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

[Umbran]

I don't think this is really consistent with a simulationist approach, is it? Or the idea that we should avoid abstractions that are at odds with "diegesis".

Some folks may be mistaking the mechanics for the simulation. The actual simulation is the result.

Preferences that get in the way of the result being a good simulation are at odds with a simulationist approach.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Some folks may be mistaking the mechanics for the simulation. The actual simulation is the result.

Preferences that get in the way of the result being a good simulation are at odds with a simulationist approach.

I would say the same is true of Gamism, or Narrativism. Preferences that get in the way of the result being a good game/narrative are at odds with the Gamist/Narrativist approach.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Some folks may be mistaking the mechanics for the simulation. The actual simulation is the result.

Preferences that get in the way of the result being a good simulation are at odds with a simulationist approach.

This is just one approach. I've seen (particularly round the 4e edition wars) people arguing explicitly and passionately in favour of process simulation over the actual outcomes. It's what the entire "disassociated mechanics" argument is based on.

For that matter when it comes to results most good narrative games from Fate to Apocalypse World give pretty good results - but most self proclaimed sim fans in my experience really dislike Fate.

Of course this all ties in to my reading of GNS that Ron Edwards understood N because it's what he wanted, understood G and was trying to get people to see it as cool even if not their thing - and just lumped everything else under S and while he was correct in some cases in his explanation S is a massively overstuffed category.

 

[AlViking]

Have you ever played DW or any other PbtA game? Or even read both DW and 5e? Because DW (for all I don't rate it as a good PbtA game) is a toolbox game and D&D is an instruction manual - with the core rules being multiple 300 page books of instructions.

You know what makes a toolbox a toolbox? The fact it contains tools; without tools you just have a box. Rule 0 or "just do what you want" isn't a tool, it's a platitude. You know what are tools? Hard and soft moves. Things like "deal damage", "turn their move back on them", "take away their resources", "split them up", "announce impending danger", etc.

D&D only explicitly includes one of the tools DW includes (deal damage). So yes it has a hammer - and a couple of other tools like a hex screwdriver. But what it mostly has is instructions and kits for things like the Invisibility Spell with its explicit components (v, s, and an eyelash encased in gum arabic or a spell focus) and assembly parts (like all monsters having all six stats). This isn't a "toolkit". D&D in the WotC era is interior design using the IKEA catalogue, complete with the instructions required to assemble each piece of furniture. And the only mainline version of D&D that has come with tools beyond a hammer and a hex screwdriver since 1e has been 4e with Skill Challenges and what was eventually boiled down to the MM3 On A Business Card
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PbtA games have the MC follow the rules because when you are playing with tools like circular saws and belt sanders and have other people around you following the rules is an extremely good idea. For flat pack furniture it isn't half as necessary.

There are 15 conditions listed in the PHB that can be applied instead of damage. Meanwhile they break down cause and effect at a more granular level than what I've seen in PbtA games, which means that D&D doesn't need named moves in the same sense that PbtA games do. Neither is better or worse, it's just a different approach.

You don't have to agree with my interpretation of the tone of the rules, it's just my impression. Since I quoted the text above from the SRD it should be obvious that I have read the rules. I've also watched actual play streams. The SRD makes it quite clear that the GM must follow the rules and much of the text comes off as instruction manual that is quite prescriptive to me.

But they consider it a new move "When you go alone into the Unhallowed Halls" for "You might want to create moves to reflect the effects of some particular threat..." to me indicates a different approach. So yes, you can create a new move or make other changes because people do that for all sorts of games all the time. But I don't need a "When you swim in the dark waters" move, I just use the tools I already have to resolve uncertainty.

I have very few house rules for my D&D game that actually change anything because I personally don't need them. Obviously other people have different preferences and there's a ton of customizations done for D&D by third parties as well.

 

[Pedantic]

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.

Am I? I'm mostly concerned with players being able to know/do things without being at the mercy of the dice or the GM, and being able to make impactful decisions to achieve their goals. This requires impartial and trustworthy mechanics and that's most easily achieved by laying out a detailed set of systems and models.

I've interestingly been cast as gamist lately, though that's also pretty fraught.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I would say the same is true of Gamism, or Narrativism. Preferences that get in the way of the result being a good game/narrative are at odds with the Gamist/Narrativist approach.

It tends to be pretty obvious if something is actively interfering with a Gamist preference, though (and whatever the theoretical preference, more than half of the shots you see taken at mechanics is because they've failed one or more people's expectations on a game level in some fashion).

 

[Thomas Shey]

This is just one approach. I've seen (particularly round the 4e edition wars) people arguing explicitly and passionately in favour of process simulation over the actual outcomes. It's what the entire "disassociated mechanics" argument is based on.

Well, there's an emotional connection that can't entirely be escaped from.

(You also have to deal with a game system that's output is, while not incorrect exactly, producing two little information for the desired case. On a certain level, a game who's combat causes casualties with the frequency and speed someone expects is doing the basic simulationist job, but if its telling you too little about what's happening along the way it still may be unsatisfactory).

For that matter when it comes to results most good narrative games from Fate to Apocalypse World give pretty good results - but most self proclaimed sim fans in my experience really dislike Fate.

Though there can be multiple reasons for that; I found adjucating if given character Aspects applied excessively stressful.

Of course this all ties in to my reading of GNS that Ron Edwards understood N because it's what he wanted, understood G and was trying to get people to see it as cool even if not their thing - and just lumped everything else under S and while he was correct in some cases in his explanation S is a massively overstuffed category.

Pretty close to my own feeling.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

Still IMO a valid goal to work toward in one's world/universe building, no?

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.

Well, I disagree, but so be it.

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).

The cynic in me thinks the locks are all designed to be pickable in the same way in order to make life convenient for those who need to, in a non-criminal way, do the picking.

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.

And this comes down to a question of accuracy vs entertainment. It's the same argument I hear when I use pop-culture Xena-like versions of the Greek deities instead of the historically-accurate versions; some say I should use the historically-accurate versions out of a sense of realism, where I prefer the pop-culture versions for the sheer entertainment value.

And if Aristotelian physics is good enough to explain why we see what we see on a daily basis in reality, it's probably also good enough for 99+% of game-related purposes. It's exceedingly rare that we'd ever need to care in-game that in a vacuum a feather would fall as fast as an anvil; what we need to worry about far more often is how external factors such as wind affect something or someone that's falling like a feather becuase they've been hit with a Featherfall spell, or whether that Ring of Free Action that allows one to move unimpeded also causes one to be in free-fall when stepping off a boat into deep water.

There are in-game occasions when lack of friction becomes a challenge to overcome - one famous bit in White Plume Mountain leaps to mind - but they're rare, and pretty easy to figure out.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Am I? I'm mostly concerned with players being able to know/do things without being at the mercy of the dice or the GM, and being able to make impactful decisions to achieve their goals. This requires impartial and trustworthy mechanics and that's most easily achieved by laying out a detailed set of systems and models.

I've interestingly been cast as gamist lately, though that's also pretty fraught.

If you're going to be bucketed, you seem to fit there better than the other two, for much the same reason I characterize myself there (though you seem farther down that road than I am.)

 

[Lanefan]

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.

If I take a brick and a feather upstairs and drop them out the window over and over again, it's almost a dead-shot certainty the brick will hit the ground first every time, with the only exception being if the feather somehow got caught under the brick on release and dragged down with it. The "why" is of course because the feather meets more air resistance and thus has a much lower terminal velocity, but for these purposes that's irrelevant: what matters is what's actually observed by whoever watches those two things fall.

In-game, I think we universally assume our game settings come with breathable air, thus the brick-and-feather observation would hold true there as well; which for game-play and narration purposes is all we ever need unless there's suddenly no air - at which point everyone has far bigger things to worry about than how fast different things fall to the ground!