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

[clearstream]

The issue here is what D&D is supposed to be simulating.

There are multiple issues, as folk are orienting their arguments to conected but separate topics. That is making progress difficult.

One topic is the attempt to assert what the essence of mechanical simulation (@pemerton's first category) is beyond (and presumably including) games. To make the arguments more digestible I will turn to that in this post and then follow up separately on other topics.

Asking that a simultionist system provide any information about how the result was achieved is strict? Note, again, I'm not talking about how much, or the quality of the information. Just that the system provide any information about how the result was achieved.

That's the difference between simulation and non-simulation.

The foremost quality of a non-game simulation is that the results predict what has and will be observed. Monte-Carlo simulations do that without providing information about how the result was achieved.

Another quality of simulations is to expose sensitivities so that multiple scenarios can be explored from differing assumptions. Integrated assessment models like those used to project global warming are one example. I think this quality matches @Hussar's focus.

A third crucial quality of simulations is that they do those things at a price that can be afforded. A consequence is that sometimes a cheap and usefully accurate simulation is preferred over a more precise but expensive simulation: no simulation is usuable if it comes at a cost that can't be paid.

A non-game simulation, no matter how detailed, that doesn't predict what will be observed with accuracy is a poor simulation. Do all of WHFRP's written game mechanics (as an example) accurately predict what has and will be observed in our real world?

That question brings into the picture my proposed types of facts in TTRPG fiction. There are no prior observed results for type-II facts (things not true in our real world but true in the imagined world) for mechanical simulation to predict. Rather, the results should form the picture that we want to have about imagined world.

(Also I don't understand the Sim-meter comment - all games have secondary worlds therefore, in the common meaning of the world, they have some element of simulation - that's trivially true - it doesn't tell us anything about priorities.)

Per the above, that isn't trivially true. Each game text is mixed: some may be mechanical simulation oriented to type-I (things true in our real world and in the imagined world) or type-III (facets of things true in the imagined world, that are of kinds that match things true in our real world) facts, some mechanical simulation oriented to type-II and type-IV (things not true in our real world but normed as true in kinds of imagined worlds) fictional-facts, and some is not mechanical simulation at all.

It has been said that

The absence of simulationist mechanics in one aspect of the game does not mean that the game lacks any simulationist mechanics.

Does the idea of "priorities" mean that there ought to be some percentage of mechanics that must be simulationist? Is that percentage the same for all possible texts? Perhaps it is something about their positioning in the published work. Regardless, no one has yet proposed how to reliably identify game text that is mechanical simulation from game text that is not. I'll turn to that later as I sadly still have a day job.

 

[Enrahim]

So, by this definition, simulation has nothing to do with the system. It's mostly due to the person running that system? Is that a fair approximation?

No. First of, I avoid using the word "system", as that might for instance include tools a GM has set up for themselves to help with the game beyond ruleset. I think what you want to talk about is what I think is less ambiguously refered to as ruleset. So I do in my post explicitely state I believe certain rules can support or hinder given simulations. So my position is clearly that ruleset is relevant. However just as ruleset cannot be disregarded, for games that heavily rely on GM you cannot disregard the GM.

Note, I'm sorry, but, I don't know what a "one word each game" is.

Each player takes turns saying a single word. The goal of the game is to create a story.

But, yeah, that's why I'm not going to agree here. If being simulationist has nothing to do with the system and is solely the realm of the person running the game, then years of criticising 4e as anti-sim just went down in flames. I was told over and over again that 4e wasn't really D&D because it doesn't fit the simulationist model. But, if, as you say, sim is only whatever the DM does, then, well, any system is sim.

But that is not what I am saying at all

I can play Dread as a heavy sim game. After all, all it takes to run a sim game is choosing the right post hoc justifications after the result is known. That's easy. The "right" post hoc justifications are not only the sole purview of the DM, but, the players are expected to accept any justification without contradiction, since it's solely the DM's role to provide those justifications.

But do the jenga tower support the simulation? Is it irrelevant to the simulation? Or might it complicate/hinder the simulation when it toples in a moment the prescribed effect of that is tricky to justify as a natural consequence of the fictional state? What do you want to simulate anyway? Is it the genre of horror movies? Or arthurian court romance? That is the sort of questionsI think is useful to ask about the ruleset and situation to determine if it is good for a simulation.

You can see why I'm thinking that this is a load of nothingburger. It's meaningless. It's basically saying, "Sim is anything I like. If I don't like it, then it's not sim, since the DM is not providing appropriate post hoc justifications."

No, it is saying sim is whatever is helpful for providing a good simulation. I think that is more meaningful than sim is whatever provide this particular structure of rules regardless of if they might or might not support actual simulations.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Perhaps the social cost is significant (but not overwhelming) for both sides.

There's that excluded middle you were talking about.

As I have said, and as I think history amply demonstrates, those who have power violate the social contract--whatever social contract it may be--on the regular. Those who do not, get punished for even the appearance of violation. Consider how Oscar Wilde paid dearly for his gay relationship with the son of the Marquess of Queensberry....and said son did not. Or any one of a million other "people who claim power don't pay nearly as much of a social cost as people who have little to none".

It's not an excluded middle if you have in fact given evidence that a certain pattern appears.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

But how about people that want absolute power over a fiction?

Then I think those people would be best served by doing the thing that does, in fact, give them absolute power over a fiction: Write a book. Or, I suppose, a film, TV show, play, etc. Video games are probably not a good idea, as players tend to chafe at being reminded about how little power they have over its fiction.

What about people that want someone else to have absolute power over a fiction?

Then I think those people would be best served by engaging in an activity that does, in fact, give someone else absolute power over a fiction they're experiencing: reading a book (or, as noted, watching a movie/TV show/play or other, similar activities).

I find this claim quite extraordinary even without this modifier. With these modifiers (that need to be there if talking about what has been the topic of this thread) I cannot see how such a claim can have any merit at all. Indeed I am worried you might start feeling like an outsider given the number of people here stating a preference for someone having absolute power over their shared fiction.

What does it mean to want to belong? Because from where I'm sitting, wanting to "belong" means, in part, that you accept and integrate the judgment of others, specifically desiring that they find you worthy of recognition and inclusion. It's a desire to integrate with a group external to yourself.

Desiring power over some given domain is entirely the opposite intent. You do not want to integrate with anything. You want to tell others what they must accept being integrated into.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Sometimes even the greatest of skill can't overcome sheer bad luck, and bad luck gets lumped in as one more factor to consider for narration of the skill-check roll.

You could be an expert climber but by sheer bad luck your rope finds that one sharp bit of flint on the whole cliff face that you didn't realize was there, and gets frayed apart just when you need it most. Or you happen to put your entire weight on the only loose rock around, a rock that didn't seem loose when you tested it. Etc.

Most of the time - maybe even almost all the time - you'll get up that cliff no problem. But this time, your luck says 'no'.

HOLD THE HORSES! STOP THE TRAIN!

For 1,000+ pages people had issues with the unfortunate luck of running into a cook when one failed one's lock-pick roll, yet now bad luck is ok for climbing.

So it is obvious the issue was the above example reflected a tool proficiency.
This thread would have been long over if the original example had been the PC fail a climb check and the Fail Forward result being he got to the top of the mountain only to encounter the cook.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Strange? None of your players have taken you up on your offer to mentor them? My best game experience as a player was with one of my former players doing their first shot at DMing.

None of my players are interested in running games--at all. In fact, I'm supremely confident that all of them have some degree of negative interest in running any game, ever.

The one, and only, player who did decide to run games, runs games of a style I have negative interest in playing. (Gritty, high-lethality, morally-ambiguous, low-level survival.) He has given me very kind compliments about my GMing style and how it helped him learn how he prefers to GM, and I have appreciated those comments. He is by far the only one.

Given it is a sellers market it shouldn't be that hard to find a group with some promising aprentice candidates?

Er...no? Not even slightly? That's like saying if I'm hoping to find someone who makes houses like I like them made, it should be easy to sell houses I have built to people interested in making houses. The two interests are fundamentally distinct.

If you can't find a good GM for you, and you have become tired of GMing yourself, be the change and make a good GM for you!

I have not "grown tired of GMing" myself. I'm simply noting that being a GM does absolutely, positively nothing to fulfill my desire to play, and thus telling me "if you want a game like X, just run a game like X!"

This is a new variation on that argument, but it's not ultimately any different in practice. I cannot "make" new GMs. (Which is to say nothing of my moral objections to the very concept!) Running a game does not create new GMs. Presuming that every player is truly a budding GM just waiting for the right mentor to shape them into precisely the kind of GM I want to see is silly at the very best. At worst, it has some very morally-questionable implications.

 

[AnotherGuy]

100% If you were more skilled on that attempt, you would have kept the rope away from that sharp edge. Were you more skilled on that attempt, you'd have recognized the crumbly rock as unsafe and not used it.

If you were more skilled, you would have picked that lock a lot sooner, before the cook made his way to the kitchen.
If you were more skilled on the attempt, you'd have not made so much noise while lock-picking thereby attracting the attention of the perceptive cook.

 

[definiteFreakyFishGuy]

Ummm... I'm confused. @pemerton, in that link you provided, was pointing to how he agreed with my points.

Perhaps I misunderstood the point. But I don't see how what he wrote supports your position.

What I took from the post is that simulationist games aspires to meet a certain level of granularity and realism at a mechanical level, which I found useful. I don't think aspirations are the same as a definition.

You keep pointing to these definitions of simulation without providing the definitions, so, it makes it rather hard to understand your point.

Unless it is a highly technical or uncommon word, I usually find the practice of posting definitions of words from dictionary or wikipedia obnoxious and condescending. If you must have a definition, feel free to pick your favorite on-line dictionary.

My point is that your definition of simulation is not a common one.

A RNG generator to simulate fair die rolls isn't a black box. We know EXACTLY how those rolls are generated. We can examine the algorithm used to generate those die rolls. ((Aren't they frequently based on the clock? Sorry, very much not my area of expertise))

To users, RNGs are black boxes. People use them all the time without knowing the underlying algorithm. Different RNGs have different algorithms underneath.

That said I don't see how knowing RNG's algorithm is relevant here. Your requirement for a simulation is that it must provide some information about the process it is simulating. An RNG's algorithm gives no information about the process of rolling a physical dice. And yet, people use RNG to simulate dice rolls all the time for the results.

I believe your position is that d20-checks in DND is not a simulation. If I used an on-line dice, which uses a RNG to do an athletics check, would you say that because we may be able to look up the RNG's algorithm, that a d20-check using an RNG is a simulation?

EDIT: If I misrepresented your position in any way, I apologize. It is not my intent to do so, and please feel free to point out any errors on my part. I also understand that you are talking to many people at once, and that those conversations might be much more interesting than mine. I will not feel slighted if you decide to ignore this post. Thank you for the conversation.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

With this, I agree.

But I'm not sure of its relevance to player agency.

Consider: You have a world where there have never been any dragonborn (or tieflings, or firbolgs, or whatever "non-Tolkien but widely-played race" option you'd prefer I used), though there are dragons and things like dragon-blooded sorcerers. You--for the sake of this argument--don't have any strong feelings one way or the other about dragonborn, but you know that they have never previously been mentioned within the world you run. You have just had a vacancy open up at your table, because a long-time player is moving away (as I know you basically only play in-person). A prospective new player has been recommended to you by a friend. They're generally a good fit (their overall system preferences are similar to yours, your friend has never had an issue with them, they're willing to work with their GMs to come to mutually-satisfying results, etc.)--but they'd really, really like to play a dragonborn, or at least something reasonably approximating one.

If you run a homebrew world where it is simply, flatly not possible to ever include any mechanical nor aesthetic novelties--where it is simply not possible for new interests to get integreated into that world--then you have cut off a meaningful part of player agency. It is not player-as-character agency, but it is still player agency nonetheless.

If, instead, you run a homebrew world where there is always the external terra incognita, then you can collaborate with this new player to find a result which doesn't do anything you have a problem with, but does achieve the few minimum things they're seeking. Perhaps you don't think it makes sense for there to be a true "species" of dragon-like humanoids in this world, but you're okay with a one-off. Or, if there are dragonborn, since they've never been heard of, you want them to be from somewhere far away--so perhaps the character's parents crash-landed in a ship from across the sea, dying only just after begging the character's adoptive parents to look after their child. Or maybe you're fine with the mechanical features, it's the aesthetic ones, so something that doesn't physically look dragon-like would be fine. Or...etc., etc., etc.

Point being, by having the freedom to dip into the "beyond the horizon" unknowns, you can support the player's agency in playing what most excites their sincere, genuine enthusiasm.

As always, "genuine enthusiasm", as I use the phrase, excludes grubby-hands power-gaming nonsense, among other sorts of things. Someone who just wants to powergame no matter what consequences it might have isn't being a reasonable participant. I'm talking about the things that fire a player's imagination and make them excited to learn what happens next.

If all you're suggesting is that the GM keep parts of the map blank for later infill as ideas occur and the campaign expands, that's great advice. All for it!

If, however, there's a secondary motive of having those blank areas be how-where you-as-player can try to introduce elements not otherwise present in the campaign (e.g. "There's no Tieflings in this part of the world, but there could be in that blank area; so why can't I play one who has made the journey from there to here?") then I stop listening real fast.

I don't understand why. This is one of the most powerful, and most useful, applications of this concept. Why is it so offensive to you to take time to consider what a player feels excited to play? To investigate how their enthusiasm can be supported, rather than rejected?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

My friends are not interchangeable widgets.

Do you demand (expect, require, whatever you like) absolute power over the fiction they're allowed to experience?