What game is the best simulationist game?

[Grendel_Khan]

I'm going to go with GURPS because it's the most realistic game (potentially) that I've got experience playing. It's on a sliding scale, you can certainly tweak the rules for a more cinematic experience, but if you want to crank up the realism it's certainly possible. One of the simplier ways they do this is by dividing skills into different categories based on how easy they are to learn. Firing a gun might be a physically easy skill whereas nuclear physics is a mentally hard skill meaning it's going to cost you more points to get that physics skill to the same level as the gun skill in most cases.

When I was a teenager, I loved the fact that GURPS had all sorts of system mastery riders and exceptions, like that guns might be physical easy skills, but firing without taking an action to aim meant you had a snapshot penalty (-4 iirc). Meaning so long as everyone burned a turn before shooting it really was very trivial to hit someone at close range, but then, ain't nobody got the time for that (especially if it's going to be another half-hour before you get another turn).

In my old age, I have no patience for that sort of thing. Or for the need to drop a half-point into a slew of skills just to simulate being a barely functioning human—sure, there are default rolls, but they're brutal. But for those who are into that level of detail and futzing, GURPS is almost impossible beat.

 

[Celebrim]

The GULLIVER rules set for GURPS, as it existed probably circa 1999, is probably the most simulationist rules set ever. (Last I looked the author was trying to simplify it.)

And it's not even that accurate. Because I've yet to see a rules set that actually models damage as shock, trauma, bloodloss and infection in detail. If you aren't modelling that, you aren't really modelling damage. GULLIVER only gets there by actually trying to model physical size accurately, something I've seen no other rules set attempt.

I dropped my own attempts at realism when I realized that only a computer could reasonably handle the calculation of 3 types of damage against 3 defenses.

Aces & Eights is probably the most detailed attempt to model the fortune in combat I'm aware of.

When evaluating rules sets for complexity, we tend to focus on how complex the fortune tests are - like the actual hit location system in Aces & Eights. I learned when I went hard simulationist in the 90's that isn't the real problem with most published complexity. Something like the HERO system which would also be in the running has pretty simple fortune tests and it's pretty easy to play from the perspective of a PC after you get through all the crunch of creating your character from the freeform chargen engine. The real problem with pure simulationism is actually that it creates simply too much preparation for the GM. The GM ultimately ends up having to ignore the rules in order to create and run enough content to game.

The secondary problem with realism is that reality doesn't make a good game. Even stories that are based on real events, we filter out all of those where the luck didn't make a great story and tell the story retroactively based on who "rolled" results that ended up producing a dramatic transcript. Since almost everyone is actually playing for the story in some sense, there gets to be a point very quickly where you have to add narrative currency to control the fortune. And that sort of gets to where I think is the sweet spot in gaming - casual realism combined with enough narrative currency to mitigate against the fortune.

Where I think simulation effort ought to be focused is not on refining the casual realism to make it more realistic, but rather on broadly simulating all the different mini-games that could transpire in the course of play - evasion, negotiation, crafting, travel, transport operation, dominion building, movement, stealth, etc.

 

[Jer]

Champions is a really good superheroic physics+ simulator, and I've played a great deal of it, but it doesn't really attempt to mimic comic books except that comics books also contain supers.

Champions is a reasonable superhero wargame, where you want to try to model the physical reality of a superhero battle more than the narrative of a superhero story. Though my speed is more Marvel Heroscape for that kind of thing these days...

 

[Nutation]

I never delved deep in Gurps. But of the game I've owned and played, it's probably Aftermath. Very crunchy in a try-hard simulationist way, while still being slightly playable. I guess it is still beaten by Phoenix Command and other math-crunch simulationist nightmares.

Nothing beats Phoenix Command/Living Steel/Rhand (developed by friends of mine) if you want to know how many inches into your opponent's spleen you drove your dirk.

 

[John Dallman]

Has anyone ever played Phoenix Command? We almost finished creating characters once, but I had the impression it was supposed to be.

A friend who has played it reckons it's too slow and cumbersome to be enjoyable.

I play a lot of GURPS, and while it certainly gets closer to modelling reality than D&D, that still isn't very close. What it achieves is verisimilitude, rather than realism, the feeling of believability. That's about all you can ask for in a pen-and-paper game of manageable complexity.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Champions is a reasonable superhero wargame, where you want to try to model the physical reality of a superhero battle more than the narrative of a superhero story. Though my speed is more Marvel Heroscape for that kind of thing these days...

There are some superhero-narrative elements baked into the system, but there's no question that as an early design it doesn't lean into that to the degree more modern superhero games (even relatively trad ones) do.

 

[TerraDave]

It doesn’t come up much in these discussions, but classic Traveller had a few simulationist edges. Both of reality—vectors in space combat, shotguns in space combat, a military career can lead to death, even before you actually started playing—but also of 1950s and 60s space opera.

 

[Baron Opal II]

Phoenix Command, at least as far as tactical combat with modern or semi-futuristic weapons go.

It also took three hours to go through 2-4 rounds of combat with a fair bit of arithmetic between rolls. Tedious isn't the word for it.

 

[Celebrim]

It also took three hours to go through 2-4 rounds of combat with a fair bit of arithmetic between rolls. Tedious isn't the word for it.

The tedium to me isn't even the really damning part, as even back then you could have automated the combat resolution with a simple computer app and people who still run PC in fact do this, letting you run combat quite quickly.

No, to me the really damning part is two fold. First, it's not even particularly realistic. Like almost all such attempts at realism it involves the designer selecting a huge number of numbers to abstract the real physics and invariably these numbers are selected nearly arbitrarily, based on designer biases, and without real play testing or necessarily high understanding of the subject matter. The resulting model therefore only has a very superficial resemblance to realism in that most of the time it spits out an answer that like could be real, but where the odds may have nothing to do with the real odds and likelihoods. The more you get to know the system, the less realistic it seems and the less able to simulate real events the game seems to become. But even more than that, the level of realism it actually achieves is probably little different in practice than what could be achieved with 2-3 more abstract rolls and 1-2 tables, using a basic hitpoint system and very high potential damages for the firearms. All that extra process doesn't actually add very much to the game even in terms of realism, because for all that it may incorporate that a simpler system doesn't, it still adding at every step opportunities for the rules to not take into account what it is trying to model correctly.

 

[Jd Smith1]

I've heard that for melee combat, The Riddle of Steel was particularly simulationist. It did also have magic. That game seems to be long out of print but there is a "licensed successor" on drivethrurpg, Blade of the Iron Throne (link is to the black & white edition). Haven't actually looked at it, myself.

You just made my day! I did not know there was a successor to RoS!