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

[Old Fezziwig]

If it ever comes down in price, I'll consider it.

Columbia Games has pretty frequent sales on the books at DTRPG, though they tend to still be more expensive than other games, even on sale.

 

[hawkeyefan]

What matters to me as a player is whether the setting my character is in consistently simulates both a) itself and b) a modicum of reality. By this I mean do its overarching physics (gravity, weather, etc.) work as they do in reality, and do its fantastic eements work consistently within themselves and also within the reality-based simulation. If yes, problem solved; and the "how" doesn't matter.

Sure… but this description is true of many, many games.

Not without looking at them and being able to read them.

What they hope those pictographs say won't have any influence whatsoever.

I never said anything about their hopes. You said you don’t think an expert in their field would have a better theory prior to obtaining first-hand experience than you would be able to come up with.

I think that’s pretty hubristic, and clearly false.

 

[Enrahim]

I'd say the answer to "What does a simulation do?" is more like "It models, as best as it can, how something would happen were it happening in reality."

A flight simulator is just that: a simulator that models, as best it can, how flying works in reality; with the goal of allowing people to practice piloting without all the resulting carnage and mess if they screw it up.

How does the flight simulator do this? By dint of lots of careful programming (analagous to out-of-fiction game mechanics) that within itself has no idea what it's doing or why, it just does it.

That programming then produces output - graphics and numbers - that appear on the screen and to which the user can then react; and it's this output-production phase that's analagous to the DM narrating the how and why of the mechanics-generated result.

Also, your answer above isn't so much defining a simulator; it's defining a predictive model like what weather-forecasting computers produce, and IMO there's a difference between a simulator and a predictive model in that a predictive model - due to its intended purpose - has to move beyond what's already known and in fact does most if not all of its work as educated speculation.

Remove all references to reality and we are close.

A simulator is a model with a time/progression component. The most common thing to attempt to model is reality. But there are other things that can be modeled as well. For instance one my unfulfilled goals of my master thesis was to try to simulate a universe clearly distinct from our in one key aspect. My brother is playing around with making board game AI based on simulating many games several moves ahead.

Edit: Sometimes the model might even be a pure mathematical construct, not really meant to represent anything at all.

 

[AlViking]

I'd say the answer to "What does a simulation do?" is more like "It models, as best as it can, how something would happen were it happening in reality."

A flight simulator is just that: a simulator that models, as best it can, how flying works in reality; with the goal of allowing people to practice piloting without all the resulting carnage and mess if they screw it up.

How does the flight simulator do this? By dint of lots of careful programming (analagous to out-of-fiction game mechanics) that within itself has no idea what it's doing or why, it just does it.

That programming then produces output - graphics and numbers - that appear on the screen and to which the user can then react; and it's this output-production phase that's analagous to the DM narrating the how and why of the mechanics-generated result.

Also, your answer above isn't so much defining a simulator; it's defining a predictive model like what weather-forecasting computers produce, and IMO there's a difference between a simulator and a predictive model in that a predictive model - due to its intended purpose - has to move beyond what's already known and in fact does most if not all of its work as educated speculation.

Even real world simulations like galaxy formation rely on numbers they just plug in for things like dark matter and dark energy. Do either one of those things actually exist, much less do we know how they work? We have no clue but we need to plug those numbers in to make the simulations at least somewhat accurate. Simulations are chock full of "We don't need to know why this happens, it just does."

 

[Maxperson]

Rolemaster is for cowards and communists. Real simulationists play HârnMaster.

(Full disclosure: I love HârnMaster on paper. I still need to run it to see if that holds up after playing it.)

I've never even heard of that one.

 

[Maxperson]

That can't be right. It has been known for centuries that it's turtles all the way down.

 

[pemerton]

I don’t think that whatever an archaeologist might conjecture is more likely. I think the likelihood of his conjecture greatly depends on the nature of his conjecture, whether he is basing it on already established facts or not.

What do you mean by "already established"?

I mean, of course the Cunning Expert is basing their conjecture on the things they know and have learned. That these are not known to the game participants doesn't mean that they're not known to the PC.

(Similarly, my PC in a sword fight with an Orc knows - by way of observation and training - how the Orc is moving and is likely to move, even though I the player don't know these things because no one ever narrates them.)

 

[pemerton]

I think that the runes meaning what they hope for is not affected one way or another by their knowledge of runes.

Obviously. Einstein being more likely than me to be right isn't because he causes the world to be as he thinks it is, but because he knows a lot about the world and that knowledge informs the beliefs and conjectures that he forms.

Likewise a Cunning Expert who has travelled widely knows a lot about dungeons and the strange runes to be found in them, which means that the conjectures that person forms are also more likely to be correct than yours or mine.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Obviously. Einstein being more likely than me to be right isn't because he causes the world to be as he thinks it is, but because he knows a lot about the world and that knowledge informs the beliefs and conjectures that he forms.

Likewise a Cunning Expert who has travelled widely knows a lot about dungeons and the strange runes to be found in them, which means that the conjectures that person forms are also more likely to be correct than yours or mine.

But what the mechanics do, is cause the player's conjecture to be right. That is not what happens in the fiction, and that's why there is a disconnect between the player and character decision space. That is why it is completely different than killing orcs and whatnot.

 

[Thomas Shey]

To me it seems weird to think that a failure or success in something would be due to one specific thing that we need to pin point. It usually is not like that. It is combination of different things.

While generally true, there's usually a primary cause, and that may be important in some cases, especially for those who think in terms of the narrative.