D&D 5E Simulation vs Game - Where should D&D 5e aim?

[Hussar]

I find that reading rulebooks for exact text is impractical during play, but eminently practical during prep. I end up doing most of my worldbuilding and formal prep in the form of meticulously researched NPC stats and magic items. A lot of the history of my world is embedded in flavor text for artifacts and the like.

Conversely, in a game, I'm generally a proponent of getting an OK answer now rather than a perfect one later. There's a lot of roughing it, a lot of "eh, that sounds like a Diplo, so roll it" and just making up a response based on how the die roll makes me feel. I carefully allot spell slots/spell points, but frequently don't bother to track them at all for NPCs because it just isn't worth the effort. I'll frequently skip around and narrate large parts of things without bothering to engage rules. And I'm by far the most hardcore RAW DM of any gamer I've ever met; plenty of DMs are just completely making rules up as they go.

If we were to accept the rules as a model for how play unfolds, this would happen:
Take three cases. In one, you're rolling an attack and need an 11 to hit the target's AC. In another, you're rolling a save against a death effect and need an 11 to make the save. In the third, you're rolling a Knowledge check to produce some interesting bit of history that has no life or death implications. Assume no other rules that alter those probabilities are in play.

If the rules were how actual play worked, those checks would each succeed 50% of the time. In fact, that isn't what happens at all. In fact, the players are likely to engage in a number of cheesy "it fell off the book" tactics for rerolling dice, distorting the probabilities in their favor to the extent that the DM is willing to indulge them. On the other hand, the DM is also likely to "cheat" wantonly, perhaps fudging the AC to alter the battle to his desired level of difficulty or based on how much time he has for the session. Saves vs death get fudged all the time if the DM doesn't want the character to die. And for minor things like knowledge, the DM may do anything from throw in the info for free without a check to juking the DC to meet the circumstances. Hard rules get ignored all the time in favor of players' ideas, DMs' goals, or simply because of ignorance or time constraints.

So to me, what unfolds is that the offscreen reality is assumed to work the way the rules describe, even if you're only occasionally actually using the rules to determine what happened offscreen. Conversely, the in-game experience is a freeform free-for-all, in which the literal rules text is only one influence on what unfolds and in which the deviations from the rules are eminently knowable.

It's a great thing that our hobby has such different experiences.

The whole "It rolled off the book thing" hasn't happened to me since I was in elementary school. For the past decade, all dice rolls during play have been 100% in the open (including all DM die rolls) and recorded since I've been using either OpenRPG or Maptool to play. I haven't fudged a die roll in many, many years. And I absolutely hate playing at tables where fudging does happen.

So, your "in fact" only really applies to you. It certainly doesn't apply to me. Our in game experience, especially since 3e was released, was far, far less free form and much stronger on conforming to the rules. IME, the tables I enjoyed the least were the ones like you describe, where the DM just "wings it" because, again, in my experience, most DM's are terrible making up rules on the fly.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I haven't fudged a die roll in many, many years. And I absolutely hate playing at tables where fudging does happen.

If you're not DMing, it's pretty hard to be sure that it isn't. Then again, I'm sure some people do it that way.

That being said, there are plenty of other ways that the rules get fudged besides simply juking the dice rolls.

So, your "in fact" only really applies to you.

I think it's fair to say that almost everyone's game experience diverges significantly from a literal reading of the relevant rulebooks in some significant way, intentionally or unintentionally.

But even just limiting it to the context I was talking about, if we simply just took all the saving throws versus death that have occurred in all D&D games, averaged the percentage chance of success, and then took the frequency of actual death in the game and averaged that, do you really think it would be the same number? I seriously doubt it.

 

[Lanefan]

Personally, I am not interested in simulationism details. Simulationist discussions seem to me neverending, since every layer of details added to increase realism soon reveals its limits, and for every corner case solved with an additional rule there is a new corner case springing up because of that rule.

[...]

Simulationism generates rules. Gamism generates rules.

Only if you let them, particularly simulation. Sim can be very freeform if you want it to be.

... in the past 2 editions IMHO. We got stuck in the idea that for everything there must be a rule, but a RPG is so much more, and IMHO it is refreshing to have so many interesting rules-free stuff to care about (but only if you want to). Incidentally, I think this makes D&D less nerdy and potentially increase the customer base.

Agreed, and this is one of the reasons I don't much like the design of last few editions.

Somewhere along the way between early 1e and early 3e the express idea of rules-as-guidelines got replaced by rules-as-law.

Lanefan

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I think simulationist rules tend not to produce such contrivances.

That much, I will definitely agree with. I would go so far as to define "Simulationism" as "The results flow naturally from the state of the world, without interference from plot contrivance or narrative influence."

The whole point of a simulation is to see what happens, because you don't know the result in advance. Plot and narrative mess with that, pushing what actually happens in the direction of what you want to happen, which robs it of much of its meaning. Like a scientific experiment, where you intentionally bias the results.

I was saying that simulationist RPG mechanics tend not to produce emotionally and dramatically satisfying situations and resolutions to those situations.

This is where I disagree. I can't become emotionally invested in a world that doesn't follow basic causality. I just don't see the point of it. If we're supposed to win, then we're going to win, so why are we even playing? How is that emotionally satisfying in any way?​

 

[Hussar]

If you're not DMing, it's pretty hard to be sure that it isn't. Then again, I'm sure some people do it that way.

That being said, there are plenty of other ways that the rules get fudged besides simply juking the dice rolls.

I think it's fair to say that almost everyone's game experience diverges significantly from a literal reading of the relevant rulebooks in some significant way, intentionally or unintentionally.

But even just limiting it to the context I was talking about, if we simply just took all the saving throws versus death that have occurred in all D&D games, averaged the percentage chance of success, and then took the frequency of actual death in the game and averaged that, do you really think it would be the same number? I seriously doubt it.

I'd say it would depend a lot on the age of the group.

But then I'm biased. We've played all rolls in the open for many years now. So IME things would be much closer than yours.

 

[Bluenose]

I was saying that simulationist RPG mechanics tend not to produce emotionally and dramatically satisfying situations and resolutions to those situations. My evidence for that claim is many many years of play experience with systems like Rolemaster, Runequest and Traveller.

I think it would depend on the nature of the thing that's being simulated and how well the game does it. Pendragon strikes me as an excellent simulation of medieval chivalric romances, and still produces situations that are full of drama and emotion.

 

[Hussar]

I think it might depend on how granular ( if that is the right word ) the sim is. In something like Gurps, which is sim heavy, you can spend an inordinate amount of time on bean counting. Which sucks all the passion out of play pretty quickly.

 

[pemerton]

I think it would depend on the nature of the thing that's being simulated and how well the game does it. Pendragon strikes me as an excellent simulation of medieval chivalric romances, and still produces situations that are full of drama and emotion.

Fair comment. Cthulhu likewise, substituting "pulp horror" for "medieval chivalric romances".

By "simulation" I was meaning process-simulation (= purist-for-system simulation, in Forge terminology) - such as one finds in RM, RQ and Classic Traveller.

I can't become emotionally invested in a world that doesn't follow basic causality. I just don't see the point of it. If we're supposed to win, then we're going to win, so why are we even playing? How is that emotionally satisfying in any way?​

Upthread, in post 46, I mentioned two sorts of RPGers who are interested in story as an outcome of play (and perhaps there are others?): "Forge-y narrativists and old-fashioned 90s-style railroaders".

The idea that "we're supposed to win" and "we're going to win" belongs to 90s-style railroaders. That's a mode of play that I personally dislike greatly. (And I have a fairly expansive conception of what counts as 90s-style railroading - for me it covers adventure path play.)

"Forge-y narrativism" is closer to where I'm at. For me, the key aspect of contrivance is not that the PCs will win, but that wins or losses will occur at points that matter. A slogan I have used in the past is "no failure off-screen". To use one of the LotR examples again, in the sort of play the Battle of the Pelenor fields is absolutely not going to be lost because of a random roll on a weather chart to see which direction the wind is blowing. But it might well be lost because the PC who confronts the Witch King fails to defeat him.

The key to this sort of play is tight scene-framing. I think causal-oriented simulationism is the enemy of tight scene-framing, because the causes leak out from one scene to another in ways that have no bearing upon dramatic significance. [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s example of bean-counting in GURPS (or Rolemaster; or certain approaches to AD&D, for that matter) is one common example of this: consequences of no dramatic significance start to be more important in shaping the transition from event to event than dramatic considerations about what matters in a thematic/dramatic sense.

 

[Yora]

I jumped into Pathfinder a while back because I was having such a hard time finding players or GMs in the area who would play anything BUT that. The first thing that struck me was how unnecessarily complex the rules are in areas that really didn't need complexity. I had forgotten what I disliked about D&D 3.5. The core book is huge. A tighter game could have been created that only took up half that amount of space.

Ocasionally, I see people proudly showing pictures of their new retroclone hardbacks, and often these things are massive 400+ page monsters. Maybe they have a whole campaign setting and monster book inside that one tome, but it still feels rather odd to me.

I compiled a handbook for my campaing, which I mostly made by copy-pasting the neccessary text into a single file. The layout is for tablets and smartphones, so it's single column with a large font, and even that comes down to only 115 pages. In regular A4 print formating, it should easily fit on less than 60 pages (without art, of course).

 

[Imaro]

[MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] (or anyone else who wants to answer)... I am curious as to your views on G.R.R. Martin's AGoT series on HBO? First would you classify it as CaW or CaS. In the show (and books) the heroes do not (IMO) consistently get lucky, roughly in proportion to their dedication and commitment... yet the show and characters provide the emotional investment for the viewers I think you were referring too (regardless of the fact that many meet non-heroic and even anti-climactic/anti-thematic ends). I think this is what I want in a rule-set for D&D... not sure what the correct term for this is.... realism/verisimilitude/etc. all feel wrong but there is a big difference (again IMO) between the protagonists of LotR and those in GoT... i think 4e leans alot more towards LotR where the characters are concerned and I want rules that lean more towards GoT... If that makes any sense.