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

[see]

Standard falling damage in D&D is, if anything, excessive. In the real world, humans who fall from roughly 50 feet have about a 50% survival rate, and those that fall from from roughly 80 feet survive about 10% of the time. 5d6 and 8d6 damage are too high to reflect those realities, and making the damage higher only makes it less realistic .

The fact that characters with the hit points to survive ten spear stabs from a peasant levee can also survive a hundred-foot fall doesn't tell you anything about the realism of D&D falling damage. It just tells you that the characters with that many hit points are superheroically resistant to things that would kill an ordinary human. Which was already explicit from the fact that they have so many times more hit points than ordinary humans.

 

[Mordhau]

Well supposedly you interpret hit points as not necessarily reflecting actual damage but near misses etc.

Hard to do that when you fall 100ft and hit the ground which is why it bothers people.

And yes, the fall may not kill you, but you probably won't be getting up and getting on with the day either.

 

[pemerton]

And yes, the fall may not kill you, but you probably won't be getting up and getting on with the day either.

It's just a flesh wound!

 

[Micah Sweet]

My life has too much realism and verisimilitude as it is. Why would I want that in an escapist fantasy?

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?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yes, ti does. It certainly is not the same as the real-world one, but as a "force that attracts a body towards the centre of the earth, or towards any other physical body having mass", it is definitely there. Spelljammer has gravity centers and gravity planes, but it's still gravity.

I agree, it obviously does not obey Newton's law of universal gravitation, but it's absolutely indistinguishable for most common occurrences, just like you usually don't notice that gravity also affects light as per Einstein's theories in the real world.

People and things fall just like they would in the real world, but then some have some sort of story protection, for example. And it also affects water very bizarrely, since there is no increase in water pressure when diving, etc.



It's not the same force, but it's still the same principle and the same name.



You're right, dragon flight has always been considered somewhat magical in D&D, but not the kind of magic that you can dispel ("In D&D, the first type of magic is part of nature. It is no more dispellable than the wind. A monster like a dragon exists because of that magic-enhanced nature.")



It's very possible, but my point in all this discussion is that it should not matter for the immense majority of the games and of the game's situations.



Indeed, which is why we don't make any hypothesis in our games about atoms and how matter behaves, the prime is made of from stuff of the four elements, and that can be manipulated by magic, but the rest is beyond what most games and characters would be able to use.

And it's also why gunpowder in general does not work. Some alchemy does work, but there is no chemical reason for sulphur + guano + charcoal to explode. Alchemist fire does explode and burn because of an alchemical reaction, not a chemical one.

There is no current rule that says gunpowder doesn't work. There has been in the past (hence the invention of magical "smoke powder").

 

[Thomas Shey]

I was giving that some thought earlier today, in fact, due to this thread.

I still use the standard d6 per 10' out of tradition and being too lazy to change it, but it's way too little damage for anything more than 10'. That said...

It gets weird because it has to engage with D&D's elevating-hit-points over time.

Ironically, for most versions of the earlier incarnations of the game, its probably more than sufficient for normal people. Most people, after all, were 1st or 0th level characters of one stripe or another and likely have somewhere in the 3--6 hit point range. A 30' fall (statistically the distance where it will kill someone more often than not) is well within what you'd expect there; if anything the 20-30' falls are perhaps too lethal too consistently there.

But D&D isn't a game with static hit points, so it looks progressively more bizarre as characters level, especially almost any incarnation of fighters. Taking elevating hit points as mostly a roundabout way to represent defensive skill, you can make an argument that you could also assume a better ability to take a fall. But pretty quickly it starts to look odd in a way in any other area of physical endeavor most old-school people would choke on; an 8th level OD&D fighter averaged 36 hit points. This meant not only was that 30' not going to kill them when they were fresh, it was just barely possible with a 60' fall, and there was about a fifty-fifty chance they'd survive a 100' fall (which people do sometimes do but it normally requires special circumstances like slopes, mud or snow, and so on).

Whatever you think about the elevating hit point model for use as a combat mechanism (I'm not that big a fan but that's neither here nor there), it looks really odd as soon as you get it into other places.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think we also need to be careful with the argument that because something is conventional and doesn't break verisimiltude due to convention we should be willing to ignore reality breaking in other contexts.

Eg. It's completely ridiculous that a human sized fighter can fight a giant, but that's somewhat waved away in the abstract convention of D&D combat. In a musical it's also ridiculous that people can randomly break out in song and people around them don't stop and point and think that it's weird, but that doesn't mean that if a person suddenly reveals they can teleport with no explanation in a musical it wouldn't be jarring and weird.

In other words realism is selective because of how wound up in conventions it is. Sure we can question these conventions, but really the onus has to be on the questioner to make the case for the alternative.

The problem you have to deal with regarding that and D&D is that at this point its developed its own conventions, so can you even talk about problems here? I think you can ask what other sort of background besides the D&D sphere (including a lot of computer games that are, effectively derived from it either directly or many steps removed) someone would hit D&D and feel it was not jarring in many cases. I've argued there aren't too many because D&D is trying to cover too much ground in terms of subgenres.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Standard falling damage in D&D is, if anything, excessive. In the real world, humans who fall from roughly 50 feet have about a 50% survival rate, and those that fall from from roughly 80 feet survive about 10% of the time. 5d6 and 8d6 damage are too high to reflect those realities, and making the damage higher only makes it less realistic .

While I agree with your conclusion, that's not the numbers I've seen (the the devil may be in the detail that the numbers I saw specifically referred to unprepared falls).

The fact that characters with the hit points to survive ten spear stabs from a peasant levee can also survive a hundred-foot fall doesn't tell you anything about the realism of D&D falling damage. It just tells you that the characters with that many hit points are superheroically resistant to things that would kill an ordinary human. Which was already explicit from the fact that they have so many times more hit points than ordinary humans.

That doesn't actually follow. You have to go down the rabbithole of what those hit points are supposed to be doing in those ten spear stabs to come to any conclusion there (and as anyone who's ever participated in a hit point discussion can tell you, there's damn near nothing even with a family resemblance to consensus about that).

 

[Lyxen]

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?

Yeah, sure because most DMs enjoy creating worlds with no logical sense and no correlation to the real world. From 42+ years of experience, I've NEVER met a DM that had created such a world, nor actually heard of those except from people who apparently want to justify making rules for others using the hypothesis that they might exist to justify... justify what exactly ?

There is no current rule that says gunpowder doesn't work. There has been in the past (hence the invention of magical "smoke powder").

And there is no current rule that says that gunpowder does work. It's actually the opposite, gunpowder weapons and explosive are an option in the game, so RAW they don't exist, and neither does gunpowder. And "inventive" (snort) players who think that they could be clever by having their character suddenly become a genius for inventing it out of the blue have no place in our campaigns.

So yes, there are rules that say that gunpowder does not existe / does not work, unless you put in place a specific option.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It gets weird because it has to engage with D&D's elevating-hit-points over time.

Ironically, for most versions of the earlier incarnations of the game, its probably more than sufficient for normal people. Most people, after all, were 1st or 0th level characters of one stripe or another and likely have somewhere in the 3--6 hit point range. A 30' fall (statistically the distance where it will kill someone more often than not) is well within what you'd expect there; if anything the 20-30' falls are perhaps too lethal too consistently there.

But D&D isn't a game with static hit points, so it looks progressively more bizarre as characters level, especially almost any incarnation of fighters. Taking elevating hit points as mostly a roundabout way to represent defensive skill, you can make an argument that you could also assume a better ability to take a fall. But pretty quickly it starts to look odd in a way in any other area of physical endeavor most old-school people would choke on; an 8th level OD&D fighter averaged 36 hit points. This meant not only was that 30' not going to kill them when they were fresh, it was just barely possible with a 60' fall, and there was about a fifty-fifty chance they'd survive a 100' fall (which people do sometimes do but it normally requires special circumstances like slopes, mud or snow, and so on).

Whatever you think about the elevating hit point model for use as a combat mechanism (I'm not that big a fan but that's neither here nor there), it looks really odd as soon as you get it into other places.

I still remember "The Adventurer that Fell to Earth" sidebar in the Spelljammer boxed set. It added re-entry fire damage.