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

[Micah Sweet]

Not particularly?

Hit points, saving throws, heck even to-hit rolls (including the everpresent 1-in-20 chance to crit) have been there from the very beginning. Every edition brings its own bits and eliminates bits from previous editions. We might be able to say, in a very loose way, that some are slightly moreso and others slightly less so, but they all share several common core bits that are innately and overtly "rule contrivances to make a playable gaming experience" or "thematic/dramatic contrivance because not doing that would be less interesting", most of which get grandfathered in.

One should think that if "simulation" were the top priority, the parts that rub most strongly against that--even if they are basal elements--would get a lot of criticism. I don't see that happening...ever, really. Instead, D&D is presented as being not only highly compatible with simulationism, but among the best for it, which....only really holds up if a person has very little experience with other, much more simulationist TTRPGs.

I have never thought that D&D was best for sim. It allows for sim, it has many trappings of it, and can be adjusted to move further in that direction. Combine that with its familiarity to the people I have access to as players and you have a game that can, if played the way I prefer, provide an enjoyable experience for both me and them.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Which is a lovely description, and a non-sequitur.

The person I was responding to declared a bright line, a line in the sand: GMs (of the style being discussed) would not EVER factor in a character's stats into a roll they made about whether an encounter might happen.

Still don't, sorry. The roll itself is not affected by the activities of the PCs, just potentially its frequency. That's my point. You are welcome to decide I was making a different point that you can then argue against if you like, but you are misrepresenting me.

 

[TwoSix]

This is what we are criticizing when we say this adjudication system is quantum or conjures stuff (beneficial or harmful runes) out of nothing or involves a disconnect between cause and effect. Here the cause is "the player rolled well to decipher the runes" with the result "the runes were beneficial".

Ok, but let's be clear on where the objection flows from.

This has nothing to do with the fiction as fiction. This is an aesthetic concern about the metagame process by which the GM introduced the fiction.

If the GM had defined the rune prior to the roll, and the roll was to determine the character's skill at deciphering the rune, you would have felt OK about the scene. It was the GM defining the rune because of the roll result that caused you to dislike it.

Since the content of the fiction doesn't seem salient to the concerns raised (since all 4 use cases, success and fail for both approaches, seem satisfactory in terms of the fiction being narrated), then the verisimilitude concern is around the metagame feel for the players, not the fiction.

To me, it appears what sets off alarm bells for sim players is the appearance of "contrivance" in the results being selected by the DM.

 

[clearstream]

How can that be? How can we have this situation where a dozen-ish folks in this thread are vociferously in favor of "the world is ALWAYS primary, mechanics are ALWAYS an abstraction and thus always at least somewhat wrong", and yet so many of those exact same people are also vociferously opposed to this, and instead expect--even demand--that the world MUST reflect what the mechanics said, not the other way around?

Bear in mind here that -- for my part at least -- I assume some mechanics to be diegetic. Meaning that invoking those mechanics reflects the world (as do their results). I stipulated that this is only true so long as players can know about those mechanics.

Edit: Totally unrelated to the thread, but did anyone else have an issue for about half an hour there where you just couldn't open 99% of threads? I tried on every device, both logged in and not logged in, and just couldn't open almost all threads. The only ones I could open were pretty old, but even then some of those didn't work.

Yes, I assumed you objected so greatly to my intransigence that you shut it all down.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So simulation is whatever we declare it to be. The principle of explosion destroys all conclusions by making literally everything true.


But what actually makes that thing that thing? Authoring new fiction IS ALWAYS "changing the world". That's what authoring new stuff is. So by your very definition, all one need do is have the GM exercise their unlimited authority in order to author whatever fiction they desire. Thus, every game is necessarily a simulation; the world has primacy, and the world is simply whatever the GM has declared it is today.

It's Humpty Dumpty's dictionary, just in worldbuilding form. " ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ " When a GM declares their game is simulationist, it is. After all, they have absolute power to author whatever they want, whenever they want, and by definition that's simply what the world is!


It's not in the superpowers. It's in the world conventions. Things like villains and heroes alike respecting secret identities. Physics that contorts on command, so super strength can lift skyscrapers in whole chunks, not crumbling the concrete beneath the hero's hands. Humans that magically don't have their spine shatter when a flying hero zips past in a blur too fast to see, saving them from a grisly end on the pavement below. Grappling hooks (or webshooters, or whatever else) that always have a convenient grapple-point, wherever the superhero might be, to zip away. Gross and near-constant violations of the conservation of matter and energy. Etc., etc., etc.


Well, it was pretty high before participating in this thread.

I had expected simulationism to involve things like:

• There is a world, and it operates exclusively by consistent, physics-like rules
• Those rules are never mere reified genre conventions nor thematic/dramatic considerations
• Even where magic is involved, it is (as TVTropes would put it) "Magic A is Magic A", meaning, the magic is just bonus physics
• Extrapolation is done in, to at least some extent, a procedural and iterative way whenever possible
• To paraphrase from that manifesto linked like 40 pages back but which got a lot of positive attention from "sim" fans, all game mechanics are always wrong, but we build them so most of the time, they are usefully wrong
• Concessions made simply for a better experience of play (e.g., to balance contrasting options so that nearly all choices are almost purely qualitative, functionally not quantitative) do not occur, period
• Other than creating what content is in the world to be revealed, the GM simply must not consider thematic or dramatic concerns (e.g. pacing, rising/falling action, the intrusion of complication, etc.)
• Other than creating their characters and having (very limited) control over their backstory, the players generally should not (note, not "must not" as with the GM) think in terms of story, unless one or more characters are trying to tell a story through their deeds
• The world has what one might call "inertia" for its contents: things don't change unless acted upon by forces in the world
• While the GM has an overwhelmingly powerful degree of control over what such forces there are, how strong they are, and where/when they apply, there is (apparently) something of a "gentleman's agreement" situation that such power should only be used in ways that are as close to perfectly realistic and consistent as possible

I could list out contrasting points for all three of my other "game-(design-)purposes", albeit perhaps with slightly less granularity.

Superhero games are the only ones I care to play where genre conventions are higher priority than verisimilitude (and even then only when there's a conflict), because IMO folks on both sides of the screen have a very hard time abiding by them if they're not enforced to some degree. Too easy to take the idea of, "I have superpowers" in a more pragmatic and less four-color direction in my experience.

In the rest of my game, ideally sim is compromised only when necessary for practical play.

 

[clearstream]

I, and my players, have never had any real issue with imagining what is going on. Why should the game rules tell us why or how we fail a climb check? My character could be climbing a trellis, a crumbling castle wall, a cliff, a giant bean stalk, a giant. It doesn't matter, the description of what happens and why is up to the people at the table. D&D simulates a heroic fantasy fictional world.

Something I found interesting about @Hussar's viewpoint is that it seemed formalist. Formalism says that the game is only played if it is played according to its rules. Play that doesn't follow the rules doesn't count as meaningful play. That could lead to worries that wherever the rules don't narrate what happens, it perforce goes unnarrated. I think there are two quite straightforward responses to this:

One is to see that play is a ritual activity that extends beyond rules (per Huizinga). Here D&D succeeds through being playful. It engages its players to imagine what happens. That's messy and sometimes doesn't work out, disappointing formalists.

Another response is to note that D&D has DM built into its procedures. It's part of the rules of D&D that DM will contribute the details of what happens to the fiction. So long as DM is doing that a formalist ought to be satisfied that the game is validly played in a complete way (unless some table finds itself accidentally starting play while lacking a DM.) Misgivings then could still come from disliking that approach, but that wouldn't make D&D incomplete as a game.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Ok, but let's be clear on where the objection flows from.

This has nothing to do with the fiction as fiction. This is an aesthetic concern about the metagame process by which the GM introduced the fiction.

If the GM had defined the rune prior to the roll, and the roll was to determine the character's skill at deciphering the rune, you would have felt OK about the scene. It was the GM defining the rune because of the roll result that caused you to dislike it.

Since the content of the fiction doesn't seem salient to the concerns raised (since all 4 use cases, success and fail for both approaches, seem satisfactory in terms of the fiction being narrated), then the verisimilitude concern is around the metagame feel for the players, not the fiction.

To me, it appears what sets off alarm bells for sim players is the appearance of "contrivance" in the results being selected by the DM.

Absolutely. I would love it if everyone proceeded from that understanding.

 

[AlViking]

I want to pull out this example, because I think it is even more clear than the cook one and comes from actual play. I get what you are trying to do it. But I don't think I can enjoy any game that uses this kind of adjudication. The problem is that nothing is fixed here--the player could just have easily made up that the runes were a protection spell, or some piece of history they wanted to introduce. And the only thing that determines whether the runes are a boon or a bane is a die roll.

This is exactly the failure we've been trying to get at with the cook example--on a good roll, the world is defined such that good things happen, on a bad one, the world is defined such that bad things do.

The runes are simultaneously good and bad until the die is rolled. No one knows, not even the GM. They are quantum runes.

Compare to a case where the players don't know what the runes are but the GM does know, because they are in the GMs notes. You see the difference?

This is what we are criticizing when we say this adjudication system is quantum or conjures stuff (beneficial or harmful runes) out of nothing or involves a disconnect between cause and effect. Here the cause is "the player rolled well to decipher the runes" with the result "the runes were beneficial".

Kind of related to all of this, I sometimes practice what's called lucid dreaming. If you're unfamiliar with the practice, it's when you become aware that you're dreaming so you take control of it and change it to what you want. For me, if I'm having a bad dream and I'm not sure if I'm dreaming or not I can levitate. If I can levitate I can fly and just fly away or change the dream to whatever I want.

I kind of look at @pemerton's scenario and I see the equivalent of that lucid dream. They teleport away from a bad situation not (as far as I can tell) because they have an inherent teleport ability like a spell in D&D but because there was a "doom pool" that was spent to get them the heck out of Dodge but ended up being lost as a complication. Then the player decided what weird runes were and how to use them and because they succeeded on their check it was good, if it had been bad the complication would have gotten worse.

This would all feel like a dream where sometimes I figured out how to control the dream and sometimes I didn't. There is no concrete fictional world that has been established, it's all just malleable clay formed by decisions and rolls made by player and GM. The fact that failure includes complications is only one part of why it wouldn't work for me, even if other aspects of the fictional world were more established.

Contrast to how something similar could happen in a D&D campaign. The characters are in a dire situation and have been cornered so they need to escape by any means necessary. Perhaps the GM described what looks like small natural tunnel they can squeeze through and the monster chasing them will never fit. Perhaps the wizard has dimension door and a portable hole everyone else can hop into and they just teleport in a random direction and distance, maybe the cleric casts Augury to confirm the where to target. However it happens, they can escape because of something established in the fiction or an ability a character has, not because an accumulation of metagame doom pool points.

As they're wandering they find the markings on the wall. The DM knows what they mean, there could even potentially have both bad and beneficial aspects to it. Maybe the runes can open a portal to the outside world but it's trapped and the characters have to carefully investigate them to figure out how to open the portal without setting off the trap. But again these are all diegetic situations and actions, things that exist and occur only within the fictional world and based on pre-established character abilities and world building by the DM.

Occasionally we'll hit something like this in D&D where the DM is just improvising as we go along. But if it's done well, the players will never know the difference. But even if it is improvisational it still follows the same core principles that what is introduced fits the world and it's themes and once something is established it's "real". There are no get out of jail free cards just because some metagame point bucket was full, the players didn't get to choose what the runes did.

Anyway, enough rambling for the moment.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Kind of related to all of this, I sometimes practice what's called lucid dreaming. If you're unfamiliar with the practice, it's when you become aware that you're dreaming so you take control of it and change it to what you want. For me, if I'm having a bad dream and I'm not sure if I'm dreaming or not I can levitate. If I can levitate I can fly and just fly away or change the dream to whatever I want.

I kind of look at @pemerton's scenario and I see the equivalent of that lucid dream. They teleport away from a bad situation not (as far as I can tell) because they have an inherent teleport ability like a spell in D&D but because there was a "doom pool" that was spent to get them the heck out of Dodge but ended up being lost as a complication. Then the player decided what weird runes were and how to use them and because they succeeded on their check it was good, if it had been bad the complication would have gotten worse.

This would all feel like a dream where sometimes I figured out how to control the dream and sometimes I didn't. There is no concrete fictional world that has been established, it's all just malleable clay formed by decisions and rolls made by player and GM. The fact that failure includes complications is only one part of why it wouldn't work for me, even if other aspects of the fictional world were more established.

Contrast to how something similar could happen in a D&D campaign. The characters are in a dire situation and have been cornered so they need to escape by any means necessary. Perhaps the GM described what looks like small natural tunnel they can squeeze through and the monster chasing them will never fit. Perhaps the wizard has dimension door and a portable hole everyone else can hop into and they just teleport in a random direction and distance, maybe the cleric casts Augury to confirm the where to target. However it happens, they can escape because of something established in the fiction or an ability a character has, not because an accumulation of metagame doom pool points.

As they're wandering they find the markings on the wall. The DM knows what they mean, there could even potentially have both bad and beneficial aspects to it. Maybe the runes can open a portal to the outside world but it's trapped and the characters have to carefully investigate them to figure out how to open the portal without setting off the trap. But again these are all diegetic situations and actions, things that exist and occur only within the fictional world and based on pre-established character abilities and world building by the DM.

Occasionally we'll hit something like this in D&D where the DM is just improvising as we go along. But if it's done well, the players will never know the difference. But even if it is improvisational it still follows the same core principles that what is introduced fits the world and it's themes and once something is established it's "real". There are no get out of jail free cards just because some metagame point bucket was full, the players didn't get to choose what the runes did.

Anyway, enough rambling for the moment.

I will note that this is just preference, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with play that has a higher metagame index. It's no better or worse in general than what @AlViking described as their preferred mode of play, just better or worse for an individual.

 

[AlViking]

I will note that this is just preference, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with play that has a higher metagame index. It's no better or worse in general than what @AlViking described as their preferred mode of play, just better or worse for an individual.

I should probably just add that to my tagline - I sometimes forget to add it.