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

[Maxperson]

I just don't see any reason why being flexible shouldn't be the norm.

You don't see a ton of people who play exactly one type of video game, or one type of board game. TTRPGs shouldn't be any different.

That really depends on what is going on in your life. When I was younger, I played many more RPGs than I do now, because I had a lot more time to play. Now I barely have time to play D&D. Couple that with 4 other people who have limited time, and my group just sticks to D&D.

Video games are different because we can for the most part play those solo, stopping and starting as time permits.

 

[Enrahim]

Actually, no rules in D&D tell you how far you fell. No matter what, you hit the bottom at the end of the round according to the rules. You can fall ten feet or ten thousand feet and you will take exactly the same amount of time to hit the bottom, and you will ALWAYS hit the bottom before 6 seconds.

Now, I agree, this is utterly ridiculous. But, that is what the rules say.

Do the rules say that? A good thing D&D has an almighty GM that can override such ridiculousness when desired! Here is a free D&D suplement:

Faling from great height.
If falling more than 500ft the character declares at the end of their turn how far they want to fall - between 500 and 1000ft. If this failing causes them to hit the ground, they then take damage as per the normal falling rules.

You are welcome, your resident physicist.

(Edit: numbers chosen to be easy to remember, while not being ridiculously far from real world corresponding numbers)

 

[Neonchameleon]

So you don't think people can have different careers or become better at their chosen career? Because the biggest complaint I hear is, once more, an issue of granularity not of a concept being emulated.

I think that 95% of D&D adventurers have the same career: adventurer. And we're dealing with a small start up here not a mega corp; everyone pitches in.

Now the class system in Apocalypse World makes sense; your class is your role within the world so you are The Gang Boss or The Cult Leader or The Lone Killer - and importantly you can both learn from other classes and can change your class under certain circumstances.

But don't try to tell me that your average functional adventurer learns nothing about stealth from working with an expert and nothing about Arcana from the wizard's mutterings round the camp fire. And it's utterly ridiculous that the barbarian is still at Religion -1 after being rewarded by multiple gods for diving into the Demonweb Pits and evicting Lolth from her domain having helped use the Blood War as a distraction.

D&D's class system is ludicrous because they don't have different careers.

 

[pemerton]

The class system can fit into a sim agenda, particularly if the classes have enough options available to represent many different ways to accomplish one's goals. In my view, class features feed into the fiction all or nearly all the time, and if they don't a little adjustment can make that happen.

One of my favorite things in the world is watching stories critically with an eye towards translating the narrative, setting and character into game terms. I can look at a character kicking butt with a variety of weapons and a distinct, training-based style and say to myself, "that's a fighter". I can see a character casting a spell and speculate how magic works in that setting. Heck, I can see a character getting hit by a monster and thrown across the room and try to figure out the combat system. More importantly I want to do those things.

IMO, all of that is sim.

Just focusing on what you say about characters:

(1) I do that - and have done that - with Marvel Heroic RP. I have built Marvel heroes using the system. I have built superheroes dreamed up by my kids using the system. I have built Gandalf using the system: Middle Earth/LotR RPGing using Cortex+ Heroic . So I think this sets a very low bar for "sim".

(2) There are RPGs that don't stat out characters by reference to their abilities in the way you envisage in your post: Agon and In A Wicked Age are two examples that occur to me. Apocalypse World to quite an extent also. But in those systems, the things you are talking about still happen because game participants imagine and narrate them - just as the GM does vis-a-vis the setting and the situation in your game. So I don't think it is necessary for "sim".

 

[Thomas Shey]

I mean, it's hard but I think it's doable. (Although everyone has different standards as to how much mechanical complexity they expect.)

That's more or less what I meant. I don't think any character generation system I'm liable to find satisfactory is going to be simple, at least at that end (and detailed character generation generally requires at least some nuance in the game system to support it; I also consider randomness in character generation generally a plague) so the question is how typical I am.

 

[pemerton]

Or you could address me about my post. And not hold people who like an overarching point as responsible for explaining my lack of nuance.

The post in question was a repudiation of the idea that “in-character thespianism” was ever the singular or even dominant focus of the hobby. It was made in direct response to the post making that very claim. Even if you interpret Traveller differently, that doesn't change my argument, it actually reinforces it. It does so by reinforcing the idea that there was a significant number of different styles and play patterns even back in the 80s and 90s.

I neither agreed nor disagreed with your post.

I simply pointed out that Traveller has a feature that you didn't mention. As best I recall, in 45 years I've never seen anyone else but me mention it.

Rolemaster likewise has a crucial avenue for player metagame decision-making, in the resolution of melee combat, that both Traveller and RuneQuest lack. And the only person I've ever seen mention that is me.

That doesn't mean that Traveller or RM are not systems designed or suitable to support predominantly sim play.

 

[pemerton]

Did you? It was a very long post full of quotes from someone whose opinions actively make me angry, so I admit I skimmed it. Sorry.

Is this supposed to me my fault? Or prove that I'm a "sim hater"? Or what?

I'm not really sure what your goal is for this thread, if you're not interested in talking about some of the regularly observed features of D&D play, and understanding what cultural, systemic etc factors give rise to them.

 

[pemerton]

To be fair, if there's a diagetic reason the character doesn't fear crossbows then it absolutely is a sim agenda.

Yes. @Don Durito said as much. But what is that "diegetic" reason, in D&D play?

 

[pemerton]

I've been in this situation though (a long time ago) with D&D The NPC had a crossbow pointed at the PC. The player decided they didn't care. The GM was pissed of at what he considered metagaming by the player who couldn't know the crossbow wouldn't kill him. He ruled that the crossbow would in fact kill the PC and asked the player if they wanted to reconsider their action.

I think you can imagine how that went.

That sort of conflict can be fairly straightforwardly analysed:

simulationism, in foregrounding the fiction itself as the thing to be prioritised and enjoyed, can foreground these various elements, but not all of them at once. A game like RM, and the sim-ish aspects of Burning Wheel, foreground the fiction: PC build (and how this models or exhibits the fiction), and action resolution (and how this models or exhibits the interplay between in-game situations and character attributes and actions), and reward (eg BW has elaborate rules for how using skills and abilities, and/or practising skills and abilities, improves those skills and abilities).

Whereas the sim-aspect of sandbox-y D&D is much more about setting, and how it feeds into situation. (As I posted about a long way upthread.)

And here's one reason why you can't prioritise all these elements all at once: if you foreground system, then - of necessity - setting and even situation will to some extent escape your grasp, because you can't control the impact that system will have on it. Conversely, if you foreground setting or situation as that component of the fiction to receive "elevated appreciation" then you are necessarily going to have to subordinate system, as it cannot be allowed to disrupt the setting or situation that is the object of appreciation.

This is another tension that manifest quite commonly in D&D play and discussion about it: see every discussion ever, for instance, about "fudging" or "rulings" or the like to make sure that "the fiction" turns out as it is supposed to.

So anyway, there are some thoughts on simulationism in D&D.

There's a reason that this is a known thing that happens in D&D play - nobody is shocked to read that example of play - whereas it doesn't come up in other RPGs.

 

[pemerton]

How many times have we seen TV or movies show someone with a gun to their head that then spins around, distracts or somehow otherwise avoids getting killed? The game simply abstracts that scene out.

The character in the fiction doesn't know that they are in no danger. The player in D&D does know that. Hence, not "diegetic".

EDIT:

It really depends what kind of fiction you're looking to emulate at the table.

See just above: it's not only about genre emulation. The status of hp as sim/"diegetic" depends upon what bits of it are part of the fiction, and what are not.

Superman's invulnerability is part of the fiction: statting up Superman with masses of defensive ability, resilience to injury etc is "diegetic".

Batman or Conan' invulnerability is a story-telling conceit: statting up Batman or Conan with masses of defensive ability, resilience to injury, etc is not "diegetic". It's metagame.