Why use D&D for a Simulationist style Game?

[pemerton]

I'm not talking perfect balance but when you have a class that gets 3 skills vs. a class that gets 6 that's a significant difference in ability to affect narrative... especially since combat powers are balanced.

Presumably combat powers are balanced around the skills available, at least in principle. For instance, the PHB strikers who get a large number of skills also tend to be a little glass cannon-y. Conversely, a fighter's reduced out-of-combat utility is (in principle) balanced by his/he staying power in combat (and that pool of surges also gives an out-of-combat resource of a sort, too, given that skill challenges can inflict surge loss).

 

[Imaro]

Presumably combat powers are balanced around the skills available, at least in principle. For instance, the PHB strikers who get a large number of skills also tend to be a little glass cannon-y. Conversely, a fighter's reduced out-of-combat utility is (in principle) balanced by his/he staying power in combat (and that pool of surges also gives an out-of-combat resource of a sort, too, given that skill challenges can inflict surge loss).

Uhm... doesn't the Strikers larger damage numbers balance out the defenders greater staying power??

 

[Savage Wombat]

I'm just saying that what characterises a sim game is that you get a relatively complete description of the fiction, at a reasonable if not perfect level of granularity, without the need for narrative injections.

I'm REALLY liking this definition. (The whole example above was a big help.) [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION], are you good with this definition? It seems to me "without the need for narrative injections" is the key - the game play (dice rolling, declaring actions) tells you what happens in the game in some fashion.

There is wiggle room in the choice of the words "relatively complete", which might explain arguments - that some people are happier with a less complete description than others. So the answer to the OP question might really be "It's Sim enough for my purposes."

 

[Andor]

The issue with hit points is that they are very close to the sequence of coin tosses. When my guy hits your guy and your guy loses 5 hp, we don't know: whether my attack was strong, or your defence poor, or a bit of both; we don't know where I've hit you, nor what the nature of the injury is (although perhaps we can infer it's minor, from the fact that your performance is not debilitated in ay way); although, at the table, we may have spent a minute or more resolving the attack, and will have to repeat the procedure several times before the outcome of the combat is known, we really have no insight into what is happening in the fiction except a general sense of which way the tide of victory is flowing from round to round.

It's not quite as divorced from the fiction as the sequence of coin tosses: for instance, STR and weapon properties factor in to the attack; armour worn and DEX factor into the defence. But even there, we can't tell - when an attack is actually made and hits - whether it was the quality of the attacker, or the deficiencies of the defender, which resulted in the hit. If we want a richer fiction, during the course of the fight, than simply "It's going A's way; woah, B just made a big comeback and now it's going B's way", that all has to be injected.

(Contrast, say, RQ with its attack and parry rolls, or Bloody Versus with its attack and defence pools. It's true that RM or RQ doesn't give us as much detail as a serious student of martial arts might want to know, but it at least picks out the difference between an Errol Flynn -style swashbuckling duel and a Tarantino-style mutual gorefest. At the level of the fighters, it gives us descriptions of the fiction "He dodged!" or "He failed to dodge and got skewered through the thigh", though it doesn't give us descriptions at the level of their individual body parts or weapons. This relates back to what I said about the wargame example: part of judging something as sim is working out what level of description is salient. For a wargame it is units, logistics, commanders etc but not individual soldiers; for a typical RPG it is individual fighters, but most players don't worry about those fencing details that you call out.

Pemertons post is pretty much spot on, and I hope he's getting across what we mean when we keep using the word granularity. It means how far in or out you are dialing the scope.

Every atom in your body has it own individual thermal energy. You could, if you have a StarTrek holodeck level computer model your body temerature by calculating every single entropic interaction. Every brownian motion, every electron jump and photon release. But it would be crazy and useless. It's dialed too far in to even track metabolic processes generating heat like digestion and muscle movement. Dial out to the molecular level you can at least get some kind of relatable information about how your sweat is cooling you by evaporation or your ATP cycle is incresing your body heat. But it's still billions of interactions per second. So you don't track it at that level. In fact, without artificial instruments your ability to resolve your own body heat is limited to feeling hot or cold. And your response is limited to gross systemic actions like taking off a sweater or eating hot soup. Thereby rendeing the molecular detail level utterly superflous.

In an RPG you generally don't care at all if your character is chilly or sweaty unless you're in a situation where it becomes important like an extreme climate. And then it's usually resolved after the fact with something akin to a con check. Becuase no one really cares to closely examine the fiction of whether their fighter kept cool by loosening his chestplate or fanning himself with a stack of hobgoblin scalps.

In real life, if someone is shot in the chest and drops dead you might say "Aha! I know exactly what happened!" But you would be wrong. You don't know if he died from shock, blood loss, or some other effect. You don't know why the guy next to him who took an apparently identical wound didn't die. My answer? One guy rolled more damage.

If you spend any amount of time studying the injuries people do and don't die from you'll realize it's impossible to model accurately. Any system, no matter how pretentious, is never going to actually "sim" things out in a way that models reality. Likewise you might cry that hit locations and death spiral systems are more accurate than D&D. And they are, for some people. For others the adrenaline response is strong enough that they might not even know they are injured until after the fight. I had a friend who once told me "The first time I was shot I knew I was dying. By the seventh time it just made me mad." Sounds like leveling up to me.

If you are playing a mass battle you do not model every individual parry and thrust of a sword, you don't even model individual wounds. You generally know if a unit is alive or dead. In some systems a unit might have more than one wound. In others you don't even track people on the individual level. When you watch a war movie and the hero is trudging through the aftermath of the battle searching for his buddy, are you upset that you don't know if the guy who killed him won by being stong and tough or quick and nimble, or do you just empathise with the hero when he finds his dead friend?

Recall that D&D grew out of war games. Gaining hit points as you level originally modeled the fact that commander units would be capable of survivng more than one hit in a mass battle. Hit Points.

Then people wondered exactly how that works and Gary (bless him) mumbled something about how they weren't literal and ignored how things like blowgun darts and falling damage let you paint the model into a corner. Some people decided that they didn't like the disconnect between the fiction and the model and came up with systems that modeled (simed) a process that better matched their own ideas of how things should work. Other didn't like the disconnect between the fiction and the system and came up with better fiction. I fall into the latter camp. But neither one is wrong, its just different approaches to solving the same problem.

In both cases it isn't really the level or accuracy or the granularity ofthe sim thats the problem, it's the mismatch between what the system portrays and what the fiction portrays.

 

[Bluenose]

Recall that D&D grew out of war games. Gaining hit points as you level originally modeled the fact that commander units would be capable of surviving more than one hit in a mass battle. Hit Points.

Apparently increased hit points originally modelled the fact that some ships were larger than others and could take more punishment. Yes, hit points were appropriated for D&D from a naval wargame, because people wanted both large monsters and "Hero" individuals to be tougher than normal one-hit-wonder warriors.

 

[evileeyore]

I'm not following or perhaps I'm not interpreting 'gamist' in the same way as you or at all. Let me give you an example. In the DMG there might be an example of how tough it is to bust-open a door made of various wood (hollow or solid) and steel..etc
Based on that guidance, I can as DM determine a DC for a set of doors the PCs want to break open. I know anything equal to or above the DC is a success and anything below the DC is a failure. With 1 and 20 being on the d20 being obvious extremes of either result. This provides the DM to freely narrate the degree of success/failure on the action.

And this is as close to sim as D&D really gets. 3rd ed which is often decried by those whom hate the system as being too "crunchy", too "gritty", or too "sim".

And yet... how does the PC break down the door? Does he kick it in? Shoulder it? Bash it with a club? Chop it with an axe? (Yes I know 3e allowed for both "bursting the door in one go" and "slowly chopping through it", but then 3e is farther away from what D&D "is" to me than the other editions.)

Is this considered 'gamist', because the DM is allowed to interpret the DC and results due to it not being codified in a table? I'm confused.

No, it's "Narrativist"... kinda. Without the narrative mechanics. Gamist is in the fact that it's a simple mechanic to achieve a goal; Door is locked/barred/stuck - PCs need to open it - They make a "Bend Bars/Lift Gates" or "DC xx to Bash in the Door" check - Door is either open or closed. How they did it does not matter for the roll (baring the split method in 3rd ed), only for the narrative.

In GURPS, such a check would be based on the door's thickness, or the lock's strength, or the frame's thickness, pick the worst, and applied versus the PC's STR or weapon damage (in which case it's probably the Door's DR and Hit Points). They might get a Charging bonus if they rush at the door, they might be using a ram which gives a different bonus, how well trained is their Forced Entry skill is, etc.

How they are doing it informs the roll in GURPS, which is why I classify it as "sim". In most editions of D&D, it's an abstraction, which is why I don't.

And as Hussar keeps poking: Hit Points! D&D does this very "gamisty" while GURPS tries to get closer to simulating real world physics. And yes there are those on the SJGames' GURPS forums that are grinding it even finer...

I'm REALLY liking this definition.

It's basically how I see "sim games".

 

[Andor]

No, it's "Narrativist"... kinda. Without the narrative mechanics. Gamist is in the fact that it's a simple mechanic to achieve a goal; Door is locked/barred/stuck - PCs need to open it - They make a "Bend Bars/Lift Gates" or "DC xx to Bash in the Door" check - Door is either open or closed. How they did it does not matter for the roll (baring the split method in 3rd ed), only for the narrative.

In GURPS, such a check would be based on the door's thickness, or the lock's strength, or the frame's thickness, pick the worst, and applied versus the PC's STR or weapon damage (in which case it's probably the Door's DR and Hit Points). They might get a Charging bonus if they rush at the door, they might be using a ram which gives a different bonus, how well trained is their Forced Entry skill is, etc.

Personally I see no narrativist vs sim differences in those two descriptions at all. It's only a (slight) difference in granularity with one system (GURPS) offering the GM more guidance in how to set the DC. To claim that D&D is more abstract is disingenuous. It was a strength check to break the door, ergo it was a strength based activity that broke it open. Whether it was the left shoulder or right or even a kick is not specified. Nor is it in GURPS. So that looks like a wash to me.

At no point is it so abstract that you don't know if you opened the door or phased through it by force of will, which might be the case in a truely abstract game like HeroQuest.

You know force was applied to the door, in an attempt to open it, rather than destroy it. Both GURPS and D&D use different systems to 'simulate' opening the door vs destroying it. In either system you could also try to disassemble the door by pulling the hinges or use a spell to bypass it entirely, or dig through the wall next to it with pickaxes. And both systems would resolve those choices differently that the str based open door check, and in pretty similar ways. Indeed the only real differences would be the book keeping. (Spending a spell slot vs fatigue frex.)

And frankly I've never played D&D with a GM that wouldn't give you a bonus to the roll if you supplied a more effective means to open the door, using the petrified dwarf as a battering ram for example, so that's a wash too. It's just that GURPS as a slightly more granular system demands a slightly higher up front narrative description of the door opening activity. That's not at all the same as saying it's a better sim.

IMHO at least.

 

[Hussar]

I'm REALLY liking this definition. (The whole example above was a big help.) [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION], are you good with this definition? It seems to me "without the need for narrative injections" is the key - the game play (dice rolling, declaring actions) tells you what happens in the game in some fashion.

There is wiggle room in the choice of the words "relatively complete", which might explain arguments - that some people are happier with a less complete description than others. So the answer to the OP question might really be "It's Sim enough for my purposes."

Yeah, I think Pemerton hits it on the head nicely. If the mechanics are a "black box" as to how something is resolved, then it isn't simulating anything, IMO. To me, that's the difference between D&D and what I would consider to be a sim game. Once initiative is rolled, there is a black box around the combatants which precludes us from using the mechanics to determine what is happening in the fiction. All we know is who won or lost.

So, I do disagree with you that this is a granularity issue. It's not that we have less information in D&D than in other systems. It's that in D&D, we don't have any information at all. How did my character die? Well, he ran out of HP. What does that actually mean in the game world? Well, we don't actually know, based on the mechanics. We can make up narratives that the table finds acceptable, but, there is no correlation between the mechanics and the narration, other than in very, very fuzzy ways. My character lost HP, so, the DM narrates that he got scratched in the arm. It's pretty much purely freeform.

The mechanics themselves, however, do not generate anything. I can't look to the mechanics and say, "Yes, this or that happened." All I can say is that "something" happened.

At the end of the day, it's not an issue of "relatively complete" vs "pretty vague". It's an issue of "any information at all" vs "no information at all". And I think that many gamers have internalised the fact that we aren't actually getting any information from the mechanics to the point where they no longer realise that they are making up the narrative largely whole cloth.

 

[Imaro]

Yeah, I think Pemerton hits it on the head nicely. If the mechanics are a "black box" as to how something is resolved, then it isn't simulating anything, IMO. To me, that's the difference between D&D and what I would consider to be a sim game. Once initiative is rolled, there is a black box around the combatants which precludes us from using the mechanics to determine what is happening in the fiction. All we know is who won or lost.

So, I do disagree with you that this is a granularity issue. It's not that we have less information in D&D than in other systems. It's that in D&D, we don't have any information at all. How did my character die? Well, he ran out of HP. What does that actually mean in the game world? Well, we don't actually know, based on the mechanics. We can make up narratives that the table finds acceptable, but, there is no correlation between the mechanics and the narration, other than in very, very fuzzy ways. My character lost HP, so, the DM narrates that he got scratched in the arm. It's pretty much purely freeform.

Well if an Orc with a sword killed my character I know he didn't burn to death, die from a spell, die from an arrow, die from acid... and so on so I don't see how you can claim we know nothing...

 

[The Crimson Binome]

How can Hussar or I be wrong about how we play the game? If I assert that in my game PC hit points are primarily a metagame device for tracking the momentum of victory - if you're losing hp faster than your enemies are its running against you, and vice versa its running your way - then who are you to say that I am wrong?

You can say that Hit Points are a metagame construct that don't actually represent anything within the game world, but unless you've house ruled the game so far that they no longer control when you are unable to fight, then they do objectively represent your ability to not get stopped by attacks. When that orc attacks your wizard, it's the number on your character sheet which determines whether you have enough skill/luck/whatever in order to keep going.

You can deny it, but any number of in-game experiments would prove it. Even if you don't actually sit down and try to figure it out in-game, events will still always corroborate it, because it is true and because the truth is the thing that doesn't change based on whether you believe it or not.

This is all about making the game more palatable for traditional purist-for-system sensibilities.

I can't argue with that, if that's the definition we're using of purist-for-system. As far as process-sim goes, the level of detail doesn't matter, as long as it's only in-game factors which determine the results of your in-game actions.