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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 9706128" data-attributes="member: 22779">I got asked if I thought simulation doesn't exist in RPG's.  And it did remind me that I have tried to drift D&D into sim territory in the past.  I'm a HUGE age of sail nerd.  I LOVE the idea of piracy and ship combat in D&D.  I SOOOO want to do it.So, back in the 3e days, I picked up a FANTASTIC book (one of my absolute favorite 3pp books and it's companion book is great too) called Broadsides!!  It's a very detailed book about ships starting from about 13th century to about 18th century ships.  The combat rules are extensive and very, very deep in sim territory.  Tacking against the wind, wind strength, movement, different actions taken during ship combat, different scales to use depending on the distance between ships, it's a sim player's dream.  Fantastic stuff.My players absolutely hated it.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" />See, the problem was, while I ADORE sim play, I'm largely alone in that.  The players wanted more cinematic style mechanics where simulation take a FAR back seat.  So, we fast forward a decade or so, and during my somewhat short lived Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign, and then later during our Spelljammer campaign, ship combat became pretty much 99% cinematic.  Skip over most of the stuff to get down to the (more or less) straight up D&D combat.But, that's a perfect example of how D&D fights back against simulation.  You look at the ship combat rules in Ghosts of Saltmarsh, and it's pretty much cinematic.  There's very little simulation going on there at all.  Because it's a heck of a lot faster to play out and, unless you're a big ship nerd like me, player just don't care.  They came to play D&D, not Tabletop Naval Wargames.  <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="🤷" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f937.png" title="Person shrugging    :person_shrugging:" data-shortname=":person_shrugging:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" />Can you drift D&D into more sim based approaches?  Sure?  But, the system is not doing you any favors here.</blockquote>

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