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

[Hussar]

/edit to add

BTW, @clearstream - the way you narrated the falling damage is exactly the same way I would do it. Totally fine. But, I'm not the one claiming that D&D is sim based. Does not bother me in the least that the game world morphs based on die results. That's perfectly fine AFAIC.

But, then again, I'm not interested in trying to pound the square peg of D&D into a round sim based hole.

 

[Lanefan]

And as for (c), not everything needs to be put into a game. The worst and most obvious offender I can think of is FATAL, since ain't nobody need any of that stuff the creator felt the need to add. To a lesser degree, AD&D1e had a big series of tables on random sicknesses and parasites and the like. Not things you might contract up from being attacked by monsters, but simply things you might pick up just because you're an adventurer living in the wilds. Realistic, yes. Did its inclusion actually add to the game in a fun or interesting way? Considering that it was never used in any later edition, I'm guessing not so much.

The inclusion of parasites and diseases was, I think, largely to make rooting around in fetid areas more hazardous and-or force more drain on spell resources. One could argue this is yet another, though minor, "loss condition" present in earlier editions that has since been stripped out.

I'm not sure if 5e even has Cure Disease as a spell any more, but IMO it should; if nothing else it's probably the single most important spell to a stay-at-home Cleric trying to help those under his care, and it often has field use for adventurers as well.

 

[Don Durito]

Setting aside specific rules misapprehensions, there is a fundamental misapprehension that is easy to fall into with D&D that I think can (and ought to) be read to cover the worries people have expressed (about surviving falls and crossbows). I noticed this in another thread where I realized I'd mis-narrated damage in a game session.

The DM Narrates the Results of the Adventurers’ Actions.​

​

Hit Points represent durability and the will to live.​

​

DM decides how to apply the rules.​

If a group want to use D&D for simulation and their world is one in which people shouldn't survive enormous falls then when a high-level fighter takes one, DM narration should say how they survive. Example "You fall, but the bending and breaking limbs of trees you fall through slow you enough that the damage isn't lethal." Or if a character takes care to plunge to a cleared area with no feasible reduction in damage, DM is endorsed to apply massive damage (i.e. instantly lethal).

One understanding of how D&D is used for simulation is to house rule, and that is valid, but to me the basic means provided in the system is straightforward... and like much else in D&D depends on its commitment to DM curation. Examining the individual rules of D&D without taking that into account is equivalent to embarking on play of DW while ignoring all the stuff about agenda and principles. Ignoring how the rules are supposed to be used.

That's only half of the issue though isn't it? You still have the player knowing that according to the rules of the game jumping off the top of a cliff is a viable tactical option.

So at the very least you need the player to play along as well and to play their character as if they don't know that the GM will narrate their miraculous survival.

Which by all means can work - but really when you get down to it, the whole point of bringing in the escalating hit points is not that they prevent Sim play, it's that they reveal that the system's priorities are elsewhere - with progression and advancement and pacing and reward.

As I said before, it's that you wouldn't start from here if simulation is your priority design goal.

 

[Enrahim]

But, if we're using the rules the way they are supposed to be used, and it requires the DM to step in and curate those rules in order to address a more sim approach, doesn't that mean that the rules aren't really supporting a sim approach? In DW, agenda and principles are pretty clearly defined. You are told pretty explicitly how they are supposed to work in the game.

I would cut the quote here, as this is the argument I think is strong in the post (the rest seem to be rehashing things already picked appart).

I think you are here onto something important. The rules of D&D are there to support game. The fameous Gygax quote given a few times in this tread clearly indicated he was willing to sacrifice simulation for game. However the secondary concern appeared to allow simulation.

I think @clearstream points to something that is close to my interpretation. Few if any rules are there to directly support any kind of simulation. They are there to make for a fun game. However sim has not been completely ignored as there are some (atemped) in-fiction anchoring for all the rules. The key idea here is that it isn't the rules but the DM that should do the heavy lifting in terms of producing a good simulation. This is signature FK thinking. This of course got diluted in post Gygax D&D, but this philosophy still has it's fingerprints all over the place, even in 4ed.

So the difference between sim focused FKR and D&D is in my view that D&D added more to rules to support a game experience than modern FKR. The structures and philosophy allowing for sim play in FKR is very present in old school D&D.

 

[clearstream]

But, if we're using the rules the way they are supposed to be used, and it requires the DM to step in and curate those rules in order to address a more sim approach, doesn't that mean that the rules aren't really supporting a sim approach? In DW, agenda and principles are pretty clearly defined. You are told pretty explicitly how they are supposed to work in the game.

Suppose that I liked this line of reasoning and applied it to Apocalypse World. So long as I ignore how the rules are supposed to be used, doesn't that mean they're not really supporting a nar approach? In D&D the principles for DM-curation are stated up front in the PHB and in core text directly addressed to DM.

Very, very little in D&D tells you how to get a most sim result out of the mechanics. And, if the DM is required to massage the world in order to fit the results that the mechanics are giving you, then those mechanics are not simulating the world.

When running D&D as sim, one would take the mechanics to be abstractions representing an imagined reality. That means that the results they give simulate something about the world, and the job of DM is to narrate what. If one were not doing that, then one might not be running D&D as sim.

I've been told repeatedly that the DM should NEVER change the world to fit the results of the mechanics. That's the opposite of sim play.

Do you mean that DM should never inflict damage on a character (change the world) just because a creature hit them and rolled damage dice?

And note, the "fall if you fail by 5" only applies to climbing. What does missing an attack by 5 look like? Is it different from missing by 1? Or missing by 10? What does failing a performance check look like? Why did my performance check fail if I failed by 3 or by 6 or by 12? The rules are completely silent here.

It applies to all ability checks. Examples are provided of trap disarming and persuasion. Missing by 1 or 2 is covered under "Success at a Cost". "Degrees of Success" covers situations where it could matter to know that one roll beat the DC by a greater margin than another, and "Critical Success or Failure" covers nat-20s and nat-1s respectively.

Combat is nuanced in other ways. The hit roll outcomes are critical hit, hit or miss, which translate into damage rolls, damage types, and conditions (status effects). That is further structured through initiative, tempo (action economy), movement and position. A miss, for example, matters through cost to tempo (Daggerheart has a rather nifty way of achieving the same thing.) Many find that sort of information sufficiently detailed to narrate from but evidently mileage varies.

But is your thought that games are inadequately simulative if their rules don't detail results for every rollable increment?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

How can you evaluate a spesific game in a truely context free case? The game under evaluation seem to be context? This thread have touched upon a lot more games than D&D.

By "context-free" I mean "nothing more than what the game itself is". As in, we're not starting from a pre-defined context and then evaluating whether a game fits that pre-defined thing or not. We are instead taking the game based on whatever it purports to do. I'm not really sure why this is confusing, since you seemed to be saying that "context" meant something pre-defined, by giving examples of games that you seemed to think are sim games (such as a "flight sim") as not fitting some hypothetical given context.

I don't think even this level of context have been established for this thread. I am pretty sure runequest, rolemaster, apocalypse world and burning wheel has been some of the bigger ones making an entry.

They have been offered as alternatives to D&D, yes, but several people have been extremely insistent that NO, we are ONLY talking about D&D, you should not bring up these other games other than to draw a comparison. That the thread is not and cannot be "about" anything but D&D because of where it is (the D&D subforum) or what it's labelled ("D&D General").

My post is based on even bigger generality than this thread though.

Okay but if you're intentionally trying to move beyond the scope of...the discussion we're actually having...I'm not really sure what, if anything, I can or even could say.

And even within the scope of D&D crawling a dungeon, there are a quite big width in possible primary focus for simulation based on group interest, each providing different answers to what is helpful vs hindering rules (simulate calustrophobic dread, simulating combat, simulating faction interactions, simulating dungeon ecology, simulating archeology, simulating resource logistics)

What does "primary focus" mean? That seems to me to be enforcing some kind of new extra context that wasn't spelled out in advance. I don't think it's fair to assert that no no no, there's a special extra context we didn't mention before but which is relevant. That needs to be spelled out in advance, and if you're going to assert that it matters, you're going to have to convince others (or at least convince me, if you wish to discuss it with me specifically) that that extra context, those extra requirements, should be baked in.

Without that prior foundation, it frankly seems like you're summoning extra requirements out of the blue, which then make meaningful discussion impossible.

Yes, and no. I think you point to another dimension that make conversation difficult.

I personally don't think so. I think it just means that a significant number of people are, knowingly or not, trying to preserve the great thing they love about an argument they know is flawed, without recognizing that what they want is part and parcel of that flaw. Much as, for example, the logical positivists of the previous century tried in vain to solve the problems with the criterion of verification, though in that case, its defenders ultimately (after about 30-40 years!) admitted that it was a lost cause. (Not that this has meant either philosophers or scientists have truly given it up! They just don't formally use it, even as their work often draws heavily from it.)

I've already proposed my alternative, which I see as cleanly solving this problem without major issues: "Groundedness." This concept recognizes that it is sentiment, not any objective quality, which is of utmost importance (the feeling of groundedness); that even highly fantastical contexts can be acceptable, even laudable, so long as they maintain certain functions (such as self-consistency and "showing their work", if you'll permit a colloquial phrase); and that the exact same context can appear grounded to one player/observer/user and un-grounded to another based on external factors (such as presence of absence of relevant background knowledge, how far/how much one can reason from input data to wider/distant consequences, how much one approves of a particular convention, etc.)

"Groundedness" fully cuts the connection to "realism" that terms like "verisimilitude" are trying to preserve. For that reason, it's not often all that acceptable to that those who want to use "realism", but recognize the faults thereof. In most cases, they want to keep that link; that's very important to them. But the link, the assertion that there is a clear mapping from the world as we know it to the fantasy world we discuss or play in, is the problem. We must instead accept that the link is not to any part of our world, but rather to human perceptions and preferences, some of which are certainly rooted in actual truths about our world, and some of which come from bloody nowhere, or which arise out of ignorance or entirely false "common knowledge" or the like. I've already brought up in this thread both the issues with how people think lockpicking works vs how it actually does, and the fact that Aristotelian physics--which is nearly 100% wrong, and even where it's right, it's usually for the wrong reasons--is a widely-held belief-system by average people, even many who actually did take a physics course that directly contradicts it. These are things where, if they are contradicted, people will often dismiss a work that does so as "unrealistic" (or "unverisimilitudinous" or whatever), even though it IS realistic and DOES resemble the truth of our world.

Trouble is, if you dismiss this thinking you have also dismissed the thinking behind most of D&D sim. You have planted yourself solidly in the kriegspiel lair what simulation is concerned, and from that view D&D is of course an abomination that is completely useless for sim purposes. There is nothing surprisingnor new hei, just an expression of a more than 100 year still unresolved fundamental disagreement. So you here neatly demonstrate the problem I pointed out

Have I? You haven't really demonstrated this. You've just reiterated your assertion that the problem is there. I would need some actual, concrete demonstration that this IS "the thinking behind most of D&D sim". Especially since I'm quite confident that multiple posters in this very thread--at the very least Pedantic and Micah Sweet--are 110% NOT into FKR anything. Pedantic in particular is perhaps the most purist simulationist I've ever known, and while I disagree with them on a great, great many things, I have nothing but respect for the clarity of their vision and the passion with which they seek it.

The goal isn't to produce a experience through game design.

Then...how can it even be a game that is designed at all?

That's what game design IS. You are designing something to achieve some kind of experience. That's...that's ALL game design EVER is.

Reformulating what you quoted from me here: The goal is to produce a simulation that supports many experiences trough game design.

No, I fundamentally and completely disagree. That's like saying that, because tactical combat takes so many forms--archers and swordfighters and axe-wielders, and even within those you have longbowmen and crossbowmen and rapier-wielders and saber-fighters and greatsword-fighters etc. etc.--that it simply cannot be the case that a game can support "tactical combat" as an experience, and is instead trying to support "all the many forms of tactical combat experiences".

The experience you are speaking of is quite simple. It is the desire for a game where a correct understanding of the world's contents, plus correct naturalistic reasoning, produces a high probability of correct conclusions. In this experience, the operative skills rewarded by the rules are seeking out information, discerning good information from bad, picking out relevant information from good, depth and breadth of rational (not just logical!) thought, creativity in applying rational thought to incomplete inputs, and evaluating consequences to correctly determine the causative (not merely correlational) relationships involved.

That is an experience. You are correct that it is not 1:1 correlated with any specific (real, virtual, or imagined) sensory input, because it generalizes across many such inputs. But that doesn't mean it isn't an experience. It's just a primarily cognitive one, rather than a primarily tactile one.

As a result of this fundamental issue, I won't really respond to the rest, as the whole argument depends on this idea that the experience aimed for by sim-y game design is somehow not an experience. It is. It is just not an experience that is directly tactile. It is an experience which supervenes upon tactile experiences. Its requirements say relatively little about what tactile inputs are acceptable; they say rather a lot about what conceptual inputs are acceptable, and those conceptual limitations lead to context-specific tactile limitations. Just as "I want a material that can be polished to a mirror shine" inherently excludes something like pumice or styrofoam or untreated wood, even though nothing has been said about any speciifc material; "polishable" and "has a mirror shine", being properties of texture, necessarily arise out of the physical material used for an object (such as a countertop or a billiard ball), even though they do not specify any particular material (such as marble or resin.)

No. I do not claim conversation is impossible. I just have observed that whenever this conversation arises it tend to get derailed. I actually cannot think of a single time I have seen this topic been discussed without devolving in at least of the manners described. I hope there has been such discussions, though. And my motivation for bringing this problem up is the hope that awareness of the challenges might help produce more fruitful discussions in the future.

(Side note - of course you can prove irrationality of square root of 2 in any number of ways. Start making claims about one of them being more "fundamental" or "elegant", and watch how the mathematicians erupt into a flame war. Yes, I have witnessed the equivalent of this)

Okay, but that pokes a huge hole in your argument from before. Your claim is--was?--that if two people come to the same conclusion for different reasons, they necessarily disagree with one another. (With an implication that these disagreements are far more important and fundamental than any other relevant fact.) That is not true; the sqrt(2) example shows so.

Now, as you say, if you start adding in additional requirements, then of course you can trigger an argument. Particularly when those additional requirements are inherently a matter of taste, such as "fundamentality" in an abstract field like mathematics, or "elegance" which I think all of us can agree is a highly subjective judgment. But such additional requirements are not really what is being discussed here, and you would have a pretty high burden of proof to show that these additional requirements/expectations are what truly matters, with the foregoing stuff being mostly incidental or merely preamble to the real argument.

(Total aside: Personally, I'm most fond of the proof which shows that by assuming there must be a ratio of coprime integers p/q=sqrt(2), then it is necessarily the case that at least one of them is neither even nor odd. But as "even integer" and "odd integer" are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive, if assumption A results in the conclusion that some integer cannot be even and cannot be odd, then assumption A must be false.)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The fourth one might want to use the word "conflict" rather than "combat", to allow for settings or games where social and-or environmental elements provide the challenges rather than foes to be physically fought and defeated.

While I think that that is a laudable goal...a frank evaluation of every edition of D&D that has ever been published makes it quite clear where the mechanical design priorities lie.

Social things are given almost no attention, with barely more than spackle. Combat, in every edition--even Gygax's, where conflict really was meant to be a sometimes food!--has far more extensive and engaging rules. The distinction you're laying out, and on which different editions of D&D differ quite strongly, is whether combat is punished (and how harshly), rewarded (and how richly), or left ambiguous (and to what degree).

Well, that's kind of exactly what I want: in effect, Earth with extras. Lots and lots of extras, maybe, but still Earth with extras.

But that's the problem. It isn't "Earth with extras". It never is. That's the whole point. We exploit a lot of tricks so people won't notice it, but that's the fundamental gap.

Or, put another way, a fantasy setting that could, in its universe, both a) include Earth and b) have a consistent and viable explanation for the physics of why magic works on the fantasy world(s) but not here; such that someone standing on the fantasy world might look at a specific dim star among many other dim stars in the night sky and in fact be looking at our Sun.

But this is simply not possible. Not without blatant, flagrant, ahem, extraction from one's gluteal cleft. It's a lovely idea. It simply does not, cannot, happen. The handwaving is not just always there, it is an essential, irreducible part of the process.

This is why I emphasize "groundedness" rather than "realism". Because it isn't about being true to anything. It isn't about anything actually in our reality. It is about truthiness: the feeling of being truth-like, utterly without regard to facts. Hence why, as I've said before, the way D&D players, even extremely strongly simulationist ones (which I would say you are not quite that simulationist, but you're closer to it than to any other preference; in its neighborhood, one might say), have a completely and utterly false idea of how lockpicking actually works. An idea that someone fails to pick a lock, not because they lacked the time to do it, not because they were too inefficient, but because they genuinely lack the understanding to pick the lock; that the lock theoretically could have been picked by them, with the tools they have, but they're simply too ignorant of the necessary skills. That is simply, flatly, not how lockpicking works, here on Earth--especially because nearly all locks that admit a given tool are pickable in exactly the same ways, it's just a matter of how efficient a person is at picking it. If you have the tools and the fundamental knowledge to try, success is functionally inevitable....if you have enough time. Time is, essentially always, the deciding factor--not ability, presuming that it was at least theoretically possible to pick in the first place (which had been stated repeatedly to be the case).

Or, as I referenced in my previous reply to Enrahim, the problem of Aristotelian physics being how people think the world works. Experts in both psychology and pedagogy have studied this extensively (this was part of my education courses I took for my tutor certifications), and clearly demonstrated that the average person, who lacks direct specific STEM education, holds something either identical or almost identical to the Aristotelian model of physics, and that model is dead wrong on almost all counts, and even when it's right, it's usually wrong about why something is the case. E.g. "objects slow down naturally" is false. Objects in motion stay in motion until acted on by an outside force; it just so happens that in most Earthly environments, those forces are air resistance and contact friction. Heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects; this is false, objects experience equal acceleration (=same falling speed for same amount of time falling) regardless of their mass, because all that matters is how much the Earth pulls on them. Hence, most people believe reality works in ways that it objectively, provably doesn't, and may respond rather poorly to works which insist on using the actually-correct ideas, thinking them "unrealistic" when the fact is they are realistic, and the reader's beliefs are not.

'Cause that's what makes this fun: not just coming up with these fantasy worlds but imagining, in a sci-fi way, that's they're actually out there and all we Earthlings have to do is find a way to get to them.

I mean, I guess? Not really what makes them appeal to me. I don't need the United Federation of Planets or Conan or Barsoom or lightsabers to be "really real" in some way out there in the universe for them to matter to me. What matters to me is whether the contents of these worlds are worthy of my attention, and whether they produce situations where either the outcome is unknown and I would like to find out what it is, or the outcome is known, and I would like to learn the specific details it will take. (E.g., if the plot of a book is understood to be "will they save the world?" the answer is almost always yes, because ending the world is far too costly for the author to really threaten it at all seriously; instead, such stories should be understood as "what will it take for these people to save the world?" That's a question that can have many, many different answers--and finding out which one is the correct answer stands a good chance of being interesting.)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

One cognitive model of fiction argues (from evidence) that people maintain an internal representation of the real world, an internal representation of the imagined world, and a meta-representational layer that among other things keeps track of which is which.

Given that picture

W is the set of facts fitting the real world model​

W' is the set of fictional facts fitting the imagined world model​

A candidate fact F can be counted "realistic" if it is true in W' or if not in W' nevertheless true in W​

Seeing as this is a cognitive rather than scientific model, inaccuracies are tolerated according to norms (the "folksy common sense" a poster once used to describe this sort of realism)​

​

That this type of truth-telling is covered by possible worlds theory helps to see that there is an additional quality - "accessibility" - that tracks whether W and W' are sufficiently similar to make this sort of comparison. One could imagine another possible world - W'' - and that it could be the case that some F' was true of W' or if not in W' nevertheless true of W''. (Although that wouldn't fit the cognitive model, which maintains worlds that are "accessible" from one another.)

I think this addresses your objections - that there should be both dragons (a fact whose truth is established through its membership in W') and let's say apples (a fact whose truth is established through its membership in W.) And this isn't something uniquely describing imaginary worlds in games, it extends to fiction. Even dropping the cognitive model aspects of it, the possible worlds description still holds.

But doing this immediately admits that what is in question is not the actual, real contents of the real world. What matters is the "real world model", emphasis added. Or, as I would put it, the real-world-model. Because the real-world-model need not actually have much connection to the real world whatsoever!

That's what my lockpicking example and the known (from evidence) prevalence of Aristotelian physics demonstrate: people often have real-world-models that are just, flatly, wrong. Not even "well it's a matter of interpretation" or "that's an obscure fact only an expert could know" or "that's a very rare event, so wrong beliefs aren't so weird". The average non-STEM-trained person genuinely does believe that heavy objects fall faster than lighter objects. That belief is simply false. It is a model that is in open defiance of the real world.

But what will matter to such a person is conformance to the real-world-model, not conformance to the real world.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Trouble is, if you dismiss this thinking you have also dismissed the thinking behind most of D&D sim. You have planted yourself solidly in the kriegspiel lair what simulation is concerned,

I do not understand how you got from FKR is simply irrelevant to game design sims because they are aggressively anti-rules to "You have planted yourself solidly in the kriegspiel lair what simulation is concerned,".

and from that view D&D is of course an abomination that is completely useless for sim purposes.

There are a whole lot of D&D 3.X fans who would disagree with you and were using this as a club in the anti-4e edition wars. (I find their case wrong; I cut my RPG teeth on GURPS but they definitely are a large camp)

The goal isn't to produce a experience through game design. Reformulating what you quoted from me here: The goal is to produce a simulation that supports many experiences trough game design.

No game produces "an" experience through game design unless the scenario is a railroad and comes in the box. Even My Life With Master doesn't and neither do Grant Howitt One Pagers. (Ten Candles might)

 

[clearstream]

But doing this immediately admits that what is in question is not the actual, real contents of the real world. What matters is the "real world model", emphasis added. Or, as I would put it, the real-world-model. Because the real-world-model need not actually have much connection to the real world whatsoever!

Yes, provided that the real-world model must be connected enough to the real world to successfully navigate it, e.g. to know not to put one's hand into a blazing furnace.

That's what my lockpicking example and the known (from evidence) prevalence of Aristotelian physics demonstrate: people often have real-world-models that are just, flatly, wrong. Not even "well it's a matter of interpretation" or "that's an obscure fact only an expert could know" or "that's a very rare event, so wrong beliefs aren't so weird". The average non-STEM-trained person genuinely does believe that heavy objects fall faster than lighter objects. That belief is simply false. It is a model that is in open defiance of the real world.

But what will matter to such a person is conformance to the real-world-model, not conformance to the real world.

This isn't quite right: what matters is that there are two-models and to put it simply F is "realistic" if F is realistic in either of them.

The picture is complicated by the possibility that player A's W might differ from player B's W, and likewise their W's. With regard to their W models (of real world) It's not uncommon for A to point out that objects in a vacuum fall at the same rate (assuming play is for some reason in a vacuum, or that the objects are aerodynamically undifferentiated) and the matter to be settled through consulting some point of reference. Having someone at the table who can establish that F is realistic in W' (the imagined world) is one means of settling any similar disputes regarding their W' models. Seeing as W' is privileged over W, the latter power can be decisive.