Why use D&D for a Simulationist style Game?

[Tony Vargas]

More generally, I don't think you can tell whether a game is "sim" or "non-sim" by looking at the fiction that it generates. From the ogre example, how do we tell whether the game was a sim one, in which the rules model really resilient fantasy warriors, or a non-sim one? We can't tell. All we can tell is that the game embraces certain genre tropes.

I know you have your idea of what constitutes a 'sim' or purist-for-system or whatever /game/, but, what also gets tossed around is 'simulationism,' which is really more about how you play. You could approach any game as a sort of simulation, if you assume that the rules are de facto laws of physics for the world. The post above about the Dr. Mengela type 1-hp-darting people to death to uncover the existence of atomic hit-points in his perverse universe, for instance, illustrates that pretty nicely. Another way it gets put is "D&D is simulating D&D" - an obvious tautology, but that doesn't stop anyone from playing it that way.

Of course, almost any RPG can be played as a simulationist game in this sense - for instance, on this approach there can be no objection to inspirational healing, because we are simply modelling a world in which "severed limbs can be shouted back on".

Not that inspirational healing ever shouted limbs back on. (In the infamous podcast, Mearls even immediately admitted he was "being ridiculous" when he said that, yet he didn't concede the point, even though he could only defend it by resorting to something ridiculous.) Generic hp loss never represented severed limbs in any edition of D&D. Those that did feature severed limbs - via /magic/ like a sword of sharpness - required much more potent magic than mere hp restorations. Cure Light (or Critical, for that matter) Wounds was /never/ able to re-attach or re-grow a severed limbs.

(Those RPGs whose rules are expressly meta-rules for regulating participant narrative authority - Prime Time Adventures is one example - are probably exceptions.)

Even then the rules could reflect the nature of the reality 'simulated' - it doesn't matter how whacked the results - for the inhabitants of the world, it's just how things are. You just end up with something like Discworld, only without the inspired humor of Terry Pratchett.

 

[Tony Vargas]

See, this right here is what I really don't get. Let's use BryonD's objection to 4e's HP recovery. Ok, fair enough, it is faster than any earlier edition (although, realistically, not much faster than 3e). But, modifying this to match the HP recovery rate of any other edition is ludicrously simple.

1. Determine what rate of recovery you like.

2. Extended rests no longer restore full HP and Surges.

3. Instead, Extended rests restore a number of surges based on how fast you want HP to be recovered.

DONE. It's literally that easy to model any D&D healing rate in 4e. And changing the healing rate will generally go a long way to recreating the pacing of earlier editions as well. Three simple steps and you can modify 4e to look a lot like any other edition.

While that's true, and while doing so wouldn't even hurt AEDU class balance (it could impact encounter balanced, which the DM would have to take into consideration), I don't think the DMG1 or 2 ever even remotely alludes to the idea (you can correct me if I'm wrong by quoting a passage, of course). There may have been an easy, theoretical, way to adjust the game, but the game didn't provide it, so it's fair to judge the game by what it /did/ provide.

5e is likely to be the first version of D&D that actually /does/ advise you to vary rates of healing. It's unfortunate that it's fragile X-encounters-of-Y-rounds-per-'day' class balance is likely to be shattered by any such tinkering, but at least it's trying.

How the heck is that a "design to suit a narrow agenda"? 4e's agenda was no more narrow than any other edition.

Also true. I don't think any prior edition gave advice about messing with healing rates. What's more, other editions tied the rate of healing primarily to the availability of magic. In classic D&D, that meant daily spells. In 3e it meant commoditized CLW wands and potions.

It's not that 4e had a narrower 'agenda' - that is, range of styles for which it was suitable. It was actually, thanks to clarity and balance, capable of handling a broader range than prior eds. It's just that the narrow "agendas" of certain eds (or even narrower agendas favored by their fans) were not forced or over-rewarded like they had been. So, while you could still play 4e in the RAW/system-mastery style that many used 3.x for, the rewards for doing so (the degree to which an optimized character, whether theoretically or in actual play, overshadowed and out-powered less-opitimzed ones) was greatly reduced, just for one obvious instance.

On the dart ninja experiments. How does that actually work though? Darts do 1 HP of damage, but, what does that actually look like? Can I shoot a 2HP commoner in the hand twice and drop him? Or do those attacks have to be placed somewhere potentially fatal? How does the person in the game world know what a blowgun's damage is?

The idea is that a hp is like an atom. You may not be able to see it, but it's indivisible. By experimenting with very small damage-causing effects, you can find a threshold past which thousands of such attacks can't kill anyone, just above that threshold is the 1-hp attack. Once you've found that, you can use extensive experimentation to discover the range of hps in some abundant population (like peasants or rats or kobolds), then experiment on them with other damage-causing effects to derive the damage curve of those effects, and, and possibly even notice that it corresponds to normal distributions like those of rolling dice.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

But this is not how D&D was designed. The features of D&D that @Hussar and I have called out as "non-simulationist" - hit points and healing; classes, levels and XP; pre-3E saving throws; etc - were not designed by Gygax to be treated as simulations. He expressly states the opposite in his DMG: hit points above 1st level are mostly meta; XP and levels are a game device, but we don't literally assume that, in the game world, there is some magical connection between acquiring loot and increasing in prowess; and saving throws are explicitly given a fortune-in-the-middle interpretation, including the possibility of a successful save vs poison indicating a failure of the attack to penetrate the skin (which @Tony Vargas already mentioned upthread, I think).

I started with 2E, under a rather process-sim-style Dungeonmaster, so I never even learned about the whole poison-that-deals-damage-but-never-actually-hit scenario until fairly recently, on these forums. Going back to some of those early Gygax quotes, it still seems out of touch with my experience as to how the game is actually played.

The example that comes to mind for me is when the fighter is chained to a wall, and a dragon breathes fire on him. Gygax explained that it would be impossible to dodge the fire, if you were actually bound to that wall, so a successful saving throw vs breath weapon meant there was a weak link in the chain which the fighter subsequently broke before taking cover behind a nearby rock.

Which honestly baffles me, because I can't imagine anyone actually running it that way. While the dragon was heading over, I'm sure the fighter was already struggling to break free, and any chance to escape would be tested before the dragon gets there. The chance to break free would be based on Strength (either a Strength check against a set DC, or a bend-bars/lift-gates check), rather than the chance to save against breath weapon. If the fighter didn't already escape before the dragon breathes fire, he would get a saving throw anyway to see if it can dodge the brunt of the blast (possibly with a penalty for being chained up), or maybe the DM would say that no save is possible, but you wouldn't get the actions somehow conflated together into a single event. Positioning and state-of-being-chained-up-or-not are too important to the state of the scenario to be left to the whims of how you describe other things that are going on.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I started with 2E, under a rather process-sim-style Dungeonmaster, so I never even learned about the whole poison-that-deals-damage-but-never-actually-hit scenario until fairly recently, on these forums. Going back to some of those early Gygax quotes, it still seems out of touch with my experience as to how the game is actually played.

Of course. AD&D (1e or 2), had yet to fall to the RAW frenzy, so DMs were happily ignoring rules, adding rules, creating, sharing & adopting variants and generally running games that were only nominally D&D. 5e is really pushing for a return to those halcyon days when the specific qualities of the rules didn't really matter, since no one was going to use them unmodified, anyway.

The example that comes to mind for me is when the fighter is chained to a wall, and a dragon breathes fire on him. Gygax explained that it would be impossible to dodge the fire, if you were actually bound to that wall, so a successful saving throw vs breath weapon meant there was a weak link in the chain which the fighter subsequently broke before taking cover behind a nearby rock.

Which honestly baffles me, because I can't imagine anyone actually running it that way.

Why not? The saving throw represents random factors, how strong the weakest link of a chain is could be pretty random.

While the dragon was heading over, I'm sure the fighter was already struggling to break free, and any chance to escape would be tested before the dragon gets there.

On the 'realism' side, he's a lot more motivated when the dragonflame hits, and said magical flame just might weaken the chain before it kills him; on the genre side, it's not even an issue: that kind of last-instant-escape is cliche.

 

[Hussar]

I started with 2E, under a rather process-sim-style Dungeonmaster, so I never even learned about the whole poison-that-deals-damage-but-never-actually-hit scenario until fairly recently, on these forums. Going back to some of those early Gygax quotes, it still seems out of touch with my experience as to how the game is actually played.

The example that comes to mind for me is when the fighter is chained to a wall, and a dragon breathes fire on him. Gygax explained that it would be impossible to dodge the fire, if you were actually bound to that wall, so a successful saving throw vs breath weapon meant there was a weak link in the chain which the fighter subsequently broke before taking cover behind a nearby rock.

Which honestly baffles me, because I can't imagine anyone actually running it that way. While the dragon was heading over, I'm sure the fighter was already struggling to break free, and any chance to escape would be tested before the dragon gets there. The chance to break free would be based on Strength (either a Strength check against a set DC, or a bend-bars/lift-gates check), rather than the chance to save against breath weapon. If the fighter didn't already escape before the dragon breathes fire, he would get a saving throw anyway to see if it can dodge the brunt of the blast (possibly with a penalty for being chained up), or maybe the DM would say that no save is possible, but you wouldn't get the actions somehow conflated together into a single event. Positioning and state-of-being-chained-up-or-not are too important to the state of the scenario to be left to the whims of how you describe other things that are going on.

This is the point you are missing though - the fighter DID make his saving throw. He does take half damage. Now, you have to find some manner to explain that. This is a narrative that fits what the dice are saying - and it's interesting and makes for a fun game. After all, if we leave the fighter chained up, then, well, we might as well simply declare him dead since he cannot escape.

The whole point here is that the narrative has to fit what the dice say, not the other way around. The dice say that he only took half damage - why? Well, that's up to the DM.

This is why I don't really get why people try to use D&D as a simulation. It never really has been one. The fighter falls off a 50 foot cliff and walks away. How? Well, wouldn't it make more sense to adjust the fiction slightly so that that fall is now believable? Maybe he hit a few tree branches on the way down. Did the DM place trees there before? Probably not, but, then, DM descriptions of scenes are hardly so precise anyway. Having a few trees in the way that the DM simply hadn't described before since they weren't relevant is likely a lot more acceptable than having our fighter Wile E Coyote his way out of the crater he just made after falling off the cliff.

Abstractions are abstractions for a reason. They are stand ins for whatever is actually happening in the reality, but they are not the reality itself. A plus sign has no existence outside of a math question. We know exactly what it means, but, when I put an apple down on the table and then put another apple down, there's no magical plus sign that appears anywhere. It's an abstraction that we use to mean putting things together.

For an abstraction to be a simulation, it has to model events in the same way as the plus sign. When I see 1+1 on paper, I can visualise exactly what is going on in reality - one thing has been placed with another thing and now I have two things. When I roll a 15 to hit and deal 12 damage, there is nothing to visualise. There is no simulation here. It's no different than the old Final Fantasy games where your sprite jerked forward on the screen and a -X appeared above the enemy.

Putting it another way, using the D&D rules, prove to me that that's not what happens in a D&D world. If the rules are a simulation, that should be an easy thing to do. Show me how the rules preclude Final Fantasy style combat where negative numbers flash above your enemies after a successful attack.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

This is the point you are missing though - the fighter DID make his saving throw. He does take half damage. Now, you have to find some manner to explain that. This is a narrative that fits what the dice are saying - and it's interesting and makes for a fun game. After all, if we leave the fighter chained up, then, well, we might as well simply declare him dead since he cannot escape.

You certainly could do it that way, I suppose. That's apparently what Gygax was intending, after all. I just don't see how it makes for compelling gameplay, in any way beyond just make-believe story-telling. Even worse, it's competitive storytelling. Given a particular outcome, how do I narrate these events to my benefit? If I say that there are branches to break my fall, then that means I can have wood to build a fire, but if I say that I land in water then that could give me hypothermia.

It's just... I don't see the point to it.

To me, the rules of the game are primarily an unbiased mechanic for determining the result of any action. I want to know, given these circumstances, what happens next. And D&D actually does a really good job of that, if you can just go with it and accept everything at face value. It might not match up with reality, but it certainly matches up closely enough with myth and legend, where a mighty warrior can be thrown from the highest mountain and then just climb back up again.

 

[pemerton]

You certainly could do it that way, I suppose. That's apparently what Gygax was intending, after all. I just don't see how it makes for compelling gameplay, in any way beyond just make-believe story-telling. Even worse, it's competitive storytelling. Given a particular outcome, how do I narrate these events to my benefit? If I say that there are branches to break my fall, then that means I can have wood to build a fire, but if I say that I land in water then that could give me hypothermia.

It's just... I don't see the point to it.

Fair enough.

For me, the point of it is that it drives the game forward.

 

[Hussar]

Why would the player narrate this? It's not a player action. I don't think it would be typical at most tables for a player to narrate a hit he received. Why would this be different?

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Why would the player narrate this? It's not a player action. I don't think it would be typical at most tables for a player to narrate a hit he received. Why would this be different?

From what I gather, it actually is fairly common. Letting the player narrate that sort of thing is a way of keeping the player engaged with the narrative, instead of just passively observing. (For people who like that kind of thing.)

 

[Tony Vargas]

To me, the rules of the game are primarily an unbiased mechanic for determining the result of any action. I want to know, given these circumstances, what happens next. And D&D actually does a really good job of that, if you can just go with it and accept everything at face value.

Any system can be used that way, if you're willing/able to ignore it's foibles. You can just accept that a high-level fighter can fall off a mountain an just dust himself off and climb back up Why/ Perhaps because that kinda thing happened when you were learning the ropes of RPGs by playing a process-sim-AD&D-variant your first DM homebrewed up. You can't just accept that if a purple worm stings the same fighter and he makes his save, the attack didn't leave a puncture wound, even though that's in the same AD&D as the terminal-velocity fighter, maybe because that first DM hid that bit from you.

There's a /lot/ of that in early-D&D experiences. The game was fluid, every DM ran it his own way, and we were new to the game, young, impressionable, however you want to paint it - we got an idea of what the game 'should' be, and can either question that idea at some point, or not.