Realistic Combat that's Simple(ish)

[Ruin Explorer]

I would say the same in D&D.

3E/4E/5E are kind of explicitly rules-first (3E by far the most, with a "rule for everything", including stuff that absolutely didn't need rules), but you can run them fiction-first and some people do, sure. I don't think any of them even present fiction-first as a concept but I could be forgetting.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

3E/4E/5E are kind of explicitly rules-first (3E by far the most, with a "rule for everything", including stuff that absolutely didn't need rules), but you can run them fiction-first and some people do, sure. I don't think any of them even present fiction-first as a concept but I could be forgetting.

Agreed with regard to 3 and 4e but I think with 5e it is as much habit as anything else. The advice to not ask for a D20 test unless the outcome is in doubt, seems to me to be a nod in the direction of the fiction.

 

[Celebrim]

There has never been a realistic pen and paper system.

What people mistake for realism is process simulation where you go through the mental steps that naturally arise when you imagine combat. But this isn't realism, just something that gives a semi-skeptical person plausible suspension of disbelief.

Take the common claim that armor as DR is "more realistic" and D&D's abstraction as making you harder to hit. It's sounds sort of reasonable except that isn't really how armor typically works in a melee combat situation. If you have two heavily armored warriors, neither is either trying to or likely able to hit the other hard enough to break through the armor. That's not how armored combat generally works. Rather, the armor generally fully protects parts of the body while not fully protecting others, so that combat comes to be about trying to score a hit on the much smaller vulnerable target, often after obtaining some sort of advantage (drawing a shield away, knocking them prone, drawing their guard to one point and then switching to attack another). The simple simulation of either armor as DR or armor making you harder to hit are both equally unrealistic or else equally realistic for a narrow range of armors and types of attacks or skill ranges of the participants.

Runemaster is no more or less realistic than D&D, it just feels a bit less abstract, and the series of steps matches our expectations about what the steps are a bit better.

The ur-example of this for me is Drawf Fortress, which takes this intuitive process simulation to the extent of modeling iron, padding, skin, flesh, and bone in various thicknesses in an attempt to realistically model attacks. Tons and tons of process simulation goes into it, and I think if anything it produces narrations of combat that are the least realistic looking things I've ever seen. It doesn't successfully emulate what is implied by HEMA, SCA or any other mock combat art. It frequently becomes pretty ridiculous, with fights devolving down to extended attempts of the two exhausted combatants to wrench the others pinky finger off because well, that's the thin point that's most easily damaged and the system doesn't really handle gaps in the armor or deliberate attempts to strip off the armor or ton of other possibilities that would come up in a similar real situation.

Pheonix Command for all of its process simulation is not more realistic than D&D.

Now, process simulation does achieve interesting things but those things aren't realism. It does achieve what I refer to as "cinematic" play because it does produce a concrete transcript of events that help all participants imagine the same outcome. It can encourage less abstract combat propositions, by encouraging a player to describe their stance, attitude, and goal more concretely. But it's not inherently a better simulation for being more detailed or inherently producing more realistic results, because so much is still left out and in most cases numbers are just picked out of the air because they fit or they are believable to the designer.

 

[Celebrim]

I would say the same in D&D.

Explicitly, that has been part of D&D's rules since the beginning. 3E attempted to quantify it somewhat with its "coup de grace" rules, and that's not necessarily a bad thing because it covers edge cases (you can coup de grace a whale, but its a bit harder to do with ordinary weapons) but the core idea of slitting the throat of a helpless opponent should generally result in death is still there.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Quite right, yes. If you accept a fiction-first principle, it doesn't matter what the rules exactly are if you slide a dagger through the faceplate in the fiction, it's very unlikely the guy inside the armour is going to have a good day. Or even be alive a few minutes/seconds later.

I was thinking about this in the context of using modern firearms in Daggerheart - if you shoot an unknowing NPC from behind, in an unarmoured head, you shouldn't be rolling damage or w/e, they're just dead. This sort of thing actually eliminates a huge number of problems that can happen with a rules-first approach.

The usual problem with that is whether the declared action is just autoresolved; otherwise all you do is move the problem back a bit. What's the situation that you can slide the dagger through that faceplate without any chance of failure? If the target is helpless there's usually coup de grace rules in most games. When shooting the unaware NPC, how close are they, and what are they doing? Hitting a head sized space with a gunshot is not an automatic thing, and that's not accounting for them potentially moving as you do it even if they aren't aware to avoid it.

Whether something is automatic or not is one of those things that can be seen differently by different people even in the situation (which doesn't say they never happen; I just don't think its quite as clear-cut as you seem to be suggesting).

 

[Celebrim]

I was thinking about this in the context of using modern firearms in Daggerheart - if you shoot an unknowing NPC from behind, in an unarmoured head, you shouldn't be rolling damage or w/e, they're just dead. This sort of thing actually eliminates a huge number of problems that can happen with a rules-first approach.

I don't see what problem that solves. It just creates new problems.

Never ever approach a question of what should happen here from the standpoint of the ruling being applied to NPCs. Always the question is what results if we apply this ruling to PCs. Is it fair to just tell the player, "Turn in your character sheet. I don't need to roll for this. Bo has been shot in your head from behind, and your character is dead."

Fiat is not a solution in the general case in part because people are terrible at self-awareness and being unbiased. Fiat always strays toward, "What do I want the story to be now?" and invariably changes the game from, "What does my character do in this fictional situation?" to "What do I need to do to appease or wheedle or trick the GM?"

The utility of fiat in a game is really small in my opinion, and typically what its really doing is exposing how the rules weren't really thought out that well particularly in an edge case. In D&Ds case the typical situation where people want to apply fiat are cases where the situation seems to demand fortune be moved form its normal place in the resolution cycle because we aren't dicing for the outcome because we have described the fiction in a way that seems to make the outcome certain. "You fell from a 200' cliff, you should be dead" is an example of that that has plagued D&D from the start.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I don't see what problem that solves. It just creates new problems.

Never ever approach a question of what should happen here from the standpoint of the ruling being applied to NPCs. Always the question is what results if we apply this ruling to PCs. Is it fair to just tell the player, "Turn in your character sheet. I don't need to roll for this. Bo has been shot in your head from behind, and your character is dead."

Fiat is not a solution in the general case in part because people are terrible and self-awareness and being unbiased. Fiat always strays toward, "What do I want the story to be now?" and invariably changes the game from, "What does my character do in this fictional situation?" to "What do I need to do to appease or wheedle or trick the GM?"

The utility of fiat in a game is really small in my opinion, and typically what its really doing is exposing how the rules weren't really thought out that well particularly in an edge case. In D&Ds case the typical situation where people want to apply fiat are cases where the situation seems to demand fortune be moved form its normal place in the resolution cycle because we aren't dicing for the outcome because we have described the fiction in a way that seems to make the outcome certain. "You fell from a 200' cliff, you should be dead" is an example of that that has plagued D&D from the start.

It's clear you don't understand what fiction-first means, and aren't interested in understanding or discussing it so not sure what this out-of-pocket rant is supposed to achieve, but such is life I guess.

Also in a fiction-first game, if you fall off a build 200 ft onto concrete and there's nothing you can do about, yeah, you're dead. There's no rolling unless there's something you can do about it or some way you could have survived. So yeah it absolutely does apply to PCs. That's a specific example in Daggerheart even, IIRC. If you don't want to shoot a PC in the head, don't have an NPC shoot a PC in the head.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

There has never been a realistic pen and paper system.

What people mistake for realism is process simulation where you go through the mental steps that naturally arise when you imagine combat. But this isn't realism, just something that gives a semi-skeptical person plausible suspension of disbelief.

Take the common claim that armor as DR is "more realistic" and D&D's abstraction as making you harder to hit. It's sounds sort of reasonable except that isn't really how armor typically works in a melee combat situation. If you have two heavily armored warriors, neither is either trying to or likely able to hit the other hard enough to break through the armor. That's not how armored combat generally works. Rather, the armor generally fully protects parts of the body while not fully protecting others, so that combat comes to be about trying to score a hit on the much smaller vulnerable target, often after obtaining some sort of advantage (drawing a shield away, knocking them prone, drawing their guard to one point and then switching to attack another). The simple simulation of either armor as DR or armor making you harder to hit are both equally unrealistic or else equally realistic for a narrow range of armors and types of attacks or skill ranges of the participants.

Runemaster is no more or less realistic than D&D, it just feels a bit less abstract, and the series of steps matches our expectations about what the steps are a bit better.

The ur-example of this for me is Drawf Fortress, which takes this intuitive process simulation to the extent of modeling iron, padding, skin, flesh, and bone in various thicknesses in an attempt to realistically model attacks. Tons and tons of process simulation goes into it, and I think if anything it produces narrations of combat that are the least realistic looking things I've ever seen. It doesn't successfully emulate what is implied by HEMA, SCA or any other mock combat art. It frequently becomes pretty ridiculous, with fights devolving down to extended attempts of the two exhausted combatants to wrench the others pinky finger off because well, that's the thin point that's most easily damaged and the system doesn't really handle gaps in the armor or deliberate attempts to strip off the armor or ton of other possibilities that would come up in a similar real situation.

Pheonix Command for all of its process simulation is not more realistic than D&D.

Now, process simulation does achieve interesting things but those things aren't realism. It does achieve what I refer to as "cinematic" play because it does produce a concrete transcript of events that help all participants imagine the same outcome. It can encourage less abstract combat propositions, by encouraging a player to describe their stance, attitude, and goal more concretely. But it's not inherently a better simulation for being more detailed or inherently producing more realistic results, because so much is still left out and in most cases numbers are just picked out of the air because they fit or they are believable to the designer.

The best lesson in this that I ever had, back in the late eighties, 2 friends were playing some flavour of modern micros, (1/300, if I remember correctly) and the scenario was a Soviet armoured force advancing into something vaguely resembling the Fulda Gap being met by a US armoured cavalry. 3 hours later and much dice rolling, consulting of charts, arguments about line of sight and so on, a turn passed, and I asked how much time this turn represented in game. I was told 3 minutes.
My takeaway was I would have a couple of Squad Leader (not ASL) games played in that time and I would learn a lot more about modern squad/platoon warfare playing them.

I am sure they were having fun, but I remain unconvinced that all the extra phases, tables, modifiers added much more realism over the base Squad Leader game.

 

[mmadsen]

There has never been a realistic pen and paper system.

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

Some rules are much less realistic than others. And some rulesets “crowd out” human judgment more than others.

 

[Celebrim]

It's clear you don't understand what fiction-first means, and aren't interested in understanding or discussing it

Sigh. It's clear you don't understand what fiction-first means and aren't interested in discussing it but do like swinging jargon around in an attempt to impress others.

Also in a fiction-first game, if you fall off a build 200 ft onto concrete and there's nothing you can do about, yeah, you're dead.

This is such a generic and meaningless claim as to be pointless and it very much depends on the genre and what we accept from the genre as plausibly "doing something about it". One way to look at this is that if the D&D implied genre is gritty realism because the PC's are only second level, then yes if they take a 200 ft fall onto a hard surface and there is nothing they can do about it, yes, they are dead. We wouldn't generally even have to roll the 20d6 though we'd probably do so for the meta-brutality of it since it gives a scale to just how very dead you probably are. It's emotionally impactful.

But you aren't really doing anything here except being explicit about your fictional genre. Captain America can survive that by landing on his mighty shield and that counts as "doing something about it". And well, so can a 15th level fighter in D&D where the implied genre is the same. "Look the mighty hero came through that with only a scratch". We get to the same point. Fiction first is just, "Well, this genre isn't super heroic so I need a more plausible "doing something about it"".

Fiction first in the sense of "you need to make an in-universe declaration of intent and method" before you qualify to make a roll, that's the way I was taught to play D&D in 1985 at age 12 by an older player, and I've been pretty much playing D&D ever sense. It's not a novel concept.

(The irony of "Fiction First" for me is that so many games that trumpet that in practice come down to negotiating which predefined move to play which is very game centric rather than negotiating what the fiction is. FATE Core even subverts this by explicitly saying that the intended move is more important than the fictional declaration, so that regardless of the fictional declaration the GM should respect the player's invented fiction as meaning the intended move.)

That's a specific example in Daggerheart even, IIRC. If you don't want to shoot a PC in the head, don't have an NPC shoot a PC in the head.

How does that change anything? Like I said, you aren't solving any problems you are just pushing them around a bit. Now you have to emulate the genre conventions of evil is stupid (or good I guess, if the PC's are evil) where to keep the game working you have to step around where you pushed the dust piles to.