D&D 5E Realism and Simulationism in 5e: Is D&D Supposed to be Realistic?

[MGibster]

How is it possible to state that D&D is not realistic but also that it needs to be somewhat ground in reality? The first clause implies a binary while the second requires that there not be.

Because people are complicated and so are our stories and our preferences.

So this applies to many works of fiction throughout a wide variety of genres. Let's take zombie entertainment like The Walking Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead, or even Juan of the Dead. Each of these stories involve a very fantastic element, namely that the dead rise and feast upon the flesh of the living. There is no plausible scenario where the dead can be ambulatory, react to stimuli, or take a bite out of their neighbors when they're feeling peckish. It's simply impossible. But you have to accept this premise in order to enjoy zombie entertainment. And I know some people who don't enjoy it simply because they can't accept the premise. So there's the binary part.

For most zombie entertainment, other than animated cadavers, the world works pretty much the same as ours. This is where the sliding scale comes in. Just because we accept the impossible premise that the dead can walk doesn't necessarily mean we'll accept other fantastical elements. If Rick Grimes can punch a hole through a zombie's skull with his bare fist or jump from five stories up without hurting himself that's too much for me. And on the surface that seems silly. If I can accept walking corpses why can't I accept someone punching holes in skulls with their fists or jumping 50 feet with no problems?

And the truth is, what I can accept is highly dependent on genre. When I watched the Avengers, I don't complain about the Hulk making conservation of mass a joke, that Captain America's shield does not obey the laws of physics, or that Hawkeye and Black Widow can make meaningful contributions to a team that includes Thor on it. And likewise, I can accept a lot of things in fantasy. But it still needs to have some elements that are grounded in reality, or, as I prefer, the impression of realism for me to enjoy.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Because many people find playing in a world that makes no logical sense at all and/or has no correlation to the real world to be not fun?

Which RPG makes “no logical sense” and has “no correlation to the real world”? I want to play it.

 

[Lyxen]

Which RPG makes “no logical sense” and has “no correlation to the real world”? I want to play it.

Toon.

Edit: corrected, and with the link.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Which RPG makes “no logical sense” and has “no correlation to the real world”? I want to play it.

I was responding to someone who seemed to think such games existed.

 

[Oofta]

How realistic can a simulation be? How realistic do we want it to be? The game needs to streamline reality in order to run reasonably smoothly at the table.

Take HP as an example. It's crap. You're perfectly fine until you go unconscious. But it's also easy to grasp and simple to implement. Playing a death spiral would be more realistic but would be more overhead and probably not as much fun for most people based on how widely it's been implemented in other games. Even in video games where the math could be done on the fly, many games follow the same paradigm.

We can justify it after the fact however we want. That blow that would have killed you at 1st level? At 10th level you've learned to roll with the punch or deflect it just enough that it only leaves a minor bruise. That works for me, because I can still visualize what's happening, it can still feel realistic in an action movie sense to me.

In other words, in most cases D&D is as realistic as I want to be. Because the other side of this is how would you model things if you want them to be more realistic? Consider armor for a moment. Any armor that is going to be effective is probably going to have a gambeson underneath (quilted armor in D&D terms) to absorb the impact of blows. Even "leather" or the studded leather armor that never existed would have had a base layer. So saying you can swim and galivant around the jungle with so called light armor but the moment you put on chain you sink like a rock and anything over room temperature kills you is not for me. I don't have any clue how hard it would be to swim in chain mail, although I did watch a video once of an older gentleman that threw on chain armor and went for a swim in a lake. He said it wasn't an issue, that the gambeson acted like a flotation device.

In other words, how can we judge realistic without having some basic testing and verification? Can I sleep in properly fitted plate armor? Heck if I know, I've never tried. I have slept on rocky ground with no padding to no ill effect, if the armor is well fitted I don't see why it would be that much different. That and plate armor should be significantly better protection, not just slightly better but that's another story.

There are always going to be compromises, it's always going to be a balancing act.

 

[dragoner]

Years ago, someone on a another board, Traveller's Citizens of the Imperium stated "It snaps my suspenders of disbelief" -Hans Ranke, which was a quite humorous way of saying you can stretch out the un-realistic qualities, until it becomes too much, and then it snaps back in a most annoying manner.

 

[Xetheral]

The Alexandrian's critique of "dissociated mechanics" completely ignores the fact that attack rolls are dissociated.

Could you clarify why you think so? To my understanding the definition of a dissociated mechanic is when the player's decision-making process can't be equated to the character's decision-making processes. Under my understanding, the attack mechanics would be associated because both the player and the character are deciding to try to hurt a foe. The attack mechanics (including the attack roll) then abstractly resolve that decision. By contrast, Action Surge would be a dissociated mechanic, because the player's decision to use Action Surge revolves around weighing present necessity against the opportunity cost of being unable to use the ability later, a consideration of which the character is entirely unaware.

There's definitely room for subjectivity regarding which mechanics are associated and which are dissociated. I'm curious whether we're reaching different conclusions about attack rolls because of such a subjective difference in how we frame the OOC/IC decisions to attack, or whether we're using different definitions of "dissociated mechanics".

Meaning, "realism" etc. are very, very frequently just rational-sounding covers for "this mechanic is new (to me) and I don't care for it so IT'S INHERENTLY WRONG AND MUST GO." (Usually the "to me" is implicit or even unneeded, but I'm leaving it in for comprehensiveness.)

I'm completely onboard with your point that using subjective disagreements about realism to make objective claims of "inherent wrongness" is problematic. But I don't see any problem with making openly subjective claims about one's preferred level of "realism" and advocating for the game to accommodate one's preferences.

No, 5e is not "realistic." D&D is not realistic, and never has been. People that argue that it is, or was, have gotten tangled up in at least one of the layers of this problem, though not necessarily any of the three I've listed here. (In very, very rare cases they might get past all three, but I find that pretty unlikely since the above covers everyone I've ever met or spoken with about the issue--again, including myself).

I have an additional question regarding the scope of your conclusion:

My opinion is that 5e, taken as a whole, is sufficiently "realistic"/verisimilitudinous/etc to satisfy my personal preferences. There are certainly aspects of the system that I wish were more "realistic"/verisimilitudinous than they are, but there aren't enough if them to spoil my enjoyment of the system.

Could you please clarify whether you intend your conclusion above to be broad enough to cover subjective opinions like mine, and therefore that you think I'm getting tangled up in one of those layers (or an unspecified layer)? Or do your intend your conclusion to be narrow enough to focus only on objective claims and thus not apply to subjective opinions like mine?

Thanks!

 

[Maxperson]

Reverse Gravity is a spell that makes creatures and objects in a small area "fall" upwards. I don't see that it has any relationship at all to the force that explains why moons orbit planets and planets orbit suns. In fact, the whole way the magical effect is describes seems to imply that there is no such thing as universal gravitation, and rather than all there is is a tendency of things to fall to earth if dropped or otherwise unsupported. The spell reverses that tendency.

Likewise, these all seem to us the word "gravity" to refer to a tendency of things to fall to earth, not universal gravitation.

It literally mentions the laws of gravity. Not just falling. The LAWS of gravity. That's a reference to the whole enchilada.

 

[Lyxen]

It literally mentions the laws of gravity. Not just falling. The LAWS of gravity. That's a reference to the whole enchilada.

Yes, moreover, with the technological and scientific level of development usually available in D&D worlds, "day-to-day" is the only application of gravity that most people of the world are confronted to. There is no reason for them to even think that the same gravity would affect heavenly bodies, if that is even the case, because for example Spelljammer mentions that the gravity generated by a planet and a ship are different, but it does not say that the motion of the planets is regulated by newtonian mechanics, for example.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That was the original story in earlier editions too, that it is literally a giant's weapon from her backstory which is oversized for a human and she takes penalties to use it but that her strength and barbarian rage are enough to make it work well.

A lot of narrative and a little mechanics thrown in to justify a Final Fantasy/Warhammer sized weapon imagery.

I just was noting that it isn't a weapon that would be practical for most characters in the setting; as of PF2e its a specific trick of that barbarian lineage, and presumably looks weird to people even in the setting.