield and is wearing chain armor and has a Dex bonus of +2. You roll an attack and miss the target by 1. What happened? For D&D to actually be a simulation, it has to tell you what happened. But, it doesn't. All it tells you is that your attack failed. You have no idea why it failed. Did you bang off the shield? Was it dodged? Was it parried? Did you whiff entirely? Did you actually make an attack or just a feint?

You have absolutely no idea. And D&D is full of this sort of thing. At no point does D&D actually tell you anything about how something works. You know that you succeeded or you failed and that's it. The idea that D&D is some sort of simulation game is ludicrous. It's this pernicious meme that has been repeated for years without anything to actually back it up. Even going back to the whole sandbox "living world" stuff, none of it is actually based on the mechanics of D&D. Those Living World supplements are pretty much system neutral. You could use them in any system and they would still work.

If you could take every Forgotten Realms supplement and run it in FATE without actually changing anything, how in the world is D&D simulating anything? See, if you actually have simulation systems, they don't work in other systems. You can't take a Harn supplement and run it in another system without massively reworking it. Because HARN is a heavily simulationist game that ACTUALLY tries to simulate something.

D&D, at no point in its history, has ever claimed any simulationist leanings. That is something that, for some unfathomable reason, people have added. Well, actually, the reason is pretty clear. The only reason that people try to claim D&D as simulationist is to block any and all changes to the mechanics that they personally don't happen to like. It's pretty much the beating heart of conservatism in D&D. It has nothing whatsoever with actually trying to simulate anything and everything with trying to force others to only play one kind of game. It's the ultimate in onetruewayism and has been used as the blunt weapon to force the fandom to reject changes that people happen not to like.

This is exactly what I mean when I say the conflation of "simulationism" and "accurately simulating reality" muddies things. I think it is a failure of language. "Verisimilitudinism" or something is probably a more accurate term than "simulationism".

Anyway, the desire to have a fictional world with verisimilitude, where the players feel like they are acting in a real place and that world is responding to them in an authentic way, does not require that you use no abstractions or that abstractions are a bad thing. Nor do abstractions necessarily get in the way of verisimilitude. In some ways they heighten it.