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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6350991" data-attributes="member: 996">In no edition of D&D does the DC of a lock change because a different character walked up to the lock and tried to pick it.  At best, we can put this off to mistaking guidelines for rules.Just because guidelines might say that a CR 3 ogre is an appropriate challenge for a given party, doesn't mean that a Cloud Giant turns into an ogre when attacked by said party.  'Status Quo' vs 'Tailored' DMing styles notwithstanding. That's no more non-sim than being beaten to 1 hp and receiving no penalties at all.  D&D characters are unrealistically resilient, that way.  Sure, in some eds, a dying character could 'stabilize' on his own get up, and be at full potential for all his attacks, checks, and so forth.  That's just the level of abstraction - and, to some extent, of simulating genre - it went for. Are the two of you even working from the same definition of sim?  I don't recall anything of the kind - and trying to dig into that would only bring back up the edition war.  But, why does it matter what /one/ edition of D&D did, if the question is 'why D&D for sim?'  If /any/ one version of D&D is adequate for sim, that's all you need to answer the question - no need to even allude to the existence of others.  Likewise, if you want to prove Hussar wrong in his assertion, you need only prove that /one/ edition was suitable for sim.That digression out of the way (and thanks for the more neutral 'non'-sim).... Here, AFAICT, we mean simulation in the natural language sense, not some weird-later-RPG-theory sense.  And, in the context of the day, it's not like you had a lot of other choices (my point in my first reply in this thread).  So it's only natural to project whatever to-be-labeled-sim-later impulses upon the game we were actually playing. By the time AD&D was complete (1st 3 books out), we had RQ, which is arguably more 'sim' (depending on your definition, of course - it made a point of handling melee combat in a more detailed and 'realistic' way, for instance, and had a skill-based system where you learned by doing and training, rather than class/level where you got better at opening locks by killing orcs).  It's not exactly the only example either.   It was mostly just a scale change.  Figures representing one creature instead of several.  D&D was a complete, published wargame before anyone thought to label it a role-playing game, but the RP aspect flowed naturally from the switch to controlling a single imaginary character instead of a whole imaginary army. I get the frequent use of the 'for me' qualifier and it's fine for what it was 'about to you,' but, I think what it was 'meant to be' came from the intent of the guy that wrote it.The main challenges to the idea of early D&D simulating something were more in the form that it simulated things very badly.  Vancian magic didn't simulate any instance of magic from myth, legend, or the fantasy genre (being unique to a specific science fiction series), armor causing you to 'miss' also rubbed a lot of folks sim-fur the wrong way, as did hps (which seemed to simulate taking physical injuries) increasing from 'experience.'  When EGG explained the ideas behind these and other objections, the rationales were often in support of what we might (or might not - seriously, these definitions are so effed up as to be virtually meaningless) call 'gamist' (Vancian, for instance, was an attempt, however unsuccessful, to make magic in PC hands playable in the context of a game) or 'narrativist' (in the way hps and saving throws represented an author/narrative tool/trope like 'plot armor,' for instance). Nod.  D&D was what was available for a time, so of course it got used for everything.  As the industry matured, other options that maybe emphasized something differently or did something better emerged.Thing is, it's also what so many of us started with, and played for so long, and have such an affection for, that the impulse to go on using for things it's maybe not ideally suited for can still be pretty strong - and, I think, perfectly OK.  Ultimately, I think, that for any definition of 'sim' (other than the dictionary definition of simulation, itself), sim is more about how you play that which game you play.  And D&D is certainly fair game (pi).</blockquote>

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