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

[AlViking]

Worthless? Maybe not, but it's probably not going to carry a lot of weight if they have no experience outside of one or two editions of a single game.

Like, imagine the following examples.

1: Anime
"Sword Art Online is one of the greatest fantasy anime shows ever made."
"Er...what makes you say that? Because it's pretty controversial, and plenty of anime is way more fantastical, both before and after it."
"Well Sword Art Online and .hack//SIGN are the only two anime I've ever watched."
"Wait so like...you've never seen Frieren? Or like Inu Yasha? Or Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood? Hunter x Hunter? Anything from Studio Ghibli???"
"Nope."

2: Cuisine
"Traditional Cantonese sweet and sour pork is one of the greatest dishes ever to come out of China."
"Really? That's pretty basic, have you ever had char kway teow or char siu bao?"
"Never heard of 'em."
"Wait, really?"
"Nope. The only traditional Chinese dishes I've ever had are sweet and sour pork and lo mein, and sweet and sour pork is way better."

3: Novels
"Harry Potter is the best 'young magic user' series ever written."
"Really? Even with all the controversy from Rowling?"
"I mean, I wish she wouldn't spout off about politics..."
"Oh, no I meant how it's super derivative of Ursula K. Le Guin's Wizard of Earthsea books."
"Never heard of 'em."
"Wait, what?"
"Harry Potter and The Wheel of Time are the only fantasy series I've ever read. Well, I only read the first three WoT books, they got too boring to continue."

No one can tell the first speaker in any of these things are things they shouldn't like, because that would be telling them that their preferences are wrong. However, people absolutely can question how much merit, if any, there might be in these sweeping claims about the prominence of some particular thing amongst a field of things they don't actually know anything about.

When the one and only thing you know comes from a single source, out of many, many other sources, it's quite easy to lack context or nuance. Just as someone doing history research prefers to have as many sources (and preferably as many primary sources) as possible, in order to avoid risk of any one source being distorted or biased, someone talking about "simulation" in gaming is....gonna really want to have played at least a few different games that do sim, or at least to have read them even without playing (though play is vastly preferable).

Pure preferences cannot be argued about. De gustibus non disputandum est. But claims about the efficacy or prominence or functionality of something are not merely preference. They're a description of where that thing fits into the broader context. A person making such statements who doesn't actually know that broader context isn't saying very much.

And, unfortunately, it is very very often the case that people who play D&D have never played any other game. Hard to draw any contrast or speak to the effectiveness of D&D when you know nothing about the alternatives, even within a narrow range like "games that place special focus on sim".

So because I don't play a dozen different games I can't have a valid opinion. Even if I've read up on, read through countless posts, watched live streams? If I don't have the chance or opportunity to play other games, isn't it on you to explain the difference? Could it be your fault that your explanations aren't good enough?

Because to me it sounds like "I disagree so your opinion is invalid".

 

[EzekielRaiden]

So because I don't play a dozen different games I can't have a valid opinion. Even if I've read up on, read through countless posts, watched live streams? If I don't have the chance or opportunity to play other games, isn't it on you to explain the difference? Could it be your fault that your explanations aren't good enough?

Because to me it sounds like "I disagree so your opinion is invalid".

If you've never eaten a dish, does reading dozens of recipes for it tell you what it tastes like?

It sounds to me like you're saying "I can have whatever opinion I want, I don't need to actually experience anything." Experience matters. I should think any fan of "simulation" would agree with at least that.

 

[AlViking]

If you've never eaten a dish, does reading dozens of recipes for it tell you what it tastes like?

It sounds to me like you're saying "I can have whatever opinion I want, I don't need to actually experience anything." Experience matters. I should think any fan of "simulation" would agree with at least that.

I've never been to the Sahara desert, I can still form an opinion about it. Knowing the ingredients and smelling a dish is enough for me to tell if I will like something without actually eating it.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I've never been to the Sahara desert, I can still form an opinion about it. Knowing the ingredients and smelling a dish is enough for me to tell if I will like something without actually eating it.

And I specifically said that if all someone is saying is personal preference, that would be fine.

But several folks are not doing that. They are not saying "this makes me happy" or "I like how this works". They are saying things like "D&D is a really good simulation game". Or, IIRC, someone--it might have been you, I genuinely don't remember--told me waaaaay upthread that D&D was one of the best simulation games.

 

[AlViking]

And I specifically said that if all someone is saying is personal preference, that would be fine.

But several folks are not doing that. They are not saying "this makes me happy" or "I like how this works". They are saying things like "D&D is a really good simulation game". Or, IIRC, someone--it might have been you, I genuinely don't remember--told me waaaaay upthread that D&D was one of the best simulation games.

Everyone I've seen that is on the D&D side of things repeatedly state that it's just preference. I rarely see people on the narrative side say it.

Opinions on how well something works as a simulation all come down to granularity and accuracy, no gaming simulation is ever going to come even close to simulating reality. It's also probably more accurate to say that people are running the game with a simulationist style where once the fiction of the world is established the GM is a referee and the players can only impact the world through their characters. It's not so much about accuracy (and it's all pretend anyway), it's about how the people at the table interact with the fictional world. Personally? I prefer a simulationist approach to a narrativist approach to gaming.

 

[clearstream]

Simulationist games are more complex. They just are. They have to be. You need that complexity in order to simulate something. A coin flip does not simulate anything.

I don't agree: complex rules are unnecessary for simulationist play. Unfortunately it may be hard for us to make much progress on this point, as we probably don't agree on what simulationism is. For a start, I'd say it is multiple things under one label, rather than one thing.

We also might not agree on what complexity in games amounts to. The way you talk about "complexity" seems to associate it with giving detailed results, but giving detailed results isn't tied to complexity. For example, the RQ Hit Location table is somewhat detailed, but it is not complex.

I wouldn't rule FKR play out from being successfully simulationist; and if not, surely I cannot rule out any game on the basis of how detailed its rules are. Among other things, that implies it's necessary to decide how to treat D&D's baseline assumption of high DM curation. It might seem promising to look at whether a game delivers the right detail to support players and DM in a simulationist enterprise... but what amounts to invariably the right detail?

 

[clearstream]

It's hard to understand how these stances square up with one another. We are now seeing that, no, there are things that matter more, like maintaining the purest feeling of verisimilitude. That's a pretty damn big change.

I think they square up by accepting we're looking at multiple different modes of play that can share features, rather than one mode of play.

 

[clearstream]

Personally? I prefer a simulationist approach to a narrativist approach to gaming.

A fundamental distinction seems to be between preferring to tell a story, and preferring to explore a subject.

And that has been observed repeatedly, over decades of thought on RPG play.

In some respects what remains hardest to understand is how baffling those with one preference can find the other. Sustaining false dichotomies between 'some given quality' and player enjoyment.

 

[Hussar]

Not quite. Why is stuff in DL 5 relevant when PCs would have been dying for 4 modules before the DM ever read that? Half the heroes of the lance could dead by then.

Oh my god.

RTFM

The fourteen modules that make up the Dragonlance saga are meant to be one adventure, same as if you had bought a WotC or Pathfinder AP. IOW, you are meant to have read all of them before you start play. Remember, this is the early 1980's. Organization of material is all new and it's often pretty wonky. But, the point is, DL 5 is very much the campaign primer. Again, which you would know if you actually bothered to read the modules or were interested in them. It's so incredibly frustrating to have to keep answering the same question over and over again instead of actually addressing points of substance. @EzekielRaiden used the DL modules as an example. He was 100% right in his description. You have now spent multiple posts trying to poke holes in something you obviously had no idea about.

Can we please move on now?

 

[Hussar]

Recognising the distinction between rules that do simulate something (simulating rules) from rules that supports play that revolves around some kind of simulation-like activity (simulationist rules) are critical in context of this thread.

I totally agree. The fact that people completely ignore the fact that D&D in no way supports any "simulation-like" activity because at no point do D&D mechanics EVER simulate anything.

Let's work it from the other direction. Let's take something that is 100% simulation. MS Flight Simulator (and various versions thereof). That is a simulation. That is a game that is attempting to recreate as much as possible the feeling of flying an airplane. Every single aspect of that game is in service to that goal. I don't think anyone would disagree here.

Now, if you looked at something like Intellivisions 1980 game Biplanes - that's completely NOT simulating anything. It's not a simulation-like activity any more than Pole Position or Mario Kart is a car racing simulation. It's not even trying to be.

Simulationist rules MUST simulate something. That's the basic definition. How can anything be considered a "simulation-like" activity if it is in no way actually connected to anything that occurs in the game?