# Why use D&D for a Simulationist style Game?



## Hussar (Aug 1, 2014)

Been reading the The Ranger You got spell casting in my peanut butter! thead and the following quote really caught my eye:



Dausuul said:


> It most certainly does not! D&D is not an abstract strategy game. If this logic applied to D&D, there would be no need for "rulings over rules." Chess doesn't need a DM.
> 
> At its core, D&D is a game of pretend. It's not all that different from when one kid says "I'm Batman!" and another says "Well, I'm Wonder Woman!" and they start fighting imaginary criminals. The rules exist to help the kids decide what happens when the imaginary Joker throws imaginary razor-edged playing cards at Batman. When the kids start debating whether Batman can dodge the playing cards, the rules offer a common ground and a set of tools with which to reach an answer. Sometimes, strict adherence to the rules produces silly results, in which case the kids can say "That's silly" and ignore them. This is one of the reasons Rule Zero was invented. But in most cases the rules provide decent answers.
> 
> Because the rules are tools for answering questions about the fiction, however, they can't be separated from it. When the rules say that Batman can only throw 3 Batarangs per day, that is a statement about the fictional world. It shouldn't be necessary for the kids to dream up ad hoc rationalizations for why Batman is choosing not to throw any more Batarangs. The rules have no authority over what Batman _chooses_ to do, only over the results of his decisions.




And, I have to admit, despite all the hoopla over the past few years, I really don't get it.  I love sim style games.  I do.  GURPS is a favourite game of mine that I don't get to play anywhere nearly often enough.  But, where does this idea that D&D is a good fit for sim style play come from?  In 2001, if you had claimed that you self identified as a sim player and your go to game for that style was D&D, everyone would look at you like you had two heads.

When did D&D become the poster child for sim play?  D&D has always been primarily gamist in most of its approaches.  The mechanics have virtually always been, "What makes this a fun game" rather than, "How can we model this through mechanics"?  This is why we have a combat system that is entirely abstract.  We use Hit Points rather than any number of systems model physical damage far better.  We have dungeons that make virtually no sense and game worlds that barely pay lip service to the massive impact that the mechanics would have if the mechanics were actually applied to world building.

So, I ask you, why D&D?  If you like sim style play where the mechanics are making a statement about the game world, then why on Earth would you choose to play D&D?


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## Andor (Aug 1, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Been reading the The Ranger You got spell casting in my peanut butter! thead and the following quote really caught my eye:
> 
> 
> 
> ...




Several thoughts occur to me.

1. It depends on which edition you're talking about. 3.x was by far the most sim-like edition of D&D, for my money 4th was the least. 

2. The rules of D&D are, as you justly point out, sufficiently abstract that they generated endless hours of discussion about what they meant from the eyes of our characters. This trail of thought leads naturally into game-as-sim modes of thought.

3. It's fun! There have been, for the entire history of the game, many gloriously deranged thought exercises in how people in these crazy worlds would do things. Remember the "What would a D&D castle really look like" debates? Do you go with a classic design and put up with dragons and wizards incinerating everything in your courtyards? Do you go with the "the sky is scary!" clamshell designs and then deal with bulette herding goblin sappers digging into your belly? How do you stop the teleport squads?

4. Some "sim" style games don't actually sim very well after a certain point. Gurps for example is a great system, but it doesn't deal very well with power levels approaching modern weaponry, let alone surpassing it. You can decry the absurdity of HP systems, but the fact is that we know of big strong guys taking a minor fleshwound to the arm and dropping dead from shock and slight women taking multiple bullets to the face and then walking down several flights of stairs to the EMTs. How do you model real world behavior like that accurately? You can't and HP systems do the job well enough.


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 1, 2014)

Hussar said:


> And, I have to admit, despite all the hoopla over the past few years, I really don't get it.  I love sim style games.  I do.  GURPS is a favourite game of mine that I don't get to play anywhere nearly often enough.  But, where does this idea that D&D is a good fit for sim style play come from?



  If it's 1975, and you want to play a sim-style FRPG, your choices are prettymuch 0D&D w/Chaimail, or 0D&D+Greyhawk.  And, even though there were lots of other games by the 80s, D&D was the one everyone had started with and knew well, so it was the natural point to start if you wanted something different - no matter how different, or how well something else already did that something different.

So were there young-grognards-to-be using D&D to play sim-style?  You betchya.  There were also some of them cooking up variants to try to play Star Wars using D&D as a base ruleset.

Really, if you could think to do it with an RPG, someone did it with early D&D.



> In 2001, if you had claimed that you self identified as a sim player and your go to game for that style was D&D, everyone would look at you like you had two heads....When did D&D become the poster child for sim play?  ...So, I ask you, why D&D?  If you like sim style play where the mechanics are making a statement about the game world, then why on Earth would you choose to play D&D?



 I blame the edition war.  (Hey, war is bad, we can blame it for any/everything.)  In the years right before the edition war, D&D was (as it has always been & still was during the war, and still will be with 5e) an FRPG with wargaming roots and wildly abstract sub-systems like rounds & hps, and no one had a problem with that (anymore, the Role v Roll debate had quieted down), we were busy concocting builds and arguing the finer points of RAW.  

Once the edition war started, people had to come up with reasons to hate one edition or the other, and that meant digging up things that D&D did well and pretending only your edition did them, and/or digging up things it did badly and pretending only the edition you hated did them.  So symmetry broke early on and one edition ended up being labeled 'bad for sim' making the other edition 'good for sim,' and, therefore, D&D being all about sim.


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## Minigiant (Aug 1, 2014)

I see it as 2 things. 
First , there is no default setting holding you back nor dictating the physics and rules of the game work in that reality. 

Second, there is the point that d&d companies are willing to sell you rules for stimulation if you're willing to pay the money.

There is no book or comic or movie telling you how far you can jump...
and if you want to know how far you can job both TSR and Wizards would sell rules for it.

EDIT: oh there was a third. 
D&D promoted house rules so any sim rule that would or could not be purchased was homemade.


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## Savage Wombat (Aug 1, 2014)

Isn't this one of those areas where you have to make sure everyone agrees on what "simulationist" means in this context?


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## Halivar (Aug 1, 2014)

The problem with sim games in general is that compounding imprecisions in the details yield enormous inaccuracy on the whole. A properly abstract system is imprecise, but accurate. Like a cone of uncertainty.


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## billd91 (Aug 1, 2014)

Hussar said:


> When did D&D become the poster child for sim play?  D&D has always been primarily gamist in most of its approaches.  The mechanics have virtually always been, "What makes this a fun game" rather than, "How can we model this through mechanics"?  This is why we have a combat system that is entirely abstract.  We use Hit Points rather than any number of systems model physical damage far better.  We have dungeons that make virtually no sense and game worlds that barely pay lip service to the massive impact that the mechanics would have if the mechanics were actually applied to world building.
> 
> So, I ask you, why D&D?  If you like sim style play where the mechanics are making a statement about the game world, then why on Earth would you choose to play D&D?




A whole lot of games have been poster children for sim play - just of different sorts of simulations. Traveller contains elements of simulating what an interstellar polity would be with communication traveling only about as fast as people can travel (no instant communications). It also has elements of simulating a rudimentary economy for speculative trade. D&D happens to have elements that simulate fantasy literary styles - particularly pulpy, combat ones by guys like Edgar Rice Burroughs.

I have a hard time saying that D&D has always been "primarily gamist" in its approach. Whenever you adapt some kind of other reality (be it real reality or genre reality), the main job you're doing is applying a gamist eye to the process. It's all about adapting some element into a playable game simulation of that element, but that doesn't make it "primarily gamist" in its approach, at least not how Hussar seems to be using the term. 

As abstract as some of the rules in earlier editions of D&D before 4e, I still believe they hold more aspirations of simulation than 4e in many ways. Both games can be used to simulate aspects of fantasy literature, albeit with focuses on different styles of action. But if we were to compare multiclassing rules, for example, 4e drops a lot of the simulation aspects the previous editions held. In an effort to enable the player to create their particular character concepts, players can multiclass their fighter PC for an individual wizard spell to add to their suite of powers. There's barely even a nod to simulating a character gradually growing in wizardly power - elements that are included in previous editions in which wizards progress from neophyte 1st level casters whether they started as one in 1e/2e's multiclassing or picked it up later in 3e's version. It doesn't really matter whether or not any of the simulations in 1e-3e were "realistic" (as if that means much with respect to wizard characters), all of them simulate a growth in power common to the zero-to-hero focus of D&D and many stories about wizard apprentices. Sure, the structures are abstract and work in a game framework - but that doesn't stop them from simulating something that a lot of players find valuable and perhaps even necessary for their view of how an RPG should work.


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 1, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> Isn't this one of those areas where you have to make sure everyone agrees on what "simulationist" means in this context?



Or at least is aware of the bizarre range of definitions out there.  (I'm not going to do any of these justice or anything, just a quick outline.)

An actual, literal, *simulation* is only concerned with accuracy, it doesn't have to be fair or fun or anything like that.  Think computer model of global warming. 

Process-sim is a style of gaming in which you focus on the "how" of what your characters are doing and the realistic/self-consistent consequences thereof.

'simulationism' treats the rules of a game as if they were an accurate simulation, and explores what those de-facto laws of physics imply about the world and its denizens.  

Genre fidelity or genre emulation is an attempt to simulate a genre (like fantasy, in an FRPG) or genre conventions, rather than simulate any actual (or even imagined), consistent, 'reality.'

Verisimilitude or realism is the selective simulation of reality in some cases, and of fantastic genre elements in others.  For instance, to construct a self-consistent world like those described in a genre, but one where cause & effect  (as modeled by simulationist-style rules) override genre convention.


I think the question was likely about process-sim, though.


Bottom line, though, a literal simulation is not a game, and unlikely to have the qualities that can make a game enjoyable (balance, fairness, or playability or being easy to learn and/or having depths to master, among other things).  Games that partake of the qualities of simulations may have to sacrifice the qualities that would otherwise make them better games to do so (depending on how far they take the simulation aspects, obviously, but also depending on what they're simulating - circular though it may sound, for instance, a simulation that simulates a game may be a pretty good game).

So, if someone tells you "D&D is a bad simulation" shrug and console yourself that it leaves it room to be a good game.


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## evileeyore (Aug 1, 2014)

Andor said:


> 4. Some "sim" style games don't actually sim very well after a certain point. Gurps for example is a great system, but it doesn't deal very well with power levels approaching modern weaponry, let alone surpassing it. You can decry the absurdity of HP systems, but the fact is that we know of big strong guys taking a minor fleshwound to the arm and dropping dead from shock and slight women taking multiple bullets to the face and then walking down several flights of stairs to the EMTs. How do you model real world behavior like that accurately? You can't and HP systems do the job well enough.



I'd argue 4e _GURPS_ handles simulating reality fine... it does not handle simulating Super Heroic "Reality" well.  At least not with out a heaping dose modifying (which several genre books have aimed to do, such as GURPS Action).  But Dungeon Fantasy?  Cliffhanger Noir?  Space Opera?  Sci-Fi?  Horro?  Mythos Horror?  Sure all that and more.



But even with heaping loads of modifications... I'm not sure it could ever handle Four-Color Super Heroic "Reality" well.  At least no where near as satisfactorily as the HERO system does.  Also it doesn;t accurately simulate the annoyances of classes and levels and other specific D&Disms... which is why I still play D&D, nothing else pisses me off quit the same way!


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## evileeyore (Aug 1, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> So, if someone tells you "D&D is a bad simulation" shrug and console yourself that it leaves it room to be a good game.



Or correct them:  D&D is a great simulation of D&D.  



Now, don't get my harping and grouching wrong, what D&D does it does really well*, what it doesn't do is simulate "reality".  But then my reality doesn't have Pointy-Eared Immortal peeps tossing about Fireballs... so... D&D is perfectly okay for that.









* Mostly annoy me to no end.


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## BryonD (Aug 1, 2014)

I would never consider "D&D" as a criteria.  So, I guess the question doesn't apply to me.

As a kid I loved 1E and, early on, 2E.  Then I started to become dissatisfied.  And I also discovered other games, primarily GURPS, but not limited to just GURPS.  
I wanted much better sim AND I wanted much lower fantasy.  2E was highly unsatisfactory, to me, at either of those criteria.

As the years went by, my desire for low fantasy drifted back to higher fantasy.  And around the same time a game came out that was a "great enough" (*for me*) sim of HIGH fantasy and it just happened to also be the 3rd edition of D&D.  I had long been more than happy with my status as a non-D&D player, so the D&D name was truly a insignificant coincidence.  

I really find the "one true wayism" and "if it doesn't happen at my table, it doesn't happen anywhere" criteria for what makes something great at a matter of taste to be highly counter-productive.


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## Celebrim (Aug 1, 2014)

Back in the day, say circa 1990, I was certain that imbalance and failure to properly judge player proposition, where features of a game that where primarily the result of its low realism - that is to say, that they didn't simulate reality with its complex give and take and checks and balances faithfully enough.  I figured that the basis of a game was reality plus stated consistent departures from same as described consistently by the rules.  Otherwise, players wouldn't know what to do, and rules wouldn't produce answers that made for a predictable outcome for anyone.

So I started running GURPS.  Only to my annoyance, GURPS was doing absolutely no better in play than D&D.  So I decided that I needed to fix GURPS, and to my great delight I found that there was a guy out there who had done exactly that.   He'd created a system he called GULLIVER based on GURPS and various house rule fixes he'd applied to the GURPS 3e system (much of which ended up being official in GURPS 4e).  

But then I discovered a the limits of my theory.  While the GULLIVER system was awesome in many ways and fixed a lot of problems, it created a game which was basically too complex to prepare, run, or play.   It caused me to step back and reassess my priorities and assumptions.   What I eventually decided was that a system didn't need to be faithful to reality.  All a system really did for you was generate a fortune - '56% chance of X/44% chance of Y'.  A good system needed to generate that fortune quickly (so that it was playable) and transparently (so that the GM could tweak for circumstance), and all it had to do in terms of realism was be believable and broadly applicable.  In the process I went back and reassessed the design of 1e D&D and discovered there was more going on than I'd thought.  

I felt that 3e D&D offered for me a good balance between my various goals, which largely still remains, "I want a game that produces self-consistent consequences from the actions of all beings within the shared imaginary space."

I'm not sure I wholly believe that a system is 'simulationist', or 'gamist', or 'narrativist'.  While it can certainly lean that way and encourage those things, fundamentally if you look at the definitions it's clear that those things have less to do with system than they do with a way of approaching and thinking about play.

For example: "Process-sim is a style of gaming in which you focus on the "how" of what your characters are doing and the realistic/self-consistent consequences thereof."  You can take the tools of any system and use them to that purpose.  All you are doing is judging roughly what you think the realistic fortune is based on the player proposition.  It's a stance; not a system.

"'simulationism' treats the rules of a game as if they were an accurate simulation, and explores what those de-facto laws of physics imply about the world and its denizens." - Again, it's a stance; not a system.

"Genre fidelity or genre emulation is an attempt to simulate a genre (like fantasy, in an FRPG) or genre conventions, rather than simulate any actual (or even imagined), consistent, 'reality.'"  - Again, that's a stance; not a system.

I don't think it's any weirder to treat D&D generally as a good basis of simulationist play than it is to treat 4e (or any other edition) as a good basis of narrativist play.


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## Emerikol (Aug 2, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Been reading the The Ranger You got spell casting in my peanut butter! thead and the following quote really caught my eye:
> 
> 
> 
> ...




I can only claim one of two things.  Either you really don't know what sim is per the GNS definition or I don't know what it is per the GNS definition.

D&D until 4e worked fantastic for my style of play.  3e got too heavy at the end and magic mart of too far.  Still overall D&D fit my playstyle like a glove from beginning to 4e.  4e totally rejected my style and went off in another direction.  Now all of this paragraph is absolute fact.  What you want to call it is up to  you?  I've called it sim but maybe I'm using the wrong term.

I reject all of these supposed desires that us sim players supposedly want.  (I haven't met a sim espousing person though actually say they wanted these things just the anti-sim people).

1.  Wound system.  Lingering injuries.  Etc.      NO.  We just want basic D&D hit points.
2.  Hit location, complex plotting of combat manuevers, or anything like it.   NO we just want a simple fighter.  Attack, hit damage.
3.  Excessively complicated tables, rules, etc... for any aspect of reality.  NO.  We would like some easy to use ad hoc rules that give the feel of reality in play.

D&D was great until it wasn't.  So you figure me out.  I'm tired of arguing about sim because nobody really seems to grasp what it really means.   If you think it is about "simulating" a world realistically then you are so far out in left field that you are no longer even in the stadium.


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 2, 2014)

Emerikol said:


> I can only claim one of two things.  Either you really don't know what sim is per the GNS definition or I don't know what it is per the GNS definition.



 Or neither of you understand it.  Or it's just so murky and useless a definition that it's of no value in the discussion.  Or, since he didn't actually reference GNS, maybe he's not even using that definition.

But, if you self-identify as a sim-only player, maybe you could address the actual question.  What about D&D makes it good for sim?  Have you tried other, non-D&D systems?  What made them less suited to your brand of it?  




> I reject all of these supposed desires that us sim players supposedly want.
> 1.  Wound system.  Lingering injuries.  Etc.      NO.  We just want basic D&D hit points.



 What about 'basic D&D hps' is sim?  EGG wrote a treatise on what hps represented in the DMG that made them pretty vague and abstract.    What about wound systems or lingering injuries isn't?  Lingering injuries, for instance, are realistic (injuries take time to heal and can be debilitating), without them how do you model things like broken bones?  Wound systems - breaking out physical wounds from temporary damage or exhaustion or morale, is, I assume what we're talking about - would add to the range of dangers you could more realistically model.



> 2.  Hit location, complex plotting of combat manuevers, or anything like it.   NO we just want a simple fighter.  Attack, hit damage.



 OK, what about a simple /fighter/ is sim?  What about a complex one is contrary to sim?  Why does this matter only to fighters and not to rogues, wizards, monks, paladins, assassins, warlocks, or other classes?



> 3.  Excessively complicated tables, rules, etc... for any aspect of reality.  NO.  We would like some easy to use ad hoc rules that give the feel of reality in play.



 The rules reality works by are really pretty complicated.  What's the nature and threshold for this 'feel' how does D&D, with it's many profound abstractions and very unrealistic bits deliver that feel?  What has the feel of reality even got to do with fantasy, which is very un-real, indeed?



> I'm tired of arguing about sim because nobody really seems to grasp what it really means.   If you think it is about "simulating" a world realistically then you are so far out in left field that you are no longer even in the stadium.



 You just said you at least wanted a 'feel of reality.'  Seems related.  If sim has nothing to do with simulation, why call it sim?  Is it short for something else?


Edit:  Also, as an aside, we might have a shot at avoiding a threadlock if we leave edition warring out of it.  The issue is sim players choosing D&D of any ed, not rejecting one edition of it.  You clearly identify as a sim player.  You /should/ be able to explain both your idea of sim, and how D&D, even D&D of only one edition, works well for that.  If you must contrast D&D to something less amenable to sim, how about contrasting it with some of the other games you've tried?


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 2, 2014)

The short answer is that D&D was a) internally consistent, and b) not caught up on details.

The major problem with something like GURPS is that it _does_ get caught up on the details, to the point where actually resolving anything took more effort than it was worth. The details aren't that important, though. As long as a game gives you a consistent answer whenever you look at it, the actually _accuracy_ (compared to real-world outcome) isn't that important (to me, at least, and presumably others). 

I don't want to play GURPS as a sim, because there's too much sim to deal with; it's _hard_ to play GURPS as a sim. To contrast, it's _easy_ to play D&D as a sim, because it only has a few touchstones to keep track of.

It's kind of like using a grid to track positions in AD&D, before any of the expanded combat rules that really made positioning important. Because there wasn't pushing and pulling, or flanking, you only _needed_ to know rough relative positions - and the grid was _great_ for that. You could easily solve _all_ of the questions that came up (usually involving line of sight, or cover), specifically _because_ it wasn't a tactical combat ruleset that required specific detailed positioning.


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 2, 2014)

That's interesting, Saelorn.  It sounds like you're saying that lack of rules is the critical element.  What if you had no rules at all?  Or a very simple, but consistent rule - like the way LARPs sometimes default to draughts as resolution mechanic, or a simple coin toss to resolve a disputed outcome?

(Oh, and there were certainly things like pushing & pulling in AD&D - there was a spell /called/ Push, for instance, that did nothing else but push, and monsters like Ropers could certainly pull you - and I'm sure that's not nearly the only examples.  And there was a definition for 'flank' (and front and back) position relative to a figure & facing, IIRC, had some bearing on shield use, was it?)


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## Ratskinner (Aug 2, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> The short answer is that D&D was a) internally consistent, and b) not caught up on details.
> 
> The major problem with something like GURPS is that it _does_ get caught up on the details, to the point where actually resolving anything took more effort than it was worth. The details aren't that important, though. As long as a game gives you a consistent answer whenever you look at it, the actually _accuracy_ (compared to real-world outcome) isn't that important (to me, at least, and presumably others).




That's a very interesting viewpoint. Could you elaborate on what you mean by "internally consistent"?


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## Tequila Sunrise (Aug 2, 2014)

Hussar said:


> So, I ask you, why D&D? If you like sim style play where the mechanics are making a statement about the game world, then why on Earth would you choose to play D&D?



For a while I tried to treat 3.x as a sim, writing dozens of pages of house rules in the effort. And the only explanation I can give is that I didn't really know any better; D&D was the game I cut my rp teeth on, the only ttrpg I had ever really played, and the only one that everyone knew.

I still have a strong sim streak in me, but it's changed over the years. At some point it went from 'faux-medieval sim + magic' to 'through-and-through fantastical world sim,' which I think 4e can do fairly well. In other words, I now mold the simulation to the game rather than trying to mold the game to the simulation. 



Andor said:


> 1. It depends on which edition you're talking about. 3.x was by far the most sim-like edition of D&D, for my money 4th was the least.



Oddly enough, I find 4e the easiest edition to treat as a fantasy-world sim. Case in point: The whole DoaM thing, which I can easily explain as "It's martial magic." Bam, problem solved!

Whereas the way that other editions treat AC ruins any sense of real sim for me. Outside of 4e, characters get better at dodging _fireballs_, but not at dodging swords! (No level-based AC bonus.) So all I can do is sigh and swallow the abstract and gamey definition of hit points being forced down my throat.

So different strokes, and all that.


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## Tequila Sunrise (Aug 2, 2014)

Emerikol said:


> I reject all of these supposed desires that us sim players supposedly want.  (I haven't met a sim espousing person though actually say they wanted these things just the anti-sim people).
> 
> 1.  Wound system.  Lingering injuries.  Etc.      NO.  We just want basic D&D hit points.
> 2.  Hit location, complex plotting of combat manuevers, or anything like it.   NO we just want a simple fighter.  Attack, hit damage.



We should meet in person, so that you can say you've met someone who wants something more than hit points in a 'hard sim,' and I can say I've finally met someone who just wants to roll a d20 and damage.


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 2, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> That's interesting, Saelorn. It sounds like you're saying that lack of rules is the critical element. What if you had no rules at all? Or a very simple, but consistent rule - like the way LARPs sometimes default to draughts as resolution mechanic, or a simple coin toss to resolve a disputed outcome?



That would certainly meet a minimal definition for internal consistency, although I'm not sure that it would be terribly interesting as a game. Believe it or not, I actually do care about the game aspect of it, even if I hold the sim aspect as a higher priority. It's all about striking the right balance.


Ratskinner said:


> That's a very interesting viewpoint. Could you elaborate on what you mean by "internally consistent"?



As I use the term, it means that the outcome of any action depends solely on what the action is (within the game world), and not how you choose to represent it (with game mechanics). 

Practically speaking, it means that any_thing _(monster, item, spell, etc) must have one true set of stats which accurately reflect what it _is_, to ensure that it has consistent interactions with everything _else_ within the game world. You can't have a mechanical difference between two _things_​ unless it reflected an actual in-game difference between those things.


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## pemerton (Aug 2, 2014)

Dausuul said:
			
		

> When the kids start debating whether Batman can dodge the playing cards, the rules offer a common ground and a set of tools with which to reach an answer.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> Because the rules are tools for answering questions about the fiction, however, they can't be separated from it. When the rules say that Batman can only throw 3 Batarangs per day, that is a statement about the fictional world. It shouldn't be necessary for the kids to dream up ad hoc rationalizations for why Batman is choosing not to throw any more Batarangs. The rules have no authority over what Batman chooses to do, only over the results of his decisions.



With due respect to Dausuul, this is a non-sequitur, and an attempt to stipulate what RPG rules must/should be rather than an attempt to examine what, historically, they actually have been.

For instance, Basic D&D says that a 1st level fighter can only take X hit points worth of damage per day, but that is not a statement about the fictional world. It is a statement at the metagame level, that gives instructions to the game players about how to resolve combats involving that fighter. To work out why the first hit which did X/2 hp of damage didn't kill the fighter, but the second hit which did X/2 hp of damge did kill the fighter, the kids have to dream up "ad hoc rationalisations" eg that the first hit was only a graze, but the second hit was a stab to the chest. The rules don't, themselves, convey any of this information.

Nor do the AD&D rules tell us why a 1st level fighter only ever gets a chance to strike one telling blow per minute, whether fighting a peasant or a demon. This is left to "ad hoc rationalisations".

Contrast, say, RQ or RM, in which the rules do convey this sort of information.

A rule that says Batamn can only throw 3 batarangs per day _with any chane of success_ is a rule about what it is fair for the kids to have Batman do in their game. It's a bit like a rule when playing armies or cops-and-robbers that says you get 3 lives. There is no ingame explanation for why you get 1, or 3, or 10 lives. The kids have chosen a number that they think is fair and fun. The batarang-attack-rationing rule is in exactly the same category.

(Also, the rule does answer _some_ questions about the fiction - eg it tells us whether or not Batman uses attacks other than his batarangs - it just doesn't answer all of them - eg it doesn't tell us why Batman uses attacks other than his batarangs. That is left to "ad hoc rationalisation" - which, of course, is what some of us call "playing the game".)



Emerikol said:


> (I haven't met a sim espousing person though actually say they wanted these things just the anti-sim people).
> 
> 1.  Wound system.  Lingering injuries.  Etc.      NO.  We just want basic D&D hit points.
> 2.  Hit location, complex plotting of combat manuevers, or anything like it.   NO we just want a simple fighter.  Attack, hit damage.
> 3.  Excessively complicated tables, rules, etc... for any aspect of reality.  NO.  We would like some easy to use ad hoc rules that give the feel of reality in play.



Unless you think I was just making stuff up on the other recent thread that discussed these things, you have encountered such a person online - namely, me. (And if you think I'm anti-sim, then you haven't been following my posts very closely. I GMed Rolemaster for 19 years. The reason I think Ron Edwards' descriptoin of purist-for-system sim is terrific is because it captures exactly what motivated me during those 19 years. And the fact that Burning Wheel's Fight! system satisfies so many of these desiderata is part of what makes it appeal to me.)

If you go to the ICE boards you'll find many more posters like me, who want the things that you descibe as key elements of a sim game.

Rolemaster, HARP and RQ players absolutely want a wound system, a hit location system, and non-ad hoc rules. (Obviously they don't want excessively complicated tables - by definition, no one wants rules that they would judge to be excessively complicated; they want rules that are _appropriately _complicated.)

As far as combat manouevres are concerned, these are actually a bigger deal in 3E and PF than in RM, RQ or HARP, mostly because they have to exist parallel to the hit point rules. Whereas in RM, say, Grappling is just another crit table, inflicting debuffs in the same sort of fashion as does the Puncture or Slash crit table.

Frankly, if you are happy with abstract AC, abstract rounds, abstract action economy and abstract hit points, I don't know in what sense you are playing sim. All the classic sim games (RM, RQ, C&S, GURPS, HARP, etc) are characterised by departures from these features of D&D's combat mechanics: they introduce armour-as-damage-reduction, hit location, wounds, parrying, continuous (or at least somewhat continuous) initiative, etc.

The most sim-oriented "modern" game I know is Burning Wheel, and it's melee combat system (Fight!) is the same in nearly all these respects: hit location, wounds, parrying, continuous initiative, etc. (But like D&D (and classic Traveller), it does use armour as hit negation rather than damage reduction.)



billd91 said:


> As abstract as some of the rules in earlier editions of D&D before 4e, I still believe they hold more aspirations of simulation than 4e in many ways.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> if we were to compare multiclassing rules, for example, 4e drops a lot of the simulation aspects the previous editions held. In an effort to enable the player to create their particular character concepts, players can multiclass their fighter PC for an individual wizard spell to add to their suite of powers. There's barely even a nod to simulating a character gradually growing in wizardly power



The character grows in wizardly power - first s/he has none, then s/he has some - access to one 1st level spell. That's growth.

If the player then wants his/her PC to have access to more wizard spells via substitution feats, those feats have to be acquired (by gaining levels) and spent on new powers. That's more growth.


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 2, 2014)

pemerton said:


> For instance, Basic D&D says that a 1st level fighter can only take X hit points worth of damage per day, but that is not a statement about the fictional world.



Unless it is, which is how I would run it as a process-sim. It's just a fact of the world that this particular dude can take so much punishment before going down.

I mean, there's nothing stopping you from running it that way. I'm sure lots of people did, and still do. You could also _not _​do that, if you think it's too silly.


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## pemerton (Aug 2, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> Unless it is, which is how I would run it as a process-sim. It's just a fact of the world that this particular dude can take so much punishment before going down.



Based on my familiarity with what I have called the "classic sim" games, and the communities around them (especially the Rolemaster and HARP communities found at the ICE boards and before that at the Guild Companion), I think there is one main reason why this is not satisfactory: it requires a notion of "punishment" that has no connection to actual, real-world biological systems.

For instance: for a real world person, being run through the chest will kill you _whether or not_ you have a graze on your forearm. But in D&D, on the Gygaxian reading of hit points (which itself requires what [MENTION=58197]Dausuul[/MENTION] calls "ad hoc rationalisations") you never get run through until you have first had your foream grazed.

This also fails to satsify your own consistency requirement - because in the game mechanics a damage roll of 4 is different from a damage roll of 5, but in the fiction they might both mean the same thing - being run through the chest. Also, in the fiction being run through the chest is different from being grazed on the arm, but in the game mechanics these might both be represented by a damage roll of 4.

The only reading of hit points that satisfies the "consistency" requirement takes them even further from real-world bioloical systems: in effect, shaving of hit points becomes like shaving off wood or chipping away at a stone block: literal ablation which is certainly one mode of punishing certain material things (though not the only way - they can be broken without being abraded) but has no connection to biology or physiology.


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## pemerton (Aug 2, 2014)

For me, the core point of [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s OP is that D&D is not a sim system in the way that GURPS, RM, RQ, C&S, HARP, etc are sim systems:

*It uses hit points rather than modelling biological injury processes;

*It uses AC rather than modelling dodging and parrying and armour absorbing/turning blows;

*It uses a sometimes baroque initiative system and action economy rather than trying to model continous motion and physical action;

*It uses classes and levels rather than some sort of skill system to try and model the diversity of human learning and knowledge/skill acquisition;

*Etc.​
These are observations, not criticisms.

Plenty of posters, on this and on previous threads, reply by saying that the D&D rules are "sim enough" for them, or give them as much sim as they feel they need, relative to complexity, or avoiding death spirals, or whatever other consideration is underpinning the compromise.

For me, the _significance_ of this is that, once you recognise that you are compromising with sim for some other reason, how can you then look at a game that draws the line of compromise in a different place and say that - unlike your game - it is not an RPG at all? Or lacks verisimilitude in some fundamental way? It may not be a game that you want to play, because it doesn't draw the compromise where you would prefer it to be drawn. But presumably other reasonable and rational people might drawn the line of compromise somewhere else.


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## Ratskinner (Aug 2, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> As I use the term, it means that the outcome of any action depends solely on what the action is (within the game world), and not how you choose to represent it (with game mechanics).
> 
> Practically speaking, it means that any_thing _(monster, item, spell, etc) must have one true set of stats which accurately reflect what it _is_, to ensure that it has consistent interactions with everything _else_ within the game world. You can't have a mechanical difference between two _things_​ unless it reflected an actual in-game difference between those things.




By "stats", may it be presumed that you mean numbers with rules-defined utility? That is, an object isn't just "made of Iron", you need to say that it has...frex: "Hardness 20" (or maybe the rulebook says somewhere that an Iron object has "Hardness 20"). 

I ask because it would seem to me that, under such a rubric for internal consistency, you are faced with the prospect of writing a very large, if not ever-increasing set of rules. That is, "Hardness 20" is meaningless data without surrounding rules defining what that means or how it might interact with the other numbers on other game entities through actions. Does this (particularly your first paragraph) mean that actions must all have some kind of functional or  numerical impact (or potential impact, in the case of failure) on the "true stats"? That is, is it necessary to define  all actions (or categories of action)? This seems to me to be at odds with your other preference for the system to not get "caught up on details". (And maybe they just are at odds...it wouldn't be the first time.)


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 2, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> That would certainly meet a minimal definition for internal consistency, although I'm not sure that it would be terribly interesting as a game. Believe it or not, I actually do care about the game aspect of it, even if I hold the sim aspect as a higher priority.



 Interesting, because the sim stereotype is of very detailed and realistic rules. 



> Practically speaking, it means that any_thing _(monster, item, spell, etc) must have one true set of stats which accurately reflect what it _is_, to ensure that it has consistent interactions with everything _else_ within the game world. You can't have a mechanical difference between two _things_​ unless it reflected an actual in-game difference between those things.



 That would seem at odds with the answer, above: that a minimalist resolution system would be internally consistent.  Now, it looks like, you'd need a mechanically unique resolution for each and every thing that has an 'in game difference.'  


 It's strange that a style called 'simulation' would have such a fluid and hard-to-pin-down definition.  

It reminds me of Princess Bride "you keep using that word..."  


I mean, what's really going on?  Are there really multiple styles all fighting over being called 'sim?'  Why?  What's so great about the word that owning it is more important than accurately describing each style?  Or is there one style of 'sim,' but it's just so complicated and nuanced that there's no way to pin it down?  Or is there something else behind all the seemingly-contradictory requirements and caveats and must-haves and must-never-haves?


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 2, 2014)

pemerton said:


> Based on my familiarity with what I have called the "classic sim" games, and the communities around them (especially the Rolemaster and HARP communities found at the ICE boards and before that at the Guild Companion), I think there is one main reason why this is not satisfactory: it requires a notion of "punishment" that has no connection to actual, real-world biological systems.



That's just talking verisimilitude, though - "true-to-life" -ness - which is not necessary for internal consistency. If people are trying to simulate real life, then it wouldn't be satisfactory to them. Those are the people who want lots and lots of complex rules, because they're trying to accurately represent real life which is incredibly complex. 

As far as I understand the various terms and factions, the aspect which is important to me is the "process sim", which is just what I had stated - that the game mechanics reflect the reality within the game world, so you can use the game mechanics to determine what happens within the game world. Kind of like that whole "game rules as laws-of-physics" thing, which people talk about.



pemerton said:


> This also fails to satisfy your own consistency requirement - because in the game mechanics a damage roll of 4 is different from a damage roll of 5, but in the fiction they might both mean the same thing - being run through the chest. Also, in the fiction being run through the chest is different from being grazed on the arm, but in the game mechanics these might both be represented by a damage roll of 4.



That's just a simplification, looking at a single metric. You could have a light stab to the torso, or a serious wound to the arm, and have them both represented as 4 damage; in much the same way that you could have a television and a bowling ball which each weigh 15 lbs - they are similar in at least one important way.

By internal consistency, though, you could not have the same spear through the torso represented as either 4 damage _or_ 5 damage. By definition, there would have to be _something_ to distinguish those wounds, in order to merit the mechanical distinction - in this case, it's easy enough to say that an impalement for 5 damage is a wound that is larger and deeper than an impalement for 4 damage. If you tried to say that the same exact impalement was either 4 damage or 5 damage, and either way could be accurate, then that would be as nonsensical as saying that this one specific bowling ball weighs either 15 lbs or 12 lbs, and both numbers are accurate.


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 2, 2014)

Ratskinner said:


> By "stats", may it be presumed that you mean numbers with rules-defined utility? That is, an object isn't just "made of Iron", you need to say that it has...frex: "Hardness 20" (or maybe the rulebook says somewhere that an Iron object has "Hardness 20").



Numbers certainly _help_ to maintain consistency. I mean, look at Pathfinder, with all of its fiddly little rules. Or GURPS, for that matter. Both systems go into some depth about material properties, with lots of numbers, and it certainly helps them to be more consistent. You never end up with mithral in a Pathfinder game which doesn't "behave like mithral".

You don't actually _need_ those numbers, though, as long as what rules you do have serve to reinforce the existing truths. You don't _need_ to know that iron has hardness 8 and 12hp per inch of thickness, as long as you know that it's strong enough to forge swords and armor but is sundered easily by adamantium. (Although, if you ever do need to figure out how much damage it takes to carve through a 5-foot thick iron wall, you would probably want to keep that consistent for the next time you have to do so.)


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 2, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> That would seem at odds with the answer, above: that a minimalist resolution system would be internally consistent.  Now, it looks like, you'd need a mechanically unique resolution for each and every thing that has an 'in game difference.'



Because the game rules are necessarily less complex than the underlying reality, it means you will always get some things which _are_ different within the game world, but which use identical mechanics. You'll just never get the _same_ thing within the game world, which uses _different_ mechanics.

You could have a light torso wound, or a heavy arm wound, and they might both be represented as 4hp of damage. Just like you could have a baseball bat or a cricket bat, and they would each be represented with the stats for a club, because their real in-game-world differences aren't great enough to warrant mechanical distinction.



Tony Vargas said:


> I mean, what's really going on?  Are there really multiple styles all fighting over being called 'sim?'  Why?  What's so great about the word that owning it is more important than accurately describing each style?



Blame GNS theory. I'm usually the first person to defend it, but even I will admit that it has problems. In this case, the problem is that it's the only theory that has any popularity, so everyone tries to fit their own personal opinions into one of the three categories.

Which isn't to say that it's entirely worthless, of course. If someone was running one of those ultra-detailed games like GURPS, I could join and I would be confident in the fact that it wouldn't break internal consistency. I just can't guarantee that it would satisfy me at a gamist level.


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## pemerton (Aug 2, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> You could have a light stab to the torso, or a serious wound to the arm, and have them both represented as 4 damage



But neither of these wounds is fatal, whereas some 4 hp wounds are. Which is the source of the inconsistency.



Saelorn said:


> That's just talking verisimilitude, though - "true-to-life" -ness - which is not necessary for internal consistency. If people are trying to simulate real life, then it wouldn't be satisfactory to them. Those are the people who want lots and lots of complex rules, because they're trying to accurately represent real life which is incredibly complex.
> 
> As far as I understand the various terms and factions, the aspect which is important to me is the "process sim", which is just what I had stated - that the game mechanics reflect the reality within the game world



My point is that all the classic "process sim" games had a conception of the processes they wanted to model that was prior to the game rules - namely, they wanted to model the processes of real-world biological and physical systems and their interactions. For instance, they want a sword fight in the game to resolve in more-or-less the way that it would in real life.

The idea that you would settle on an essentially arbitrary system of mechanics, and then read the gameworld off that, is one that I have never encountered except among a few posters on this board (you being one of them). It has no precedent in the history or culture of the classic sim RPGs.

Which is not a criticism, but an observation that I think is relevant to [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s OP. When Hussar is referring to sim play, I believe that he, like the classic sim RPGers, is assuming that we have a prior conception of the causal processes that our rules are meant to model.


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## pemerton (Aug 2, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> Are there really multiple styles all fighting over being called 'sim?'  Why?





Saelorn said:


> Blame GNS theory.



Ron Edwards uses "sim" for a particular analytic and classificatory purpose. He is trying to contrast RPGs in which the participants are expected to make decisions drawing upon concerns that come from outside the play of the game itself - these he labels either narrativist or gamist - from RPGs in which the participants (players moreso than GMs) are meant to confine themselves, in deciding how to make decisions in the course of play, to the contents of the game itself.

Within sim, he distinguishes two main approaches:

*Purist-for-system, in which (i) players confine themselves to applying and discovering the consequences of the game system, and (ii) the game system itself aspires to be, and is at least adequate as, a model of the ingame causal processes. Classic Traveller, RQ, RM, GURPS, C&S and HARP are all examples of this.

*High concept, in which the system is not necessarily meant to model in game processes (though it might) but rather to deliver genre-appropriate outcomes, with the players along for the ride. CoC is a classic of this; so is Ars Magica. A lot of White Wolf and 2nd ed AD&D play aspires to this, but Edwards is very down on it because the mechanics won't actually deliver the genre experience unless the GM manipulates and fudges them along the way (rule zero, or "the golden rule" fromWW). I think a lot of ENworld posters play D&D in more-or-less this style.​
Notice that purist-for-system play brings with it a type of constraint on mechanics (rules-as-gameworld-physics) that high-concept sim play does not. For instance, the "obscure death" rule in Dragonlance is designed to help support high-concept play, but it doesn't model any ingame causal process. Similarly for action points in 3E Eberron.

By gamism Edwards doesn't mean what most ENworld-ers mean by that (on ENworld, "gamist" tends to be used to mean "uses metagame mechanics"). He means play where players make decisions based on the desire to win. Again, this is not related to any particular style of mechanics. For instance, Gygaxian AD&D is a mix of rules-as-physics mechanics (eg the way weapons are modelled, Vancian casting, the morale and loyalty rules) and metagame mechanics (eg initiative and action economy, hp, saving throws, XP gain), but the default playstyle for Gygaxian D&D is gamist (what Gygax calls "skilled play", which includes what many ENworlders would regard as improper metagaming, like planning spells among casters for optimisation without wondering about how they communicate with one another in game; as well as gaming the GM).

For Edwards's purposes, the goal of winning via skill play is more salient than the mechanical details or so-called Gygaxian naturalism; but for others, including I think many ENworlders, the "naturalism" is highly salient, and makes them think of Gygaxian D&D as a type of sim (not in Edwards's sense, but in the sense of aspiring to present a "naturalistic" gaming experience).

Finally, by "narrativism" Edwards means play that aspires to yield a satisfactory story as a pretty immediate consequence of play, without anyone actually having to take responsibility as a storyteller - the idea is that the mechaincs will be such that if the players do their bit, and the GM does his/her bit, then story will emerge "automatically" with no need for fudging or deliberate authorship. I think among D&D players, especially ENworlders, this is a rather uncommon motivation for play. Most ENworlders, when they talk about "narrative" play, mean something like a game with a high degree of continuity in the fiction, and rich backstory that makes sense of the conflicts in which the PCs find themselves. (The starkest contrast would be play in which the PCs simply start at the entracne to this week's variation on White Plume Mountain, with no backstory continuity beyond the PCs being the same ones.)

Most ENworld "narrative" play is, in Edwards's terms, high concept sim with a high degree of GM force to maintain the coherence of the backstory and continuity - but many of these ENworld players wouldn't label themsevels as sim players because they are not using the terminology for the same classificatory purpose as Edwards is.


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## Neonchameleon (Aug 2, 2014)

First, the problem is root-deep for two reasons.  First, Ron Edwards labelled simulationist play incoherent which meant either he doesn't understand it or it doesn't fit the model properly.  It's the obvious proud nail.  Second, it's being waved around as a banner in the edition wars - and such banners tend to have whatever usefulness they had stripped away.



billd91 said:


> I have a hard time saying that D&D has always been "primarily gamist" in its approach. Whenever you adapt some kind of other reality (be it real reality or genre reality), the main job you're doing is applying a gamist eye to the process. It's all about adapting some element into a playable game simulation of that element, but that doesn't make it "primarily gamist" in its approach, at least not how Hussar seems to be using the term.




D&D, especially before DL1, is the _textbook_ example of a gamist RPG.  You're going down a really weird obstacle course and trying to retrieve as much loot as possible as the core activity.  The simulation, such as it is, serves to facilitate this.



> But if we were to compare multiclassing rules, for example, 4e drops a lot of the simulation aspects the previous editions held. In an effort to enable the player to create their particular character concepts, players can multiclass their fighter PC for an individual wizard spell to add to their suite of powers. There's barely even a nod to simulating a character gradually growing in wizardly power - elements that are included in previous editions in which wizards progress from neophyte 1st level casters whether they started as one in 1e/2e's multiclassing or picked it up later in 3e's version.




I couldn't disagree more.  4e is IMO the _only_ version of D&D with a simulationist form of multiclassing.

First _you do not leave your old class._  You don't suddenly forget or fail to use everything you've learned before and utterly change your approach.  Instead you take the new things and integrate it into what you already did.  And you don't suddenly stop getting better at your core competency.  Secondly, you're misrepresenting the 4e multiclassing rules.  If you want to slowly grow into additional power in their new class, there are three separate ways of doing it - feats, Paragon Path, and Paragon Multiclassing (which no one ever uses).  All of which represent substantial continuing investment.  

From a sim perspective AD&D dual classing is ridiculous - and AD&D multiclassing is duplicated by 4e's Hybrids.  As for 3.X multiclassing, when you suddenly stop learning what you were doing for a whole level - and the way a powerful fighter learns and is meant to use first level wizard tricks is _exactly_ the same as the way an apprentice wizard is, no that isn't sim either.  At least not of the world as I know it.



Emerikol said:


> D&D until 4e worked fantastic for my style of play.  3e got too heavy at the end and magic mart of too far.  Still overall D&D fit my playstyle like a glove from beginning to 4e.  4e totally rejected my style and went off in another direction.  Now all of this paragraph is absolute fact.  What you want to call it is up to  you?  I've called it sim but maybe I'm using the wrong term.




The interesting question is _why_ it didn't work.  And what I got from your list is "They changed it and now it sucks.  I like D&D because I was happy with it."



Saelorn said:


> The short answer is that D&D was a) internally consistent, and b) not caught up on details.




... _seriously?_

AD&D of the myriad subsystems was internally consistent?  3.X of the Standard Climbing Tree was not caught up on details?



Saelorn said:


> Unless it is, which is how I would run it as a process-sim. It's just a fact of the world that this particular dude can take so much punishment before going down.
> 
> I mean, there's nothing stopping you from running it that way. I'm sure lots of people did, and still do. You could also _not _​do that, if you think it's too silly.




If you do it that way IMO you are into Order of the Stick territory.  Nothing wrong with that - but it's very distinctive and doesn't work like most fantasy settings.


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## The Black Ranger (Aug 2, 2014)

Sounds to me like an argument that tries to paint people who like sim oriented games into gamers who think every part of a game needs to simulate real life, and that's just not true. 


Also, if I hear "well there are wizards and dragons so how can it be a sim game", it just lets me know that the person doesn't know what a sim oriented game actually means.


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## TrippyHippy (Aug 2, 2014)

I do remember the Ron Edwards essay on ’System Matters’, now included in his Sorcerer RPG, and thinking just how stereotyped his examples were of supposed Gamist, Narrativist and Simulationist games. He proposed that Pendragon was a prime example of a simulationist game, for example, yet it holds a greater awareness of narrative structure than most other games I know, while there are plenty of ‘game’ rewards within the rules too. 

I think the proposition, stated in that essay, that any game could only be effective in just one ‘outlook’, and that it was ‘incoherent’ for them to attempt anything else…was fundamentally idiotic, frankly. 

So do I see issues with D&D attempting to, say, simulate historical accuracy or the narrative of specific literature? Of course. Yet, I do think that people get hung on labels rather than simply enjoying different games on their individual merits - which can often defy any simplistic categorisation.


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## dream66_ (Aug 2, 2014)

Hussar said:


> In 2001, if you had claimed that you self identified as a sim player and your go to game for that style was D&D, everyone would look at you like you had two heads.




I'm not arguing if it is or is not, I'm just finding your choice of date there interesting.

3.0 came out in August of 2000, one of the biggest attacks I saw against it at the time was complaints about "too simulationist" 

so it seems to me that in 2001 that would be point of absolute maximum simulation in all of DND history.


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## Andor (Aug 2, 2014)

pemerton said:


> My point is that all the classic "process sim" games had a conception of the processes they wanted to model that was prior to the game rules - namely, they wanted to model the processes of real-world biological and physical systems and their interactions. For instance, they want a sword fight in the game to resolve in more-or-less the way that it would in real life.
> 
> The idea that you would settle on an essentially arbitrary system of mechanics, and then read the gameworld off that, is one that I have never encountered except among a few posters on this board (you being one of them). It has no precedent in the history or culture of the classic sim RPGs.
> 
> Which is not a criticism, but an observation that I think is relevant to [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s OP. When Hussar is referring to sim play, I believe that he, like the classic sim RPGers, is assuming that we have a prior conception of the causal processes that our rules are meant to model.




Wound systems are perhaps the classic place where gamers and game systems have different goals and expectations and it's a classic scrapping ground over 'meaning'.

As I've mentioned in this thread, even the most anal retentive attempts to model real life biological processes like Morrow Project or Erma Felna EDF will fall utterly short of their goal. Big stong men have died falling off a step ladder. A stewardess survived a fall of 33,000 feet. Is there any game in the world that allows for both of those outcomes? In real life a sword through the shoulder might be meaningless, or it might kill you if it's 1 mm to the left and nicks the subclavian artery. 
Something no game I've ever played models is the fact that wounds may get worse over time. At the moment you're stabbed chances are your adrenaline is up and you may not even feel the wound. The next day however after the adrenaline wears and swelling sets in you will surely feel it. Anybody know a game system where wound penalties are worse the next day? No? And that's not even taking into account infection, or poor healing. 

My point? All damage systems are abstract, and are poor models of real world processes. Some of them admit it better than others.

Frankly for D&D I actually like to use what you describe as a purist-for-system approach to understanding the damage system, using a fiction conceit I first saw in the game World Tree. In that game (which is actually not a level based game but nevermind) hit points represent not just 'meat points' but the effectively supernatural skill of your soul to hold onto your body even when mere biology indicates you should be dead. In that world no one would expect an experienced warrior to die simply because he was shot in the eye and stabbed in the heart. 

Is it an accurate depiction of real world wound behavior? No. But then again no system is, and it explains the consequences of the rules system in a way which both satisfy my expectations and allow me to understand whats happening from the POV withing the world.


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## SkidAce (Aug 2, 2014)

Celebrim said:


> Back in the day, say circa 1990, I was certain that imbalance and failure to properly judge player proposition, where features of a game that where primarily the result of its low realism - that is to say, that they didn't simulate reality with its complex give and take and checks and balances faithfully enough.  I figured that the basis of a game was reality plus stated consistent departures from same as described consistently by the rules.  Otherwise, players wouldn't know what to do, and rules wouldn't produce answers that made for a predictable outcome for anyone.
> 
> So I started running GURPS.  Only to my annoyance, GURPS was doing absolutely no better in play than D&D.  So I decided that I needed to fix GURPS, and to my great delight I found that there was a guy out there who had done exactly that.   He'd created a system he called GULLIVER based on GURPS and various house rule fixes he'd applied to the GURPS 3e system (much of which ended up being official in GURPS 4e).
> 
> ...




Quoted so it can be read again.


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 2, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> Because the game rules are necessarily less complex than the underlying reality, it means you will always get some things which _are_ different within the game world, but which use identical mechanics. You'll just never get the _same_ thing within the game world, which uses _different_ mechanics.



 Ah! that does make more sense.  



> You could have a light torso wound, or a heavy arm wound, and they might both be represented as 4hp of damage.



 And, on characters with different hp totals, a light arm wound might be 1hp for one or 10hps for the other - but they're on different characters, so they're not the /exact/ same thing being represented by different mechanics.  



> Blame GNS theory.



 I do.  ;P   And the edition war.  And I'm sure there are others...


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 2, 2014)

pemerton said:


> Ron Edwards uses "sim" for a particular analytic and classificatory purpose. He is trying to contrast RPGs in which the participants are expected to make decisions drawing upon concerns that come from outside the play of the game itself - these he labels either narrativist or gamist - from RPGs in which the participants (players moreso than GMs) are meant to confine themselves, in deciding how to make decisions in the course of play, to the contents of the game itself.
> 
> Within sim, he distinguishes two main approaches:
> 
> ...




[/QUOTE] So simulating an imagined reality where a genre story could be set and might actually happen (but probably never will, to your character), vs simulating the conventions of a genre story so events tend to tie together into one (if not necessarily a good one).

Apart from the inevitable-seeming pointlessness of building up one and disparaging the other, not terrible - especially when considered as part of a broader set of descriptions...


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## Dannyalcatraz (Aug 2, 2014)

> 4e is IMO the only version of D&D with a simulationist form of multiclassing.




I would assert that 3.X is at least as simulationist, and is even moreso in certain certain areas.  You learn your class abilities at the same rate as any other initiate when you first pick up the class, you don't exchange old knowledge out for new knowledge, and how you receive the full benefits of being N level in that class.

To clarify: 

1) when you MC in 4Ed you pick and choose what abilities you learn over time, and such learning always comes at the cost of learning in your primary class.  Sometimes, you do a straight up swap for things you already learned.  But you don't learn intervening techniques & skill, you skip levels.  And some MC feats don't even grant a power at all.

2) there are paragon paths in 4ed that are absolutely barred to multiclassed PCs because the MC feat does not grant the prerequisites for the path- look at the PHB ranger paths, for some examples.  In a sense, you're a RINO: ranger in name only.


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## pemerton (Aug 2, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> So simulating an imagined reality where a genre story could be set and might actually happen (but probably never will, to your character), vs simulating the conventions of a genre story so events tend to tie together into one (if not necessarily a good one).



Yes. Though the purist-for-system games tend to adopt inworld features designed to at least nudge things in a genre direction - eg the spells in RM, and the magic systems in RQ. At least in RM, this does tend to cause caster/non-caster balance issues of a sort that I'm pretty sure you are familiar with in (at least some versions of) D&D.



Tony Vargas said:


> Apart from the inevitable-seeming pointlessness of building up one and disparaging the other, not terrible



There is no disparaging of high-concept sim, nor of purist-for-system sim. There is disparaging of 2nd ed AD&D and White Wolf, but that is because their mechanics, when used as written, don't actually deliver the promised genre experience. CoC and Ars Magica, which don't have this problem, aren't disparaged at all.



Neonchameleon said:


> Ron Edwards labelled simulationist play incoherent which meant either he doesn't understand it or it doesn't fit the model properly.



Can we have quotes for this? He doesn't say any such thing in the "Right to Dream" essay, and as someone who has played a bit of RQ and Traveller, and a lot of RM, I think he nails purist-for-system perfectly.

He does say that some high concept sim games (especially AD&D 2nd ed and White Wolf/Storyteller) are incoherent, but that is for the reasons I stated in my post and reiterated just above: they ostensibly aim at genre fidelity/replication, but have no system to achieve that other than GM override of the classic D&D-style combat mechanics plus a task-resolution skill system. He doesn't suggest that CoC is incoherent, nor Ars Magica.



Andor said:


> Big stong men have died falling off a step ladder. A stewardess survived a fall of 33,000 feet. Is there any game in the world that allows for both of those outcomes?
> 
> <snip>
> 
> Something no game I've ever played models is the fact that wounds may get worse over time. At the moment you're stabbed chances are your adrenaline is up and you may not even feel the wound. The next day however after the adrenaline wears and swelling sets in you will surely feel it. Anybody know a game system where wound penalties are worse the next day?



Rolemaster allows for both the falling outcomes, though not at the correct odds: any fall has a 1 in 50 chance of doing no damage regardless of its distance (because an 01 or 02 is always a "fumble", or auto-miss in the case of a fall); and between high open-ended attack rolls plus crit tables any fall can deal a fatal injury.

HARP is similar.

RM doesn't deal with adrenaline in the way you describe - Adrenal Moves that permit temporary ignoring of wound penalties or stun are a distinctive skill that have to be developed.

In any event, my point is not that RQ, RM, HARP etc achieve what they aspire to: my point is that they have a definite aspiration. There is a reason that all the classic sim games depart from D&D, and especially D&D's combat mechanics, in the way that I have described. They are driven by a common frustration with those mechanics, namely, that they don't model ingame causal processes but rather generate outcomes while requiring "ad hoc rationalisations" to fill in the details of the gameworld events.

This is not a criticism of D&D, but rather an observation about the motivations lying behind the design and play of those systems.



TrippyHippy said:


> I do remember the Ron Edwards essay on ’System Matters’, now included in his Sorcerer RPG, and thinking just how stereotyped his examples were of supposed Gamist, Narrativist and Simulationist games. He proposed that Pendragon was a prime example of a simulationist game, for example, yet it holds a greater awareness of narrative structure than most other games I know



Here is a quote from the Right to Dream essay that explains why Pendragon is a (high concept) simulationist game (that in the same essay is described, together with CoC, as "truly outstanding"):

A lot of internet blood has been spilled regarding how this phenomenon [of a game like Pendragon that, via its system, generates a long-term story arc] is or is not related to Narrativist play, but I think it's an easy issue. The key for these games is GM authority over the story's content and integrity at all points, including managing the input by players. Even system results are judged appropriate or not by the GM; "fudging" Fortune outcomes is overtly granted as a GM right​
Conversely, central to narrativist play _as Edwards uses that term_ is the absence of GM authority over the story, and indeed the absence of _any_ authority over the story on the part of any participant - in Story Now play, story is to be emergent from each participant doing his/her thing, with no one actually authoring it.

As I posted upthread, I think relatively few ENworld posters interested in Story Now play. And the most common way that "narrative" or "narrativist" is used on ENworld has nothing to do with Edwards' own use: it is used to pick out the existence of rich backstory and a plot continuity to the campaign that is deeper then "Well, this week our intrepid adventurers find themselves standing at the entrance to White Plume Mountain."

In Edwards' terminology, most of this sort of play is High Concept simulation, but some of it will be gamist but built on a very rich fiction as its chassis - I imagine the best of Adventure Path play is like this. (Which doesn't mean that it is "gamist" in the way that term is normally used on ENworld - but the typical ENworld usage of "gamist", just like the typical ENworld usage of "narrativist", has basically nothing to do with Edwards' usage. As I posted upthread, the differences in play that are highly salient to Edwards are generally not that relevant on ENworld, where people are interested in different sorts of contrast of playstyle.)


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## Celebrim (Aug 2, 2014)

Andor said:


> Big stong men have died falling off a step ladder. A stewardess survived a fall of 33,000 feet. Is there any game in the world that allows for both of those outcomes?




Err... not to ruin your otherwise good point, but... mine?

I use a modified version of D&D 3.0e.  The falling rules I use are a bit complex to go into now, but the heart of them is a variant falling system published in Dragon during 1e.

Let's do the stewardess first.

a) Stewardess is a 1st level human commoner with 8 CON.  She has the typical 10 hit points you'd expect.  She falls 33,000 feet hitting terminal velocity on the way down, but luckily falls into a snow drift which qualifies as a 'soft' surface so she takes no impact attack and has an increased damage divisor.   As a medium creature, base damage for this fall is (20d20)/(1d6+1).  Maximum damage is 200, but there is a huge range of expected results based on the throw of that 1d6.  With a lucky throw of 6, she has a divisor of 7.  Average damage from 20d20 is 210, so she has a 1 in 6 chance of 'only' taking 30 damage.  This would still instantly kill her, but if the throw of 20d20 is less than 140 and she rolls a '6' for the divisor, then all she has to do is make an stabilization check before bleeding out and not die of hypothermia.  If the throw of 20d20 is less than 63, then she won't even lose consciousness or take serious injury.  And of course you can play around and see that there are a lot of possible results.   In the real life example, the inflicted damage was probably around 16 (in my system terms) and she took traumatic injuries but managed to not break her head then stabilized and made a lot of other lucky throws to survive.  Still the outcome is possible.

b) Big man falls off a step ladder is harder.   Assume he was standing on a 6' step ladder above an unyielding surface, such as concrete, so that it is approximately a 10' fall.   A big man in my system would be a 1st level brute with 14 CON and 16 hit points.  He falls approximately 10' doing base 1d20/1d6 damage.  Worst case this is 20 damage by itself, enough to put him on the floor unconscious bleeding to death or provoke a traumatic injury roll that could crush his skull.    Worse, he also is going to take an impact attack from the unyielding surface as a +1 melee attack doing 1d6+1 damage.   Worst case on that is 14 damage (a critical hit).   So maximum expected damage here is 34 damage, enough to instantly kill even a much tougher man.   Of course, expected damage is an entirely different matter.   The average damage her is probably closer to 5, which bruises the big guy but is hardly memorable.   Those around him don't really realize just how close he came to dying.


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## Emerikol (Aug 2, 2014)

It's far easier to classify what I don't like than state exactly what I like.  

Paramount for.me is suspension of disbelief and as.a result immersion in a fantasy world.  If I were watching a serious drama where a.cartoon rabbit appeared occasionally making wisecracks then I would cease to enjoy that drama.

In order for me to achieve immersion my mechanics need narrative mechanical unity.  As a result they cannot be dissociative or time travel.  They must make sense as the rules of the world and not just as the rules for the PC.  The more they seem to follow a consistent system vs being random exceptions the better.  

When a game honors the above restraints it makes the world feel right to me.  I can suspend my disbelief for a few hours.  

I don't mind some abstraction within the above boundaries.  Abstraction has nothing to do with realism.   You can be highly abstract or very not abstract and still be realistic or not.

I will leave the classification of my playstyle as a homework assignment for you theoreticians.  I will say that I believe a lot of people out there share my preferences to varying degrees.


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## Celebrim (Aug 2, 2014)

pemerton said:


> Which is not a criticism, but an observation that I think is relevant to [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s OP. When Hussar is referring to sim play, I believe that he, like the classic sim RPGers, is assuming that *we have a prior conception of the causal processes* that our rules are meant to model.



 - emphasis mine

Back in the day, when I was playing AD&D and I and almost everyone else in my groups assumed that the ultimate goal was to obtain realism plus versus clearly spelled out exceptions to reality in the rules that pertained to the specifics of the game universe (magic, if you would), one of the show stopping arguments was over realism.  Realism was something anyone could appeal to when they didn't feel that the rules as written or the DMs ruling matched up with reality.  What for example was the realistic way for infravision to work?   Was it realistic to model a dog as having much higher than written Int and Wis for the purposes of detecting invisible creatures given the dog's incredibly acute senses of smell?  Just how fast could a giant eagle ferry a small army up a cliff?  How long would it take for wood to cure?  Bringing in a specialist book of knowledge to the table was about as good as bringing in a rule book if it had numbers that pertained to the question in play.  How much weight could a 2" hemp rope lift?

Of course, quite often such an authoritative source to inform our simulation was not on hand.  People relied on the best informed guess based on their prior conceptions of the causal processes.  

Of course, anyone can tell you that quite often these guesses were wildly off, particularly in the case of those made by 17 year old nerds convinced they knew a little of everything.   Not only were their spectacular arguments that derailed play for hours, but I'm sure a lot of gamers on these boards can tell you horror stories of GMs whose house rules and rulings were based on their prior conceptions of the causal processes where they were just wildly off base in terms of not only realism, but how well their custom smithed rules matched reality and how gameable those rules actually were.

I think we all had some ideas about what the idea rules would model that D&D didn't.   For example, I was for example pretty sure that D&D needed to focus much more clearly on the value of parrying attacks.  In particular, I was pretty sure that weapon length needed to be a much bigger factor in play than it was based on my experiences in fencing and weapon play.  And that was just one of several areas that I felt needed revisions, if ever I could figure out a good mechanic for doing so.  For example, I was pretty sure D&D needed explicit mechanics for tripping, disarming, grappling and other sorts of alternative attacks - or at least better than the ones in the DMG which were really broken (and abused by me as a DM for keeping low level monsters relevant).  

Almost invariably among people with strong prior conceptions of the causal processes involved, two mechanics that repeatedly came under fire were hit points and Vancian spell casting.   They didn't 'make sense'.  They weren't 'realistic'.   Even to the extent that 'health' could be quantized, it certainly shouldn't increase with experience.  To a large extent I accepted these sorts of arguments and didn't question them, though in general, I didn't know exactly what to replace the ideas with.  

It was only when I actually abandoned D&D in frustration with its lack of 'realism' and started playing and examining the alternatives, that I began to question the assumptions behind 'hit points aren't realistic'.   Largely this is because I found that all the systems created by people with strong opinions that D&D wasn't realistic and who were trying hard to create process as simulation were in fact failing in that hard, and not only failing in the their goal of being more 'realistic' but producing arguably worse games.   Instead of being more realistic, what they really turned out to be was the published equivalent of that guy who had house ruled a bunch of 'realistic' stuff that was really just based on his on preconceptions of what the causal processes for simulating realism should be.  They weren't in fact actually the causal processes of reality.  They were just preferences based on the assumption that this sort of causal process would produce more realistic answers than that sort of causal process, even if in fact the range of results and the likelihood of results no more matched reality than the simplier systems with different assumptions that they had replaced.

The problem with saying that if you don't have hit points you are more purist for sim is that life doesn't actually work like the other system whatever it is (wound tracks, inflicted conditions, etc.) either.   If you step back from the individual elements of the process and looked at the inputs and outputs from a black box perspective, the ones with the more moving parts weren't necessarily doing better at producing answers to the questions.   The things that they were modeling can't easily be quantified in real life either, and the individual pieces weren't necessarily any better fits to reality.

Believe it or not, this didn't initially deter me in the slightest.  I was so convinced that there was a pony in their somewhere, that I just kept right on refining.  You could in fact get there.  I could see it.  Many of the rules in GULLIVER had some basis in actual physics.   It was being informed by actual reality.   But it turned out that reality was ungamable.  The final iteration of this, the bottom of the rabbit hole, would be turning to a physics book as the authority source for your process simulation.  It became clear to me long before that that it was never going to work, and it was only then that I started putting my assumptions to the test. 

Turns out hit points are just as much process sim as wound tracks and inflicted conditions.  You just have to give up your biased preconceptions about what a realistic model would look like and start asking, "What is the real question I'm trying to answer in this contest/scenario?"


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## TrippyHippy (Aug 3, 2014)

pemerton said:


> Here is a quote from the Right to Dream essay that explains why Pendragon is a (high concept) simulationist game (that in the same essay is described, together with CoC, as "truly outstanding"):
> 
> A lot of internet blood has been spilled regarding how this phenomenon [of a game like Pendragon that, via its system, generates a long-term story arc] is or is not related to Narrativist play, but I think it's an easy issue. The key for these games is GM authority over the story's content and integrity at all points, including managing the input by players. Even system results are judged appropriate or not by the GM; "fudging" Fortune outcomes is overtly granted as a GM right​
> Conversely, central to narrativist play _as Edwards uses that term_ is the absence of GM authority over the story, and indeed the absence of _any_ authority over the story on the part of any participant - in Story Now play, story is to be emergent from each participant doing his/her thing, with no one actually authoring it.
> ...




The trouble with this argument is that the games he highlighted as ‘Narrativist’ games in his original essay, including his own Sorcerer RPG, were just as GM controlled as Pendragon or other ‘Sim’ or ‘Gamist’ games he cited. I do recognise a clear structural difference in games like My Life With Master or Fiasco or Baron Munchhausen, but what I read from Ron Edward’s selection was a preference for rules-light games spiced with a bit of gaming bigotry. This came to a controversial head, of course, in his later essay which asserted that the ‘incoherence' of Vampire: The Masquerade rules _literally_ caused brain damage. 

Moreover, I just don’t think he spent enough time looking at gaming innovation outside his own bubble of self aggrandisement. 1980s comedy games like Paranoia, Toon and Ghostbusters all had aspects in their mechanics that would now be called ’narrative’ in design. In Ghostbusters, for example, you had a pool of points that allowed players to influence plot, Toon had narrative hooks and motivations and Paranoia an almost ritualistic approach to scenario design. The ‘revolution’ in game design had happened a long time before The Forge started. All Ron Edwards and co did was to stick labels on it. Which didn’t work.


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 3, 2014)

Emerikol said:


> It's far easier to classify what I don't like than state exactly what I like.



 We all know you didn't like 4e.  It contentious and doesn't really matter a this point.  /Try/ thinking about what you actually 'need' for this version of sim of yours, in the positive sense and why D&D in general (or a given ed if you must) works so well for it...  or, you know, maybe a definition that isn't all edition-war talking points and hot-buttons.

You could give examples from your campaign of great sim moments.  You're very passionate about the subject, have run that way for a long time, and your players all love it, so you must have lots of 'em.


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## pemerton (Aug 3, 2014)

TrippyHippy said:


> The trouble with this argument is that the games he highlighted as ‘Narrativist’ games in his original essay, including his own Sorcerer RPG, were just as GM controlled as Pendragon or other ‘Sim’ or ‘Gamist’ games he cited.



 *shrug* I'm not here to defend or even anayse Sorcerer, a game I've never played - though from what I know of it I think it includes techniques, such as "kickers", which mean that it is not "just as GM controlled" as a game like Pendragon or CoC. And I personally think the techniques presented in a game like Burning Wheel are clearly different from those in a game like RQ or Pendragon or Ars Magica, as far as distribution of authority, and approach to scene-framing and action resolution, are concerned.



TrippyHippy said:


> I just don’t think he spent enough time looking at gaming innovation outside his own bubble of self aggrandisement. 1980s comedy games like Paranoia, Toon and Ghostbusters all had aspects in their mechanics that would now be called ’narrative’ in design.



This passage is from Edwards' "Story Now" essay, written in 2003:

Looking at earlier games from a Techniques perspective, a shift to Narrativist play within the larger Gamist context is apparent in some _Tunnels & Trolls_, as discusssed in "Gamism: Step On Up". I also recommend reading and playing _Marvel Super Heroes_, reviewing the entire _Strike Force_ text in light of the 1st and 2nd editions of _Champions _being used by that group, reviewing the extensive documentation of _Champions _play presented in the APA-zine _The Clobberin Times'_, and giving _Toon_, _Ghostbusters_, and _James Bond_ a try. I am not saying "These are Narrativist games," but rather, evidence supports the claim that these rules-sets supported some Narrativist play back then.​
I've always felt Edwards has a pretty good knowledge of a pretty wide range of RPGs and how they were played. In his "Hard Look at Dungeons & Dragon Essay"[/rul] (also from 2003) he discusses narrativist approaches to early D&D play. In his Story Now essay he recognises plenty of pre-Sorcerer but clearly 90s games that demonstrate narrativist aspirations (eg Over the Edge, 1992) as well as important techniques for supporting narrativist play (eg Maelstrom Storytelling, 1997).



TrippyHippy said:


> All Ron Edwards and co did was to stick labels on it. Which didn’t work.



I'm not sure what you mean when you say "it didn't work". Plenty of people seem to have had useful conversations about how to achieve a certain sort of RPG play - for instance, how to achieve the epic and thematic scope of Dragonlance without the need for GM fudging and railroading - and then gone on to achieve it.

And in my own case, Gygaxian D&D, and D&D more generally, made a lot more sense after reading Edwards's essays than beforehand. Edwards' discussion of fortune-in-the-middle and other non-process-sim approaches to resolution also helped me work out how 4e was meant to be played (given that I came into 4e after 19 years of GMing Rolemaster, which takes process-sim in resolution absolutely for granted).


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## BryonD (Aug 3, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> We all know you didn't like 4e.  It contentious and doesn't really matter a this point.  /Try/ thinking about what you actually 'need' for this version of sim of yours, in the positive sense and why D&D in general (or a given ed if you must) works so well for it...  or, you know, maybe a definition that isn't all edition-war talking points and hot-buttons.
> 
> You could give examples from your campaign of great sim moments.  You're very passionate about the subject, have run that way for a long time, and your players all love it, so you must have lots of 'em.




You know, this is actually a very interesting way to phrase the question and makes me rethink some of my perspective and use of labels.

The first RPG I ever personally experienced was 1E.  To me, at that time, it was obvious and completely intuitive, that 1E D&D was "simulating" being a character in a fantasy epic tale.  Of course between both being a kid and lacking the years of evolution of the gaming community and perspectives, I never dwelt on this in anything approaching the way it is discussed today.  It was simply true that D&D was about being Strider or Merlin and thus, it was defacto a simulation experience.  In modern perspective I do not think of 1E as remotely a "sim" game.  But this is different than a modern game that is not "sim".  Late 1970s computers can not be described as "fast" in any reasonable modern standards.  Btu the best computers then were "fast", and 1E was the best "sim" going in the same way.  And, for starting from war games, I give all credit to Gygax and fellows for the massive first step in innovation they provided.

But to me it was always about "sim" and always meant to be sim.  To the extent I discussed these matters with friends, I have zero recollection of anyone every challenging that idea.  As time went by and I found games that innovated on the "sim" elements, I left D&D.  And when 3E came along there were plenty of references to the fact that is was "HEROizing" D&D, etc....  It was turning D&D into a reflection of the collective progress that had been made.  

But there were never moments of "this is a great sim thing".  It was a constant goal to ever strive after at every step.  I want consistent immersion in "I am *THAT* character" and if there is a better way to make the world feel like that, I want it.  Start with absolute reality, but immediately start tossing huge chunks aside to adjust for being in the story.  Obviously things like magic redefine the mechanics.  But the stories are relatively simplistic and the warrior hero can go toe-to-toe with the hill giant.  So HP and a list of other issues are embraced as a way to get there.  Btu the spirit always remains, do the best you can at "being that character".

The goal is being that guy in an otherwise natural feeling world that behaves in a reasonably consistent manner based on the alternate truths that define it. Any moment that sticks out as contrary to that is a bad thing.  And in almost any game system there are these moments.  I won't remotely claim that 3E doesn't hiccup in a variety of circumstances.  But it tries and, case by case, does between and adequate and an outstanding job.  So ti has never been about that great sim moment.  It has always been about avoiding those "anti-sim" moments.

Games that instead embrace that anti-sim spirit have never been remotely successful for me.  
And to be absolutely clear, for the purpose of conversation I'll presume I am the one who is out of touch here.  Loving these anti-sim elements is completely legitimate and wonderful.  I respect the difference in taste and preference.

But, the explanation for why I love "3E/PF (hopefully 5E)" as "sim", is going to require presenting thing that will sound "edition war talking points" to someone who is defensive about 4E.  Because 3E doesn't have high points of awesome sim.  But it never has points of intentional anti-sim.  
4E embraces and takes joy in anti-sim.  
I (me, and me alone) hate it when a character gets beat up by ogres and then just bounces back with no recovery time or outside source of healing.
I hate it when DCs can consistently and reliable be taken from a single page that covers almost everything.
I hate it when one brilliant move does not solve a problem then and there because the skill challange says 3 more successes are needed.
Obviously I could go on and on.

If you want to say that 3E doesn't make a great sim, then fine, I won't argue with you.
To me, it aspires to be a great sim.  And it never takes it upon itself to aggressively point out that it doesn't want to be a sim.
So, I can play a game that, at my table, is a sim game and uses 3E rules and works in a highly fun manner.  And that stands without a single moment of "now that was sim glory!".


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## TrippyHippy (Aug 3, 2014)

pemerton said:


> *shrug* I'm not here to defend or even anayse Sorcerer, a game I've never played - though from what I know of it I think it includes techniques, such as "kickers", which mean that it is not "just as GM controlled" as a game like Pendragon or CoC. And I personally think the techniques presented in a game like Burning Wheel are clearly different from those in a game like RQ or Pendragon or Ars Magica, as far as distribution of authority, and approach to scene-framing and action resolution, are concerned.



According to the Sorcerer text, a ‘Kicker’ is “an event or realisation that your character has experienced just before play begins” to acts as a catalyst. Whoop-ee-doodaa! It’s not as if RQ or Pendragon or Ars Magica ever laid out any provision of those things, is it!? Whether you choose to think the techniques are different to those provided in other games, they are not objectively so. To me, the notion of Troupe-style play used in Ars Magica is very much an explicit device for ‘distribution of authority’. It’s the issue that games like Ars Magica fail to get recognised for innovating half the ideas proposed by Ron and co. that tends to discredit their ideas themselves.



> This passage is from Edwards’ ”Story Now” essay, written in 2003:
> 
> Looking at earlier games from a Techniques perspective, a shift to Narrativist play within the larger Gamist context is apparent in some _Tunnels & Trolls_, as discusssed in "Gamism: Step On Up". I also recommend reading and playing _Marvel Super Heroes_, reviewing the entire _Strike Force_ text in light of the 1st and 2nd editions of _Champions _being used by that group, reviewing the extensive documentation of _Champions _play presented in the APA-zine _The Clobberin Times'_, and giving _Toon_, _Ghostbusters_, and _James Bond_ a try. I am not saying "These are Narrativist games," but rather, evidence supports the claim that these rules-sets supported some Narrativist play back then.​
> I've always felt Edwards has a pretty good knowledge of a pretty wide range of RPGs and how they were played. In his "Hard Look at Dungeons & Dragon Essay"[/rul] (also from 2003) he discusses narrativist approaches to early D&D play. In his Story Now essay he recognises plenty of pre-Sorcerer but clearly 90s games that demonstrate narrativist aspirations (e.g. Over the Edge, 1992) as well as important techniques for supporting narrativist play (e.g. Maelstrom Storytelling, 1997).



All written after the publication of his Sorcerer game, of which none of these ‘innovations’ were acknowledged. In retrospect, he basically chooses older games he likes and relates their influence to his own preferred games alone. 



> I’m not sure what you mean when you say “it didn't work". Plenty of people seem to have had useful conversations about how to achieve a certain sort of RPG play - for instance, how to achieve the epic and thematic scope of Dragonlance without the need for GM fudging and railroading - and then gone on to achieve it.
> 
> And in my own case, Gygaxian D&D, and D&D more generally, made a lot more sense after reading Edwards's essays than beforehand. Edwards' discussion of fortune-in-the-middle and other non-process-sim approaches to resolution also helped me work out how 4e was meant to be played (given that I came into 4e after 19 years of GMing Rolemaster, which takes process-sim in resolution absolutely for granted).




It didn’t work because his categories, which were essentially lifted from Jonathon Tweet’s Everway, but presented in more ‘authoritative’ fashion, fall down on so many exceptions to the rule. They also fall down, incidentally, on the simple grounds that they caused more tension and conflict in the gaming community than the collective worth of the games their movement spawned. How many of them are truly played with the same community levels of D&D or CoC or any other? How can people claim these games are less well designed than the ones they push? Indeed, any game designer who feels the need to make vain proclamations about how influential their game is, in the text of the game itself, is really just demonstrating how little influence they ever had at all.


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 3, 2014)

Neonchameleon said:


> AD&D of the myriad subsystems was internally consistent?  3.X of the Standard Climbing Tree was not caught up on details?



AD&D was consistent in that it always used the same rules for the same stuff. A level 5 priest was a level 5 priest, whether it was a PC or NPC, and a longsword always dealt 1d8 damage.

I will definitely grant that 3.5 was pushing the limit on acceptable details, though. Of course, that limit is going to vary between people, and even 3.5 never got as detailed as something like GURPS.



Neonchameleon said:


> If you do it that way IMO you are into Order of the Stick territory.  Nothing wrong with that - but it's very distinctive and doesn't work like most fantasy settings.



You certainly could play it that way, but it isn't really necessary. I was actually thinking something closer to Slayers, though my go-to example for in-game-world acknowledgement of physical punishment is Brock from Venture Bros.


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## pemerton (Aug 3, 2014)

TrippyHippy said:


> According to the Sorcerer text, a ‘Kicker’ is “an event or realisation that your character has experienced just before play begins” to acts as a catalyst. Whoop-ee-doodaa! It’s not as if RQ or Pendragon or Ars Magica ever laid out any provision of those things, is it!?



The two editions of AM that I own are the 1st and the 3rd. Neither has "kickers" or anything analogous.



TrippyHippy said:


> Whether you choose to think the techniques are different to those provided in other games, they are not objectively so.



I'm not sure what the test for "objective" difference is. But Jonathan Tweet (designer of Ars Magica and Over the Edge) regards "fail forward" as a distinct technique. He attributes it to Ron Edwards and Luke Crane, and in the 20th anniversary edition of Over the Edge says that, in retrospect, it should be incorporated into the system; and in 13th Age he advocates its use.

Jonathan Tweet's view that Luke Crane and Ron Edwards came up with a new technique, that he had not identified in his earlier games, is good enough for me.



TrippyHippy said:


> All written after the publication of his Sorcerer game, of which none of these ‘innovations’ were acknowledged.



So you think it's a bad thing that someone's ideas, and familiarity with his/her material, grows over time?



TrippyHippy said:


> It didn’t work because his categories, which were essentially lifted from Jonathon Tweet’s Everway <snippage> fall down on so many exceptions to the rule.



Edwards has a detailed discussion of the relationship of his ideas to those of Jonathan Tweet and John Kim that anyone can read who wants to do so. I'm not sure what exceptions you have in mind. I believe you when you say that you don't find his essays helpful for your gameplay, but that is certainly not true for me.



TrippyHippy said:


> they caused more tension and conflict in the gaming community than the collective worth of the games their movement spawned. How many of them are truly played with the same community levels of D&D or CoC or any other? How can people claim these games are less well designed than the ones they push?



The designers of RM, RQ, et al all marketed their games on the basis that they are better designed than D&D. (I'm not sure who you have in mind as saying that his/her game is better designed than CoC - Ron Edwards, at least in what I've read, has only praise for the design of CoC. I already cited him upthread describing it, along with Pendragon, as an "outstanding" game.)

WotC promoted 3E as better-designed than 2nd ed AD&D. I've seen dozens of people on this forum asset that Pathfinder is better designed than D&D (4th edition). I don't see why D&D should be immune from having others claim that their game is better designed.

At one time Rolemaster/MERP was the second biggest RPG after D&D. But I've likewise read dozens of posts on this forum, indeed in this very thread, deriding the design of RM.

As to whether the "indie" RPG movement spawned games of any worth, I agree with Jonathan Tweet, Rob Heinsoo and others that it did: the main ones I know personally are Burning Wheel, HeroWars/Quest, 4e D&D, Marvel Heroic RP and Dungeon World. I think these are pretty good RPGs.


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## pemerton (Aug 3, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> AD&D was consistent in that it always used the same rules for the same stuff. A level 5 priest was a level 5 priest, whether it was a PC or NPC, and a longsword always dealt 1d8 damage.



Just as a point of clarification: in 1st ed AD&D the stat requirements for class membership are different for PCs and NPCs; some NPC fighters are incapable of gaining levels; 0-level humans don't get CON bonuses to hp; non-human NPCs (orcs, trolls, ogres, giants etc) don't get the same STR bonuses to hit and damage as do classed PCs and NPCs; it is optional for those same NPCs to deal the same damage with their weapons as do classed PCs and NPCs; and NPC half-orcs attack on the monster to hit table rather than on the table appropriate to their class.


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## pemerton (Aug 3, 2014)

BryonD said:


> The first RPG I ever personally experienced was 1E.  To me, at that time, it was obvious and completely intuitive, that 1E D&D was "simulating" being a character in a fantasy epic tale.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> The goal is being that guy in an otherwise natural feeling world that behaves in a reasonably consistent manner based on the alternate truths that define it.



I don't think this distinguishs 1st ed AD&D from any other version of D&D, RQ, RM, Burning Wheel, HeroWars, etc. Any fantasy RPG involves "simuating" being a character in a fantasy epic tale.

That doesn't mean that all those games are the same, in design or intended play experience or actual play experience. But you can't distinguish them in terms of which ones do, and which ones don't, set out to have the players "simulate" being a character in a tale of epic fantasy, or set out to have the player "be that guy in an otherwise natural-feeling world".



BryonD said:


> I hate it when one brilliant move does not solve a problem then and there because the skill challange says 3 more successes are needed.



Interestingly, this is exactly the same reason why the classic sim game designers and players hate hit points: because no matter how good the attacker's attack, the opponent can't be killed if s/he still has hit points left after the damage is rolled.

For my part, understanding how skill-challenge style mechanics work (mostly extended contests in HeroWars/Quest) actually helped me understand how hit points can be part of a viable combat resolution system.


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## BryonD (Aug 3, 2014)

pemerton said:


> I don't think this distinguishs 1st ed AD&D from any other version of D&D, RQ, RM, Burning Wheel, HeroWars, etc. Any fantasy RPG involves "simuating" being a character in a fantasy epic tale.
> 
> That doesn't mean that all those games are the same, in design or intended play experience or actual play experience. But you can't distinguish them in terms of which ones do, and which ones don't, set out to have the players "simulate" being a character in a tale of epic fantasy, or set out to have the player "be that guy in an otherwise natural-feeling world".



I would completely argue that a persistent dedication to that as a primary goal *does* distinguish some of those games from others.
Again, I'm not claiming that 4e rejects the idea of "being the character".  That would be absurd.  But in the cases I listed, amongst others, it openly embraces the idea that "anti-sim" is better.  Again, I'm not claiming that this is anything other than a matter of taste.  But you can't have it both ways either.  If you are only going to look at it in the most broad of terms ("involves 'simulating'") then you can't claim any real merits for any game.  They are all equivalent but the conversation doesn't tell you anything.  If you start turning over the rocks and looking at the mechanics, such as the very short list of typical examples I gave, then you start seeing how the games very much do become distinguished from one another.




> Interestingly, this is exactly the same reason why the classic sim game designers and players hate hit points: because no matter how good the attacker's attack, the opponent can't be killed if s/he still has hit points left after the damage is rolled.
> 
> For my part, understanding how skill-challenge style mechanics work (mostly extended contests in HeroWars/Quest) actually helped me understand how hit points can be part of a viable combat resolution system.



This I completely buy.  I mean, from an ogre's PoV one good strike with his club will kill a normal human.  One good strike = 1 success.  A fighter with 10 times the HP means the ogre needs 10 successes.  There is an analogy to be seen there.

Before anyone ever heard of 4E I had events in my 3E games that could be called "skill challenges" and though the specifics were different, I think anyone would reasonable agree the core idea is there.  There was mystic shamanistic ritual that the party had to endure in an orc encampment.  They were put inside a tent with various burning herbs.  As smoke filled the tent everyone started making CON saves.  The ones how got through gain status and some perks, the ones how didn't suffered great harm.  One PC actually died.  

I also recall an event that involved getting through a mountain pass during a blizzard.  

There are plenty of cases where the narrative nature of the event makes these mechanics work.  But as I used to always say, the mechanics should follow the narrative, not the other way around.  You and I had this debate back when it mattered and we never agreed.  As a default mechanic it becomes very unsatisfactory for me.  Because there are plenty of time when it really doesn't fit.  You can't always say X success or Y failures is the answer.  Or, I should say, if "simulating being a character" in a quasi-naturalistic world is you highest goal, there are times when this is a substandard option.

Anything I dislike about 4E can, and almost certainly does, have specific circumstances in which it does work within a 3E (or other system) game that I would love.  If it just so happens that the narrative leads to that mechanic.  If a particular fighter goes through a ritual or just experiences a crazy event, or through 1 of 10,000 possible explanations he gains the ability to self heal, then I WANT that guy to be able to bounce back 4E style.  Maybe a thieves guild has a magic door they use to test members and it always changes itself to challenge the person trying to open it.

But the point is, being able to show examples where the mechanics happen to fit the narrative doesn't come close to saying that the mechanics are a good foundation for consistent use throughout the system.  At least, not if your goal is dedication to never being "anti-sim".


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## TrippyHippy (Aug 3, 2014)

pemerton said:


> The two editions of AM that I own are the 1st and the 3rd. Neither has “kickers” or anything analogous.



Yes it does. It’s called ‘providing a backstory and reason to adventure’. Pretty  much every RPG has had something like that ever since D&D. To then stick a formal label on such a thing and call it an ‘innovation’ is no such thing at all. 



> I’m not sure what the test for “objective" difference is. But Jonathan Tweet (designer of Ars Magica and Over the Edge) regards "fail forward" as a distinct technique. He attributes it to Ron Edwards and Luke Crane, and in the 20th anniversary edition of Over the Edge says that, in retrospect, it should be incorporated into the system; and in 13th Age he advocates its use.
> 
> Jonathan Tweet's view that Luke Crane and Ron Edwards came up with a new technique, that he had not identified in his earlier games, is good enough for me.



It’s a shame that these others never saw fit to acknowledge the innovations present in Ars Magica, however, and openly scorned Rein-Hagen’s Vampire:The Masquerade. Over The Edge tends to get a lot of credit from the Forge community, but largely because it fits into their own preconceived ideas of what innovation is. The actual stated purpose of OtE’s game system (a variation of the D6 system in most respects) was to be a simple system - and was never claimed to be something ‘revolutionary’. Tweet criticises his own work in relation to new games all the time, and all power to him for doing that. It doesn’t legitimise these games as being special or superior in design though. 



> So you think it’s a bad thing that someone’s ideas, and familiarity with his/her material, grows over time?



No, I think people who make self-aggrandising claims are bad. If their work was so influential, you’d think they’d have the confidence to let other people make these claims about their games, rather than writing essays in their own books and websites about it. 



> Edwards has a detailed discussion of the relationship of his ideas to those of Jonathan Tweet and John Kim that anyone can read who wants to do so. I'm not sure what exceptions you have in mind. I believe you when you say that you don’t find his essays helpful for your gameplay, but that is certainly not true for me.



I don’t find essays that are broadly saying “your gaming experiences are invalid; I know more about your own game experiences than you do” are especially useful. I’m sure you can find quotes from Ron Edwards on all sorts of things, however, as he wrote an awful lot of opinion, but his own games - Sorcerer and Trollbabe - are nothing like as impressive as he has frequently claimed them to be.   



> The designers of RM, RQ, et al all marketed their games on the basis that they are better designed than D&D. (I'm not sure who you have in mind as saying that his/her game is better designed than CoC - Ron Edwards, at least in what I've read, has only praise for the design of CoC. I already cited him upthread describing it, along with Pendragon, as an "outstanding" game.)
> 
> WotC promoted 3E as better-designed than 2nd ed AD&D. I've seen dozens of people on this forum asset that Pathfinder is better designed than D&D (4th edition). I don't see why D&D should be immune from having others claim that their game is better designed.
> 
> At one time Rolemaster/MERP was the second biggest RPG after D&D. But I've likewise read dozens of posts on this forum, indeed in this very thread, deriding the design of RM.



The issue is not whether Ron endorses games or what preferences anybody has - it’s how he chooses to arbitrarily categorise them - and deride people or groups or game design for not playing in the manner he sees fit. 



> As to whether the “indie” RPG movement spawned games of any worth, I agree with Jonathan Tweet, Rob Heinsoo and others that it did: the main ones I know personally are Burning Wheel, HeroWars/Quest, 4e D&D, Marvel Heroic RP and Dungeon World. I think these are pretty good RPGs.



Of these, two are hardly indie games, unless you consider Margaret Weiss/Marvel and WotC to be independently owned in any way. 

HeroWars/Quest was originally written in 2000 and, despite being cited by The Forge as a game they like, was actually commissioned primarily to play in the Glorantha setting due to ownership complications of the RuneQuest game at the time. It wasn't an ‘indie’ game as such - although it wrote a lot about narrativism in relation to it’s design as opposed to RQ. It is notable that many gamers awaiting on the upcoming Guide to Glorantha (systemless by design) are choosing RQ6 as their game system of choice again, rather than HeroQuest. I’d be interested to see how HeroQuest fares in future publications, seeing that RQ is largely under the charge of Moon Design again. I would say the same thing about D&D4e and Dungeon World in the light of 5e’s release. 

In the case of Burning Wheel, well personally, I don’t like it at all. I have attempted to play it, but find a lot of it’s mechanics counter-intuitive and flatly not worth the effort. I did like Marvel Heroic, and recognise some ‘indie’ ideas in it, but the best thing about it was that it didn’t waste any effort in trying to make claims about how revolutionary or brilliant it’s system was - it just got on with explaining how to play it in a fun way. Unfortunately, that game’s license has now gone the way of the dodo - ironic enough if you still think it was ‘independently’ owned. 

In the case of 4E, flatly, it largely goes to the heart of what I feel was wrong with the ‘indie movement’ - narrow, inflexible game precepts and an arrogant assertion that gamers had somehow been playing the game wrong all the years before. If that is the indie movement’s ‘legacy’ claim then I thoroughly endorse that view…but now it’s been superseded by 5E. In short, what legacy?


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## pemerton (Aug 4, 2014)

TrippyHippy said:


> It’s called ‘providing a backstory and reason to adventure’.



I don't think this is a very precise description of what a "kicker" is. It's not this particular feature of "kickers" that makes Edwards' claim them as innovative. What Edwards claims to be innovative is the fact that the kicker is not just backstory but an immediate crisis in which the PC is located - so it's a type of player-authored scene-framing that the GM is obliged to incorporate into the opening fiction of the game.

Mearls has discussed the innovative nature of the "kicker", as well as developing it in a slightly "old-school" direction:

So, years ago Ron Edwards (I think) introduced the idea of kickers and bangs in Sorcerer. I own Sorcerer, read it, and thought I understood them. . . .

o a lot of this stuff is basic RPG theory and covers some now fundamental methods to put characters into motion. The big reveal for me is that, for the past few campaigns, I've been unhappy with how the story has progressed. . . . So, yesterday, to kick off my Greyhawk Temple of Elemental Evil campaign, I trotted out a set of Traveller-style rules I built with an eye toward kickers and bangs. The rules lack significant mechanical impact on a PC. Instead, they build kickers right into the character's background. We ended up with some really interesting characters with lots of reasons to push the story ahead. The kickers it produced also suggest a number of bangs that can come up in play.​

One of the distinctive aspects of a "kicker", as opposed to a "plot hook", is a more general aspiration of "story now" RPGing - narrow entrance, wide exit; or, tight framing that doesn't dictate outcomes. Edwards emphasises this in a post that Mearls links to in the blog I've just quoted from:

I am warning the user from providing a Kicker that only gives the protagonist one reasonable thing to do. "My house is burning down," has pretty much only one reaction: get out of the burning house. "Guys are coming to kill me," is the same: defend yourself and try to turn the tables.

(Whereas "A guy tried to kill me with a hatchet on the bus" provides a more surrealistic or offbeat or perplexing problem beyond the actual physical danger.)

Thus the Kicker style I am aiming at, with that particular admonition, is that for which different people might have their characters react to differently. Otherwise you end up with the typical non-Narrativist character hook: "I'm a merc. A guy hired me to kill Bobby G." Well, duh, he's going to kill Bobby G now. So what?

None of this has anything to do with what I am perceiving you to be asking about: the description of a character's action or reaction in the Kicker itself. There is nothing wrong with this, at the most basic level. Including, "I barely got away from the guy by hurling myself out the emergency exit, when we took a corner at 45 mph," could easily be added to the hatchet Kicker.

However, permitting or encouraging such additions hits a practical problem very, very swiftly - players turn in elaborate short stories, essentially "playing before they play" in the way people have done for decades. You get reams of colorful events with ... as it turns out ... no entry into the act of role-playing. The reactions have been made and the Kicker is, for all intents and purposes, over before play has begun.

Therefore if I were to see Kickers with characters' actions and reactions as part of the text, I might be very picky about how _much_ of that material would be acceptable.​


TrippyHippy said:


> It’s a shame that these others never saw fit to acknowledge the innovations present in Ars Magica



Here is a passage from Edwards' "Right to Dream" essay in which he acknowledges an innovation present in Ars Magic:

High Concept play can be divided neatly into those which are greatly concerned with "the big story" and those which are not. Historically, the latter used to be the most common: Call of Cthulhu, Jorune, or more recently Dread and Godlike, in which "the story" only refers to a record of short-term events and set-pieces. However, following the spearhead for this type of game text, Ars Magica, now the long-term story-type is more common.​


TrippyHippy said:


> Over The Edge tends to get a lot of credit from the Forge community, but largely because it fits into their own preconceived ideas of what innovation is. The actual stated purpose of OtE’s game system (a variation of the D6 system in most respects) was to be a simple system - and was never claimed to be something ‘revolutionary’.



Here are some quotes from Over the Edge (1997 revised edition, as reproduced in the 20th anniversary edition):

Page 4
_Over the Edge_ emphasises role-playing and story-telling over number-crunching. The mechanics are exceedingly easy and open to interpretation. . . . [C]omplex mechanics invariably channel and limit the imagination . . . When I look at the player characters that my friends have invented in my games, and I review the adventures they have had, they stand out as people and events that I had never before seen in role-playing games . . . [T]he rules in any game are a boat that takes you to the shore you want to reach. . . . [Y]our boat [in OtE] is a purely functional construction without the elaborate detail and complications. It is my hope that the boat's simplicity will encourage you to concentrate on your goal (enjoyable role-playing) without getting caught up in the vehicle (the rules).

Page 192-93
Role-playing is unusual among art forms in that the artists are also the audience. When you run a game or a character, you are doing it for your own enjoyment and that of your friends, not for a separate audience. . . .

*The Literary Edge* _by Robin D Laws_
OTE is, among other things, an attempt to further the development of role-playing as art. . . . [T]he GM is not a "storyteller" with the players as audience, but merely a "first among equals" given responsibility for the smooth progress of the developing story. . . . In roleplaying . . . the GM is oten called on to say "no" to players' desires for their characters . . . But GMs should also be prepared to say "yes" to players when a suggestion inspires new possibilites for the storyline. . . . The GM is not a movie director, able to order actors to interpret a script . . .  Instead, he should be seeking ways to challenge PCs, to use plot developments to highlight aspects of their characters, in hopes of being challenged in return. . . . Think of all yur actions as GM as literary devices. . . . When viewing role-playing as an art form, rather than a game, it becomes less important to keep from the plaers things their characters wouldn't know. . . . For years, role-players have been simulating fictional narratives the way wargamers recreate historical military engagements. They've been making spontaeous, democratized art for their own consumption . . . Making the artistry conscious is a liberating act . . . Have fun with it, and enjoy your special role in aesthetics history - it's not everybody who gets to be a pioneer in the development of a new art form.​
I see at least two motifs in what I have quoted. First, there are quite deliberate claims about the distinctive and innovative character of OtE as a system - Tweet describes the uniqueness of the PCs and events he has seen, and Laws refers to the game's role in further developing RPGs as an art form.

Second, there are characterisations of the nature of RPGing and the function of RPG rules that are typical of the "indie" movement (eg Vincent Baker) and that are quite relevant to a discussion of when/how games can be played in a sim fashion. Tweet talks about rules as a vehicle, and Laws talks about GMing as the deployment of "literary devices". That is, the system is seen not in a process-sim fashion as a model of the fiction, but rather in a metagame fashion as a device to be used by the game participants to determine what the content of the fiction is to be.

OtE didn't invent such approaches, of course: you can see Gygax describing them in his DMG, most clearly in his discussion of saving throws, but it's also there in his discussion of XP, of the action economy and (perhaps to a lesser extent) of hit points. But he didn't make those discussions the centrepiece of his design, and as various posters on these boards have testifid over the years (eg   [MENTION=6698278]Emerikol[/MENTION]) those features of Gygax's rulebooks were regularly ignored - hence why many D&D players saw F/R/W saves as a sensible rationalisation of the saving throw rules, rather than the radical transformation that I regard them as being.

But OtE is distinctive in making this sort of approach to the game an overt centrepiece that can hardly be ignored in playing the game.



TrippyHippy said:


> Tweet criticises his own work in relation to new games all the time, and all power to him for doing that. It doesn’t legitimise these games as being special or superior in design though.



Here is Tweet on pp xv-xvi of the anniversary edition of OtE:

*New Game Tech*
. . . Free-form, story-oriented roleplaying has come a long way in twenty years. . . .

Fail Forward
A simple but powerful improvement you can make to your game is to redefine failure as "things go wrong" instead of "the PC isn't up to the task." Ron Edwards, Luke Crane and other indie RPG designers have champions this idea, and they're exactly right. . . .

Sorcerer's Kicker
Each PC's first session starts with some compelling event that the character cannot ignore. . . . The player invents his own kicker.​
The passage on "fail forward" is reproduced almost word-for-word on p 42 of the 13th Age rulebook.

My view is that if Tweet regards certain designs as innovative ("new game tech"), and as improvements that he includes in his new games and retrofits to his old games, then there is a good chance that he is right. I don't think he is just being modest and failing to claim credit for things that he already invented.



TrippyHippy said:


> I’m sure you can find quotes from Ron Edwards on all sorts of things, however, as he wrote an awful lot of opinion, but his own games - Sorcerer and Trollbabe - are nothing like as impressive as he has frequently claimed them to be.



I don't really see why this matters. Many people don't think that Gygax's games - even AD&D - were as impressive as he claimed them to be. Even if that's a minority opinion on AD&D, it's a very widely held opinion on Dangerous Journeys, which is as full of self-aggrandising descriptions in its intro material as any RPG I've read.



TrippyHippy said:


> I don’t find essays that are broadly saying “your gaming experiences are invalid; I know more about your own game experiences than you do” are especially useful.



I don't think that Edwards is broadly, or narrowly, saying "your gaming experiences are invalid." He _does_ claim to be able to help you improve your RPGing experience; if you don't agree, then the solution is pretty simple: ignore his advice!

That's just a special case of the general rule that, if you are going to read critics, you should read ones who speak to you. The world is full of literary critics, theatre critics, music critics, RPG critics etc.They have widely varying views. Many critics loved the film "Sideways"; I found it largely uninspiring and a bit insipid. The critics mostly preferred the second to the first Wolverine movie; my taste is the opposite, although the weight of serious opinion is strong enough the other way that no doubt I will one day give the second movie another chance.

I can't remember what led me to Edwards' "system matters" essay - I followed some chance link around 10 years ago. As someone who had thought about system for a long time (GMing Rolemaster, and discovering both its strengths and its many limitations, can do that), I found that essay, and the other ones on the site, hugely insightful. They have made one of the single greatest conributions to my GMing of anything that I have read, and for me that is the bottom line measure of whether or not something written about RPGing techniques is worthwhile. They improved my Rolemaster game; they laid a solid foundation for my 4e game; they helped me make sense of my Dying Earth and HeroWars rulebooks; they led me to Vincent Baker's blog and to a forum post by Paul Czege about scene-framing which both described my own GMing techniques back to me and helpd me to improve them. Edwards' posts also distilled GMing problems that had afflicted both my own game (hence enabling me to correct them) and other games that I had played in (hence enabling me to avoid them).

I've got little doubt that many of the leading personalities of the Forge would find my 4e game dull and shallow - mechanically clunky by their standards (but quite tolerable for someone who has 19 years of Rolemaster under his belt) and thematically simplistic. But that's fine - I'm not playing with them, I'm playing with my friends of many years. That doesn't mean that I can't benefit from their insightful advice.



TrippyHippy said:


> The issue is not whether Ron endorses games or what preferences anybody has - it’s how he chooses to arbitrarily categorise them



The categorisations are not arbitrary. They are reasoned. The reasoning may not be perfect in all cases: it rarely is, particularly where criticsm is concerned.

As I posted upthread, I don't think Edwards' categories are all that salient on ENworld, although I do think that some ENworld discussions would be improved by greater recognition among participants that "immersion" is not the only reason people play RPGs, and that when White Plume Mountain or ToH or Against the Giants were written the main goal of play was not "immersion" but "beating the dungeon". (In Edwards's terminology, the two contrasting agendas here are some form or other of simulationism, and gamism.)

But the fact that some critic's categories are not relevant to some participants in the hobby does not make them arbitrary. My own background in RPGing is pretty mainstream, and I found the categories interesting and useful. I also have a lot of sympathy with Edwards's claim that narrativist or gamist goals will inevitably cause tension within simulationist play: in the case of high concept play, there will be balance-of-power issues between GM and players; in the case of purist-for-sim play there will be the issue that   [MENTION=8900]Tony[/MENTION]Vargas noted upthread, that the system won't reliably deliver the challenge or the story that the gamist/narrativist player wants. This sympathy is grounded on my own experiences as an RPGer, and reasoned projection from those experiences.

On the other hand, I think that Edwards exaggerates the contrast between gamist and narrativist play. A game like The Dying Earth bring this out, in my view: he classifies it as narrativist even though it doesn't satisfy his formal definition (which is, in my view, too narrow) and even though it can be seen as gamist in the same fashion as parlour games like charades and dictionary, the idea being to amuse your friends with witty quips. But I don't think this matters a great deal, especially as Edwards himself notes that a number of RPGs lend themselves to either gamist or narrativist play, depending upon the direction in which the participants take them (he names T&T and the original Marvel Super Heroes game; I think 4e and The Dying Earth could be added to the list).



TrippyHippy said:


> pemerton said:
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Vincent Baker is thanked in the acknowledgements for MHRP, and its indebtedness to earlier games based around free descriptors as the mechanical core, and scene-based conflict resolution, is pretty obvious. The influence of this sort of design, especially the latter, on 4e is equally obvious, and Heinsoo noted the influence of indie games on 4e's design in a pre-release interview:

No other RPG’s are in this boat. There might not be anyone else out there who would publish this kind of game. They usually get entrenched in the simulation aspect.

Indie games are similar in that they emphasize the gameplay aspect, but they’re super-focused, like a narrow laser. D&D has to be more general to accommodate a wide range of play.​
As a general rule, the influence and significance of an avant-garde cultural movement isn't judged by how many people actually paid attention to its immediate outputs. I mean, how many people have actually looked at or admired even a reproduction of DuChamp's "Fountain"? That doesn't mean that dada, and related movements like the surrealists, have had little influence on our contemporary culture.



TrippyHippy said:


> HeroWars/Quest was originally written in 2000 and, despite being cited by The Forge as a game they like, was actually commissioned primarily to play in the Glorantha setting due to ownership complications of the RuneQuest game at the time. It wasn't an ‘indie’ game as such - although it wrote a lot about narrativism in relation to it’s design as opposed to RQ. It is notable that many gamers awaiting on the upcoming Guide to Glorantha (systemless by design) are choosing RQ6 as their game system of choice again, rather than HeroQuest. I’d be interested to see how HeroQuest fares in future publications, seeing that RQ is largely under the charge of Moon Design again. I would say the same thing about D&D4e and Dungeon World in the light of 5e’s release.



I don't understand what this passage is trying to say.

For instance, why do you say "despited being cited by The Forge as a game they like, [Hero Wars] was actually commmissioned to primarily play in the Glorantha setting". What is the force of the "despite"? Everyone who knows of HeroWars knows it was written for Gloranthan play. Ron Edwards knows it was written for Gloranthan play, and talks about this in his discussion of the system (and also in his comparisons of it to Runequest; which - by the way - he describes in his "Right to Dream" essay as one vehicle, together with CoC, for "perhaps the most important system, publishing tradition, and intellectual engine in the hobby - yes, even more than D&D.")

And what is the significance of the fact that Glorantha players prefer some other system? Or that more people play 5e than DungeonWorld? Is that meant to show that the games spawned by the indie RPG movement are of little collective worth? Is your metric for worth "widely played"?



TrippyHippy said:


> In the case of Burning Wheel, well personally, I don’t like it at all. I have attempted to play it, but find a lot of it’s mechanics counter-intuitive and flatly not worth the effort.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> In the case of 4E, flatly, it largely goes to the heart of what I feel was wrong with the ‘indie movement’ - narrow, inflexible game precepts and an arrogant assertion that gamers had somehow been playing the game wrong all the years before.



Is your metric for worth "I don't like it at all"? Many people find Rolemaster not worth the effort. Does that mean Rolemaster is of little worth?

As for 4e, can you point me to these "arrogant assetions" in the rulebooks? Do you mean James Wyatt's suggestion to skip colour encounters, like casual chats with gate guards? Is you metric for a game being of worth that you like the designer chatter?

It is hard to find a RPG book more opinionated, more full of admonitions to play one way rather than another, than Gygax's DMG - which tells both Monty Haul gamers and purist-for-system simulationists that they've been playing the game wrong all the years before. And the 2nd ed PHB is full of attacks upon system optimisers and hard-core gamist players (ie precisely the sorts of players who invented D&D!).



TrippyHippy said:


> If that is the indie movement’s ‘legacy’ claim then I thoroughly endorse that view…but now it’s been superseded by 5E. In short, what legacy?



It seems that you yourself have strong views on how people should design and play RPGs. Is the difference between you and the Forge that you have a popular majority on your side?


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## Manbearcat (Aug 4, 2014)

TrippyHippy said:


> Yes it does. It’s called ‘providing a backstory and reason to adventure’. Pretty  much every RPG has had something like that ever since D&D. To then stick a formal label on such a thing and call it an ‘innovation’ is no such thing at all.




This is incorrect.



pemerton said:


> I don't think this is a very precise description of what a "kicker" is. It's not this particular feature of "kickers" that makes Edwards' claim them as innovative. What Edwards claims to be innovative is the fact that the kicker is not just backstory but an immediate crisis in which the PC is located - so it's a type of player-authored scene-framing that the GM is obliged to incorporate into the opening fiction of the game.




This is 100 % correct.

I don't have the time nor the inclination for much more commentary than that right now.  But, outside of authorial rights being granted to the player, "providing a backstory and reason to adventure" shares nothing in common with the "kicker" technique.  

Oh, and Sorcerer doesn't suck.  Its a good game and it does what it sets out to do (which is pretty much the point of the Forge as a thinktank for RPG design).


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## Hussar (Aug 4, 2014)

Trying to wheel this thread back around, and avoid the low level edition warring that seems to be brewing here.  

I look at a simulation as a model for describing what happens when you do something.  Newtonian physics might be an abstraction, sure, but, it does describe pretty well why someone might yell at me from across the room when I break wind, even silently.  (Well, it might be Newton's fault, or it might be that bean burrito I had last night, or possibly a collusion of both.   )

In any case, a simulation model in order to actually BE a simulation model has to tell you how something happened.  And we do see this in arguments over D&D.  The idea of rules as physics for example means exactly this.  The rules model what happens in the game world.  

My problem with that is, the rules have never actually done it.  Take combat as a good example.  Bob the fighter attacks an orc and misses.  Now, in the game, all that's happened is Bob failed to achieve a particular number.  But, what happened in the game world?  Well, we really don't know.  Did Bob whiff, did he bounce off armor, did the orc parry the attack, did the orc use its shield?  Who knows?  The rules certainly doesn't tell us anything other than the attack failed.

The same thing is true when the attack succeeded.  All we know is somehow Bob managed to reduce the orc's HP.  How he did so, again, is entirely up in the air since the mechanics are silent on the issue.  

In a simulation model, all those questions get answered.  The degree of detail might vary, but, at least there are answers there.  That's what a simulation should do - provide answers.  But D&D mechanics never actually manage to provide any answers really.

Earlier it was mentioned that the multiclassing rules are good simulations.  Really?  Simulating what?  Bob the fighter carves his way through a bunch of orcs, gets the pie and goes back to the Keep.  He has killed and looted and done enough stuff that the game judges him to be second level.  Upon gaining second level, he takes a level in Wizard/Magic User (take your pick, depending on edition).  What happened in the game world?  He has done absolutely no training, and has had no contact with any wizards, yet, now he somehow gains the abilities that would normally take years of training to gain.  After all, had he started out as a first level wizard, he would have had to spend many years becoming that wizard.  But, he spends two weeks killing orcs, and that makes him a magic user?  How?

The rules, again, are silent on the issue.  There is no how there.  If there's no how, then what makes it a simulation?

One thing I do agree with [MENTION=44640]bill[/MENTION]91 about though is this.  D&D is a great game for emulating the works of E. R. Burroughs.  An alien being with superpowers arrives on the scene, stronger, faster and better than anyone around him, and proceeds to climb his or her way to the top of the heap, gaining wealth and fame along the way.  Sounds exactly like a D&D character to me.


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## billd91 (Aug 4, 2014)

Hussar said:


> In a simulation model, all those questions get answered.  The degree of detail might vary, but, at least there are answers there.  That's what a simulation should do - provide answers.  But D&D mechanics never actually manage to provide any answers really.




Maybe you're asking the wrong questions of it.



Hussar said:


> Earlier it was mentioned that the multiclassing rules are good simulations.  Really?  Simulating what?  Bob the fighter carves his way through a bunch of orcs, gets the pie and goes back to the Keep.  He has killed and looted and done enough stuff that the game judges him to be second level.  Upon gaining second level, he takes a level in Wizard/Magic User (take your pick, depending on edition).  What happened in the game world?  He has done absolutely no training, and has had no contact with any wizards, yet, now he somehow gains the abilities that would normally take years of training to gain.  After all, had he started out as a first level wizard, he would have had to spend many years becoming that wizard.  But, he spends two weeks killing orcs, and that makes him a magic user?  How?
> 
> The rules, again, are silent on the issue.  There is no how there.  If there's no how, then what makes it a simulation?




The rules don't have to answer every possible simulation-oriented question under the sun. But how does Bob get to be able to cast a cone of cold as a multi-classed wizard/<something else>? He starts out on his magical journey as a neophyte caster and learns weaker magic before he can master more powerful magic. His skills build as he gains in level until he's finally able to master that particular spell and - like a single classed wizard - he doesn't get to take shortcuts (which is where 4e cuts out a lot of the ambition toward simulation). What the rules *aren't* doing is explaining all of the details between here and there. That's up to the player and DM.

You seem to be getting hung up on the label simulation and think it has to be at some particular level of granularity. But it doesn't. Any expectations of granularity are entirely imposed by the assumptions of the viewer.


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## TrippyHippy (Aug 4, 2014)

Manbearcat said:


> This is incorrect.
> 
> 
> 
> ...




Well, I have the Sorcerer game, including the Annointed version, and I see no mechanic whatsoever that actually differentiates it. Indeed, no actual mechanic at all. I am tired of people trying to assert that simple story motivations are in any way new, and that anybody who dares to interpret these things differently is ‘incorrect’. The ‘immediacy’ of the situation is irrelevant - it’s no different to saying ‘five orcs run attack you - what do you do next’ in effect, or the other bazzilion reasons why people already justified playing their characters in interactive fantasy worlds for thirty years prior to Sorcerer.  

And for the record, I am not arguing that Sorcerer ‘sucked’ - it has a neat central mechanic, it’s playable, and the presentation format is attractive - merely that it wasn’t as revolutionary as people claimed it to be (including the author).


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## Bluenose (Aug 4, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Trying to wheel this thread back around, and avoid the low level edition warring that seems to be brewing here.
> 
> I look at a simulation as a model for describing what happens when you do something.  Newtonian physics might be an abstraction, sure, but, it does describe pretty well why someone might yell at me from across the room when I break wind, even silently.  (Well, it might be Newton's fault, or it might be that bean burrito I had last night, or possibly a collusion of both.   )




OK, but that's about results - not necessarily about the process by which you arrive at those results. 



> In any case, a simulation model in order to actually BE a simulation model has to tell you how something happened.  And we do see this in arguments over D&D.  The idea of rules as physics for example means exactly this.  The rules model what happens in the game world.




No, I don't agree. I think it has to give results that are within the plausible range for the genre the game is in and there's no need to show how those results are arrived at. If that means the player or GM describing how something happens, then that's something I'm perfectly happy to do.



> Earlier it was mentioned that the multiclassing rules are good simulations.  Really?  Simulating what?  Bob the fighter carves his way through a bunch of orcs, gets the pie and goes back to the Keep.  He has killed and looted and done enough stuff that the game judges him to be second level.  Upon gaining second level, he takes a level in Wizard/Magic User (take your pick, depending on edition).  What happened in the game world?  He has done absolutely no training, and has had no contact with any wizards, yet, now he somehow gains the abilities that would normally take years of training to gain.  After all, had he started out as a first level wizard, he would have had to spend many years becoming that wizard.  But, he spends two weeks killing orcs, and that makes him a magic user?  How?




It's probably not so significant a factor with editions other than 3e, since that sort of multi-classing/dual classing is much less common (indeed, it's entirely prohibited in all versions of Basic D&D). I'd certainly never have permitted a character to do that without requiring that the training rules be used, even in a game where I was waiving them for normal levelling up. 

Though of course Classes and Levels aren't exactly poster children for simulation of anything in particular, at least when done in the D&D style.


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## TrippyHippy (Aug 4, 2014)

pemerton said:


> It seems that you yourself have strong views on how people should design and play RPGs. Is the difference between you and the Forge that you have a popular majority on your side?




No, I don’t. I have strong views on what I enjoy or not, but I don’t accept a one-size-fits-all theory that tries to categorise why I like games or not. As such, I have no prescribed views on how people should design or play games. 

I’m sorry, but your post was just too long to answer all of your points. Of the bits I edited out - I agreed with some bits, disagreed with others - but found that a bulk of it was moving away from the salient points I was wanting to address. I will note that many of the quotes you cite were made later on and written in hindsight. Moroever, you are selecting quotes from a vast amount of online discussion - some of it was fine and dandy, but there _was_ also an element of condescension, sometimes just implied, from some that was less than magnanimous towards particular games and groups. 

The issue over citing things like Heroquest, Ghostbusters, Ars Magica, Toon, Paranoia, RuneQuest, Vampire or indeed Joe Blogg’s D&D house rules from 1978 is that people were considering narrative devices and techniques way back throughout the hobby. Always. They just didn't make a big thing about them. 

For example, I used to be of the mind that Ars Magica ‘innovated’ the idea of ‘troupe play’, until another player pointed out that he had been doing the same sort of thing with Traveller for years. Now, very little of this is written about in the rulebooks - but the nuance of the premise (creating collectively owned spaceships and managing their maintenance like a business) does indeed lend itself towards rolling up multiple characters and creating a soap opera out of it - with multiple narrative angles for different selected characters on a scenario-by-scenario basis. Understated, perhaps - but there nevertheless. It is to AM’s credit that the author explicitly denounces any claim that the game’s ideas are somehow exclusive to it, and it’s this sense of humility which is lacking in games such as Sorcerer, et al. 

With regards to 4E and ‘arrogant design’, my point with all these games was that they created a theory based buffer for themselves that actually inhibited critical analysis. In the case of 4E, the whole GNS argument was that the game was made more ‘coherent’ by establishing a specific outlook for playing it. Without delving into edition warring, the problem I have is that by making the game rigidly stick to this agenda, it actually just served to disenfranchise players. Yet, the game design itself is somehow exempt from criticism insofar that it reached it’s stated goals and ‘purpose’. 

It encapsulates my entire viewpoint about The Forge games too - it became near impossible to simply say,  “I don’t enjoy playing Dogs in the Vineyard”, or The Burning Wheel, or whatever, without becoming embroiled in debate with people who were basically saying the reason you don’t like it is ‘you’re the wrong type of player!’, or ‘you’re not playing it right!’ or even more simply ‘you don’t get it!’. The whole GNS theory to me was just a bogus way of deflecting criticism rather than encouraging it. 

Do I think there has been any positive influence from these games? Sure. I’ve already cited Marvel Heroic as a game I admire a lot, and I also think Fiasco is brilliant. But there has also been a shift in the language of these games too - again, less interested in making claims of influence or revolution, or what type of game it represents, or demanding ‘rules as written’ play, and just getting on with the creative fun of the game itself. That is what I respect.


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## Hussar (Aug 4, 2014)

billd91 said:


> Maybe you're asking the wrong questions of it.
> 
> 
> 
> ...




But, it's not that the rules aren't explaining *all* the details between here and there.  it's that it's not explaining *ANY* of the details between there and here.  You haven't described a simulation of anything other than a model of the model.  The growth from beginner caster to higher level caster is pretty much a purely D&D thing in the first place, but, also, that growth isn't actually detailed at any point.

Basically, your simulation is only simulating playing D&D.  It's certainly not simulating any sort of experiential growth since the PC doesn't actually have to do anything other than gain levels to gain that particular spell.  And his gaining levels don't actually have to have anything to do with gaining that particular spell.

Simulations have to model SOMETHING or they aren't simulations.  There is nothing actually being modelled here.  My wizard gains Cone of Cold simply through gaining X number of levels, which, in themselves are a gamist construct that doesn't actually model anything.  

We gain levels because gaining levels is fun and gaining levels lets us do more things with our characters.  We're not simulating anything by gaining levels.  Again, if we look at more simulationist style games, gaining experience typically means that you have to spend points on things that you did while gaining that experience, or finding someone to teach you new stuff and then spending the points.

You don't get to automatically gain new knowledge in game without actually going through the motions of explaining how you gained that knowledge.  Not in a simulation style game.


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## Hussar (Aug 4, 2014)

Bluenose said:


> OK, but that's about results - not necessarily about the process by which you arrive at those results.
> 
> 
> 
> ...




But, if there is nothing to show how those results are reached, then what's being simulated?  What is the model?  I miss an attack, which means that my opponent does not lose HP.  None of that has any impact on the game world.  I hit on an attack, my opponent loses HP.  We still have no idea what's actually happened in the game world.  

What good is a model that doesn't actually tell us anything?

Like I said, I like simulationist games.  Spent far, far too many hours playing Star Fleet Battles way back when.    I totally get the point.  I enjoy them.  But, again, I'm just baffled by the idea that someone would pick up the D&D rules, any edition, and think, "Hey, here's something I can really use to model what it would be like to live and adventure in a fantasy world".  It's a really foreign concept to me.


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## BryonD (Aug 4, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Like I said, I like simulationist games.  Spent far, far too many hours playing Star Fleet Battles way back when.    I totally get the point.  I enjoy them.  But, again, I'm just baffled by the idea that someone would pick up the D&D rules, any edition, and think, "Hey, here's something I can really use to model what it would be like to live and adventure in a fantasy world".  It's a really foreign concept to me.



And I think it because you are bringing preconceived notions into it.  
I've also played Starfleet Battles.  And I've played D&D with a lot of people who have NOT played SFB and a few people who have.  But the vast majority of people I've played with fall into the highly "pro-simulationist" camp.  And I don't think any of them want anything close to the level of precision.  In high school we even discussed a Star Trek campaign and the use of SFB for ship to ship combat was brought up and laughed off as absurd.  It was completely obvious to us that that degree of accuracy would be counter-productive to the RPG experience.  That wasn't remotely a complaint about the merits of SFB battles as a great tactical war game or remotely an retraction of our dedication to "simulation" role playing (though we didn't use that term).  It was simply an obvious understanding of scale and context.


And that is the key distinction.  There is no value in comparing degree of accuracy of simulation when the point at hand is whether to have simulation or not.  GURPS may have a vastly better lock picking simulation than 3E.  And a LARP game with a operation-style buzzer puzzle might be an even better simulation.  A game that requires the player to recite random Shakespeare quotes for his character to open locks is not going to get the "simulation" label from me.  Just because I can rank tiers of "simulation" doesn't mean any the games that fall under "simulation" don't deserve it, nor does it mean that saying the Shakespeare game falls outside that label.  And if your game says that the DC of a lock is based on your character level, then it also falls outside that label.  

When a game embraces "anti-sim" elements, it is fair to consider that game to be something other than simulation.  Whereas a game that earnestly pursues simulation should probably be called simulation, even if there is a better alternative out there. 

I don't recall ever being in these "simulation" debates prior to 4E.  I do recall being in debates, even pre 3E in which GURPS, for example, was compared to 2E as either a "much better model" or "far too tedious", depending on which side a person's tastes ran to.  But the concept would be "my sim is  better than your sim".  It wasn't until 4E came along that the overt reject of sim in a range of game elements reframed the debate.  (Not remotely saying non-sim games didn't exist, I'm saying 4E brought the debate into the forefront of the community)

It is like we used to argue over whether dates or strawberries are the better fruit.  Now someone throws a can of Coke on the table, gets upset that their Coke isn't accepted as a fruit so claims that clearly a date isn't a fruit because strawberry.  It doesn't make sense.

A lot of people like game that are dedicated to attempting to consistently model something and yet still provide a good foundation for role playing.  SFB level of detail is not remotely needed for that.  But there is a lot of room for being between SFB and abandoning the persistent commitment to sim.  If in the context of RPGs you say you get it because SFB, then you don't get it.  If you want to get it, you should try letting go of your preconceived notions and honestly looking from others point of view. Or just decide it doesn't matter to you.  Either way, you may still decide it doesn't work for you, but you might actually get it.


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## Hussar (Aug 4, 2014)

BryonD said:


> And I think it because you are bringing preconceived notions into it.
> I've also played Starfleet Battles.  And I've played D&D with a lot of people who have NOT played SFB and a few people who have.  But the vast majority of people I've played with fall into the highly "pro-simulationist" camp.  And I don't think any of them want anything close to the level of precision.  In high school we even discussed a Star Trek campaign and the use of SFB for ship to ship combat was brought up and laughed off as absurd.  It was completely obvious to us that that degree of accuracy would be counter-productive to the RPG experience.  That wasn't remotely a complaint about the merits of SFB battles as a great tactical war game or remotely an retraction of our dedication to "simulation" role playing (though we didn't use that term).  It was simply an obvious understanding of scale and context.
> 
> 
> ...




Just a point of order - In AD&D, the DC to pick a lock was entirely based on your character level.  Are you now claiming that AD&D embraces "anti-sim" elements?

My problem is, you're claiming that D&D "earnestly pursues simulation", at least I think you're claiming that.  Is that correct?  

Where?  Where is D&D earnestly pursuing simulation of anything?  That's the point I'm trying to discover here.  D&D, AFAIC, does not, and never has, earnestly pursued simulation.  There might have been some simulationist veneer glued on here and there, but, of all of the things that people claim make D&D D&D, Vancian casting, levels, 6 stats, the combat system, none of it comes anywhere near trying to model anything.  Where are these models that are trying to earnestly pursue simulation.

Look, I totally agree that a Star Fleet Battles level is not what I want either.  Snore fest.  Totally agree.  But, the models have to simulate _something_ don't they?  They have to be able to tell us something about the game world.  But, all the combat system tells us is when something is alive or dead.  And even that's iffy.  All the level system tells us is that if I kill enough orcs, I learn how to speak Elven.  Bwuh?  Even the six stats don't really tell us much.  What does a 14 Int mean?  What does a 9 Cha mean?  

Sure, I can peg interpretations to stuff, but, most of it is artificial fabrications with virtually no connection to the actual model.  My fighter has taken 14 damage.  What does he look like?  Well, he looks like anything I want him to look like since the system doesn't give a single indication of what he actually looks like.  Can my 10 Int character come up with detailed, intricate plans?  Why or why not?  

On and on.  The models don't tell us anything.  They aren't really modelling anything.  The mechanics are not there to model anything because they can't.  The mechanics can't answer any questions, because they are not really earnestly pursuing simulation.


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## Andor (Aug 4, 2014)

Hussar said:


> But, it's not that the rules aren't explaining *all* the details between here and there.  it's that it's not explaining *ANY* of the details between there and here.  You haven't described a simulation of anything other than a model of the model.  The growth from beginner caster to higher level caster is pretty much a purely D&D thing in the first place, but, also, that growth isn't actually detailed at any point.
> 
> Basically, your simulation is only simulating playing D&D.  It's certainly not simulating any sort of experiential growth since the PC doesn't actually have to do anything other than gain levels to gain that particular spell.  And his gaining levels don't actually have to have anything to do with gaining that particular spell.




Well actually (depending on the edition) that's true only if you wish it to be true. Execpt for 4e (I just looked in the DMG and couldn't find anything, might have missed it) the requirements for training are left up to the GM with several suggestions made. Essentially that level of granularity is left up for the table to decide based on their preferences. Actually D&D does that a lot. The rules are explicit where they need to be explicit to resolve conflict. (Where they model outcomes rather than exact interim states, although the modeling is still more precise than a game like HeroQuest.) Outside of conflict resolution the Gm is handed a bunch of dials which he can set as desired. If you want to track nitty gritty details of diet, encumbrance and upkeep, you can, although it is not mandated and most do not. 



Hussar said:


> But, if there is nothing to show how those results are reached, then what's being simulated?  What is the model?  I miss an attack, which means that my opponent does not lose HP.  None of that has any impact on the game world.  I hit on an attack, my opponent loses HP.  We still have no idea what's actually happened in the game world.




Sure you do. Joe hit Ellen with a sword and Ellen now has a diminished capacity to take more damage. Whether that is because she has a bruise, a scratch or a gaping wound is unknown. It also doesn't matter. Why would it? The rules contain no system for precisely simulating surgical repair, it's just a generic medicine check or (more likely) magical healing. So what is gained by knowing if Joe's epee punctured her spleen or her gall bladder? I mean, you can point to RM with it's manifold lists of healing spells for each and every bodily system, but frankly I never saw the point as the game never actually tells you when you need which one. So what is gained?



Hussar said:


> Like I said, I like simulationist games.  Spent far, far too many hours playing Star Fleet Battles way back when.    I totally get the point.  I enjoy them.  But, again, I'm just baffled by the idea that someone would pick up the D&D rules, any edition, and think, "Hey, here's something I can really use to model what it would be like to live and adventure in a fantasy world".  It's a really foreign concept to me.




It can be a lot of fun and occasionally horrifying to indulge in the exersice. Consider for example a 3.x based world which used the training by level rules for character advancement including expenses. Now also assume that the world is not mysteriously stuffed with monsters with bulging sacks of loot. What is the outcome?

The inhabitants of that world know about high level characters and their potential power. The nations of that world will want such characters, but they are a considerable expense and require constant trials (adventures) to keep progressing. What happens? 

One of the likely outcomes is actually the same as the social structure of the ninja camps in Naruto. Small bands of absurdly powerful people who are mostly dedicated to the training of the next generation of absurdly powerful people and who continually hire themselves out for a variety of task to keep bringing in the XP and cash they need to keep the ball rolling. I'm tinkering with an entire campaign world based off that insight.


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## Hussar (Aug 4, 2014)

Andor said:


> Well actually (depending on the edition) that's true only if you wish it to be true. Execpt for 4e (I just looked in the DMG and couldn't find anything, might have missed it) the requirements for training are left up to the GM with several suggestions made. Essentially that level of granularity is left up for the table to decide based on their preferences. Actually D&D does that a lot. The rules are explicit where they need to be explicit to resolve conflict. (Where they model outcomes rather than exact interim states, although the modeling is still more precise than a game like HeroQuest.) Outside of conflict resolution the Gm is handed a bunch of dials which he can set as desired. If you want to track nitty gritty details of diet, encumbrance and upkeep, you can, although it is not mandated and most do not.
> 
> 
> 
> Sure you do. Joe hit Ellen with a sword and Ellen now has a diminished capacity to take more damage. Whether that is because she has a bruise, a scratch or a gaping wound is unknown. It also doesn't matter. Why would it? The rules contain no system for precisely simulating surgical repair, it's just a generic medicine check or (more likely) magical healing. So what is gained by knowing if Joe's epee punctured her spleen or her gall bladder? I mean, you can point to RM with it's manifold lists of healing spells for each and every bodily system, but frankly I never saw the point as the game never actually tells you when you need which one. So what is gained?




But, again, what does that actually mean?  Diminished capacity to take more damage?  Diminished how?  Again, I don't need anything precise, but, "I'm down 14 HP" isn't imprecise, it's actually fairly meaningless since loss of HP only means that you have less HP, nothing else.  

I'm not looking for granularity.  I'm looking for a model that actually says something about the game world.  "I lost 14 HP" has no real correlation in the game world since no one in the game world knows what a HP is and there is no mechanical link between HP loss and physical effects.




> It can be a lot of fun and occasionally horrifying to indulge in the exersice. Consider for example a 3.x based world which used the training by level rules for character advancement including expenses. Now also assume that the world is not mysteriously stuffed with monsters with bulging sacks of loot. What is the outcome?
> 
> The inhabitants of that world know about high level characters and their potential power. The nations of that world will want such characters, but they are a considerable expense and require constant trials (adventures) to keep progressing. What happens?
> 
> One of the likely outcomes is actually the same as the social structure of the ninja camps in Naruto. Small bands of absurdly powerful people who are mostly dedicated to the training of the next generation of absurdly powerful people and who continually hire themselves out for a variety of task to keep bringing in the XP and cash they need to keep the ball rolling. I'm tinkering with an entire campaign world based off that insight.




Heh, that sounds like fun.  

------------

A side thought occurs about lock DC's.  3e is actually the only edition where DC's for skills is completely external to the PC.  In 1e, thief skills were absolute - you had an X% chance of success based on your level.  There was no modifier AFAIK.  In 2e, your success for skills (non-weapon proficiencies) were based on your base 6 stats.  A high stat person would succeed more often than a low stat person, but, there were no modifiers external to the character.  4e suggests that DC's be linked to level, although, they go a step further and suggest that the scenario reflect the level of the character.  It's not that locks change DC depending on the level of the character but rather a higher level character will typically only find more difficult locks (or whatever it is you are trying to do).

Only 3e actually had objective DC's for the game world.

I suppose, thinking about it, that's a good place to start for model.  If the DC for doing something is baselined, then you have a workable model of reality.  So, I can see this as a decent sim style point in the game.


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 4, 2014)

Up to this point, your post was doing pretty good.



BryonD said:


> Games that instead embrace that anti-sim spirit have never been remotely successful for me.



 I'm pretty sure that styles that don't require as much or as successful sim as you prefer don't define themselves solely by their opposition to your style -  as you have just done in dubbing them 'anti-sim.'  I don't think it's at all helpful for you even to discuss that imagined, diametrically-opposed point of view.  For one thing, people who actually know what their various styles are about are going to violently disagree with you, and you just might construe any defense of other styles as an attack on sim.


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## billd91 (Aug 4, 2014)

Hussar said:


> A side thought occurs about lock DC's.  3e is actually the only edition where DC's for skills is completely external to the PC.  In 1e, thief skills were absolute - you had an X% chance of success based on your level.  There was no modifier AFAIK.  In 2e, your success for skills (non-weapon proficiencies) were based on your base 6 stats.  A high stat person would succeed more often than a low stat person, but, there were no modifiers external to the character.  4e suggests that DC's be linked to level, although, they go a step further and suggest that the scenario reflect the level of the character.  It's not that locks change DC depending on the level of the character but rather a higher level character will typically only find more difficult locks (or whatever it is you are trying to do).
> 
> Only 3e actually had objective DC's for the game world.
> 
> I suppose, thinking about it, that's a good place to start for model.  If the DC for doing something is baselined, then you have a workable model of reality.  So, I can see this as a decent sim style point in the game.




Whether or not the difficulty of a lock is objective depends a bit on your perspective. In 3e, yes, the DCs are expected to be set entirely outside the PC trying to pick the lock. But, if you turn the math around, that's also the case in 1e/2e. It's just that in 1e/2e, the difficult of a lock is treated as uniform - there is no gradation between qualities of the lock (officially in the rules, though there were cases in which modifiers did appear) and so the only variable is skill of the lock picking thief - determined by level/points invested (for 1e/2e), class, race, and restrictive armor worn in meeting that difficulty. 

And with non-weapon proficiencies, the possibility of there being potential modifiers is explicitly called out. They are, for the most part, just left to the DM's discretion. Tracking is a notable exception and includes several modifiers based on objective criteria.

3e, I think, definitely made the setting of difficulties much more codified and objective from the standpoint of the written rules. From a conceptual standpoint, it was easier to explain and justify the DCs to questioning players. I'm not entirely convinced that the system was actually easier to use, particularly in giving the player the tools they wanted to estimate their chances of success. Estimating a 1e theif's skill chances or a 2e character's non-weapon proficiency use chances was simple and intuitive. If I had a 40% chance to move silently, then 4 attempts out of 10 I would succeed. If my target on a NWP was 15 or lower, I succeeded in 15 out of 20 tries. That was a lot easier than estimating my ability move silently in 3e with its opposed rolls even if unifying the system with the d20, stat mods, and skill ranks had a certain elegance.


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## Andor (Aug 4, 2014)

Hussar said:


> But, again, what does that actually mean?  Diminished capacity to take more damage?  Diminished how?  Again, I don't need anything precise, but, "I'm down 14 HP" isn't imprecise, it's actually fairly meaningless since loss of HP only means that you have less HP, nothing else.
> 
> I'm not looking for granularity.  I'm looking for a model that actually says something about the game world.  "I lost 14 HP" has no real correlation in the game world since no one in the game world knows what a HP is and there is no mechanical link between HP loss and physical effects.




Do you know precisely what has happened? No.

You know that someone hit someone with a weapon, as that was the attempt being modeled by the system.
You know that blood was drawn (if it was a s/p weapon.) 

Some will argue that you cannot know that blood was drawn as HP are abstract, which might be true except that you can paint them into a corner. Frex a blowgun dart does 1 or 1-2 points of damage. And each and every hit with a blowgun dart is capable of administering an injectable poison, if and only if the dart actually does damage. A barbarian with DR 2 can be shot so full of darts he looks like a hedgehog, but he will never have to make a poison save. Ergo a 1hp hit from a blowgun dart indicates that the dart penetrated into the bloodstream. We now know that 1hp of damage is at very least the equivalent of a pinprick. It cannot be a near miss whatever some say. So there we have a mechanical link between hp loss and physical effects.

You could, if you were an evil scientist in a D&D world, explore this rigorously by chaining a bunch of people to posts and having your ninjas blowgun them to death while you record the events.
You would rapidly discover mean hp totals for the base population, and whatever tougher figures you could find. "Interesting, Thorvold the Belligerent required 78 darts to be knocked unconcious, my god that's four times as many as his horse!" If you were fantasy Himmler you could probably derive the entire damage system by weapon as well as hp by class and level.

Ergo, HP mean something concrete within the gameworld of D&D. It's not something we understand well, because our reality doesn't work that way. But can the people inside a D&D world perceive the existence of HP? Yes, yes they can. Actually for an extreme example of this there is always Erfworld where HP totals are explicit and actually viewable by others inside the world. 

Indeed they are probably well aware of other implications of the HP system, for example it's impossible to accidently beat someone to death with your fists. Doing lethal damage (depending on  the edition) requires deliberate effort. So Houdini would not have died from that punch to the gut unless his assailant was a monk attempting to assainate him. Which now that I think about it should imply that D&D worlders are even quicker to use their fists to resolve disputes than real world people, but beating someone to death might just stir up a lynch mob....

Like I said, thinking about this stuff is fun.


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## Emerikol (Aug 4, 2014)

pemerton said:


> Unless you think I was just making stuff up on the other recent thread that discussed these things, you have encountered such a person online - namely, me. (And if you think I'm anti-sim, then you haven't been following my posts very closely. I GMed Rolemaster for 19 years. The reason I think Ron Edwards' descriptoin of purist-for-system sim is terrific is because it captures exactly what motivated me during those 19 years. And the fact that Burning Wheel's Fight! system satisfies so many of these desiderata is part of what makes it appeal to me.)




I'm not doubting some people exist that want what you are describing.  The problem is that a lot of people that I consider "in my camp" thinking wise are not wanting those things and yet still reject a category of other mechanics.  

I think I want a game that has mechanics that don't break my immersion as well as one that is fairly rules light but with the ability to add on options.  I don't mind the DM being empowered to cover all the corner cases using judgment instead of a book full of a zillion rules.  That judgment can be guided though by solid guidelines that teach the DM how to set effective DCs and how to interpret spells and so forth.

So perhaps I am just a subcategory of simulationist.  I'm a rules lite simulationist.


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## Bluenose (Aug 4, 2014)

Hussar said:


> But, if there is nothing to show how those results are reached, then what's being simulated?  What is the model?  I miss an attack, which means that my opponent does not lose HP.  None of that has any impact on the game world.  I hit on an attack, my opponent loses HP.  We still have no idea what's actually happened in the game world.
> 
> What good is a model that doesn't actually tell us anything?




What's being,or perhaps I should say should be being, modelled is results that fit into the range of plausible ones for the game in question. How those are arrived at is plenty abstract. But, Abstract is not the opposite of Simulationist. Not getting plausible results from situations is where a game fails in the simulation aspect, and it's certainly the case that D&D often gives horribly silly results - but that's not because the process isn't detailed enough to explain how this happens, which is largely irrelevant to whether the result is plausible enough. 

It's funny to think how I've had these same arguments before in the context of a different type of game (tabletop wargaming, specifically). I'm rather expecting a similar long term effect, once the arguments settle down and emotions calm a little. Some time in the 2020s, I believe.


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 4, 2014)

Andor said:


> You know that someone hit someone with a weapon, as that was the attempt being modeled by the system.
> You know that blood was drawn (if it was a s/p weapon.)
> 
> Some will argue that you cannot know that blood was drawn as HP are abstract, which might be true except that you can paint them into a corner. Frex a blowgun dart does 1 or 1-2 points of damage. And each and every hit with a blowgun dart is capable of administering an injectable poison, if and only if the dart actually does damage.



 Actually, EGG went into just that question in the 1e DMG.  The upshot was that a successful save vs an insinuative poison indicated that no open wound was inflicted for the poison to envenom.  A 'pseudo-hit,' as some folks called it back then.  

So, you could, with just one extra step (a gratuitous poison save), determine if an actual wound had been inflicted or not.  You could also dream up odd coincidences where a character could be reduced to 0 hps without ever failing that poison save, and thus have been pseudo-hit to pseudo-death.

Pretty weird, but that was AD&D for you.



> A barbarian with DR 2 can be shot so full of darts he looks like a hedgehog, but he will never have to make a poison save.



 That /really/ depends on edition.   




> You could, if you were an evil scientist in a D&D world, explore this rigorously by chaining a bunch of people to posts and having your ninjas blowgun them to death while you record the events.
> You would rapidly discover mean hp totals for the base population, and whatever tougher figures you could find. "Interesting, Thorvold the Belligerent required 78 darts to be knocked unconcious, my god that's four times as many as his horse!" If you were fantasy Himmler you could probably derive the entire damage system by weapon as well as hp by class and level.



 That is hilarious, yes.  Of course - again, in 1e - if the DM ruled the chained-up experimental subjects 'helpless,' they'd just be killed at a rate of 1/round (actually, startlingly slowly, thanks to the 1-minute round).



> Doing lethal damage (depending on  the edition) requires deliberate effort. So Houdini would not have died from that punch to the gut unless his assailant was a monk attempting to assainate him.



 In any edition of D&D, even if Houdini had been /stabbed/ in the gut, /but left with 1 hp/, he wouldn't have had a penalty to his attempt to escape, and wouldn't have drowned.   No wound penalties.  For  that matter, if he had been punched for enough lethal damage to die /later/, he'd have been unconscious.

Other systems, if not exactly more realistic, could conceivably see such things happen.  Hero, for instance, tracks 'BOD' (lethal damage) and STUN separately, so you could be conscious, but dying.


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## BryonD (Aug 4, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Just a point of order - In AD&D, the DC to pick a lock was entirely based on your character level.  Are you now claiming that AD&D embraces "anti-sim" elements?



I don't recall that.  Are you referencing the "lockpicking %" ability of thieves?  Because that is completely different.
The point I've made with "anti-sim" is blatantly rejecting any attempt at simulation.  The Thief table does not do that.  

If a 2nd level thief and a 14th level thief approach the same lock, the higher level thief will have a better chance because his skill is better, there is nothing in the system to suggest that the lock itself became easier to open.  1E *does* assume that all locks are the same.  And I'd put that under a poor showing at sim, but it is still a date, nowhere near as sweet as a strawberry, but still a fruit, unlike Coke.  If there were different difficulties of locks and it was built into the system that the same lock was harder depending on how high the thief level, then THAT would be a soft drink, and yes, I'd call it "anti-sim".    If I've missed or forgotten something in 1E, please direct me to it.



> My problem is, you're claiming that D&D "earnestly pursues simulation", at least I think you're claiming that.  Is that correct?
> 
> Where?  Where is D&D earnestly pursuing simulation of anything?  That's the point I'm trying to discover here.  D&D, AFAIC, does not, and never has, earnestly pursued simulation.  There might have been some simulationist veneer glued on here and there, but, of all of the things that people claim make D&D D&D, Vancian casting, levels, 6 stats, the combat system, none of it comes anywhere near trying to model anything.  Where are these models that are trying to earnestly pursue simulation.



Where does it not?  

I mean, vancian casting attempts to simulate a world with magic in which spellcasting works by those basic rules.  What more do you want?  A STR of 18 is stronger than a STR of 12.  You seem to be arguing that because it does not meet some unstated standard of being a statistically provable accurate sim that it is no more sim than things that openly abandon sim.  

If Joe is the local arm wrestling champion and he has a STR of 16 in my 1E game, his STR is known and can be compared to the STR of anyone else.  If Mike (STR 11)and Sue (STR 17) challenge him, I know how they compare. Does that make it a great sim?  No.  Does it make it anything less than an attempt at sim?  Of course not.  

Now, if I’m playing some other game and the rules expect me took look at Mike’s level and find the DC for beating Joe on a page in a book and then look at Sue’s level and find a very possibly DIFFERENT number for beating Joe on that same page, then Joe no longer has a meaningful value within the world.  In this game it just became “anti-sim”.  



> Look, I totally agree that a Star Fleet Battles level is not what I want either.  Snore fest.  Totally agree.



I didn’t say I didn’t like it.  I said the standard was absurd for RPGs.


> But, the models have to simulate _something_ don't they?  They have to be able to tell us something about the game world.  But, all the combat system tells us is when something is alive or dead.  And even that's iffy.  All the level system tells us is that if I kill enough orcs, I learn how to speak Elven.  Bwuh?  Even the six stats don't really tell us much.  What does a 14 Int mean?  What does a 9 Cha mean?



An Int of 14 means I’m near the top of intelligence in a scale based on 3 – 18.  The char is clearly smarter than average but not as smart as can be expected at the top of the normal range.


> Sure, I can peg interpretations to stuff, but, most of it is artificial fabrications with virtually no connection to the actual model.  My fighter has taken 14 damage.  What does he look like?  Well, he looks like anything I want him to look like since the system doesn't give a single indication of what he actually looks like.  Can my 10 Int character come up with detailed, intricate plans?  Why or why not?
> 
> On and on.  The models don't tell us anything.  They aren't really modelling anything.  The mechanics are not there to model anything because they can't.  The mechanics can't answer any questions, because they are not really earnestly pursuing simulation.



First, I’ll state that repeatedly claiming these are not earnest efforts to pursue simulation is just obtuse denial.  Degree of success, and the ability of a group of players working together in the spirit of a good experience has shown that it does work for decades.  

Again, you are using a pointless standard that completely attempts to sidestep the key issue.  You have shown me over and over that dates are less sweet than fruit, but you have done nothing to show me that they are not fruit or that Coke is a fruit.

Prior to 4E I would largely agree with the spirit of the points you are making.  I would ENJOY debating the merits of improving the tangible meaning.  I would have never acknowledged that they were not “sim”, but I’d agree that you could call them “very poor” sim in a lot of cases.  Keep in mind that I left 2E with no desire to go back for pretty much this reason.  But 4E has changed the context of the conversation.  

Saying that 14 INT is not meaningful is a completely different matter to saying that a DC14 lock turns out to be DC 21 because a different character tried to open it.  Saying  40 hp damage to a fighter does not have a fixed meaning is different than saying that a fighter can be beat unconscious by Ogres and have absolutely no after effect the next morning, with no outside mechanism for recovery.  I don’t care how many times you tell me you don’t think pre-4E versions of D&D were bad at sim.  You are completely entitled to your opinion on that.  But over and over 4E abandons sim altogether.  It has been PRAISED for this.  So there is no point in arguing where 1E falls on the scale if the question at hand is whether or not a game should be on the scale in the first place.


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## BryonD (Aug 4, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> Up to this point, your post was doing pretty good.
> 
> I'm pretty sure that styles that don't require as much or as successful sim as you prefer don't define themselves solely by their opposition to your style -  as you have just done in dubbing them 'anti-sim.'  I don't think it's at all helpful for you even to discuss that imagined, diametrically-opposed point of view.  For one thing, people who actually know what their various styles are about are going to violently disagree with you, and you just might construe any defense of other styles as an attack on sim.




Shrug.

I didn't seek this out.  Hussar is proclaiming all D&D non-sim.  The new bizzaro standard requires a term to address the difference.

Again, 4E was hugely praised by its fanbase as rejecting sim. 

As a matter of fact, it occurs to me as funny that Hussar never felt motivated to make this case in the early days of 4E when there was a constantly flood of "Thank God D&D isn't trying to be a sim any longer."


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## BryonD (Aug 4, 2014)

pemerton said:


> Unless you think I was just making stuff up on the other recent thread that discussed these things, you have encountered such a person online - namely, me. (And if you think I'm anti-sim, then you haven't been following my posts very closely. I GMed Rolemaster for 19 years. The reason I think Ron Edwards' descriptoin of purist-for-system sim is terrific is because it captures exactly what motivated me during those 19 years. And the fact that Burning Wheel's Fight! system satisfies so many of these desiderata is part of what makes it appeal to me.)



I realize you were not replying to me, and you were replying to a statement about "anti-sim" people.

I don't think I've encountered anyone that I would label "anti-sim" as a gamer.  There may be such people.  And I'd have nothing against it if I did.  But I'm not saying this about people.
Further, and I said this in another post to you but it bears repeating, 4E certainly has lots of sim elements throughout it.  I mean, I suspect if you played a long session of 4E and flagged every minute in which an "anti-sim" thing came up, the % of minutes would be very small.  But it does happen, by design, throughout the experience.  So, for example, a fighter could go through a day of adventure with nothing happening that crosses into the unfun elements as perceived by Bryon.  (Some of these things probably would happen, but it certainly "could" be avoided for any given day).  But if he ends up thrashed by Ogres and then that evening insto-recovers his HP then that is a big moment of intentionally designed and celebrated "asim". So it was a day of sim, a moment of asim, and then , lets assume another full day of sim.  Well, to me that whole next day is in the context of existing as it does because of that one asim moment.  I'm not going to be satisfied.  So, the point is, I can be completely unsatisfied because of asim elements while 99.7% of your game time was "sim".  
So I'm not saying anything about people and I'm not saying 4E is remotely lacking in sim elements.
And, probably most important of all, I'm not claiming any merit to either system being remotely superior to the other, only which I prefer.

I'm also stating that the difference does exist.


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 4, 2014)

BryonD said:


> Saying that 14 INT is not meaningful is a completely different matter to saying that a DC14 lock turns out to be DC 21 because a different character tried to open it.



  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.



> Saying  40 hp damage to a fighter does not have a fixed meaning is different than saying that a fighter can be beat unconscious by Ogres and have absolutely no after effect the next morning, with no outside mechanism for recovery.



 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.



BryonD said:


> Shrug.Hussar is proclaiming all D&D non-sim.



 Are the two of you even working from the same definition of sim?  



> Again, 4E was hugely praised by its fanbase as rejecting 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)....




BryonD said:


> The first RPG I ever personally experienced was 1E.  To me, at that time, it was obvious and completely intuitive, that 1E D&D was "simulating" being a character in a fantasy epic tale.  Of course between both being a kid and lacking the years of evolution of the gaming community and perspectives, I never dwelt on this in anything approaching the way it is discussed today.  It was simply true that D&D was about being Strider or Merlin and thus, it was defacto a simulation experience.



 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.




> In modern perspective I do not think of 1E as remotely a "sim" game.  But this is different than a modern game that is not "sim".  Late 1970s computers can not be described as "fast" in any reasonable modern standards.  Btu the best computers then were "fast", and 1E was the best "sim" going in the same way.



 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.  



> And, for starting from war games, I give all credit to Gygax and fellows for the massive first step in innovation they provided.



 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.



> But to me it was always about "sim" and always meant to be sim.  To the extent I discussed these matters with friends, I have zero recollection of anyone every challenging that idea.  As time went by and I found games that innovated on the "sim" elements, I left D&D.



 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).



> As time went by and I found games that innovated on the "sim" elements, I left D&D.



 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).


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## Savage Wombat (Aug 4, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> Are the two of you even working from the same definition of sim?




Which is why I broached the point way back when.


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## Hussar (Aug 5, 2014)

Well, I did give my definition of simulation - a model for determining what and how something happens - upthread.



			
				BryonD said:
			
		

> I don't recall that. Are you referencing the "lockpicking %" ability of thieves? Because that is completely different.
> The point I've made with "anti-sim" is blatantly rejecting any attempt at simulation. The Thief table does not do that.
> 
> If a 2nd level thief and a 14th level thief approach the same lock, the higher level thief will have a better chance because his skill is better, there is nothing in the system to suggest that the lock itself became easier to open. 1E *does* assume that all locks are the same. And I'd put that under a poor showing at sim, but it is still a date, nowhere near as sweet as a strawberry, but still a fruit, unlike Coke. If there were different difficulties of locks and it was built into the system that the same lock was harder depending on how high the thief level, then THAT would be a soft drink, and yes, I'd call it "anti-sim". If I've missed or forgotten something in 1E, please direct me to it.
> ...




The point is, EVERY lock is the same.  No matter what, all locks in the world get easier to pick the higher level you are.  What is being simulated here?  What is being modelled?  How is it that all locks in the world get easier to open as I kill more orcs and take ore treasure?  

You claimed that DC by level is anti-sim.  All editions other than 3e had lock DC's set by level.  A lock for a 1st level 1e thief opens about 15% of the time (I'm working from memory here) modified by race, dex and armour worn.  A lock for a 6th level thief opens about 40% of the time.  IOW, all lock DC's are set by the level of the character.

Note, in 4e, locks do not change depending on the level of the character.  If the lock was DC 20 at 1st level, it's still DC 20 at 20th level.  In 1e, that lock was DC 18.  Now, it's DC 14.  All locks get easier.  There's nothing being simulated here.  IOW, no matter what, all locks get easier depending on the level of the thief.  Just like it gets easier to sneak past creatures, regardless of the creature, depending on the level of the thief.  All trap DC's similarly fall regardless of the trap, depending on the level of the thief.

That's not even a date, that's a cola right there.


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 5, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Well, I did give my definition of simulation - a model for determining what and how something happens - upthread.



 I don't see how any resolution system could have trouble with that one.



> The point is, EVERY lock is the same.  No matter what, all locks in the world get easier to pick the higher level you are.  What is being simulated here?



 What's being simulated by the thief's 'special' ability table in 1e is that the thief goes from abysmal to competent at picking locks over something like 10 levels or so.

What isn't being modeled /by that table/ is that some locks may be harder or easier than others - that's up to the DM to provide when he designs a dungeon (or other challenge) and places locks as part of it.  Same goes for traps.  A kind DM would give 'low level' locks & traps a substantial bonus to make the poor 1st-level thief look good once or twice in the short time he'd've had to live.


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## pemerton (Aug 5, 2014)

Hussar said:


> I look at a simulation as a model for describing what happens when you do something.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> ...



I completely agree with this. It is just this sort of concern that motivated the classic sim fantasy RPGs: C&C, RM, RQ, etc. They were reactions to the lack of process modelling in D&D.



billd91 said:


> Maybe you're asking the wrong questions of it.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> You seem to be getting hung up on the label simulation and think it has to be at some particular level of granularity. But it doesn't. Any expectations of granularity are entirely imposed by the assumptions of the viewer.



As Hussar replied, it's not a question of granularity. It's not that D&D lacks detail in answering these questions. Rather, it doesn't answer them at all. It doesn't distinguish between a miss due to the attack stumbling, a parry, a dodge, etc. Nor, in its damage rules, does it distinguish different sorts of injuries, exhaustion etc. The combat rules in fact have only two states - alive and dead - but determine the application of those states via an ablation mechanic that does not actually model any physical process in the gameworld. ("Losing hit points" is a game state; it's not a physiological state, nor the model of any such state.)



Andor said:


> Joe hit Ellen with a sword and Ellen now has a diminished capacity to take more damage.





Andor said:


> You could, if you were an evil scientist in a D&D world, explore this rigorously by chaining a bunch of people to posts and having your ninjas blowgun them to death while you record the events.



As Hussar said, "diminished capacity to take more damage" is a description of a game-mechanical state. It does not describe an ingame state, because there is no state of a physiological system which is "a diminished capacity to take more damage". Killing someone with a sword is not like abrading a plank with a plane, or chipping away at a stone block with a chisel.

As for the scientific experiment, Gygax doesn't agree with you. For instance, in his DMG he expressly denies that the gaining of XP is a model of what is happening in the gameworld, or that the action economy for combat is a model of what is happening in the gameworld. He explains that they are game mechanical devices to enhance playability and make for a fun game. If you have PCs or NPCs try and subvert that by setting up "hit point" experiments you won't discvoer truths of the ingame fiction - you'll just spoil the game.



Bluenose said:


> What's being,or perhaps I should say should be being, modelled is results that fit into the range of plausible ones for the game in question.



I think it's more than that. For RQ, RM etc it's not just about plausible results. It's about a plausible process. The objection to hit points isn't just that they're unrealistic (say, in relation to bow shots or falling). It's also that in D&D combat you don't actually know what is going on.

At least, that's how I read and experienced it.



BryonD said:


> I don't recall ever being in these "simulation" debates prior to 4E.



The first one I know of personally - which I'm sure was not the first one - is from 1980: Roger Musson's White Dwarf article "How to Lose Hit Points and Survive". The evidence that they took place earlier is (i) the existence of RQ and C&S, and (ii) Gygax's anti-simulationist remarks in his DMG. He wasn't talking in the abstract; he was taking a stand in debates that were live at the time in the fantasy RPGing scene.

What has changed over the past 10 to 15 years is that people have somehow come to identify D&D as a sim system, whereas throughout the 80s and 90s it was recognised that the sim games were those like RM, RQ etc. I think this is the influence of 3E.


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## Andor (Aug 5, 2014)

Hussar said:


> You claimed that DC by level is anti-sim.  All editions other than 3e had lock DC's set by level.  A lock for a 1st level 1e thief opens about 15% of the time (I'm working from memory here) modified by race, dex and armour worn.  A lock for a 6th level thief opens about 40% of the time.  IOW, all lock DC's are set by the level of the character.
> 
> Note, in 4e, locks do not change depending on the level of the character.  If the lock was DC 20 at 1st level, it's still DC 20 at 20th level.  In 1e, that lock was DC 18.  Now, it's DC 14.  All locks get easier.  There's nothing being simulated here.  IOW, no matter what, all locks get easier depending on the level of the thief.  Just like it gets easier to sneak past creatures, regardless of the creature, depending on the level of the thief.  All trap DC's similarly fall regardless of the trap, depending on the level of the thief.




There is exactly no difference between having a fixed DC with a character level based bonus to the roll and having a fixed bonus with a DC related to the characters level. The DC is a 1e lock never changed, your chance of opening it changed based on your increased skill as defined by the characters level. Exactly the same a a 1st level thief and a 6th level thief in 4e having different odds to open the same DC 20 lockbased on their differing bonuses. 

The only difference is that 4e explicitly expects the DC to rise based on the level of the adventure, in order to maintain the "sweet spot", as described in the DMG on page 61. Which is there explicitly to meet metagame goals rather than to accurately 'sim' anything.



pemerton said:


> As Hussar replied, it's not a question of granularity. It's not that D&D lacks detail in answering these questions. Rather, it doesn't answer them at all. It doesn't distinguish between a miss due to the attack stumbling, a parry, a dodge, etc. Nor, in its damage rules, does it distinguish different sorts of injuries, exhaustion etc. The combat rules in fact have only two states - alive and dead - but determine the application of those states via an ablation mechanic that does not actually model any physical process in the gameworld. ("Losing hit points" is a game state; it's not a physiological state, nor the model of any such state.)
> 
> As Hussar said, "diminished capacity to take more damage" is a description of a game-mechanical state. It does not describe an ingame state, because there is no state of a physiological system which is "a diminished capacity to take more damage". Killing someone with a sword is not like abrading a plank with a plane, or chipping away at a stone block with a chisel.




And that is absolutely true. In real life, and at your table. Although you might well consider real-world blood loss to serve as an ablative damage function.

It is not absolutely true in every game or at every table, I've already described in this thread what it would mean at mine. 

If you insist that D&D is attempting to 'sim' the world as you understand it, then yes it is a miserable failure. A fireball is a grotesque violation of the law of conservation of energy for example. Speak with dead is (at very least) a violation of the laws of entropy. Flight violates conservation of momentum and gravity. A Dragon is a walking-talking-flying-speaking-firebreathing violation of all of the above plus the cube-square law. 

And it's the damge system that makes you question the state of the sim? Really?

D&D is not attempting to model your life, it is attempting to model a reality where elements that we would consider supernatural are common place parts of everyday life. Rather that insisting the system falls down because it fails to emulate what happens to you when you stub your toe, consider instead that it may be successfully emulating a world where people know that they will experince life after death with the same certainty you feel about tomorrows dawn. That they know that there is no wound short of death that cannot be healed with perfect recuperation with the aid of magic. It is a fictional reality and it follows fictional rules. 

Sim, to you, seems to mean an attempt to model reality as we experience it. Which is fine but it's not the only meaning of the word. In fact that is a completely pointless exercise as many of the experiences related in this thread will show. For many reasons not least of which is we simply don't know how some things work well enough to model them in a game and it would be a nightmare to try. 

The sim-as-process joy that I get out of the game comes from not insisting that the rules are some kind of misbegotten tragedy that stand between me and my fun, but instead taking them at face value and seeing where they go. So far they've taken me to some pretty interesting places, and if I don't like where they go, well, I can always change the rules. More often then not the problem lies not at the level of the rules, but with the fiction we are trying to relate them to.


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## pemerton (Aug 5, 2014)

TrippyHippy said:


> I have the Sorcerer game, including the Annointed version, and I see no mechanic whatsoever that actually differentiates it. Indeed, no actual mechanic at all. I am tired of people trying to assert that simple story motivations are in any way new



I think if you describe things at the level of "simple story motivations" you are not going to identify what it is that is being claimed to be new.

For instance, if I think of antecedent mechanics to "kickers", I think of (say) taking Hunted/Enemy disadvantages in Champions/HERO-type games. These have the aspect of player choice of adversity. But they are different too, apart from anything else in being framed as disadvantages, which puts a weight on them in relation to gameplay, and a set of motivations for player and GM, that is different from how a "kicker" works.

And for me, the fact that Jonathan Tweet identifies the kicker in its specific form - a player-authored situation of opening adversity - as "new game tech" counts as a reason to think that he doesn't regard Ars Magica as already incorporating it.



TrippyHippy said:


> It encapsulates my entire viewpoint about The Forge games too - it became near impossible to simply say,  “I don’t enjoy playing Dogs in the Vineyard”, or The Burning Wheel, or whatever, without becoming embroiled in debate with people who were basically saying the reason you don’t like it is ‘you’re the wrong type of player!’, or ‘you’re not playing it right!’ or even more simply ‘you don’t get it!’.



I guess I've not really had that experience.

I mean, I've got no interest in playing Nicotine Girls: the tropes don't particularly grab me, and the whole set-up is rather depressing. (If I was younger and still attending cons, and there was a con session on, I might play it - but that's true of a lot of systems.) But reading Nicotine Girls was, for me, what switched on a light about the structure of end games in an RPG campaign. It helped me bring a long-running Rolemaster campaign to a satisfactory close, and I will be using similar techniques and ideas to manage the conclusion of my 4e campaign. I think reading Nicotine Girls has helped me understand, and is helping me as a GM to manage, the epic destiny aspect of 4e play.

And I can imagine any number of people not wanting to play Burning Wheel - it is mechanically very heavy (its resemblance to RQ and RM in this respect is part of why it appeals to me), for instance. But I think it is a mistake, from both a GMing and RPG design point of view, not to notice some of the techniques that it uses. For instance, I've seen innumerable complaints from people GMing 4e that players in a skill challenge won't attempt skill checks in which they don't have good bonuses. And I think many of those GMs could benefit from adopting some of the techniques that Luke Crane spells out in his BW books - both ways of framing conflict so that players will engage even if it's not mechanically advantageous to them; and ways of narrating failure, so that the upshot is not shutting down those players' engagement with the game.

Luke Crane probably wasn't the first GM to come up with such devices - in my own case, after all, I know that I discovered "no myth" scene-framing as a technique long before I ever read anyone discussing it, although I didn't fully appreciate its relationship to the admonitions to prepare everything that I had read in the GMing books that I grew up on. But Luke Crane's rulebooks give a better statement of these techniques than any other RPG books that I'm personally familiar with.

And for me, that's what matters: the payoff for my RPGing. I don't care whether or not Paul Czege thinks my 4e game is shallow; what I care about is that a single forum post of his taught me more about using NPCs in encounters than any thing else I've ever read on that topic. And whether or not he was the first person to use such techniques, or even to articulate them, it was different enough from the standard advice that I'm happy to credit him with some degree of "innovation" or "revolution".



TrippyHippy said:


> With regards to 4E and ‘arrogant design’, my point with all these games was that they created a theory based buffer for themselves that actually inhibited critical analysis. In the case of 4E, the whole GNS argument was that the game was made more ‘coherent’ by establishing a specific outlook for playing it. Without delving into edition warring, the problem I have is that by making the game rigidly stick to this agenda, it actually just served to disenfranchise players.



I don't really get this thing of "disenfranchising players". For me, AD&D became unplayable as a serious RPG because of what I increasingly experienced as the inadequacies of its combat and magic rules: hit points, spell memorisation, etc. Was I "disenfranchised" by AD&D? The question doesn't really make sense to me. The game wasn't enjoyable for the sort of seriousness of play that I wanted, so I played a different game (Rolemaster). When WotC started publishing a version of D&D that I could play in a serious way, I stopped GMing RM and switched to 4e. I don't think of that as "re-enfranchisement". It's just me following my preferences: I wanted something from a fantasy RPG that 4e was able to deliver.

As for critical analysis of 4e - I think it is hard to argue that the game has been under-analysed, or not subjected to scrutiny.


----------



## pemerton (Aug 5, 2014)

Andor said:


> And that is absolutely true. In real life, and at your table.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> ...



This is an approach to simulationist gaming that I have never encountered except in the context of this forum.  [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] is another proponent of it (I believe - of course I am happy to be corrected if I'm wrong).

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". (Those RPGs whose rules are _expressly_ meta-rules for regulating participant narrative authority - Prime Time Adventures is one example - are probably exceptions.) Interrupt actions literally correspond to modest time travel talents. Etc.

But this is not how D&D was designed. The features of D&D that  [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] 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 [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] already mentioned upthread, I think).

That's not a reason why you can't treat them differently: no one is saying that you have to follow the dictates of Gygax. But the classic simulationist games - Rolemaster, Runequest, Traveller, Chivalry & Sorcery, etc - were written by RPGers who took Gygax at his word. They accepted that, in the fiction of a fantasy RPG, we are to imagine causal processes to be unfolding in much the same way as they do in real life, unless magic is present. So, for instance, we are to assume that in-game humans learn much like real humans do; and then these games introduce PC build rules that require training or experience as a basis for acquiring and improving skills. We assume that swordplay and injury works much as it does in real life: so we introduce rules in which death and injury don't follow a logic of ablation, but rather follow a logic of attacking, parrying, and taking injuries that debilitate in various specific ways.



BryonD said:


> 4E embraces and takes joy in anti-sim.
> I (me, and me alone) hate it when a character gets beat up by ogres and then just bounces back with no recovery time or outside source of healing.





BryonD said:


> for example, a fighter could go through a day of adventure with nothing happening that crosses into the unfun elements as perceived by Bryon.  (Some of these things probably would happen, but it certainly "could" be avoided for any given day).  But if he ends up thrashed by Ogres and then that evening insto-recovers his HP then that is a big moment of intentionally designed and celebrated "asim".





Tony Vargas said:


> 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.



In edition to Tony's point, there is the further issue - what does it mean to say "the fighter was thrashed by ogres"? Given that nothing in the game rules tells us the details of any injury suffered by the fighter, if we narrate ourselves into a corner and then complain about the outcome, to some extent we need to question our narrative practices. (The best practical advice I know of on this is found in Robin Laws HeroWars rulebooks.)

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.



Hussar said:


> 4e suggests that DC's be linked to level, although, they go a step further and suggest that the scenario reflect the level of the character.  It's not that locks change DC depending on the level of the character but rather a higher level character will typically only find more difficult locks (or whatever it is you are trying to do).





BryonD said:


> I hate it when DCs can consistently and reliable be taken from a single page that covers almost everything.





BryonD said:


> Saying that 14 INT is not meaningful is a completely different matter to saying that a DC14 lock turns out to be DC 21 because a different character tried to open it.



If you are using the 4e DC chart in the way that Hussar described, then no DC14 lock turns out to be DC 21 because a different character tried to open it. Level-appropriate DCs are pegged to the fiction.

The game does take for granted that you won't have PCs of wildly varying levels adventuring together - if you do, then you can't really peg level-appropriate DCs to the fiction, because you can't pitch the fiction at a level of difficulty that is appropriate for both characters. The 4e rules deal with this issue by clearly advising that the game won't work very well if the PCs are of wildly varying levels - and it gives advice on the awarding of XP intended to prevent such a state of affairs accidentally coming up in game.

Of course, you don't have to always use the DC-by-level chart the way that Hussar describes. For instance, you might take the view that some particular task - say, successfully praying to a god for a certain sort of divine intervention - is just as hard for a high level PC as a low level PC. So you say that, for all characters, the DC is a level-appropriate Hard DC. In that case, a prayer that is DC 18 for one character might be DC 25 for another. But that is no different, as a mechanical feature, from the fact that being hit for 10 hp is fatal for some PCs but a mere scratch for others: as with the connection between the mechanical feature of hit points, and its meaning in the fiction, so the connection between the mechanical feature of the DC, and its meaning within the fiction, is relative to some other property of the character concerned (total hp, in one case; character level, in the other case).

Using the 4e DC chart in the way that Hussar describes need not be anti-sim at all: you peg certain fictional obstacles to certain DCs, and then you frame PCs of the appropriate level into those challenges. The 4e DMG actually takes just this approach to doors, portcullises and falling damage: it gives a chart of DCs by door type, and a rule for damage per distance fallen, and then advises for what level PCs it is appropriate to frame challenges containing certain sorts of door or certain heights of drop-off.

Using the 4e DC chart in a way in which DCs are character relative, though, _is_ anti-sim, in just the same way that hit points are. (For those who treat hp as sim, then of course the character-relativity of DCs could be similarly handled: there is some magical feature of the gameworld which means that higher level PCs encounter more heavenly "static" when they try to pray to the gods - perhaps their egos get in the way.)



BryonD said:


> I hate it when one brilliant move does not solve a problem then and there because the skill challange says 3 more successes are needed.



As I posted upthread, this is no different from the fact that no matter how brilliant a fighter's strike, it can't kill an ogre (or hill giant, or whatever) dead in a single blow. You noted the analogy but then said nothing further about it.

In D&D combat narration, as expounded by Gygax, the "solution" to the problem in the combat case is that there is a _reason_, in the fiction, why the single blow can't kill the ogre. The fighter, despite (say) rolling a natural 20 to hit and maximum damage, nevertheless fails to strike the ogre in a vital spot. (Which the fighter could, of course, do with a minimally successful to hit roll and a 1 on the damage die, if the ogre has already been reduced to 1 hp.) In other words, failures and external complications are narrated in to explain why the ogre is not dead.

Narration of a skill challenge is no different. The player's conception of the move may have been brilliant, just as his/her conception of the strike against the ogre. But if the dice plus successes remaining dictate that the challenge has not been overcome, then the GM's job is to narrate in some sort of failure of external complication that accounts for that.

This is standard fortune-in-the-middle stuff. It's not simulationist, at least in process/purist-for-system sense. But it has been a part of D&D's combat system ever since the beginning. Which I think is  [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s point: how can a game which is non-sim in such an obvious way (no matter how good a fighter's strike, s/he can't kill the ogre dead, simply because the ogre is in the metagame state of having full hit points) be put forward as a serious sim vehicle?


----------



## TrippyHippy (Aug 5, 2014)

pemerton said:


> I think if you describe things at the level of "simple story motivations" you are not going to identify what it is that is being claimed to be new.
> 
> For instance, if I think of antecedent mechanics to "kickers", I think of (say) taking Hunted/Enemy disadvantages in Champions/HERO-type games. These have the aspect of player choice of adversity. But they are different too, apart from anything else in being framed as disadvantages, which puts a weight on them in relation to gameplay, and a set of motivations for player and GM, that is different from how a "kicker" works.
> 
> And for me, the fact that Jonathan Tweet identifies the kicker in its specific form - a player-authorMagica as already incorporating it.



Well maybe asking Tweet’s erstwhile partner, Mark Rein-Hagen would elicit a different response? His follow up game - Vampire: The Maquerade (which Ron Edwards expressed seething hatred of in written articles) - actually featured an idea of playing structured, player driven Preludes for characters, with details created to establish exactly how, why and what happened for the PC to become a Vampire. Sounds pretty much like “a player-authored situation of opening adversity” to me. But while this example was explicitly detailed (more so than Sorcerer’s Kickers) the notion of players providing a reason to adventure is as old as the hobby itself.



> Luke Crane probably wasn’t the first GM to come up with such devices - in my own case, after all, I know that I discovered “no myth" scene-framing as a technique long before I ever read anyone discussing it, although I didn't fully appreciate its relationship to the admonitions to prepare everything that I had read in the GMing books that I grew up on. But Luke Crane’s rulebooks give a better statement of these techniques than any other RPG books that I’m personally familiar with.



Read more RPG books then? 

The problem with most of Luke Crane games - the latest one I played was FreeMarket - is not that the games are complex, but that the needlessly make the game complex as if it’s a substitute for depth or style. The point about these games being ‘guarded against criticism through game theory’ is that he would never accept this criticism as being in any way valid, and simply writes games to please himself, and a cadre of ‘believers’ rather than a critical audience. 



> And for me, that’s what matters: the payoff for my RPGing



Even if it’s just a case of you not having located these ideas from other sources previously? The issue here is your own subjective perception based on your open experiences, and discounting those of others. That’s the problem with a lot of these debates in a nutshell. 



> I don’t really get this thing of “disenfranchising players".



You’re missing the point here too. D&D4th was designed to suit a narrow agenda. The fans that had grown up with the game catering for different outlooks and play styles were disenfranchised. The criticism and scrutiny you cite, however, was overlooked by those that felt the game had reached is goals by sticking to this narrow agenda and focussing heavily on realising it. This is largely what framed the ‘edition war'.


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## pemerton (Aug 5, 2014)

TrippyHippy said:


> The problem with most of Luke Crane games - the latest one I played was FreeMarket - is not that the games are complex, but that the needlessly make the game complex as if it’s a substitute for depth or style. The point about these games being ‘guarded against criticism through game theory’ is that he would never accept this criticism as being in any way valid, and simply writes games to please himself, and a cadre of ‘believers’ rather than a critical audience.



I don't understand what is objectionable about writing games to please himself and those others who like the games. If people want to buy his games, what's the problem. (And it's not as if Ken Hite is a non-critical "believer" whom Luke Crane duped into praising BW.)


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## TrippyHippy (Aug 5, 2014)

pemerton said:


> I don't understand what is objectionable about writing games to please himself and those others who like the games.



Because it’s exempting his game from criticism - isn’t critical analysis of game design what The Forge was supposed to be about?


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## pemerton (Aug 5, 2014)

TrippyHippy said:


> Because it’s exempting his game from criticism - isn’t critical analysis of game design what The Forge was supposed to be about?



I don't understand how desinging a game to please oneself is exempting the game from criticism. I mean you're, right now, criticising the game - in what way is it "exempted"?

If by "designing to please himself" you mean no thought or effort has gone into the design, then I flat-out disagree. I think the evience of thought and effort is very plain in the BW rulebooks.


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## Hussar (Aug 5, 2014)

Trippy Hippy said:
			
		

> You’re missing the point here too. D&D4th was designed to suit a narrow agenda. The fans that had grown up with the game catering for different outlooks and play styles were disenfranchised. The criticism and scrutiny you cite, however, was overlooked by those that felt the game had reached is goals by sticking to this narrow agenda and focussing heavily on realising it. This is largely what framed the ‘edition war'.
> 
> Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...-Simulationist-style-Game/page9#ixzz39WjEkEuA




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.  How the heck is that a "design to suit a narrow agenda"?  4e's agenda was no more narrow than any other edition.  Whether it's the HEROization of D&D in 3e or Gygaxian naturalism in 1e.  If you couldn't fiddle with the rules to suit your play style, that's on you.

------

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?  

This idea that you can reify the mechanics in the game world is such a bizarre notion.  These are abstractions.  As such, you can't actually make them real, any more than you can make C real.  C is an abstraction so that we can understand how fast light goes in a vacuum.  But, you cannot point to C anywhere in the universe.  It doesn't have any real existence.  HP have no real existence.  You cannot measure them any more than you can measure a plus sign.


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 5, 2014)

pemerton said:


> 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.


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 5, 2014)

Hussar said:


> 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.
> 
> ...



 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.


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 5, 2014)

pemerton said:


> 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.


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 5, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> 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.


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## Hussar (Aug 6, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> 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.


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 6, 2014)

Hussar said:


> 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.


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## pemerton (Aug 6, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> 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.


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## Hussar (Aug 6, 2014)

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?


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 6, 2014)

Hussar said:


> 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.)


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 6, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> 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.


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 6, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> 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.



Right, and since there were plenty of people who _did _have fun running it that way, because the system was entirely capable of doing it well, those people are plenty justified in wanting the new edition to be equally capable of that.

That's actually the major selling point of this edition.


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## Hussar (Aug 6, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> Right, and since there were plenty of people who _did _have fun running it that way, because the system was entirely capable of doing it well, those people are plenty justified in wanting the new edition to be equally capable of that.
> 
> That's actually the major selling point of this edition.




But, that's my point.  No, the systems were not capable of doing it well.  There are many, many other systems out there that do this well and D&D is not one of them.  Generally, many of those systems got their genesis BECAUSE D&D is not one of them.  The new edition is no more capable of modeling events than any other edition.  

The only difference is, 4e made no secret of the fact.  It was in your face that this was a game.  3e was generally silent on the issue, but, that didn't make it well suited for simulating anything.  

The reason the systems were radically changed back in the day is because the system WASN'T capable of doing simulation.  You had to add that in and then squint really hard to ignore the stuff that didn't really make any sense.  But out of the box?  Not even a little.


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 6, 2014)

Hussar said:


> The reason the systems were radically changed back in the day is because the system WASN'T capable of doing simulation.  You had to add that in and then squint really hard to ignore the stuff that didn't really make any sense.  But out of the box?  Not even a little.



We didn't radically change anything. It was just that, out of the box, with a literal reading of everything. If you sit down and read the rules, then that was one of the common interpretations. It just _was_ a process sim, unless you went into it with some pre-conceived notion that it wasn't.

It's also possible that you read it some other way.


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 6, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> Right, and since there were plenty of people who _did _have fun running it that way, because the system was entirely capable of doing it well, those people are plenty justified in wanting the new edition to be equally capable of that.



 'Entirely capable of doing it well' /when you simply ignored any bits you felt weren't doing it well/, yes.  So, sure, you could feel entitled to the same thing - and get the same thing rather easily, really.  But, no, you never got it out the box with a literal reading, you (or, in your specific experience, your first DMs), modified it.  Everyone did, really.  

And...



> That's actually the major selling point of this edition.



 Yes, 5e is trying to get back to that, to encourage the DIY attitude among DMs who adopt 5e.  

Whether it's a /selling/ point depends on how much people are willing to pay for permission to change the rules they buy...  ;P


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## pemerton (Aug 6, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> It was just that, out of the box, with a literal reading of everything. If you sit down and read the rules, then that was one of the common interpretations.





Saelorn said:


> since there were plenty of people who _did _have fun running it that way, because the system was entirely capable of doing it well, those people are plenty justified in wanting the new edition to be equally capable of that.



4e is equally capable of being run that way. It's just that the world that it gives you will be slightly different from the 3E world (eg the spoken word is more powerful, generally, in 4e than in 3E) or the AD&D world (in which people are less stop-motion in their movements than they are in the sim 3E and 4e worlds).


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## Haffrung (Aug 6, 2014)

Hussar said:


> In 2001, if you had claimed that you self identified as a sim player and your go to game for that style was D&D, everyone would look at you like you had two heads.




First off, few gamers today, and even fewer back in 2001, have any idea what 'sim' or any other GNS term means. They're theoretical modelling tools talked about by handful of people on the internet. And the people who came up with the GNS theory have always had trouble defining 'simulation', and aren't exactly fans of D&D either. Which isn't surprising, as D&D, by the standards of the theorists, is an 'incoherent' game. The fact it's also the most popular game in the hobby only rubs salt in the wound.



Hussar said:


> When did D&D become the poster child for sim play?




It's not. D&D is by far the most popular RPG in the world. In its 40 year history it has been played by millions of people in all kinds of ways.



Hussar said:


> So, I ask you, why D&D?  If you like sim style play where the mechanics are making a statement about the game world, then why on Earth would you choose to play D&D?




Because I've always run D&D that way and never had a problem with it.

D&D as a 'gamist' system? Then why does it have five different kinds of coins, and dozens of different kinds and sizes of gems, rather than use an abstract wealth system? Why does the equipment guide include things like carts, chickens, and backpacks, along with the weight (down to the fraction of a pound) of each item? Have you read the AD&D DMG? It includes costs per day for masons, sages, architects, and other labourers. The exact dimensions, costs, and maneuverability of all kinds of sea-going vessels. The properties of dozens of real-world herbs. Elaborate tables showing the likelihood of encountering different creatures in all terrains and climates imaginable. Detailed lists of rare spell components. Lists of historical titles from medieval Europe and the Near East. And on and on.

What do you think the purpose is for all this content except to held the DM create verisimilitude that the campaign world is a living, breathing world, deeply rooted in medieval history, that exists independently of the game. 

When I was 12 years old I didn't know anything about 'sim' or GNS (which was more than 20 years away). But me and my buddies instinctively interacted with the game in the terms of the game world. We did not use metagame knowledge to gain advantage. We wanted to think only in terms of what the characters could see and do in the game world. And we wanted the mechanics of the game to support the game world, not the metagame of the game system. So we think of a character in the game world and model him on his role in the world, not his role in the party. A worshipper of Odin might use a spear, even if that's an inferior weapon to a sword. A druid has responsibility to nature and the wilderness that may come into conflict with the goals of the rest of the party. If the PCs don't know about the powers of a particular monster, then neither do the players, and acting on that knowledge is a form of cheating. For a time, we even had only the GM track PC hit points, as we found it 'unrealistic' that the PCs would have a precise awareness of how injured they were, and thinking in terms of those numbers dispelled our immersion in the game world. 

And D&D works perfectly well in this model I've described. Why switch to another game when we're happy with the one we've played for over 30 years?


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## Hussar (Aug 6, 2014)

My problem is that you are conflating immersion with simulation.  There's nothing inherently immersive about simulation.  Details are just that, details.  Note, while you have the exact dimensions of an ocean going vessel, your sword weights such and such coins.  Encumbrance is measured in coin, where "coin" is an abstract measurement and not actually the literal weight of a coin.  Yet, apparently, that's easy to ignore.

Just because something is highly detailed doesn't make it simulation.  This is getting back to the idea of granularity really.  Being granular doesn't make something a model either.  It makes something a better model, sure, but, you can model things without that level of detail and it's still a model.  Knowing the GP wage of a mason has nothing to do with simulation.  How fast can that mason work?  What checks do you make in AD&D to determine how well that mason builds something?

Oh, yeah, that's right, AD&D doesn't have a skill system, so, we pretty much have to free form any work that that mason actually does.  The system sure as heck isn't telling us anything.

Good grief, you really think that D&D doesn't have an abstract wealth system?  Really?  An economic system completely divorced from any market factors?  It takes 5000 gp worth of diamond dust to cast Raise Dead.  How much is that?  What volume?  How much does it weigh?  And, if I go to somewhere where diamonds are really rare and more valuable, does that change how many Raise Dead's I can cast?

Like Tony Vargas says, D&D is a good simulation only if you are willing to ignore the vast swaths of the game that are purely gamist.  Which brings me back to my original question.  If you really value simulation and enjoy that kind of play, why use a system that is so incredibly bad at it?  Is it simply inertia?  You've been using the system so long you just don't even see the changes you've made any more?


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## Haffrung (Aug 6, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Like Tony Vargas says, D&D is a good simulation only if you are willing to ignore the vast swaths of the game that are purely gamist.  Which brings me back to my original question.  If you really value simulation and enjoy that kind of play, why use a system that is so incredibly bad at it?  Is it simply inertia?  You've been using the system so long you just don't even see the changes you've made any more?




D&D is sim. And gamist. And narrative. Because D&D, more than any other RPG, is about what people do at the table with it rather than the system in isolation.

Why stick with it? Because to most people who play D&D, there effectively are no other RPGs. They don't care if some other game theoretically does something better than D&D. If they have fun playing D&D, why switch to another game? 

In short, system matters far less than RPG forum theorists want to believe.


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 6, 2014)

Haffrung said:


> D&D is sim. And gamist. And narrative. Because D&D, more than any other RPG, is about what people do at the table with it rather than the system in isolation.
> 
> Why stick with it? Because to most people who play D&D, there effectively are no other RPGs.



 Really, GNS is about how people play the game. No game is G, N, or S, it's the people who play it that emphasize one or another (or don't).  

D&D was the first RPG, and the only RPG with name recognition outside the hobby, making it the natural place for new players to start.  That means gamers naturally adapt it to whatever mode of play they gravitate to.  Classic versions of D&D were rambling, inconsistent (as the GNS theorists said, 'incoherent') systems, but, that actually made it comparatively 'easy' to focus on parts of the game that worked for you, ignore or change other parts, and play it the way you liked.  'Easy' in the sense that it was harder to try to play the game 'RAW' than to mess around with 'fixing' it.

Between being the point of entry, and inviting tinkering, Classic D&D was as close as it comes to being all games to all gamers.  So, /of course/ people inclined to what would later be labeled (perhaps incoherently) as 'sim' used D&D that way and formed the opinion that it "was a sim game."


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## Imaro (Aug 6, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Which brings me back to my original question. If you really value simulation and enjoy that kind of play, why use a system that is so incredibly bad at it? Is it simply inertia? You've been using the system so long you just don't even see the changes you've made any more?




Eh... Here's a pretty good summary of what I think most people would say...



Haffrung said:


> D&D, by the standards of the theorists, is an 'incoherent' game...
> 
> D&D is by far the most popular RPG in the world. In its 40 year history it has been played by millions of people in all kinds of ways...
> 
> ...





I also think you're stuck in absolutes.  I think very few gamers want a pure simulationist experience... or a pure gamist experience or even a pure narrativist experience.  I think that the majority of people actually want some of each (to taste of course) in their roleplaying and thus D&D not only being the first, and the most popular but also having an "ïncoherent" design was able to scratch the itch of those who wanted a nice helping of simulationist play without being bogged down or beholden to it (Again especially when tweaked to taste) especially if it was only minor adjustments one had to make to reach the level of simulationist play you wanted in the game.
 [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]: I am curious do you feel the same way about those who were fans of 4e's nod to narrativist play?  I mean there's FATE, MHR, Heroquest along with a slew of other games more suited to narrativist play much better then 4e was... so why play 4e?  Honestly my theory is it's very similar to the reasons I stated above (People can derive fun in multiple ways and thus an "ïncoherent" game can often suit them better than a game that leans too heavily in one area... (even if they do favor one type of fun a little more than the others) but I'd be curious to hear your thoughts...


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## Jester David (Aug 6, 2014)

This is a Granny Smith vs Golden Delicious argument.


When you compare two things pulled from a very narrow selection, you will always be able to find the differences. No matter how similar things are, you can always find differences. Granny Smith apples are more green while Golden Delicious are yellow. Smith is more bitter while Golen are softer. D&D is more abstract and GURPS is more sim. 
But as soon as you widen the selection, the similarities outweigh the differences. Comparing Granny Smith and Golden Delicious to a pear reveals the former have the same size, shape, rough texture, thickness of skin, and a more similar taste. The pear has a vastly different shape, is much softer, and has a radically different taste. When you compare D&D and GURPS to something remotely comparable, like Descent or Battletech, both seem like models of simulation and verisimilitude.
But pears and apples are still pretty close. We still haven't quite hit the cliche that is apples and oranges. Which would be games as different as chess or Magic the Gathering. 


D&D is has elements of sim. Because, like all RPGs, it's tied to a narrative that evokes the real world. The mechanics have to remotely match the narrative, and mechanics that are impossible to narrate become problematic. 
Mearls had a good example of this in one of his Legends & Lore articles. When fighting a big monster (say a dragon) the players might opt to duck behind a pillar for cover. They don't need to know that cover exists as a mechanic or know how it works. But they're doing the action anyway because it makes sense: keep a big hunk of stone between you and the giant monster with a breath weapon. That's inherently simulationist. 
The player could turn around and push over the ruined pillar, potentially bringing the roof down on the dragon. Unlike cover, there are no rules for "topping a pillar" or "roof falling on dragon" but the action can still work and have positive consequences because the game reflects the narrative. 

You can't choose to hide behind a pillar in MtG, or make creative use out of the environment in Battletech. You're bound by the rules. While you can roleplay, talk in character, add a connective narrative between sessions, and the like the games are still as limited by the rules as video games. 


There are less sim RPGs on the market, but these tend to be much, much less crunchy than D&D. Things like the Marvel Heroes game and, to a lesser extent, Fat, where you might not necessarily narrate individual rounds of combat and instead describe scenes. Instead of hiding behind a pillar to gain cover you instead gain cover and then describe how you gained it.

(The big exception to this being hitpoints and armour class. Which are much closer to the effect then cause abstractness of story manipulation games. You survive the hit because you had lots of hit points and the DM narrates how that worked. But those are really the exception.)


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## evileeyore (Aug 6, 2014)

Haffrung said:


> Why stick with it? Because to most people who play D&D, there effectively are no other RPGs.



My anecdotal evidence belies your statement.


In my last group D&D was simply the game "no one hated so much we wouldn't play it".

4 of us 'preferred' _GURPS_*. 1 was a Rolemaster fanatic.  One was an "and girlfriend" who played whatever was on the table (good roleplayer, lousy with rules).

*Out of that 4 one was a CoC fanatic, one a CP2020 fanatic, one liked both _GURPS_ and AD&D equally, and I'm the _GURPS_ fanatic.

We tended to play D&D because it does mindless fantasy better (and had far more published modules and campaigns than other systems).  But we did run other games (notably Shadowrun and _GURPS_).


My previous group played a mix of total a homebrew system (used for sci-fi military and dark fantasy games) and Masterbook games (Shatterzone and a home campaign based on _Cast A Deadly Spell_).


The previous group played Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu, Warhammer Fantasy, and V:tM.


The previous group played _GURPS_ (my high school group, I was the ST and had just discovered _GURPS_).


The previous group played AD&D, Star Frontiers, Gamma World, Call of Cthulhu, and D&D BECMI (because I was the DM and those were what I owned).


The previous group was my first (early '80's) and we played D&D BECMI, Rolemaster, Star Frontiers, Gamma World, Top Secret, Boot Hill, Paranoia, Call of Cthulhu, and some homebrew stuff (which was mostly us doodling about with the way rules worked).





In all but the last group (or first if you want to count it that way) the other players were involved in other gaming groups where D&D was but one system of many that they enjoyed.  Indeed, I've only met a few people in my 30ish years of gaming who've only ever played one game system.  And only two people who were so "invested" in playing only one system that they'd actually turn down playing another system.


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 6, 2014)

evileeyore said:


> My anecdotal evidence belies your statement.
> 
> 
> In my last group D&D was simply the game "no one hated so much we wouldn't play it".



 That's actually an example of his statement, not a contradiction of it.  If you have a group of gamers, and the one game they can agree on playing - even if all of them would much rather play something else - is D&D, /it's effectively the only game/.


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## evileeyore (Aug 7, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> That's actually an example of his statement, not a contradiction of it.  If you have a group of gamers, and the one game they can agree on playing - even if all of them would much rather play something else - is D&D, /it's effectively the only game/.



Somehow I failed to read one word, "effectively", when I read his post.

However my last group was a bit of an outlier to my other experiences where we played a fairly large variety of games.


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## Hussar (Aug 7, 2014)

Haffrung said:


> D&D is sim. And gamist. And narrative. Because D&D, more than any other RPG, is about what people do at the table with it rather than the system in isolation.
> 
> Why stick with it? Because to most people who play D&D, there effectively are no other RPGs. They don't care if some other game theoretically does something better than D&D. If they have fun playing D&D, why switch to another game?
> 
> In short, system matters far less than RPG forum theorists want to believe.




That I probably agree with.  It's not that the game does X well or badly, it's that people are simply unwilling for many reasons to try anything else.


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## Hussar (Aug 7, 2014)

Imaro said:


> Eh... Here's a pretty good summary of what I think most people would say...
> 
> 
> 
> ...




I think where I take issue here though, is that making D&D work as a simulation takes far, far more than "minor adjustments".  The idea of HP being real, for example, isn't a minor adjustment, it's a complete change to the intentions of the game.  Heh, to bring up a personal bugaboo, ruling that looking at a medusa turns you to stone requires actually specifically changing what the rules say.  

It's not that you are making minor changes here.  The changes are actually pretty wide reaching and to reach any sort of modelling, you pretty much have to change every single rule.



> [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]: I am curious do you feel the same way about those who were fans of 4e's nod to narrativist play?  I mean there's FATE, MHR, Heroquest along with a slew of other games more suited to narrativist play much better then 4e was... so why play 4e?  Honestly my theory is it's very similar to the reasons I stated above (People can derive fun in multiple ways and thus an "ïncoherent" game can often suit them better than a game that leans too heavily in one area... (even if they do favor one type of fun a little more than the others) but I'd be curious to hear your thoughts...



[/quote]

Thing is, there's a difference here.  No one claims that 4e isn't narrativist right out of the box.  You can't.  It's right there in the rules.  Those things that you claim are "anti-sim" are narrativist.  You admit that 4e borrows narrativist elements do you not?  The concept behind Skill Challenges is pulled straight out of narrativist games.  Warlord healing, Come and Get It, and various other player driven narrative mechanics are narrativist based concepts.

In D&D, there aren't simulation mechanics to be had.  They have to be added in, because when you use D&D mechanics, you rarely, if ever, model anything that is happening in the game world.  All you are doing is resolving an action in a very gamist fashion.  

Again, using D&D mechanics, in any edition, show me why D&D combat isn't the same as Final Fantasy combat where your character shakes slightly then an enemy has a -X HP number show up above his head.  Thing is, you can't.  Adding in the narrative of the combat is something you have to do, it's not part of the mechanics.  The mechanics only tell you when something is alive or dead.  It doesn't tell you anything in between.  It could be a swashbuckling fight a la the duel in The Princess Bride, or it could be Final Fantasy 2.  Mechanically, there is zero difference.

But to get that swashbuckling fight, you have to add in the narrative.  3e and 4e added in a little by using the battle map and making movement and position more important, but, that's very, very minor and not what most people point to when they talk about how D&D simulates things.  

So, that's the difference for me.  4e, while it might not be the best narrative game on the market, does have, right out of the box, a number of narrativist elements.  D&D, though, really doesn't have simulationist elements and never did.


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## Hussar (Aug 7, 2014)

Jester Canuck said:


> /snip
> 
> 
> 
> ...




I find it interesting that you have to actually pick two non-roleplaying games to find examples of not being able to tie the narrative to the mechanics.  I mean, Battletech is pure simulationist as a board game.  You are looking at a tabletop war game.  That's about as rooted in sim play as it gets.  It might have some wonky bits, but, it is a simulation.

Choosing to hide behind a pillar can be done in a gamist RPG or a Narrativist one as well though.  In a Gamist game, Cover gives X bonus.  What that cover is, doesn't really matter, so long as you can gain cover.  In a Nar game, you could claim cover and then add in the pillar (the James Bond RPG allowed you to spend Bond points on exactly this), or you could use the pillar and gain cover as needed.  

None of that is particularly simulationist.  Sim play is not "How do we make a coherent story".  Sim play isn't concerned overly with story elements.  Sim play is a means to model HOW something happens in play.  If your only concern is hiding behind something and gaining cover, all three styles can do that quite easily.  Heck, even Battletech has cover rules.  MtG, true, doesn't since it's far too abstract to be able to deal with that.

But, in what way is MtG not a simulation of two very powerful wizards duking it out?  Abstract, sure, but, I've been told that that's perfectly acceptable as a simulation, we shouldn't get bogged down in granularity.  Two powerful Walkers are fighting it out using their minions that they summon.  The minions are limited by their natures (so consistency is maintained) and the reality of the fight is consistent for all participants - no one can add or subtract anything.  How is this different from a D&D fight between two powerful wizards?


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 7, 2014)

Hussar said:


> I think where I take issue here though, is that making D&D work as a simulation takes far, far more than "minor adjustments".  The idea of HP being real, for example, isn't a minor adjustment, it's a complete change to the intentions of the game.



Using HP as an objective measurement of physical toughness _isn't_ a minor adjustment, though. It isn't an _adjustment_ of any sort. It's just a literal reading of the rules. It doesn't accurately reflect the description of Hit Points that they give in the book, sure, but the rules of the game never adequately supported that description anyway. The rules of the game said that you lost Hit Points when someone swung a sword that overcame your armor, or when you fell off a cliff, but not when you were tired or scared or Enfeebled or cursed or any of the other things that _should_ have caused your Hit Points to go down if they were trying to stick with their description.

Using objective Hit Points is an honest attempt to _make sense_ of things, and it _works_.


Hussar said:


> In D&D, there aren't simulation mechanics to be had.  They have to be added in, because when you use D&D mechanics, you rarely, if ever, model anything that is happening in the game world.  All you are doing is resolving an action in a very gamist fashion.



Let's look at crafting in 3E, because those are very simple rules that probably mirror what other DMs ruled in prior editions when there were no rules for that sort of thing. At its most basic, you buy some materials and spend some time building a thing, and then make a check to see whether or not it was successful.

Would you say that's a simulation of any sort? Because I would. It's a very simple one, sure, but it's really all that you need. Anyone, no matter who they are, has to spend time and money in order to build a thing, unless there's some good in-game reason for why they don't need to - special feats or class features which allow them to spend less money for parts, or craft faster due to superior skill, or access to a ready supply of existing parts. The rules of the game reflect _only_ the truth that exists _within_ the game world.


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## Hussar (Aug 7, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> Using HP as an objective measurement of physical toughness _isn't_ a minor adjustment, though. It isn't an _adjustment_ of any sort. It's just a literal reading of the rules. It doesn't accurately reflect the description of Hit Points that they give in the book, sure, but the rules of the game never adequately supported that description anyway. The rules of the game said that you lost Hit Points when someone swung a sword that overcame your armor, or when you fell off a cliff, but not when you were tired or scared or Enfeebled or cursed or any of the other things that _should_ have caused your Hit Points to go down if they were trying to stick with their description.
> 
> Using objective Hit Points is an honest attempt to _make sense_ of things, and it _works_.





I think the operative word here would be, "to you".  It makes sense to you.  Objective HP to me are completely meaningless.  A 100HP elephant and a 100 HP halfling barbarian mean that HP have no objective meaning whatsoever.  Some things have lots of HP because they are really big, like an elephant or a dinosaur.  Some things have lots of HP because they are really fast and nimble, like a halfling barbarian or a kobold fighter.  But, HP have zero objective meaning.  They are always subjective.  The HP you have are based on a number of factors, most of which are "What would make this a more fun game?"

The idea that HP are objective is pretty easily disproven.  And note, there are a number of things that make your HP go down without actually physically injuring you.  Spells like Phantasmal Killer certainly.  


> Let's look at crafting in 3E, because those are very simple rules that probably mirror what other DMs ruled in prior editions when there were no rules for that sort of thing. At its most basic, you buy some materials and spend some time building a thing, and then make a check to see whether or not it was successful.
> 
> Would you say that's a simulation of any sort? Because I would. It's a very simple one, sure, but it's really all that you need. Anyone, no matter who they are, has to spend time and money in order to build a thing, unless there's some good in-game reason for why they don't need to - special feats or class features which allow them to spend less money for parts, or craft faster due to superior skill, or access to a ready supply of existing parts. The rules of the game reflect _only_ the truth that exists _within_ the game world.




But, that's not actually how crafting works.  When you craft something, so long as you can beat the DC, you cannot fail to craft it.  The only question is how long does it take you.  You cannot actually fail to craft something.  And, again, there is nothing being modelled here.  You start with tools and sticks, spend your time and gold, and you get your arrows or armour or whatever.  It's no more simulation than what you would do in Everquest.  It's maybe, kinda, sorta simulating something, but, not really.  As I go up levels, I can craft more complicated things, or I can craft simpler things faster, but, that's about it for the craft skill.  

Never minding, of course, that in gaining those levels, I didn't have to  craft anything.  I can now make very excellent glassware because I killed lots of goblins.

Of course, there's always Craft's cousin, the Profession skill, which is about as far from simulation as you can get.  Spend your time, make your check, make that much GP.  

And, of course, you are also limiting yourself to a single edition Saelorn.  D&D doesn't begin and end with 3rd edition.  Non-Weapon Proficiencies in 2e were even less simulation.  And 1e didn't have them at all.

You might be able to make an argument for the craft skill.  I can see that.  But, that's a pretty corner case element.  Or, put it another way, if I remove the craft skill from D&D, a lot less tables would see much of a difference than if I added a wounds/vitality points system to D&D or changed the HP system in any way.


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## Greg K (Aug 7, 2014)

Hussar said:


> D&D doesn't begin and end with 3rd edition.  Non-Weapon Proficiencies in 2e were even less simulation.  And 1e didn't have them at all..




Wrong. 1e did not have them in the PHB or DMG.  However, it did have Non-Weapon Proficiencies. Non-Weapon Proficiencies first appeared in the 1e supplements Oriental Adventures, The Wilderness Survival Guide, and the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide.


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## Beleriphon (Aug 7, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> You certainly could play it that way, but it isn't really necessary. I was actually thinking something closer to Slayers, though my go-to example for in-game-world acknowledgement of physical punishment is Brock from Venture Bros.




Only because he is the equivilent of two ninjas duck taped together.


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 7, 2014)

Beleriphon said:


> Only because he is the equivilent of two ninjas duck taped together.



He's basically the epitome of the Fighter (or Barbarian) - he can kill anyone, in horrific ways, and withstand inhuman amounts of physical punishment. And it never turns into Order of the Stick style silliness, because they just play it completely straight.


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## Hussar (Aug 7, 2014)

Greg K said:


> Wrong. 1e did not have them in the PHB or DMG.  However, it did have Non-Weapon Proficiencies. Non-Weapon Proficiencies first appeared in the 1e supplements Oriental Adventures, The Wilderness Survival Guide, and the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide.




How many years was that after the release of 1e?

Why do we get to include that, but, we are forced to only look at the core 3 of editions we happen not to like?


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## Hussar (Aug 7, 2014)

By the way, I'm still waiting for the sim crowd to explain to me how D&D combat, any edition, precludes Final Fantasy 1 style combat.  After all, if it's modelling something, then how can something so completely outside of the model be included?


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 7, 2014)

Hussar said:


> The idea that HP are objective is pretty easily disproven.  And note, there are a number of things that make your HP go down without actually physically injuring you.  Spells like Phantasmal Killer certainly.



Setting aside the obvious counter-argument that you've heard a million times, I never actually said that HP are meat. That's completely irrelevant to the topic at hand. I just said that they're _objective_. _However_ your luck/skill/toughness/etc are reflected in your ability to not be killed by swords, it is a fact of the world that doesn't change depending on who looks at it. It's simply _true_ that your 100hp fighter or elephant can withstand that number of "hits" before dropping. You can pretend that it doesn't exist - that it's simply narrative convention, which doesn't correspond to anything - but you would be wrong.



Hussar said:


> Of course, there's always Craft's cousin, the Profession skill, which is about as far from simulation as you can get. Spend your time, make your check, make that much GP.



Actually, Profession is an even _better_ example of pure simulation. You go to work, do stuff, and depending on how well you do it means you earn more or less money. I can't imagine a better summary of how a street performer, crafts-person, or merchant would actually go about making money.

Granted, that's an extreme overview, but it factors in both skill (the modifier) and luck (the die roll), in an extremely elegant manner. It's not perfectly accurate to the real world, of course, but that was never a condition for process-sim.




Hussar said:


> You might be able to make an argument for the craft skill. I can see that. But, that's a pretty corner case element. Or, put it another way, if I remove the craft skill from D&D, a lot less tables would see much of a difference than if I added a wounds/vitality points system to D&D or changed the HP system in any way.



If you replaced hit points with wounds/vitality, that would not make the game any more or less narrative or sim. It would still be objectively true that you can take X amount of sword "hits" before dropping, except suddenly the system is more detailed with penalties and variable healing rates or whatever.

You don't need details for something to be sim. You just need objective causality.


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## evileeyore (Aug 7, 2014)

Hussar said:


> By the way, I'm still waiting for the sim crowd to explain to me how D&D combat, any edition, precludes Final Fantasy 1 style combat.  After all, if it's modelling something, then how can something so completely outside of the model be included?



Hi, I'm part of the "sim crowd".  D&D is terrible sim so don't drag us into this.




Oh, you wanted the "D&D is sim" crowd.  Sorry can't help you there.


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## Hussar (Aug 7, 2014)

Saelorn said:
			
		

> You just need objective causality.




Could you expand on this?  I'm not sure what you mean.  And that's not snark, but, I think there might be something here that I'm really missing.

To me, the fact that one character has 100HP and an elephant has 100 HP, has absolutely no bearing on the in game fiction.  None whatsoever.  There is no way to tell, in game, those numbers.  They exist completely outside of the reality.  There is no means by which someone in game can tell how many HP something has.

The mechanics of HP and combat do not model any event.  They don't tell you anything other than a combatant is alive or dead.  

If I use something like a wound/vitality system, now the model informs the narrative.  I know whether or not an attack has actually physically wounded the target and by how much.  That's a pretty simple example of a simulation.  You can certainly get more detailed than that, but, you need at least that much detail before you can actually claim you have any sort of model.

I keep coming back to this.  A simulation model has to tell you how something happened.  Otherwise it's not actually simulating anything.  I could flip a coin and decide the outcome of a battle.  Is that a simulation?  Two combatants come together, I flip a coin and say X or Y wins the fight.  Now, what's the difference between a coin flip and D&D combat, other than detail?  It's still just a coin flip, albeit a much more complicated one.  

Same goes with the Profession skills.  Nothing is told about how you made that money.  Who gave you that money?  What did you do?  All we know is you spent X time, and made Y money.  That's not a simulation of anything.  That's pure gamism.  There's no model there.  Spend time, add ranks (which can be added even though you've never actually DONE anything related to your skill) and you make more money.  

Put it another way, what is a skill rank measuring?  Expertise in a skill?  But, how is that expertise being gained?  What does having three ranks in a given skill actually mean?  How long does it take to increase your skill?  When I use Profession Sailor, what am I actually doing?  We have no idea because there's no real model here.  All I am told by the mechanics is Time In, Money Out.  That's it.  Note, you cannot even ever FAIL your profession check.  You will automatic succeed every single time you try.  You gain half your check in GP/week, full stop.  That's not a model of anything.  If we use the rules as a guide here, every single person in a D&D world is automatically rich.  They can't ever fail.  Everyone in the world makes X gp/week if we apply the rules to the broader world.

This is why I talk about how the rules really only apply to the game, and not the world.  That would be absolutely nonsensical if every single profession automatically made money.  A single rank in a profession would give you 1 gp/week automatically and even a 1st level commoner gets that.  Every single artisan is automatically successful, presuming whatever it is they are trying to make is within their ability to make it.  Every single time.

That's ridiculous.


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## Hussar (Aug 7, 2014)

evileeyore said:


> Hi, I'm part of the "sim crowd".  D&D is terrible sim so don't drag us into this.
> 
> 
> 
> ...




Hey, I love sim games.  I do.  I have all sorts of them sitting on my shelf and I adore them.  That's why I find the "D&D is sim" thing so mind boggling.  It's like watching people play golf and tell me how it's a fantastic defensive sport.  Or having people tell me how their Toyota Corolla is such a fantastic rally car.  Could I use one as a rally car?  I suppose I could with all sorts of modifications.  But, there are just so many cars on the road that really ARE fantastic rally cars, why would I want to use one that isn't?


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## evileeyore (Aug 7, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Hey, I love sim games.  I do.  I have all sorts of them sitting on my shelf and I adore them.  That's why I find the "D&D is sim" thing so mind boggling.  It's like watching people play golf and tell me how it's a fantastic defensive sport.  Or having people tell me how their Toyota Corolla is such a fantastic rally car.  Could I use one as a rally car?  I suppose I could with all sorts of modifications.  But, there are just so many cars on the road that really ARE fantastic rally cars, why would I want to use one that isn't?



We are in total agreement.

D&D is good at "simulating D&D" and in most respects the genre work that is reflected in it (though for less wahooey Sword and Sandal genres I'd chose a less wahooey system).


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## Greg K (Aug 7, 2014)

Hussar said:


> How many years was that after the release of 1e?
> 
> Why do we get to include that, but, we are forced to only look at the core 3 of editions we happen not to like?




 The issue in question is you stating 1e *never* had non-weapon proficiencies. Don't change goal posts.


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## I'm A Banana (Aug 7, 2014)

A lot of this convo strikes me as the Amazing Power Of Jargon To Confuse Things Further.

Setting aside the obfuscating jargon for a second, we get the original claim that D&D rules are used by the players of the game as a common ground to answer questions about what happens in your imaginary world when desires conflict (Batman does not want to be hit by the cards, the Joker wants to hit him, who wins? Ask the rules), and a question about why anyone would ever play D&D like that.

The best answer I can imagine is that the players who play this way are basically following the instructions given to them by every edition of D&D. 
[sblock="citation needed"]
The intro to OD&D specifies that the rules are "guidelines to follow in designing your own fantastic-medieval campaign," explicitly saying that the DM crafts the game and uses the rules at their option. This implies that the rules are open to facilitating whatever campaign the DM wants to craft. The Holmes revision similarly indicates "The game is limited only by the inventiveness and imagination of the players."

The intro to 1e specifies "You interact with your fellow role players, not as Jim and Bob and Mary who work at the office together, but as Falstaff the fighter, Angore the cleric, and Filmar, the mistress of magic!" This implies that you should be acting in character and making character choices based on what your character would do.

The intro to 2e gets very explicit in that a key step of distinguishing a role-playing game from a board game is "Now imagine how you would react in that situation and tell the referee what you are going to do," and goes on to say "The player makes decisions, interacts with other characters and players, and, essentially, 'pretends' to be his character during the course of the game." This all points to a game where your decisions should be based on what the story is in the moment. 

The intro to the Red Box says "The Dungeons & Dragons game is a way for us to imagine together...you, along with your friends, will create a great fantasy story..." And then, "...you will be like an actor, pretending to be that character." This is explicitly about imagination, role performance, and story-creation, pointing to a game whose primary function is to pretend to be an imaginary person.

The intro of 3e is also pretty explicit: "A character can try to do anything you can imagine, just as long as it fits the scene the DM describes." 

Even 4e: "The DM makes D&D infinitely flexible - he or she can react to any situation, any twist or turn suggested by the players, to make a D&D adventure vibrant, exciting, and unexpected."..."The DM sets the scene, but no one knows what's going to happen until the characters do something -- and then anything can happen!"..."In an adventure, you can attempt anything you can think of. Want to talk to the dragon instead of fighting it? Want to disguise yourself as an orc and sneak into the foul lair? Go ahead and give it a try." (this is a bit contradictory with 4e in practice, what with its 'know what your NPC's are to be used for before you use them' and similar, but the framing is certainly there like in the editions before it)

And now 5e: "It's about picturing the towering castle beneath the stormy night sky and imagining how a fantasy adventurer might react to the challenges that scene presents....Unlike a game of make-believe, D&D gives structure to the stories, a way of determining the consequences of the adventurers' action. Players roll dice to resolve whether their attacks hit or miss or whether their adventurers can scale a cliff, roll away from the strike of a magical lightning bolt, or pull off some other dangerous task. Anything is possible, but the dice make some outcomes more probable than others."
[/sblock]
In all these ways, the D&D game has told people that you play the game mostly by making in-character decisions based on the world you and the DM are describing, and, in fact, that this is part of what distinguishes a role-playing game from other games (which is why OD&D and 1e are more vague about it -- the TRPG wasn't a game genre yet back then, Gygax didn't necessarily know how this thing 'worked'). 

From those descriptions, it sounds like a rule that would tell you that your character could only eat three sandwiches in a day would be a rule that wouldn't fit in this kind of game well, since you wouldn't be deciding to eat a sandwich based on what your character would do in this situation, but based on whether or not the rules would allow your character to eat another sandwich. Such a rule would not have a comfortable place in a game about pretending to be a character (unless your character had some pre-existing reason that they could only eat three sandwiches?).

I mean, the intros are pretty consistent. OD&D probably goes the furthest to suggest that this might go the other way around (that the rules might determine what your character is capable of attempting rather than describing what happens when your character attempts a thing), but even before TRPGs were a thing, OD&D was saying that the rules flowed from the desires of the players and the DM, not vice-versa. 

So I wonder: why would anyone NOT play the game this way? Why would you NOT presume the rules were there to adjudicate what happens when the player tries "anything"? Why would you instead presume that the rules define what the player can try to do?


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## pemerton (Aug 7, 2014)

Haffrung said:


> First off, few gamers today, and even fewer back in 2001, have any idea what 'sim' or any other GNS term means. They're theoretical modelling tools talked about by handful of people on the internet.



Ron Edwards, John Kim and others didn't invent the word "simulationism" used to describe RPGing. Gyagx discussed it in his DMG. Lewis Pulsipher talked about it in the pages of White Dwarf over 30 years ago (thread here).

The absence of simulationist mechanics in D&D was noted almost from the get-go. This is especially true of its combat mechanics, which relied upon an abstract action economy, a to hit mechanic that combines armour and dodging into a single AC and that builds both the combatant's attack skill and the defender's parrying skill into a single d20 roll, and hit points that include aspects of dodging plus "meta" factors like luck while eschewing actual wounds or injuries. Games like Chivalry & Sorcery, Runequest and Rolemaster were all about replacing these abstract and fortune-in-the-middle mechanics with mechanics that could be treated as process simulations. These games also change the non-sim feature of D&D PC-building (classes, levels, XP) and replace them with skill systems, PC improvement based on training (typically in-the-field training - so adventuring makes you better at adventuring), etc. (Rolemaster still has classes and levels, but these are just the vehicle for a point-buy skill system. AD&D 2nd ed went somewhat more simulationist in its XP system, especially dropping XP-for-gold, but still kept the non-sim class and level structure.)



Haffrung said:


> And the people who came up with the GNS theory have always had trouble defining 'simulation'



If you look at post 31 upthread you'll see pretty straightforward characterisations of the two main types of sim that GNS/Forge-ites are interested in: purist-for-system sim (RQ is the poster child) and high concept sim (CoC, Ars Magic and Pendragon are all exemplars).

Their reasons for grouping these two styles together as sim are somewhat idiosyncratic to their broader analytical concerns; on ENworld, I think most posters would see the two styles as pretty different. This thread is mostly about purist-for-system sim, which you might also call "process sim", and that is what I am focusing on in this post.



Haffrung said:


> D&D as a 'gamist' system? Then why does it have five different kinds of coins, and dozens of different kinds and sizes of gems, rather than use an abstract wealth system? Why does the equipment guide include things like carts, chickens, and backpacks, along with the weight (down to the fraction of a pound) of each item? Have you read the AD&D DMG? It includes costs per day for masons, sages, architects, and other labourers. The exact dimensions, costs, and maneuverability of all kinds of sea-going vessels.



The point of all this, in Gygax's game, is to create challenges for the players: can you optimise your load? Can you win in the minigame of your ship vs the pirates' ship? Can you optimise your expenditure on masons, sages, etc?

This is all "gamist" in the Forge sense, in that it is about winning the game. ("Gamism" in the typical ENworld sense is something completely different - it is used to describe a game that uses lots of metagame mechanics"). In AD&D the game you are trying to win, on many occasions, is a game of logistical optimisation. You can see this in Gygax's discussion of "skilled play" in the closing (but pre-Appendix) pages of his PHB; and in the example of the wizard and fighter packing their gear in Appendix O of his DMG.



Jester Canuck said:


> D&D is has elements of sim. Because, like all RPGs, it's tied to a narrative that evokes the real world. The mechanics have to remotely match the narrative, and mechanics that are impossible to narrate become problematic.
> Mearls had a good example of this in one of his Legends & Lore articles. When fighting a big monster (say a dragon) the players might opt to duck behind a pillar for cover. They don't need to know that cover exists as a mechanic or know how it works. But they're doing the action anyway because it makes sense: keep a big hunk of stone between you and the giant monster with a breath weapon. That's inherently simulationist.
> The player could turn around and push over the ruined pillar, potentially bringing the roof down on the dragon. Unlike cover, there are no rules for "topping a pillar" or "roof falling on dragon" but the action can still work and have positive consequences because the game reflects the narrative.





Hussar said:


> I find it interesting that you have to actually pick two non-roleplaying games to find examples of not being able to tie the narrative to the mechanics.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> ...



Hussar is correct here. You can't identify a game, or an episode of play, as "simulationist" or "gamist" based on a recount of the fiction.

So from the fact that a player can declare as an action "I hide behind the pillar" or "I try to bring the roof down on the dragon by toppling the pillar" tells us nothing about whether the game is, or is being played as, simulationist, gamist or narrativist.

What makes 4e a non-sim game is the fact that when a player declares such an action the GM will ascertain the DC from a DC-by-level chart, and then narrate in the appropriate fictional details; and if the attempt to push over the pillar succeeds, will determine the consequences for the dragon from a damage-by-level chart, and similarly narrate in the matching fiction al details.

Whereas what makes RQ or RM a purist-for-system sim game is the fact that the GM will ascertain the DC by first establishing the nature of the pillar in the fiction, and then reading a DC off an appropriate chart; and if the attempt to push over the pillar succeeds, the damage dealt will be determined by reference to some general principles governing the injuries inflicted by falling heavy objects.

AD&D handles pillar-pushing via STR checks or bend bars rolls. These are closer to the 4e than RQ/RM style of resolution; the chance of success is appropriate to the character (based on stat, whereas in 4e level is more important). 3E, on the other hand, handles this closer to RQ/RM, as it at least purports to set a DC based on the fiction. What differentiates 3E from RQ/RM, in my view at least, is that at a certain point the DCs and associated numbers (eg natural armour bonuses for high-CR creatures) become completely disconnected from any conception of what they correspond to in the fiction. So we have locks with DCs of 20, 30 and 40 but no real sense of what these varying difficulties correspond to in the fiction. This is why I don't regard even the skill system in 3E as genuinely satisfying purist-for-system design constraints.



Imaro said:


> I am curious do you feel the same way about those who were fans of 4e's nod to narrativist play?  I mean there's FATE, MHR, Heroquest along with a slew of other games more suited to narrativist play much better then 4e was



How so? I think 4e is perfectly well suited to light narrativist play out of the box. It is obviously a much heavier system than the others you mention, and probably lacks the capacity for depth of HeroWars/Quest (but I wouldn't say that MHRP is all that thematically profound!), but I think it goes without saying that if you are playing 4e then you enjoy a heavy system.

The 3E skill system at low-to-mid levels (where my points about the disconnect between numbers and fiction don't really bite) is probably equally suited to purist-for-system play. But that still leaves you with the action economy, hit points etc in combat. Plus classes and levels in PC building. And many other elements not very well suited to those sim considerations. And AD&D doesn't even have the skill system.


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## Hussar (Aug 7, 2014)

I'd say that that's someone besides the point though.  All three styles and combinations thereof can be approached from an "In Character" way.  And D&D has never really pushed the idea of you should always act in character either.  The intros say that, but, then the mechanics are a mostly gamist mishmash of rules that tell you what happens when you try to do something.  

Sure, immersion is important.  I agree and I want to be immersed.  But, by the same token, there are all sorts of elements in every edition that talk about stepping outside the character and performing all sorts of activities.  There's nothing inherently immersion breaking with having one player (not the DM) at the table, from time to time, dictate bits and pieces of the scene.

Sure, the majority of the scene will be the result of the DM, but, DM+players =/= lack of immersion.  Not necessarily anyway.  That varies from table to table.

My point is, people talk about playing D&D as a world simulation.  That the mechanics of the game define the world.  The mechanics are essentially the physics engine in a First Person Shooter.  They define the reality of the world.  Now, there are games that do this.  And there are games that do this really, really well.  D&D is not one of them, and I wonder, if modelling the world is the goal, why you use D&D for it.  

The thing is, ten pages into this thread, no one's really been able to point to anything that says, "Yeah, D&D works great for this".


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## pemerton (Aug 7, 2014)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> we get the original claim that D&D rules are used by the players of the game as a common ground to answer questions about what happens in your imaginary world when desires conflict (Batman does not want to be hit by the cards, the Joker wants to hit him, who wins? Ask the rules), and a question about why anyone would ever play D&D like that.



That's not the question at all.

The rules of 4e are used by the players of the game as a common ground to answer questions about what happens in the shared fiction when participants are disagreeing over what new elements are to be introduced into it. But they are not simulationist mechanics, and they were being explicitly excluded by the post that prompted  [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s OP.

In particular, Hussar was responding to this:

Because the rules are tools for answering questions about the fiction, however, they can't be separated from it. When the rules say that Batman can only throw 3 Batarangs per day, that is a statement about the fictional world.​
That is a claim about the rules that goes beyond their role in providing a common ground for regulating the fiction. It also imputes to them a particular role in determining the content of that fiction (roughly, any constraint that is part of the rules must correspond to some sort of ingame causal constraint). 4e's rules don't play this role.

Hussar was also responding to this:

The rules have no authority over what Batman chooses to do, only over the results of his decisions.​
This is a specification of a _distinctive way_ in which the rules might regulate the creation of the fiction: namely, they do not regulate action delcarations by players, only the adjudication of the outcomes of those action declarations. No rules for any edition of D&D have ever exemplified this, because they all include combat action economies that ration action declarations in a way that are independent of the results of prior action declarations. (At the moment I'm playing a DungeonWorld PbP. DungeonWorld is different from D&D in this respect, as it has no action economy, or at least not one that I've discovered yet. It's fully fiction-first.)

In 4e the rules have a lot of authority over what a player can choose to have his/her PC do. In addition to the basic action economy, there are all sorts of acquisition and rationing rules around action points, power use, hit point recovery, etc.

This doesn't make 4e any less of an RPG. (Nor is D&D, other editions, any less of an RPG than DungeonWorld even though the latter is more fiction-first than any edition of D&D that I've experienced.)



Saelorn said:


> I never actually said that HP are meat. That's completely irrelevant to the topic at hand. I just said that they're _objective_. _However_ your luck/skill/toughness/etc are reflected in your ability to not be killed by swords, it is a fact of the world that doesn't change depending on who looks at it. It's simply _true_ that your 100hp fighter or elephant can withstand that number of "hits" before dropping. You can pretend that it doesn't exist - that it's simply narrative convention, which doesn't correspond to anything - but you would be wrong.



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?

If I state that, in my gameworld, "luckiness" is not an ingame property, but rather that abilities like hit points, rerolls etc take place at the metagame level, and that in the game they reflect nothing more than coincidence or "good fortune" - ie random chance happening to run the PC's way - then in what way am I wrong?

You can play hit points as real within the fiction if you like - a "luck shield" which gets hammered away until eventually it is worn down and the final hammering actually hammers the PC's body (I would note an oddly different "luck shield" from that provided by a luckstone or a prayer spell or whatever) - but the rules don't mandate such an approach. And it wasn't the approach intended by the original designers, so it's hardly as if the approach that I (and Hussar) prefer is in some way deviant.



Saelorn said:


> If you replaced hit points with wounds/vitality, that would not make the game any more or less narrative or sim.



But done well it would make the game a lot more palatable to traditional purist-for-system players, who want the resolution processes of the game to reflect, in some tenable if approximate fashion, actual real world processes of fighting with swords. The original version of wounds/vitality was authored by Roger Musson over 30 years ago, and published in White Dwarf as "How to Lose Hit Points and Survive". He is quite overt about his purist-for-system motivations: part of his objection to the standard D&D combat system is that hit points try to mix the physical and metaphysical, which Musson compares to trying to mix oil and water.

In his system "hit point" loss corresponds to exhaustion, from dodging blows - and he explains how other acts of exertion, including spell casting if so desired, might be modelled in terms of hit point loss. Wounds correspond to actual physical injury - and they inflict action penalties and a chance to die. And can be coupled with a hit location system if desired.

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


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## pemerton (Aug 7, 2014)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> the D&D game has told people that you play the game mostly by making in-character decisions based on the world you and the DM are describing, and, in fact, that this is part of what distinguishes a role-playing game from other games (which is why OD&D and 1e are more vague about it -- the TRPG wasn't a game genre yet back then, Gygax didn't necessarily know how this thing 'worked').
> 
> From those descriptions, it sounds like a rule that would tell you that your character could only eat three sandwiches in a day would be a rule that wouldn't fit in this kind of game well



Yet the rule that you can't eat more than one sandwich per combat round has been part of the game since day zero, and it is still there. So either the designers got the nature of their game wrong, or you did!

This idea that metagame rules are not part of RPGing seems to me to be nothing more than an attempt to tell a whole lot of people that they're doing it wrong. And it just becomes weird when it's in the same post that defines a game that has always had a strict action economy as the acme of non-metagame RPGing.


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## Sadras (Aug 7, 2014)

Hussar said:


> My point is, people talk about playing D&D as a world simulation.  That the mechanics of the game define the world.  The mechanics are essentially the physics engine in a First Person Shooter.  They define the reality of the world.  Now, there are games that do this.  And there are games that do this really, really well.  D&D is not one of them, and I wonder, if modelling the world is the goal, why you use D&D for it.
> 
> The thing is, ten pages into this thread, no one's really been able to point to anything that says, "Yeah, D&D works great for this".




I'm not going to debate whether D&D is or isn't for simulation-style games, I will probably get tripped up in the theory and various definitions. I will answer, that I use D&D instead of RM for world simulation due to the preference for lighter rules. I have played RM (a few months), and my experience from it was that it was a rules heavy game. Perhaps my impression was wrong - I was a lot younger.

I will agree the granularity of detail makes the RM engine better for simulation-style gaming, but that does not mean that D&D is all the way on the other side. Like someone said earlier which I tend to agree with, its o_bjective-based simulation.
_Of course various versions of D&D, as discussed, catered more/less to a greater detail for simulation within the system. I don't think one needs to have pages & pages of tables for simulation. A few examples or pointers in the DMG would be enough to point a DM in the right direction to produce the desired effects for a sim approach to an action. D&D, IMO, is the rules-light version of sim - generally for the vast majority of us, I imagine its easier to DM.


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## Imaro (Aug 7, 2014)

Hussar said:


> I think where I take issue here though, is that making D&D work as a simulation takes far, far more than "minor adjustments".  The idea of HP being real, for example, isn't a minor adjustment, it's a complete change to the intentions of the game.  Heh, to bring up a personal bugaboo, ruling that looking at a medusa turns you to stone requires actually specifically changing what the rules say.
> 
> It's not that you are making minor changes here.  The changes are actually pretty wide reaching and to reach any sort of modelling, you pretty much have to change every single rule.




I disagree, especially when it comes to 3.x.  With the OGL there were so many variants published of numerous mechanics that it was in fact trivially easy to find one to suit your playstyle.  As a quick example... Want more sim style hit points then use the wounds and vitality variant found in both Unearthed Arcana for 3.5 and the Star Wars roleplaying game... Want more sim armor use the DR variant also found in Unearthed Arcana.  These are basically house rules that were codified in that book but which others have used since D&D was first played.  I don't think they take all that much work to implement but YMMV.  In the end as I alluded to in my previous post it was pretty easy to find the type of mechanics that fit your style during the 3.x/OGL era if you really wanted to change things.




Hussar said:


> Thing is, there's a difference here.  No one claims that 4e isn't narrativist right out of the box.  You can't.  It's right there in the rules.  Those things that you claim are "anti-sim" are narrativist.  You admit that 4e borrows narrativist elements do you not?  The concept behind Skill Challenges is pulled straight out of narrativist games.  Warlord healing, Come and Get It, and various other player driven narrative mechanics are narrativist based concepts.




Hmmm, I thought we were discussing why "better"options for styles of play aren't used vs. D&D... Are you now claiming that every edition of D&D has no sim elements whatsoever out of the box?  I find that assertion a little hard to swallow (since we then get into levels of simulationism in mechanics which I haven't seen codified throughout this entire conversation)... or are you claiming 4e does narrativist play better than other versions of D&D, if so I'm not arguing that... I'm arguing that it is inferior in pushing that playstyle compared to the games I listed?  If you believe this to be false, please explain in what way?  If not then I don't see how your "use a better system"thoughts don't also apply here...


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## Imaro (Aug 7, 2014)

pemerton said:


> How so? I think 4e is perfectly well suited to light narrativist play out of the box. It is obviously a much heavier system than the others you mention, and probably lacks the capacity for depth of HeroWars/Quest (but I wouldn't say that MHRP is all that thematically profound!), but I think it goes without saying that if you are playing 4e then you enjoy a heavy system.




Well one way in which those games do narrativist play better than 4e is in the allocation of meta-game resources to affect the narrative... 4e has no balance when it comes to any one particular character's ability to affect the narrative vs. another character's...


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## Andor (Aug 7, 2014)

Hussar said:


> I think the operative word here would be, "to you".  It makes sense to you.  Objective HP to me are completely meaningless.  A 100HP elephant and a 100 HP halfling barbarian mean that HP have no objective meaning whatsoever.  Some things have lots of HP because they are really big, like an elephant or a dinosaur.  Some things have lots of HP because they are really fast and nimble, like a halfling barbarian or a kobold fighter.  But, HP have zero objective meaning.  They are always subjective.  The HP you have are based on a number of factors, most of which are "What would make this a more fun game?"




No, no they aren't. As I explained earlier in the thread they are in world derivable by character in the world. Your counter claim was that the GM would have to flub the results to maintain your own mental model. Which is not a counter arguement, the GM can change the law of gravity if he feels like it.



Hussar said:


> The idea that HP are objective is pretty easily disproven.  And note, there are a number of things that make your HP go down without actually physically injuring you.  Spells like Phantasmal Killer certainly.




How is that a counter-arguement? That only dispells the idea that HP are purely, and only 'meat points', an idea no one here has advanced. It is at best a strawman argument.

Interpretations of Hit Points differ, as I've said I interpret them as the souls ability to cling to the mortal frame. You should consider btw that in a world where every being is confirmed to have a soul which survives after death every death is a supernatural event, no less magical than a lifeball. Every one.




Hussar said:


> But, that's not actually how crafting works.  When you craft something, so long as you can beat the DC, you cannot fail to craft it.  The only question is how long does it take you.  You cannot actually fail to craft something.




You literally just said that if you ignore the resolution mechanic there is no chance for failure. In what game exactly is that not true? A craft skill in D&D in a binary resolution system, although you could always make it a skill challange sort of affair. I know a lot of games and I can't think of a single one where a non-magical craft system works any differently.



Hussar said:


> Never minding, of course, that in gaining those levels, I didn't have to  craft anything.  I can now make very excellent glassware because I killed lots of goblins.




Are you complaining about the binary resolution system (exactly the same as the one in RQ only with 1/5th the granularity,) or are you complaining about the advancement system? Those are two very different things. 



Hussar said:


> And, of course, you are also limiting yourself to a single edition Saelorn.  D&D doesn't begin and end with 3rd edition.  Non-Weapon Proficiencies in 2e were even less simulation.  And 1e didn't have them at all.




No. 2e NWPs were exactly the same as 3e skills, only less granular. It was still binary resolution, although I'm in a 2e game right now and we use the amount you beat the check by to gauge degree is success, so...



Hussar said:


> By the way, I'm still waiting for the sim crowd to explain to me how D&D combat, any edition, precludes Final Fantasy 1 style combat.  After all, if it's modelling something, then how can something so completely outside of the model be included?




It doesn't. It also doesn't preclude dance fighting. So what? All combat systems are abstract at some level. In RQ a sword blow (aside from a critical hit) is only very slightly more detailed than a D&D sword blow (in that I know I hit the arm instead of just somewhere.) There is nothing in the RQ rules to prevent the FF1 combat either, is there?



Hussar said:


> To me, the fact that one character has 100HP and an elephant has 100 HP, has absolutely no bearing on the in game fiction.  None whatsoever.  There is no way to tell, in game, those numbers.  They exist completely outside of the reality.  There is no means by which someone in game can tell how many HP something has.




Yes, there is. They can stab it with a pin and count how many poke it takes for them to die. To maintain your stance requires the GM to cheat when they do so in order to keep the narrative distance your position requires.



Hussar said:


> The mechanics of HP and combat do not model any event.  They don't tell you anything other than a combatant is alive or dead.
> 
> If I use something like a wound/vitality system, now the model informs the narrative.  I know whether or not an attack has actually physically wounded the target and by how much.  That's a pretty simple example of a simulation.  You can certainly get more detailed than that, but, you need at least that much detail before you can actually claim you have any sort of model.




No, no you don't. You keep getting hung up on sim when you really mean granularity. Any combat system has flaws and places where the sim breaks down or gives absurd results. For example in RQ if I get an arm chopped off it doesn't reduce the amount of damage to the torso it takes to kill me. Why? Didn't I lose any blood? Am I immune to shock? Why am I not taking a penalty to maneuver checks now that I'm off balance?



Hussar said:


> Same goes with the Profession skills.  Nothing is told about how you made that money.  Who gave you that money?  What did you do?  All we know is you spent X time, and made Y money.  That's not a simulation of anything.  That's pure gamism.  There's no model there.  Spend time, add ranks (which can be added even though you've never actually DONE anything related to your skill) and you make more money.
> 
> Put it another way, what is a skill rank measuring?  Expertise in a skill?  But, how is that expertise being gained?  What does having three ranks in a given skill actually mean?




And what is the difference between having a 33% in a skill in RQ and a 38% in a skill? Oh right, 5% chance to succeed in a binary resolution system, just like +1 to a skill in D&D.



Hussar said:


> My point is, people talk about playing D&D as a world simulation.  That the mechanics of the game define the world.  The mechanics are essentially the physics engine in a First Person Shooter.  They define the reality of the world.  Now, there are games that do this.  And there are games that do this really, really well.  D&D is not one of them, and I wonder, if modelling the world is the goal, why you use D&D for it.
> 
> The thing is, ten pages into this thread, no one's really been able to point to anything that says, "Yeah, D&D works great for this".




Actually several people have said, repeatedly, that D&D does D&D great. 

All game engines are resolution systems. All of them portray, sim if you will, game worlds. And all of the have flaws. All of them.


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## evileeyore (Aug 7, 2014)

Sadras said:


> I'm not going to debate whether D&D is or isn't for simulation-style games, I will probably get tripped up in the theory and various definitions. I will answer, that I use D&D instead of RM for world simulation due to the preference for lighter rules. I have played RM (a few months), and my experience from it was that it was a rules heavy game. Perhaps my impression was wrong - I was a lot younger.



Rolemaster isn't jokingly referred to as Rulemaster or Chartmaster for no reason.

Younger Sadras was hitting that nail on the head.  Rolemaster is a heavier, weighter, system.  It's the main part of what turns people from RM (when they are the type to be turned from it).  



> I will agree the granularity of detail makes the RM engine better for simulation-style gaming, but that does not mean that D&D is all the way on the other side. Like someone said earlier which I tend to agree with, its _objective-based simulation._



I've read what they wrote a few times and I'm not sure those words really go together coherently.  To me it just means "gamist".  But I'm sitting firmaly across the table from you on this issue.  I like D&D fine for it's wahooey, non-reality basedness.  I like the old game where I could emulate the whacky antics Cuchalain or Hercules got up to... which "D&D is sim" starts to erode.



> Of course various versions of D&D, as discussed, catered more/less to a greater detail for simulation within the system.



No, they catered more or less to granularity (3e is particularly gritty, OD&D is smooth).  Granularity is not sim, it's just gritty.


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## Imaro (Aug 7, 2014)

[MENTION=1879]Andor[/MENTION] ... Just wanted to say great post contrasting of RQ's "sim" vs. D&D's "sim".  It really does appear to be some invisible line [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] has drawn in the sand of granularity where some abstractions becomes sim vs. others being non-sim... I alluded to this in my previous post.


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## pemerton (Aug 7, 2014)

Imaro said:


> Well one way in which those games do narrativist play better than 4e is in the allocation of meta-game resources to affect the narrative... 4e has no balance when it comes to any one particular character's ability to affect the narrative vs. another character's...



I'm not sure what you think powers are then, and skills. And rituals, for those PCs who had them.

"_Lack_ of balance" isn't a criticism I normally see levelled at 4e's PC building system.


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## Imaro (Aug 7, 2014)

pemerton said:


> I'm not sure what you think powers are then, and skills. And rituals, for those PCs who had them.
> 
> "_Lack_ of balance" isn't a criticism I normally see levelled at 4e's PC building system.




Are number of skills balanced between classes?  What about Utility powers?  Rituals?  I see this criticism leveled against 4e alot.  Different strokes I guess...


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## pemerton (Aug 7, 2014)

Imaro said:


> Are number of skills balanced between classes?  What about Utility powers?  Rituals?  I see this criticism leveled against 4e alot.



If that's the level of detail at which you're juding a game as a narrativist framework, then what about the fact that, in the example campaign in the Fate Core book, the player of the wizard is given access to the spellcasting stunt without having to spend a refresh for it, because it's genre appropriate? Does that suddenly mean that Fate is somehow inferior as a narrativist vehicle?


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## Imaro (Aug 7, 2014)

pemerton said:


> If that's the level of detail at which you're juding a game as a narrativist framework, then what about the fact that, in the example campaign in the Fate Core book, the player of the wizard is given access to the spellcasting stunt without having to spend a refresh for it, because it's genre appropriate? Does that suddenly mean that Fate is somehow inferior as a narrativist vehicle?




If you want me to comment on this you're going to have to be more specific as far as where this is located in the rulebook, haven't read FATE core in awhile, and I'm not going to spend time searching through it for a vague reference.

EDIT: Ah, I found it...  is the below what you are speaking of... because if so it's a houserule that is specifically called out as going against the normal rules.  Not sure how that in anyway reflects on the actual rules in 4e creating an imbalance.

Normally, you’d probably also charge points of refresh, because you’re adding new actions to a skill, but Amanda’s group is lazy and is handwaving it in favor of group consensus.)


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## pemerton (Aug 7, 2014)

Imaro said:


> I see this criticism leveled against 4e alot.



If I was going to point out the deficiencies of 4e for narrativist play, I wouldn't look at the mechanics of the PC build rules at all. The two main things I would point to are:

(1) That it is possible, within the rules, to build a PC who has no significant thematic hooks. A halfling archer-ranger of Avandra or Melora is in danger of being such a character. For the designers, I think the fact that some options are thematically more vanilla than others (eg dragonborn, tiefling, dwarves, warlocks at the strong theme end; rangers, halflings, wizards towards the other end) was probably a feature. But for narrativist play it is a bug.

(2) That it is possible, within the rules, for the GM to frame encounters that have no significant thematic bite. Kruthiks and ankhegs are in danger of being such encounters. The rules have good advice on ensuring tactically engaging encounters, but are pretty weak on the thematic side of things.​
Happily, both these issues can be avoided by making judicious choices from the list of options open to players and GMs.

A third criticism that might be run is that the actual thematic span of the game is not very wide, but then the same could be said of MHRP. This doesn't make it poor for narrativist play, it just means that you don't pick it up for that purpose unless the thematic stuff you want to engage with is stereotypical heroic fantasy.



Imaro said:


> If you want me to comment on this you're going to have to be more specific as far as where this is located in the rulebook, haven't read FATE core in awhile, and I'm not going to spend time searching through it for a vague reference.



It's in the final chapter, about extras.


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## Imaro (Aug 7, 2014)

pemerton said:


> It's in the final chapter, about extras.





Yeah called out specifically as a houserule Amanda's group is using that goes against the normal rules.  In other words it's the group creating an imbalance not the rules...


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## Imaro (Aug 7, 2014)

pemerton said:


> If I was going to point out the deficiencies of 4e for narrativist play, I wouldn't look at the mechanics of the PC build rules at all. The two main things I would point to are:(1) That it is possible, within the rules, to build a PC who has no significant thematic hooks. A halfling archer-ranger of Avandra or Melora is in danger of being such a character. For the designers, I think the fact that some options are thematically more vanilla than others (eg dragonborn, tiefling, dwarves, warlocks at the strong theme end; rangers, halflings, wizards towards the other end) was probably a feature. But for narrativist play it is a bug.
> 
> (2) That it is possible, within the rules, for the GM to frame encounters that have no significant thematic bite. Kruthiks and ankhegs are in danger of being such encounters. The rules have good advice on ensuring tactically engaging encounters, but are pretty weak on the thematic side of things.​
> Happily, both these issues can be avoided by making judicious choices from the list of options open to players and GMs.
> ...




Great just add em to the list.  I wasn't trying to give an exhaustive rundown of why 4e strikes me as less optimal for narrativist play then the other games I listed... Just giving one example, but I still don't see how this as well as the imbalance in resources I noted doesn't strengthen my own assertion.


----------



## Sadras (Aug 7, 2014)

evileeyore said:


> I've read what they wrote a few times and I'm not sure those words really go together coherently.  To me it just means "gamist".  But I'm sitting firmaly across the table from you on this issue.




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.

With RM I would perhaps look at a table with x results (guessing here), and based on the roll read off the table. In D&D the results are equal to x multiplied by 'infinity'. 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.


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## Hussar (Aug 7, 2014)

Andor said:
			
		

> You literally just said that if you ignore the resolution mechanic there is no chance for failure. In what game exactly is that not true? A craft skill in D&D in a binary resolution system, although you could always make it a skill challange sort of affair. I know a lot of games and I can't think of a single one where a non-magical craft system works any differently.
> 
> Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...Simulationist-style-Game/page14#ixzz39iF0ofsT




Reread the skills in question.  There is absolutely no failure condition in either Craft or Profession.  You always succeed.  The only variable in Craft is time.  In Profession, you absolutely cannot fail a Profession check.  You gain your skill check/2 in gp per week when using this skill.  That's the only random element in this skill.

A person with a single rank in a Profession skill cannot fail to make money every single week.


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## ST (Aug 7, 2014)

pemerton said:


> If that's the level of detail at which you're juding a game as a narrativist framework, then what about the fact that, in the example campaign in the Fate Core book, the player of the wizard is given access to the spellcasting stunt without having to spend a refresh for it, because it's genre appropriate? Does that suddenly mean that Fate is somehow inferior as a narrativist vehicle?




That example seems pretty cherry-picked, considering the example campaign is made extremely simple on purpose, and absolutely everywhere else in FATE the idea of giving up refresh or an Aspect in order to cast spells is pretty much made explicit. (Plus the idea that you're told "decide these things when you make your campaign" so _there is no default_, just multiple options.)

e: I see this got covered earlier, yes, as was said above, it's called out as a specific deviation from the rules and so is a pretty weird "example" of a deficiency in the rules.


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## Hussar (Aug 7, 2014)

Imaro said:


> [MENTION=1879]Andor[/MENTION] ... Just wanted to say great post contrasting of RQ's "sim" vs. D&D's "sim".  It really does appear to be some invisible line [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] has drawn in the sand of granularity where some abstractions becomes sim vs. others being non-sim... I alluded to this in my previous post.




You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.  

Granularity is not the issue.  The issue is that the model required for sim play is absent in D&D mechanics.

Again, how do the simulationist mechanics of D&D preclude Final Fantasy combat?  In truly sim based systems, I cannot run combat like a Final Fantasy 1 combat where the combatants line up on either side of the screen and shake each other to death with negative numbers appearing above their heads.  There are a number of models out there that make such an attempt impossible.

D&D combat isn't one of them.


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## Savage Wombat (Aug 7, 2014)

Hussar said:


> You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.
> 
> Granularity is not the issue.  The issue is that the model required for sim play is absent in D&D mechanics.
> 
> ...




Solely in the interest of getting this straightened out:

It seems to me that Final Fantasy combat is a sim.  It simulates "what happens when these two parties meet" in the most ridiculously uncombatlike fashion possible - but it does simulate it.  Two monsters running into each other and "fighting" by comparing their HP ("I have 105 to your 99 - I win") is still a simulation - just an overly simplistic one.  Really, my pointing my fingers at you and saying "Bang, you're dead" simulates combat.  Just completely without rules.

Granularity seems relevant to me here.  The rules get more precise, and that's better for simulation, but just because something's a poor simulation doesn't mean it's not one at all.


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## Greg K (Aug 7, 2014)

Imaro said:


> I disagree, especially when it comes to 3.x.  With the OGL there were so many variants published of numerous mechanics that it was in fact trivially easy to find one to suit your playstyle.  As a quick example... Want more sim style hit points then use the wounds and vitality variant found in both Unearthed Arcana for 3.5 and the Star Wars roleplaying game




True. For myself, I used the Death Save optional rule from UA to do away with negative hit points. I combined it with a mechanic from an issue of Scrollworks in which Fatigue and Exhaustion penalties set in as a character loses certain percentages of hit points. I also added the  maneuver system from Book of Iron Might which does forced movement and other 4e type "rider" effects for martial combat using to hit penalties to attacks rather than encounter or daily powers. The to hit penalties reflect the difficulty of pulling of maneuvers and the importance of martial skill (BAB) without limiting to daily or encounter powers ("Heroic Luck" is reflected by the use of Action Points from UA). Furthermore, martial skill gets further reflected in another rule from Book of Iron Might in which BAB substitutes for skill ranks to resist Bluff, Tumble, etc. in combat  (actually, I use this as the base for using skills in  combat to Bluff, Holdout, in combat with skills adding their synergy bonus to BAB).


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## Haffrung (Aug 7, 2014)

pemerton said:


> If you look at post 31 upthread you'll see pretty straightforward characterisations of the two main types of sim that GNS/Forge-ites are interested in: purist-for-system sim (RQ is the poster child) and high concept sim (CoC, Ars Magic and Pendragon are all exemplars).
> 
> Their reasons for grouping these two styles together as sim are somewhat idiosyncratic to their broader analytical concerns; on ENworld, I think most posters would see the two styles as pretty different. This thread is mostly about purist-for-system sim, which you might also call "process sim", and that is what I am focusing on in this post.




 Here's what I, and most of the people I've ever played with, enjoy:



We only like to know and control what our PCs know and control. OOC knowledge is regarded as akin to cheating. As I noted, for a time we even denied players knowledge of PC HPs, under the reasoning PCs wouldn't have such a precise knowledge of their physical condition. Players make decisions in-character, while application (and even knowledge) of the rules is left to the DM.
Using knowledge of a monster that the player knows, but the PC doesn't, is regarded as cheating.
We customize characters based on concepts, not on mechanical optimization. So a worshipper of Odin might use a spear instead of a sword, even though it's mechanically inferior.
We don't go into deep PC background or scripted adventures. Story is something that's generated organically in play.
No interest in players shaping the game world or narrative independently of PC knowledge and actions.
Usually speak in character.
Prefer rules light play with great latitude for DM discretion and judgement.

Okay, so tell me what GNS style we fall under?



pemerton said:


> The point of all this, in Gygax's game, is to create challenges for the players: can you optimise your load? Can you win in the minigame of your ship vs the pirates' ship? Can you optimise your expenditure on masons, sages, etc?




Not the way we play. We don't pay strict attention to encumbrance, torches, etc. The game, to us, has always been about immersing ourselves in the game setting, exploring fantastic environments (often dungeons), and getting more powerful to face more powerful challenges.


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## Jester David (Aug 7, 2014)

Hussar said:


> I find it interesting that you have to actually pick two non-roleplaying games to find examples of not being able to tie the narrative to the mechanics. I mean, Battletech is pure simulationist as a board game. You are looking at a tabletop war game. That's about as rooted in sim play as it gets. It might have some wonky bits, but, it is a simulation.



That was by intent. 
You need to step away from looking at roleplaying games to see more diversity and range between simulation/abstraction. 



Hussar said:


> Choosing to hide behind a pillar can be done in a gamist RPG or a Narrativist one as well though. In a Gamist game, Cover gives X bonus. What that cover is, doesn't really matter, so long as you can gain cover. In a Nar game, you could claim cover and then add in the pillar (the James Bond RPG allowed you to spend Bond points on exactly this), or you could use the pillar and gain cover as needed.



You can certainly play gamist, hiding behind cover for the bonuses. But the point is in D&D, even the most gamist and abstract versions, you can make choices based on the narrative that will have some mechanical effect.
In a non-RPG, if you try to take an action not covered by the rules (such as hiding behind partial cover in a game that only differentiates between line-of-sight and non-LOS) then the cover grants no benefit. You can never gain a benefit for something not in the rules. 



Hussar said:


> None of that is particularly simulationist. Sim play is not "How do we make a coherent story". Sim play isn't concerned overly with story elements. Sim play is a means to model HOW something happens in play. If your only concern is hiding behind something and gaining cover, all three styles can do that quite easily. Heck, even Battletech has cover rules. MtG, true, doesn't since it's far too abstract to be able to deal with that.






Hussar said:


> But, in what way is MtG not a simulation of two very powerful wizards duking it out? Abstract, sure, but, I've been told that that's perfectly acceptable as a simulation, we shouldn't get bogged down in granularity. Two powerful Walkers are fighting it out using their minions that they summon. The minions are limited by their natures (so consistency is maintained) and the reality of the fight is consistent for all participants - no one can add or subtract anything. How is this different from a D&D fight between two powerful wizards?



This really comes down to what "simulation" means. Is it the emulation of reality, or simply the representation of some story or concept of the game. 
The later definition is pretty darn liberal as it means chess is a sim (two armies fighting) and only games like poker or backgammon would be non-sim. 

The difference between narrative of most games and RPGs is that in the former it's just an overlay. MtG would work just as well if you replaced all the fluff with science fiction terms and the summoned monsters with warping in fleets. There's no connection between the mechanics and the gameplay. Dissociative mechanics some would say. But also, nothing in the narrative can ever have any affect on the game. 
Which is the catch. The narrative in an RPG can influence the mechanics. Not just in the creation of new rules but in situational events. Despite the story of two dueling wizards, you cannot do something like walk up to your rival wizard and just kick them in the bollocks. If there is a wizard duel in D&D you are not limited by the rules and can do just that, or target the ground beneath the wizard's feat dropping them down, or distract the wizard by revealing you slept with her husband last night, or make an offering of peace and work out your grievances without magical combat.

Because the narrative can affect the game, all RPGs are inherently much more sim than other games.



pemerton said:


> Hussar is correct here. You can't identify a game, or an episode of play, as "simulationist" or "gamist" based on a recount of the fiction.
> 
> So from the fact that a player can declare as an action "I hide behind the pillar" or "I try to bring the roof down on the dragon by toppling the pillar" tells us nothing about whether the game is, or is being played as, simulationist, gamist or narrativist.
> 
> ...



This ignores my first point about apples to apples. Which was the more important part of my first post. 
The quote the OP references compares D&D to chess, while the OP compares D&D to GURPs. The two samplings are so different that the results of the comparison are useless.

You go right to a comparison between RPGs, picking the most abstract version of D&D to compare with more sim games. Which is a very narrow sampling. And yes, D&D will seem less sim than many other RPGs while being more sim than other select RPGs. 
But when you compare D&D to other types of game it is incredibly sim.

Really, D&D is somewhere in the middle in terms of sim. And often has the flexibility to play it more sim or more abstract depending on the DM.


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## pemerton (Aug 7, 2014)

Imaro said:


> Iit's a houserule that is specifically called out as going





Imaro said:


> Yeah called out specifically as a houserule Amanda's group is using that goes against the normal rules.  In other words it's the group creating an imbalance not the rules...





ST said:


> That example seems pretty cherry-picked, considering the example campaign is made extremely simple on purpose, and absolutely everywhere else in FATE the idea of giving up refresh or an Aspect in order to cast spells is pretty much made explicit. (Plus the idea that you're told "decide these things when you make your campaign" so _there is no default_, just multiple options.)
> 
> e: I see this got covered earlier, yes, as was said above, it's called out as a specific deviation from the rules and so is a pretty weird "example" of a deficiency in the rules.



ST, you've misunderstood my point. It is Imaro, not me, who is saying that any game in which player resources are not perfectly balanced is an inferior narrativist vehicle.

I don't agree. I don't think perfect balance of player resources is essential for a sound narrativist vehicle, as long as each player has sufficient resources to make a meaningful contribution. And I regard the example in the Fate book as consist with my view. If the Fate designers thought that an imbalance of resources of the sort they describe undermined the game, do you think they would have included it as an example? Of course they wouldn't have. By presenting the example, they are endorsing it as a completely viable way to play the game.

Which, to my mind, refutes the contention that 4e _must_ be an inferior narrativist vehicle because the distribution of resources across players/PCs is not always perfectly symmetrical.


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## Andor (Aug 7, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Reread the skills in question.  There is absolutely no failure condition in either Craft or Profession.  You always succeed.  The only variable in Craft is time.  In Profession, you absolutely cannot fail a Profession check.  You gain your skill check/2 in gp per week when using this skill.  That's the only random element in this skill.






			
				D20SRD said:
			
		

> Craft (Int)
> 
> Like Knowledge, Perform, and Profession, Craft is actually a number of separate skills. You could have several Craft skills, each with its own ranks, each purchased as a separate skill.
> 
> ...




So instead of your claimed impossibility for failure what we instead see is a skill system which represents a craft check as an ongoing process with incremental process and a nuanced failure system which allows for both stalled progress and a ruining of materials. It also explicitly allows you to dial the granularity in or out. 

I suppose it's true that you cannot technically fail in the sense that trying again becomes impossible. You can however continue to ruin materials until you run out of money. Kind of like how it works in the real world. I mean, what real world craft check can result in permanent failure where you can't try again no matter how much you spend? Gem cutting I suppose, with a singular stone like the Star of Africe or the Hope diamond? Which is actually covered by the "Ruin the raw materials" rule.

Out of curiosity I just tried to google RQs craft system. I found this:


> > ... which is a nice segue into my point. Presumably, communities
> > without large scale access to Repair or Form/Set spells use mundane
> > techniques to repair weapons. Presumably, also, these skills are
> > covered under Craft. Does anyone have any ideas for a RQ3 (or
> ...




You keep stating what isn't sim. Would you like to describe what sim is?


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## Imaro (Aug 7, 2014)

Hussar said:


> You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.
> 
> Granularity is not the issue.  The issue is that the model required for sim play is absent in D&D mechanics.




What exactly is that "model"?  All I've seen so far is a comparison of granularity.  Without a definition of the model you are speaking to, how does anyone but you determine whether D&D meets the requirements or not?


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## pemerton (Aug 7, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> It seems to me that Final Fantasy combat is a sim.  It simulates "what happens when these two parties meet" in the most ridiculously uncombatlike fashion possible
> 
> <snip>
> 
> my pointing my fingers at you and saying "Bang, you're dead" simulates combat.  Just completely without rules.



For my part, this doesn't help me grapple with the current discussion because it makes all RPGs count as sim: after all, all RPGing involves procedures for taking declarations about character actions within the fiction ("My guy fires his gun at you") to outcomes within the fiction ("The gun shot hits; you're dead").

But the post in the OP, to which [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] was responding, made a stronger claim than this. The post also said that in an RPG, the procedures for moving from action declaration to action resolution and outcomes _tell us what the fiction is like_. It is that additional constraint that makes a game sim, in Hussar's sense. And Hussar's point is that many procedures in D&D do not satisfy this constraint.

Hit point attrition via attack and damage rolls, for instance, is a procedure for going from action declaration ("My guy attacks your guy with his sword") to action resolution ("Whack, your guy is dead!"), but in the course of doing that they _don't_ tell us what the fiction is like. For instance, when the combat is still ongoing, and my guy has lost 10 hp and has 15 hp left and your guy has lost 20 hp and has 3 hp left, the mechanics don't tell us what the fiction is like. They don't tell us how many cuts your guy has on his body. Or how serious those cuts are. They don't tell us whether my guy is bleeding or not. They don't tell us whether the fight looks more like The Princess Bride or Basil Rathbone vs Errol Flynn (which I gather was Gygax's inspiration) or looks more like a Tarantino movie (which is how many players and GMs on these boards seem to narrate things).

That's the sense in which D&D combat is not a sim system.



Jester Canuck said:


> This ignores my first point about apples to apples. Which was the more important part of my first post.
> The quote the OP references compares D&D to chess, while the OP compares D&D to GURPs. The two samplings are so different that the results of the comparison are useless.
> 
> <snip>
> ...



My response to this is similar to my response to Savage Wombat, and to Kamikaze Midget further upthread.

The way in which D&D is sim compared to chess is nothing more than the way in which it is an RPG rather than a board game. By those standards, Prince Valiant or Marvel Heroic RP or Nicotine Girls is also a sim game. But we all know they're radically non-sim RPGs.

The quote the OP references makes particular claims about the relationship between RPG mechanics and RPG fiction, that I've unpacked earlier in this post. It is _those claims_ that are the focus of the discussion over whether or not D&D is sim. There are RPGs for which those claims are true: Rolemaster, Runequest, Classic Traveller, Chivalry & orcery, etc. But D&D is not one of them.

That's not a criticism of D&D. [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] is eminently capable of explaining what his motivations are for starting and participating in this thread. Mine are to make the point that you can be an RPG, and a very fine RPG, without satisfying the relationship between procedures of action resolution, and content of fiction, that the quote referenced in the OP asserts _must_ obtain if a game is to be an RPG.


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## pemerton (Aug 7, 2014)

Haffrung said:


> Here's what I, and most of the people I've ever played with, enjoy:
> 
> 
> 
> ...



It's a little hard without you giving any examples of actual play, nor examples of what motivated particular decisions by participants in the course of that play.

But if you really want me to have a stab at it, I would say that you are playing a high concept simulationist game, with the main focus of play being for the players to experience immersion into the world that is created and managed entirely, and almost entirely, by the GM.

You say that "story is generated organically in play", but you also say that you play with "great latitude for DM discretion and judgement". And players are expected to make decisions purely from the in-character point of view, not having regard to metagame considerations. To me, that all suggests high-concept sim. I would expect that you and your group have very high expectations of the sort of play experience a GM will deliver: I think you would insist on a "living, breathing world" with richly detailed NPCs, and would find a "dungeon of the week" GM pretty shallow and uninspiring.

My guess is that, as well as D&D (especially perhaps 2nd ed AD&D D&D) games your group might enjoy (and perhaps have played in the past) would include Pendragon, Call of Cthulhu, Ars Magica, perhaps Lot5R (I'm not sure how heavy its rules are relative to your preferences), perhaps Dread (I'm not sure what your tolerance would be for Jenga resolution), perhaps some Fudge-based games but not more contemporary Fate-based games. If you play 3E/PF, I would expect that it's rules heaviness would be a source of frustration from time-to-time.

That's my best effort to "profile" you and your group from the small amount of information that I have.


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## Savage Wombat (Aug 7, 2014)

pemerton said:


> Hit point attrition via attack and damage rolls, for instance, is a procedure for going from action declaration ("My guy attacks your guy with his sword") to action resolution ("Whack, your guy is dead!"), but in the course of doing that they _don't_ tell us what the fiction is like. For instance, when the combat is still ongoing, and my guy has lost 10 hp and has 15 hp left and your guy has lost 20 hp and has 3 hp left, the mechanics don't tell us what the fiction is like. They don't tell us how many cuts your guy has on his body. Or how serious those cuts are. They don't tell us whether my guy is bleeding or not. They don't tell us whether the fight looks more like The Princess Bride or Basil Rathbone vs Errol Flynn (which I gather was Gygax's inspiration) or looks more like a Tarantino movie (which is how many players and GMs on these boards seem to narrate things).
> 
> That's the sense in which D&D combat is not a sim system.




Working towards clarity here.

So: a system in which two armies clash and casualties assessed is not sim.

A system in which two fighters stand toe to toe, some dice are rolled and one fighter is declared dead is not sim.

At some point, two fighters stand toe to toe and, in the middle of the fight, wounds are assessed and one person penalized for bleeding is sim?

Clearly a system in which two fighters are modeled on a holodeck and pain tolerance, shock threshold, point of impact and the like are calculated is completely sim.

We have a continuum from one extreme to the other.  At what point does the line into "sim" get crossed?  I mean, you say things like "attacks modeled in the fiction" but even in complex systems like Rolemaster, you're not comparing, say, your high-line thrust with their low guard, or rolling for my attempt to disengage my blade and continue the thrust.  

Is it just that HP don't count as sim?

(No axe to grind here - I just want to see the term get defined better.)


----------



## SkidAce (Aug 7, 2014)

pemerton said:


> It's a little hard without you giving any examples of actual play, nor examples of what motivated particular decisions by participants in the course of that play.
> 
> But if you really want me to have a stab at it, I would say that you are playing a high concept simulationist game, with the main focus of play being for the players to experience immersion into the world that is created and managed entirely, and almost entirely, by the GM.
> 
> ...




What the poster you quoted describes is how we have always played d&d.  

I don't get the fixation on the GNS theory (aside from it might help me understand others better) but I agree with you that its a type of sim.  Specifically since we have the portion "players to experience immersion into the world that is created and managed entirely, and almost entirely, by the GM."

So I guess the question of the OP, why use D&D for a sim game is valid.  And to be honest, the answer would be merely...because we have.  Which for 28 years has meant we can, and did.

Which is why I get defensive when people imply we are doing it wrong. (nobody in particular...these threads come and go).


----------



## Hussar (Aug 7, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> Solely in the interest of getting this straightened out:
> 
> It seems to me that Final Fantasy combat is a sim.  It simulates "what happens when these two parties meet" in the most ridiculously uncombatlike fashion possible - but it does simulate it.  Two monsters running into each other and "fighting" by comparing their HP ("I have 105 to your 99 - I win") is still a simulation - just an overly simplistic one.  Really, my pointing my fingers at you and saying "Bang, you're dead" simulates combat.  Just completely without rules.
> 
> Granularity seems relevant to me here.  The rules get more precise, and that's better for simulation, but just because something's a poor simulation doesn't mean it's not one at all.




Ok, this does go a long way to explaining why we can't come to any agreement here.  If you look at Final Fantasy 1 combat and see that as a simulation, then, yeah, we're just never going to agree.  To me, that's pure gamism.  There's nothing actually being simulated here, at all.  The damage dealt, the chances of a successful attack, none of that is based on any sort of modelling of what is happening in the situation.  All we know is who won in the end.  It's coin flipping writ large.  

Again, a simulation actually has to explain HOW SOMETHING HAPPENED.  That's the point of a simulation.  You cannot actually tell me how one creature killed the other creature using Final Fantasy 1.  Same with D&D.  You can tell me that the monster is dead, but you can't actually tell me anything about how it died.



Imaro said:


> What exactly is that "model"?  All I've seen so far is a comparison of granularity.  Without a definition of the model you are speaking to, how does anyone but you determine whether D&D meets the requirements or not?




A model, any model, has to explain how something happened.  It could do so in very basic terms, but, it does actually have to tell you how something happened.  Why did someone get annoyed with me when I passed gas?  Well, our handy Newtonian simulation model tells us that gas disperses in a volume, thus, that person could smell my social faux pas.  Event begins, event is explained and the event concludes.  Simulation.

By the definition of simulation you are using, Pac Man is now a simulation.  Well, I suppose that explains why people insist their D&D is a sim game.  Just use a definition of simulation that includes anything and everything you want it to include and then claim that your favourite edition does that.  Ok, I understand better now.  Simulation is simply the latest equivalent of Video Gamey.


----------



## Imaro (Aug 7, 2014)

pemerton said:


> ST, you've misunderstood my point. It is Imaro, not me, who is saying that any game in which player resources are not perfectly balanced is an inferior narrativist vehicle.
> 
> I don't agree. I don't think perfect balance of player resources is essential for a sound narrativist vehicle, as long as each player has sufficient resources to make a meaningful contribution. And I regard the example in the Fate book as consist with my view. If the Fate designers thought that an imbalance of resources of the sort they describe undermined the game, do you think they would have included it as an example? Of course they wouldn't have. By presenting the example, they are endorsing it as a completely viable way to play the game.
> 
> Which, to my mind, refutes the contention that 4e _must_ be an inferior narrativist vehicle because the distribution of resources across players/PCs is not always perfectly symmetrical.





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.


----------



## Savage Wombat (Aug 7, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Ok, this does go a long way to explaining why we can't come to any agreement here.  If you look at Final Fantasy 1 combat and see that as a simulation, then, yeah, we're just never going to agree.  To me, that's pure gamism.  There's nothing actually being simulated here, at all.  The damage dealt, the chances of a successful attack, none of that is based on any sort of modelling of what is happening in the situation.  All we know is who won in the end.  It's coin flipping writ large.
> 
> Again, a simulation actually has to explain HOW SOMETHING HAPPENED.  That's the point of a simulation.  You cannot actually tell me how one creature killed the other creature using Final Fantasy 1.  Same with D&D.  You can tell me that the monster is dead, but you can't actually tell me anything about how it died.




But it is a simulation, at a higher level.  Like Sim City is a simulation - of a city.  You don't need to know how the individual people interact, because the simulation is at a higher level than that.  Similarly, a game where you simulate the outcome of a fight by comparing two numbers.  It's extremely abstract, but it tells you what happened ("the orc is dead") and why ("a fighter killed him") IF that's all you need to know.

In your combat examples, I could argue that you don't really know what happened because you're not modeling kinetic energy vectors, metal vs. skin durability, sword technique, molecular friction, and any absurd level of detail.  Which is fine because you don't care to know that precisely.

The point is this: there's clearly a continuum from "no sim" to "total sim" at the ridiculous extremes.  You seem to be drawing a line on that continuum and saying "anything to the left of this line is NOT sim".  Is that it?  You want a particular percentage of sim in your game to qualify?  That's fine, just tell us where the line is.

If we just want to say that "when Forge theory says a game is sim, they mean it contains at least 50% sim elements, and D&D is more like 35%" I'd be OK, because we'd have a benchmark.


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## Imaro (Aug 7, 2014)

Hussar said:


> By the definition of simulation you are using, Pac Man is now a simulation.  Well, I suppose that explains why people insist their D&D is a sim game.  Just use a definition of simulation that includes anything and everything you want it to include and then claim that your favourite edition does that.  Ok, I understand better now.  Simulation is simply the latest equivalent of Video Gamey.




What definition am I using?? I asked you for one, which you've still only provided in the most vague terms...


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## pemerton (Aug 7, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> Working towards clarity here.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> (No axe to grind here - I just want to see the term get defined better.)



That's clear.

I _do _have an axe to grind - I think that an RPG can be an excellent RPG without being a sim RPG (and I also think some sim RPGs are excellent RPGs too) - but I think that I can put that particular axe to one side for this fragment of the conversation!



Savage Wombat said:


> So: a system in which two armies clash and casualties assessed is not sim.
> 
> A system in which two fighters stand toe to toe, some dice are rolled and one fighter is declared dead is not sim.



I want to say: from what you've said, we can't tell. We need more information about the games in question.

Before you say "Bloody hell, he's just weaseling out of things", let me explain. (At length, sorry, with detailed examples.)

In a wargame, the elements of the fiction on which we are focusing, and hence the causal processes that we are trying to simulate, are probably not individual soldiers. We are probably focusing on units, on commanders, on logistics, on relatively high-level tactics.

So to work out whether or not the game is sim, we need to know whether or not it generates descriptions of the ingame fiction _at the level of description on which we are focusing in playing the game_. So if the game tells us all about the logistics of the two armies, factors in the qualities of their commanders, has regard to unit-level tactics, etc, then there is a good chance it will count as a sim game. In summary, the use of its mechanics to resolve action declarations also generates descriptions of the fiction that we care about in the playing of the game (eg we can tell how logistics made a difference, or how the holding back of strategic reserves turned out to be an error, or that it was the charisma of the commander holding the troops together that turned the tide of battle).

By way of contrast: you might adapt Risk to resolve a wargame component of an RPG. That could be a completley fine resolution system, but it would in no way count as sim, because from the resolution in risk you can't work out what happened in the fiction at the level of logistics, unit-level tactics, command decisions, etc. It's all just a black box.

Turning now to your two fighter who stand toe-to-toe, some dice are rolled, and one is dead and the other not. To know whether or not this is sim, I want to know how the dice were worked out. For instance, what you describe can happen in RQ: the attacker rolls an attack, and succeeds; the defender rolls a parry, and fails; the attacker then rolls hit location and damage; the defender subtracts armour, and N points go through; and let's suppose it's N points to the head and is enough to be fatal.

That's sim. We know what happened; one guy swung at the other guy's head, the other guy failed to parry, and was therefore killed by the blow.

Burning Wheel has a different style of one-roll combat resolution, called Bloody Versus. Each player splits his/her weapon skill into two pools: attack and defence. Armour and shields add to the defence pool. Superior weapons add to the attack pool. Speed advantages can be added to either pool (player's choice). Then each pool is rolled, and for each combatant if the attack roll beats their defence roll they take an appropriate amount of damage (and there are injury and hit location rules as part of this). There is also a (notional) 2x2 grid that tells you what happens overall: if both fighters hit, mark of the injuries, and the one who delivered the better hit gets to decide what happens next; if both miss, the one who got the better defence gets to decide what happens next; if one hits and the other misses then that one is the winner - the loser doesn't suffer any additional damage beyond that already applied in comparing attack and defence totals, but is also treated as knocked down, temporarily dazed/disabled, or otherwise at the mercy of the winner.

Now Bloody Versus isn't perfect sim: for instance, when you look at the grid and work out the overall outcome, some narrative injection is required. But it has strong sim elements. For instance, although the outcome on a draw (both hit, both miss) is the same, we can tell from the procedures of resolution whether the character who has the initiative (and so whose player gets to decide what happens next) got the initiative by succeeding through stronger offence, or got the initiative by succeeding through more skillful defence. And although, when there is a clear winner, the winning player is free to narrate exactly how the loser is at his/her mercy, that is still constrained by the fact that the procedures of resolution tell us what sort of injury it was that defeated the loser.

So I would say that this is still moderately sim. From the procedures of resolution, you can get quite a sense of what happened in the fiction at the level were are interested in (ie between these two fighters), although some narrative injection is required.

Now consider as a one-roll resolution system a coin toss. That is not sim at all. The result of the coin toss isn't affected by discernible features of the characters (who is stronger, faster, better armed or armoured, etc). And the process of tossing the coin and reading the outcome off the result doesn't fill in any details at all of what happened in the fiction to produce that result. No sim at all.

It doesn't become more sim, either, if instead of a single coin toss we do a series (say, best of 3). Even though we are keeping a tally of coin tosses, nothing in the procedures correlates that tally to anything definite in the fiction about the two fighters we are focusing on. At best we have a sense of momentum - which way is the tide of victory flowing at this particular stage of the resolution - but we don't know whether that is because one is fighting really strongly, or one is defending with great skill, or one is badly hurt, or has failing morale, or whatever.



Savage Wombat said:


> At some point, two fighters stand toe to toe and, in the middle of the fight, wounds are assessed and one person penalized for bleeding is sim?



Yes, assuming that the assessment of wounds is itself an upshot of the process of resolution used up to that point. But if the rules just say "After 3 rounds, roll a die for each participant who is still alive and apply a result from the random wounds table" then we don't have sim, even though that fits your description. Because in this latter case, the wound outcome isn't a result that is determined simply by the process of resolution of the declared actions. It's a type of narrative injection, although determind by die roll rather than participant choice.



Savage Wombat said:


> At what point does the line into "sim" get crossed?  I mean, you say things like "attacks modeled in the fiction" but even in complex systems like Rolemaster, you're not comparing, say, your high-line thrust with their low guard, or rolling for my attempt to disengage my blade and continue the thrust.
> 
> Is it just that HP don't count as sim?



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.

If you did want a system that went into even more focus, then of course nothing is stopping a design going down that path (and I believe that The Riddle of Steel does something along those lines).

The reason that I think RM, RQ, C&S etc clearly count as sim, whereas D&D with its hit points doesn't, is becaue there is a level of description which makes sense for an RPG - simple descriptions of what this guy, in the fiction, did or suffered - which their resolution systems generate. But D&D's hit point system doesn't generate those sorts of descriptions. This is the point that  [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] is getting at with his (mostly rhetorical, I think) challenge to explain, simply by reference to the mechanics, why a D&D fight is not FF. He's making the point that any descriptions of what the individual fighters are doing - even at the relatively non-granular descriptive level of dodging, parrying, being struck in the leg, etc - has to be injected by the participants, and won't be generated simply by applying the mechanical procedures for combat resolution.

(I haven't talked at all about issues around initiative, action economy and "stop motion"; nor about classes, levels and XP. But the same sorts of differences are in play between D&D and the sim games in respect of these: a much tighter correlation of mechanics and fiction, so that you can read the fiction off the mechanics, and vice versa, without the need for "narrative injections. And for completeness: I'm not complaining about narrative injections. At the moment I'm in my 6th year of GMing a system - 4e - that relies very heavily on narrative injections. 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.)


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## Bluenose (Aug 7, 2014)

Andor said:


> Out of curiosity I just tried to google RQs craft system. I found this:




RQ3's crafting rules cover how long it typically takes to make a variety of items, minimum skill levels to attempt this, the costs involved, and the equipment needed. I can only assume that the people you quote (who are discussing the edition from 1984, btw, rather than one of the current ones) didn't have the supplement they appeared in.


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## pemerton (Aug 7, 2014)

SkidAce said:


> I don't get the fixation on the GNS theory (aside from it might help me understand others better) but I agree with you that its a type of sim.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> So I guess the question of the OP, why use D&D for a sim game is valid.  And to be honest, the answer would be merely...because we have.  Which for 28 years has meant we can, and did.



I'm pretty sure that when [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] talks about sim he means what The Forge calls purist-for-system sim, and what some around here call "process sim". Whereas the sort of sim that I was "profiling" upthread (and apparently inadvertantly profiled you too!) is "high concept sim" or "genre emulation". I think a lot of ENworldes wouldn't describe it as sim at all, but perhaps more along the lines of terms like "immersion", "actor stance", "no metagaming" etc.

The reason that GNS puts the two sorts of sim together, when ENworld would normally treat them as quite different, is because GNS is really focused on the roles of the different game participants in building up the shared fiction. What both sorts of sim have in common is that the players don't contribute to the fiction except by playing their PCs from within the parameters of the character. In process sim, the mechanics do the rest (of actually resolving the consequences of action declaration); in genre emulation, the mechanics and/or the GM enforce genre considerations and keep the world and the story ticking along in the right way.

Process-sim players will complain about 4e, Come and Get It etc because the power violates ingame causality. Genre emulation/high concept players will complain about CaGI because it "pulls them out of character", and makes _them_ do a job (deciding what the NPCs do) which they want the _GM _to be doing. The Forge thinks that, even though the reason the two players complain is a bit different, the fact that they complain about the same things shows they have something in common - which is why The Forge gives them the same label (sim).

As to the "fixation" on GNS: I personally find it a very helpful analysis. It has helped me improve my game, understand a whole lot of RPGs better, make sense of people I read on these boards, etc. But other people probably would find other approaches useful. By way of a (slightly left field) analogy, I'm a huge admirer and advocate of Max Weber's historical sociology, and both in my professional life and my daily life listening to the news etc I use Weber's interpretive framework to make sense of things. But I wouldn't necessarily expect everyone else in the world to find Weber's analysis appealing. (Even I have to admit he isn't as helpful as modern economics for understanding, say, interest rate fluctuations. But for me those aren't as important as other features of politics and the economy. A different person, though, with different interests, might find modern economics much more insightful than Weber. Mutatis mutandis for GNS theory.)


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## pemerton (Aug 7, 2014)

Imaro said:


> 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).


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## Imaro (Aug 7, 2014)

pemerton said:


> 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??


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## Savage Wombat (Aug 7, 2014)

pemerton said:


> 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."


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## Andor (Aug 7, 2014)

pemerton said:


> 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.


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## Bluenose (Aug 7, 2014)

Andor said:


> 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.


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## evileeyore (Aug 7, 2014)

Sadras said:


> 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...




Savage Wombat said:


> I'm REALLY liking this definition.



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


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## Andor (Aug 8, 2014)

evileeyore said:


> 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.


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## Hussar (Aug 8, 2014)

Savage Wombat said:


> 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.


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## Imaro (Aug 8, 2014)

Hussar said:


> 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...


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 8, 2014)

pemerton said:


> 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.



pemerton said:


> 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.


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## evileeyore (Aug 8, 2014)

Andor said:


> Personally I see no narrativist vs sim differences in those two descriptions at all.



And that's the problem.

D&D doesn't care if your hitting it with your axe, shoulder charging it, or kicking it in.  "Make a Bend Bars/Lift Gates - STR DC Check" and you're done.

_GURPS_ cares.  Those differences inform the roll.  And it's not a slight difference.  Is the PC Charging?  That's a bonus.  Is he putting his shield into it?  That's a bonus.  Does he have a skill that aids?  That's a bonus.  And it's not a "simpel roll", it's damage whether striaght STR or a weapon (Shield Bash is a weapon).  If the PC "fails" to burst the door, he's still damaged something (whichever the ST deemed was the weak point) and can apply more damage on the next try.

D&D - Pass/Fail.  Nothing in between.  The roll doesn't inform us of anything else.  That the DM can create a narrative is meaningless, he can do so any time he wants, with out rolls.  That the roll in D&D is a Pass/Fail is where is fails to be sim.


And HP.  LOL.  Hit Points are so abstract it's not funny.  For those crying "HP are meat" they really should play _GURPS_, there HP is meat.



> 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.



A Kick deals damage differently than a Slam, Slams deal damage based on velocity and mass:  (HPxvelocity)/100.  If a Shield is involved you have make a Shield skill roll to properly set it between the PC and the target, if successful it adds it DR to the damage.

A Kick just deals Thrust +1 or 2 depending on the level of your Karate or Brawl skill.  Unless you're using a Special Technique, which can increase the damage a bit.


So, yes the roll (which is informed by all these modifiers) can tell you whether the PC Slammed the door, hit it with his Axe, Kicked it, Punched it, etc...  no DM needed to wave his hand and invent narrative.

Sorry if I didn't spell it out.  But _GURPS_ is vastly more sim than D&D has or likely ever will be.  And as I've said, _GURPS_ isn't even close to a "perfect" sim.  Not even close.

I put it around the 60% Simulation mark.  D&D is in the high teens, low twenties.  IMO.





> 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.



No it isn't.  _GURPS_ builds the roll based on the narrative to simulate the events the PC is describing he's trying to do.  D&D says "Roll the dice" and abstracts the results, the DM then narrates.

Is D&D completely abstract?  No.  And no one is making that claim.  However D&D is a very poor sim game, it has almost no sim elements at all.




Hussar said:


> 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.



That's what I see happening here.


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 8, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> You can _say_ that Hit Points are a metagame construct that don't actually represent anything within the game world,



 He said "momentum of victory" even that's not nothing.  I mean, can't you picture a duel where one duelist has that momentum?  Sure, it's abstract, but it's not /nothing/.  (I'm not sure which of you I'm arguing with here, BTW.)



> 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.



 Wild boars, barbarians, and a few other mechanics from several editions will confound that experiment a tad.


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## evileeyore (Aug 8, 2014)

Imaro said:


> 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...



Did he chop off your arm?  Did you bleed out?  Did he decapitate you?  Was it death by a thousand small cuts?  Did he stab your left big toe and make your head explode like a blood fountain?

You don't know based on the rolls (okay, sure, if dealt 1 damage to you with each "attack roll" then death by a thousand cuts might be pretty accurate).  All you can know is vaguely the speed at which you went from Perfectly Healthy to Dead.  And that's right in the Gamist wheelhouse.


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## pemerton (Aug 8, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> 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.



This paragraph reveals it's own inconsistency.

As you say, when I am playing a game it is _numers on the character sheet_ that determine whether or not the fiction contains element A ("My guy is alive") or element B ("My guy is dead, killed by an orc"). The character sheet doesn't exist in the game. A number of the things written on the character sheet - eg player name - don't exist, nor represent anything, in the game.

It is a _further decision_ which is not mandated by the game rules, and which at least one edition of the rules - Gygax's AD&D - eschews, to decide that the hit point tally on the character sheet represents some ingame property of a character. It's your prerogative to make that decision in your game. I can tell you that in my game that decision has not been taken; and I think likewise at  [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s table.



Saelorn said:


> any number of in-game experiments would prove it.



This isn't true either, without introducing additional premises which I don't accept.

Here is a true counterfactual: _if_ the players at the table declared certain actions, involving shooting blowgun darts into commoners; and _if_ the outcomes of those declared actions were resolved using the combat mechanics; then the PCs in the gameworld might be able to formulate and even verify certain hypotheses about the gameworld.

But the first antecdent of the counterfactual is not true in my game: the players have never declared such actions. Nor is the second antecedent of the counterfactual true in my game: the outcomes of those declared actions would not be resolved using the combat mechanics.

Here is the relevant passage from the 4e DMG that explains why not (p 40):

When a power has an effect that occurs upon hitting a target - or reducing a target to 0 hit points - the power
functions only when the target in question is a meaningful threat. Characters can gain no benefit from carrying a sack of rats in hopes of healing their allies by hitting the rats.

When a power’s effect involves a character’s allies, use common sense when determining how many allies can be affected. D&D is a game about adventuring parties fighting groups of monsters, not the clash of armies. A warlord’s power might, read strictly, be able to give a hundred “allies” a free basic attack, but that doesn’t mean that warlord characters should assemble armies to march before them into the dungeon. In general, a power’s effect should be limited to a squad-sized group - the size of your player character group plus perhaps one or two friendly NPCs—not hired soldiers or lantern-bearers.​
In other words, 4e is designed to be played treating common sense and genre sensibilities as a constraint on the deployment of the action resolution mechanics. It is not designed with the intention that the action resolution mechanics are a general theory/picture of how things work in the gameworld.

Hence, if (contrary to my real-life expectations) the players in my game were to have their PCs declare the sort of "experiment" you describe, the combat mechanics wouldn't be used to resolve them - the commoners would simply be declared killed ("saying yes" rather than making the players roll the dice).

_If_ you treat the game mechanics as a model of ingame processes, then the experiments you describe can be performed. But at that point you are affirming as a premise what you were hoping to prove, namely, that the mechanics are a model of ingame causal processes.

In other words, as I already posted upthread, the decision to treat the mechanics as a process is a _choice_. Even in RQ you could treat the mechanics as purely metagame if you wanted to; it's just that if that's how you wanted to play you probably wouldn't bother with RQ. Similarly, you _could_ treat the 4e mechanics in a process sim way if you wantd to, ignoring the rules text that I just quoted. Though personally I'm not sure why you'd bother - there are much better process-sim games out there.


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## pemerton (Aug 8, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> He said "momentum of victory" even that's not nothing.  I mean, can't you picture a duel where one duelist has that momentum?  Sure, it's abstract, but it's not /nothing/.  (I'm not sure which of you I'm arguing with here, BTW.)



I agree that "momentum of victory" is not nothing. But it's very very abstract when what we're trying to picture, in our minds' eyes, is the back-and-forth between these two fencers. As I've said upthread, you can't tell if it looks like Flynn vs Rathbone, or a Tarantino bloodfest, or something else.

One part of 4e that is much more process oriented is its positioning and movement rules (though there is the stop-motion element which is a bit weird from a sim point of view). It's therefore no surprise, to me at least, that some of the wonkier parts of 4e resolution come into play when the non-metagame combat positioning mechanics bump into the more metagame parts of the system, like the skill challenge rules.


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 8, 2014)

Hussar said:


> The mechanics of HP and combat do not model any event.  They don't tell you anything other than a combatant is alive or dead.



Unless they do. If you use HP as a model of how close someone is to falling, then it represents that and it tells you how injured someone is. This allows it to interact meaningfully with the rest of the system, and particularly the healing rules. If you look at someone, and the character sheet says HP = 3/70, then you _can_ say that this person is beaten nearly-to-death. If you opt for the HP-are-meaningful solution, then the character knows to cast a powerful healing spell, or run away, or defend or go all-out offense if the enemy can possibly be dropped with the next attack.

Or you can go with the HP-are-meaningless view, in which case nobody has any idea whether they can take another hit or not (however you choose to define hit, or not), and nobody has any reason beside superstition to drink a healing potion because it has no visible effect. At which point, I don't even know how you would play that game.



Hussar said:


> A simulation model has to tell you how something happened.  Otherwise it's not actually simulating anything.  I could flip a coin and decide the outcome of a battle.  Is that a simulation?



Yes, it is. It's not a very satisfying one, though, since it only includes random factors and does not take into account any of the characteristics of either side.



Hussar said:


> Same goes with the Profession skills.  Nothing is told about how you made that money.  Who gave you that money?  What did you do?  All we know is you spent X time, and made Y money.  That's not a simulation of anything.  That's pure gamism.  There's no model there.  Spend time, add ranks (which can be added even though you've never actually DONE anything related to your skill) and you make more money.



I'm pretty sure that they do actually explain that you need to be able to ply your trade in order to get that roll. Maybe it's in the PHB, rather than the SRD, but it _should_ be obvious.

If you are a sailor, then you need to be able to get a job on a boat in order to make that money. If you have Profession (masseuse), and there's nobody in the city who is willing to let you touch them, then you don't get a roll and you don't earn money. If you have Profession (bartender), then you don't get a check unless you actually have a somewhere to work where you can tend bar.

It seems like you're being deliberately obtuse about this, but maybe I'm taking for granted how obvious it is that anything involves actually doing what it says it is. Profession generally represents the service sector, so the money you earn comes from your customers; if you do your job well, and are fortunate in circumstances, then you can earn more money than if you don't do your job well and your services aren't in great demand that week.

And you shouldn't add ranks in a skill that you've never used. Your skill ranks are supposed to represent the skills that you've actually used. They _do_ go over that in the DMG, though enforcement is optional as an aid to simplify gameplay.


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 8, 2014)

pemerton said:


> As you say, when I am playing a game it is _numers on the character sheet_ that determine whether or not the fiction contains element A ("My guy is alive") or element B ("My guy is dead, killed by an orc"). The character sheet doesn't exist in the game. A number of the things written on the character sheet - eg player name - don't exist, nor represent anything, in the game.



Exactly! The character sheet doesn't exist in the game, but the distinction between A and B _does_ rely on it. In order for causality to hold, that number on the sheet _must_ then correspond to something which exists within the game world.



pemerton said:


> In other words, 4e is designed to be played treating common sense and genre sensibilities as a constraint on the deployment of the action resolution mechanics. It is not designed with the intention that the action resolution mechanics are a general theory/picture of how things work in the gameworld.



Right again. Most people agree that 4E was designed toward genre conceit rather than rules-as-physics. That's the major reason why I don't play it. Trying to play it as process-sim would require a lot of effort, and I would say that it's more trouble than it's worth. That's why I play 3E, which works incredibly well as process-sim.


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## Andor (Aug 8, 2014)

evileeyore said:


> And that's the problem.
> 
> D&D doesn't care if your hitting it with your axe, shoulder charging it, or kicking it in.  "Make a Bend Bars/Lift Gates - STR DC Check" and you're done.
> 
> ...




That is NOT sim vs narrative. It is a sim at a different level of granularity. In any meaningful sense GURPS gives me exactly as much nothing as D&D.

Fantastic I used my foot and so I did statistically .7 more damage then the shoulder bash, I opened the door! Yay. Now I turn and look at the door. Which component failed? Was it the hinges, the latch, the frame, the structure of the door? If it was the latch did I break the bolt or did the strike plate fail? If it was the hinges does the break reveal crystalline fracturing or perhaps a void left as a manufacturing flaw? If the door suffered a structural failure what is the fracture pattern? Did you take into account the differing grain structures of Sitka spruce vs Yellow pine? If it was a solid door, what it the salvage value of the remaining wood?

At any level of sim, I can utterly break your pretense of system based verisimilitude by insisting on asking a question the rules don't cover and forcing the GM to invent a narrative. The whole point of a rules system is to provide a resolution mechanic which is more rigid than "Because I said so." and less effortful than calculating it out using hard physics right down to the Higgs field and Planck time. And therefore any level of sim, short of that will have some point where the system uses shorthand and the GM must wing it if you peer closer. 

GURPS vs HERO vs RQ vs D&D (except for 4e) is not sim vs narrative, it's just different levels of granularity. 

Runequest vs HeroQuest? Now THAT is sim vs narrative. Because in HQ when you beat the badguy you do not know how you beat him until after the fact. Once the resolution system is finished you have to go back and fill in the narrative because you have no clue whether he fell to your swordblade or to your relentless logic the system draws no distinction between them. RQ and HQ by the way are both explicitly designed to portray the same world, and given that it's a mythic reality it's an open question which system portrays it more accurately.


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## pemerton (Aug 8, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> Hussar said:
> 
> 
> 
> ...



How do you know that it is a simulation? Until you know more about the game rules, you can't tell.

The only RPG I know of that uses a coin toss resolution system is Prince Valiant, but it is not a "single toss" system. So instead, here are the action resolution rules for Paul Czege's RPG The World, The Flesh and The Devil:

[T]ake a blank six-sider and allocate sides to the World, the Flesh, and the Devil, creating your character's W/F/D die. The way you allocate the sides determines the comparative significance of the three forces in your character's life . . .

The only requirement is that you must have at least one World, one Flesh, and one Devil side. . . .

The game also requires that the GM have a set of five dice with different allocations of plus and minus symbols on them . . .  in black and red . . .

When a player has stated intent for the character to do something where the outcome is in question, the GM will give the player one of the conflict resolution dice with the plus and minus symbols on them. Which one depends on his assessment of the difficulty of the situation and the character's ability to accomplish what the player intends. . . .

The player rolls both his W/F/D die and the one the GM gave him. If the result is a Devil+, it means the victory was one in which the character transcended some aspect of the Devil, and the player narrates the outcome. If the result is Flesh-, it's a failure of the flesh and the player narrates the outcome. . . .

There are no opposed rolls, and the GM never rolls. However, if a player rolls a red plus or red minus it means the GM narrates the outcome, rather than the player. This give the GM power to introduce bittersweet victories and dramatic, crippling failures.​
There's also a re-roll mechanic, based on invoking character descriptions.

This is an RPG that is very close to a coin-toss resolution system. (Whether it is good RPG or not is another question; per Ron Edwards, "Is there such a thing as Fortune-at-the-beginning? Playtesting so far indicates that it's not very satisfying for Narrativist play; see discussions at the Forge of _Human Wreckage_ and_ The World the Flesh and the Devil_.")

And the resolution system is not modelling or simulating anything. It is, quite overtly, a system for distributing _among real, flesh-and-blood game participants_ certain obligations to develop the content of the fiction in certain ways. Someone who sat down to play this RPG, and who said of the resolution system that it is a simulations, but not a very good one because it only models random factors, has simply failed to understand the mechanics of the game. Such a person needs to re-read the rules!



Saelorn said:


> The character sheet doesn't exist in the game, but the distinction between A and B _does_ rely on it.



Not in my game. The distinction between A and B is the result of the participants in the game agreeing that one or the other is true of the shared fiction. They reach that decision by reference to the hit point tallies, but the hit point tallies are not themselves indicative of anything in the fiction. (For instance, in the fiction there is no difference between defeating a minion giant, who mechanically has 1 hp, and defeating a standard giant, who has 200 hp, except that one turned out to take a bit longer than the other for some reason. Nothing in the system obliges that reason to be narrated as "because the standard one was tougher". It could be narrated as "the minion got unlucky, and parried when it should have thrust."



Saelorn said:


> In order for causality to hold, that number on the sheet _must_ then correspond to something which exists within the game world.



My whole point is that Hussar and I do not play a game that satisfies you "causality" requirement. We play a game in which the ingame causation is one thing (imaginary processes in an imaginary world) and the method for determining the content of the fiction is something else (a series of rules that authorise various participants in the game, at various points during the play of the game, to introduce new content into the fiction, or change existing content.

You, personally, may not enjoy playing such a game, but that doesn't change the fact that other people, out here in the real world, are doing it.



Saelorn said:


> Most people agree that 4E was designed toward genre conceit rather than rules-as-physics. That's the major reason why I don't play it.



Obviously. My point is that you are mistaken when you deny that Hussar and I _are_ playing the game as I have described it.

For instance, upthread you said, of hit points, that "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". Presumably by "you" you mean "my PC" rather than me - what represent my personal ability to not get stopped by attacks is my own (rather limited) skill at fighting and running away.

But in my game (and Hussar's) a PC's or other character's hit points do not "objectively" represent that character's ability to not get stopped by attacks. They regulate the conditions under which the participants in the game are obliged to say "that character just got stopped by an attack" or are permitted to say "that character hasn't yet been stopped by any attacks". And this didn't require a house rule. It's just playing 4e as it comes out of the box. The hit points are part of a really existing set of rules that constrain the players. The ingame causal processes are imaginary laws of nature that constrain imaginary people. And the two sets of rules - the real ones and the imaginary ones - are not in any sort of correlation.



Saelorn said:


> If you use HP as a model of how close someone is to falling, then it represents that and it tells you how injured someone is.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> If you look at someone, and the character sheet says HP = 3/70, then you _can_ say that this person is beaten nearly-to-death.



Unless the hit point loss was all inflicted by Phantasmal Killer, in which case the person looks white as a sheet though otherwise physically hale.

There are additional complications, too. For instance, in my 4e game you can't tell from the fact that a person looks badly hurt how many hp s/he has. For instance, in my last session both of the defenders - each of whom has somewhere over 150 hp - took around 300 hp damage, the paladin from falling down a cliff and then being swallowed by a remorhaz at the bottom, the fighter from being beaten up by giants. But between in-combat healing (second wind, lay on hands, healing word etc) and a short rest, they are both at full hp. But obviously there injuries haven't been healed by 5 minutes of rest. They still look terrible. It's just that they're no longer close to falling.

For a cinematic analogue, think of Aragorn returning to Helm's Deep after his fall. He still looks terrible as he throws the doors open, but he is not at all close to falling. His injuries are no longer affecting his ability to fight with full vigour.



Andor said:


> in HQ when you beat the badguy you do not know how you beat him until after the fact. Once the resolution system is finished you have to go back and fill in the narrative because you have no clue whether he fell to your swordblade or to your relentless logic the system draws no distinction between them.



That's not really accurate. If you generate the points needed for victory by using your Swordsman ability, you can't retrospectively declare that you defeated your opponent with your Relentless Logic.

Even the much looser RPG The World, The Flesh and The Devil still puts some constraints on the content of the narration of resolution, based on the result of the W/F/D die. I've never heard of an RPG in which resolution can be completed, and have generated _no_ constraints on narration beyond the basic ones derived from genre and scene framing. (Which is not to say that such a game doesn't exist - I haven't heard of every RPG. But HeroWars/Quest is not it.)


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 8, 2014)

pemerton said:


> I agree that "momentum of victory" is not nothing. But it's very very abstract when what we're trying to picture, in our minds' eyes, is the back-and-forth between these two fencers. As I've said upthread, you can't tell if it looks like Flynn vs Rathbone, or a Tarantino bloodfest, or something else.



 Sure.  That just makes a very abstract system like hps more readily adaptable to a variety of styles and sub-genres.  

Really, hps is one of the little jewels of the D&D sacred-cow collection.  Along with, clunky though it is, leveling.  They're things that those 'fantasy heartbreakers' trying to 'improve' D&D often ditch - and end up with death spirals and static, boring characters, instead.


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 8, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> Right again. Most people agree that 4E was designed toward genre conceit rather than rules-as-physics.



Rules as physics is more about the attitude you approach the game with - and a certain amount of plain, simple de-facto reality - than the rules themselves.

The reality is that the game rules - however abstract, consciously 'narrativist' or whatever, or even non-existent in the case of freestyle RP - /are/ the de-facto laws of physics of the game world.  There's no escaping it.  Whether you worry about those laws of physics not resembling some realistic or verisimilitudinous laws of physics is down to attitude.

Play 4e and lampshade it's de facto laws of physics, and you have something a bit like Discworld, where the value of pi happens to be 4.

Do the same with 3e and you have Order of the Stick.

Take either and assume the laws of physics (and/or magic) that the characters in-game are aware of or believe in are not /exactly/ those of the game, though, and you can have a something a bit like a typical fantasy setting - a bit /more/ like an heroic fantasy setting where the PCs actually /are/ the heroes, in the case of 4e.


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## pemerton (Aug 8, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> hps is one of the little jewels of the D&D sacred-cow collection.



I've got nothing against it - I'm in my 6th year of GMing a campaign using a combat system (4e) built around hit points.

I just don't think it's a sim mechanic.


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## pemerton (Aug 8, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> The reality is that the game rules - however abstract, consciously 'narrativist' or whatever, or even non-existent in the case of freestyle RP - /are/ the de-facto laws of physics of the game world.  There's no escaping it.



I don't agree with this. There's no way, in a game of The World, The Flesh, and The Devil, that the notion of a W/F/D die, or of red and black symbols on the GM's die are part of the "physics" of the gameworld.

Another example is from HeroQuest revised. One job the GM has is to impose penalties on player checks using broad descriptors in circumstances where that descriptor overlaps with another player's PC's narrow descriptor. So, for instance, if PC A is "Strong", and PC B is "Able to lift heavy objects with ease", then in a check that involves lifting the player of A takes a -3 penalty. This penalty doesn't reflect anything in the gameworld. It is a metagame device to stop A's broader descriptor overshadowing B's narrower, more colourful descriptor.



Tony Vargas said:


> Play 4e and lampshade it's de facto laws of physics, and you have something a bit like Discworld, where the value of pi happens to be 4.



Sure, you can ignore "genre blindness", have NPCs comment that whenever B is around A finds it harder to lift rocks, etc. But (assuming you want to play a serious game) why would you lampoon your own game like that?

As long as you don't, you can maintain physics of the gameworld which are quite independent of the game rules themselves.


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## evileeyore (Aug 8, 2014)

Andor said:


> That is NOT sim vs narrative.



I didn't say "narrativist".  I said "gamist".  D&D (as a rules system) is more worried about whether the door opened or not (gamism) than how you opened the door (sim) to the extent that the "how" isn't a part of the rules, nor is the state of the door afterwards, aside from it being "open".



> In any meaningful sense GURPS gives me exactly as much nothing as D&D.



False.  _GURPS_ roll results will indicate the HP status of the door, whether it is open or not, as well as how much damage the PC (or his weapon or shield if used) has taken.



> Fantastic I used my foot and so I did statistically .7 more damage then the shoulder bash, I opened the door! Yay. Now I turn and look at the door. Which component failed? Was it the hinges, the latch, the frame, the structure of the door?



At this point _GURPS_ informs the ST of which of those things based on the prior decision of which was weakest.  This is more information than D&D provides.


You call it "granularity" but miss out on what the actual difference was:  D&D didn't care.  None of this made an ounce of difference in the gamist pursuit of "Open The Door".  Those things mattered for _GURPS_.  Is _GURPS_ gamist?  Of course.  It has win states.  It has rules to move one towards those win states.  However it a simulation of the physics that gets you there.  D&D skips the physics and hands you your "Win/Lose" state, the DM supplies all the narrative*, and invents any simulation.


* Which is not "narrativist".  It's just narration.




> At any level of sim, I can utterly break your pretense of system based verisimilitude by insisting on asking a question the rules don't cover and forcing the GM to invent a narrative.



Sure.  It's just so much easier with D&D. Like radically easier.*

How much HP is "meat"?  _GURPS_ answers this with "All of it".  Was that sword swing a wound or did it just "shave some luck off"?  _GURPS_ answers this (hint it's never "luck"**), but it might not be a "wound".  Is your character bleeding?  _GURPS_ answers this.  Did the sword thrust skewer an interneal organ?  Again...


* Though I have a gamist/narrativist system that goes one step farther than D&D.  FFG's Star Wars.  It doesn't even bother with a thin veneer of verisimilitude.  It's as gamist as 4e D&D, a zero sim game.

** Okay.  It could be.  With the right Powers or Options being used.  But generally it's not.




> The whole point of a rules system is to provide a resolution mechanic which is more rigid than "Because I said so." and less effortful than calculating it out using hard physics right down to the Higgs field and Planck time.



False on both counts.  "Because I said so" is a fine rule in a purely Narrative driven game.  And you've never played SEEKRIEG I see... I can't prove it, but I swear Planck's Constant has to be involved those claculations somewhere...  *grumble mumble* scientific calculator my butt *grumble mumble*


Now, you might mean "I want the whole point to be" which is perfectly cromulent statement.




> And therefore any level of sim, short of that will have some point where the system uses shorthand and the GM must wing it if you peer closer.



Sure.  That's why I place _GURPS_ at about 60% sim (and 40% gamist) and D&D between 15-25% sim (and 75-85% gamist).

Though, boith games have "editions" (Optional Rules in _GURPS_ case) that inject plentiful amounts of narrative mechanics.


My only point in this thread is this:  D&D is a poor choice for simulationism.  Unless you're simulating a D&D world* and then it does it better than any other game system ever.

* See Order of the Stick for a radically meta take on this premise.


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 8, 2014)

pemerton said:


> I don't agree with this. There's no way, in a game of The World, The Flesh, and The Devil, that the notion of a W/F/D die, or of red and black symbols on the GM's die are part of the "physics" of the gameworld.



 Of course they are.  They're just a deep, impenetrable layer of those laws that anyone trying to puzzle them out from the inside is never going to figure out.   



> Another example is from HeroQuest revised. One job the GM has is to impose penalties on player checks using broad descriptors in circumstances where that descriptor overlaps with another player's PC's narrow descriptor. So, for instance, if PC A is "Strong", and PC B is "Able to lift heavy objects with ease", then in a check that involves lifting the player of A takes a -3 penalty. This penalty doesn't reflect anything in the gameworld. It is a metagame device to stop A's broader descriptor overshadowing B's narrower, more colourful descriptor.



 So A and B would never notice that they performed differently in eachothers' mutual absence than when both are present?



> Sure, you can ignore "genre blindness", have NPCs comment that whenever B is around A finds it harder to lift rocks, etc. But (assuming you want to play a serious game) why would you lampoon your own game like that?
> 
> As long as you don't, you can maintain physics of the gameworld which are quite independent of the game rules themselves.



Oh, I'm in agreement, here.  It's easy to ignore the laws of physics - people did it for thousands of years, even when dealing with real laws of physics.  

And lampshading can be a hoot.


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## Bluenose (Aug 8, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> Really, hps is one of the little jewels of the D&D sacred-cow collection.  Along with, clunky though it is, leveling.  They're things that those 'fantasy heartbreakers' trying to 'improve' D&D often ditch - and end up with death spirals and static, boring characters, instead.




For the least-Sim bit of D&D rules, I'd suggest Initiative and non-simultaneous action. And that's also a sacred cow, which 4e partly devoured with it's off-turn actions. I'd love to see someone try and defend turn-based combat as a mechanic that simulates what's actually happening, which I don't think even OotS has touched on.


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## pemerton (Aug 8, 2014)

Bluenose said:


> For the least-Sim bit of D&D rules, I'd suggest Initiative and non-simultaneous action.



I think that it's up there with hit points, yes.

And even pre-3E D&D, which tended to have slightly more continuous action within the (1 minute) round, still has initiative and an action economy that (in my view) can't be set out in simulationist terms.


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## Imaro (Aug 8, 2014)

evileeyore said:


> Did he chop off your arm?  Did you bleed out?  Did he decapitate you?  Was it death by a thousand small cuts?  Did he stab your left big toe and make your head explode like a blood fountain?
> 
> You don't know based on the rolls (okay, sure, if dealt 1 damage to you with each "attack roll" then death by a thousand cuts might be pretty accurate).  All you can know is vaguely the speed at which you went from Perfectly Healthy to Dead.  And that's right in the Gamist wheelhouse.




I never argued it was a perfect simulation that takes into account all possibilities (In fact I don't think anyone has)... However @_*Hussar*_ claimed we don't know anything from the mechanics which is the point I was addressing... Not sure how you showing we don't know some things is the same as stating we don't know anything...

EDIT: For the record I agree with [MENTION=1879]Andor[/MENTION] in that your examples are more about granularity and specificity than any clear line of simulationism  vs. not.


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## Imaro (Aug 8, 2014)

evileeyore said:


> Sure.  That's why I place _GURPS_ at about 60% sim (and 40% gamist) and D&D between 15-25% sim (and 75-85% gamist).
> 
> Though, boith games have "editions" (Optional Rules in _GURPS_ case) that inject plentiful amounts of narrative mechanics.
> 
> ...




I'm curious if your 15-25% sim D&D takes into account the various rules options that arose in 3.x, or even stuff like the Skills & Powers/historical splats in AD&D 2e? I mentioned the optional 3.5 rules earlier because I think it's a pretty important point.  

I also am curious what percentage narrativist would you say D&D is?

Finally if these optional rules can get D&D to 60% or more sim then is it still a poor choice for simulationism, especially given such factors as the size of it's fanbase, familiarity with rules, availability, etc.?


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## Imaro (Aug 8, 2014)

Bluenose said:


> For the least-Sim bit of D&D rules, I'd suggest Initiative and non-simultaneous action. And that's also a sacred cow, which 4e partly devoured with it's off-turn actions. I'd love to see someone try and defend turn-based combat as a mechanic that simulates what's actually happening, which I don't think even OotS has touched on.




Yes there are rules that aren't simulationist in D&D (as well as in Runequest, GURPS, etc.) I don't think anyone has claimed it is a pure sim, and I've even commented that it being "incoherent" is actually part of the appeal of D&D... the issue is whether these things are so blatant/widespread/etc. that they cause a problem for those looking for a majority sim-play experience... I don't think 2-3 rules (hit points, initiative, and well I can't think of another offhand that's been brought up) out of all the rules in D&D are enough to ruin that for most people.


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## Hussar (Aug 8, 2014)

Here's an example, from 3e, of a mechanic I consider to be a pretty good "modelling" mechanic.

The Jump skill.  When I use the jump skill (presuming a running start), my distance is my final score in feet.  The entire event is modelled by the mechanics and we know mostly what happened.  The character moved at least ten feet, and then jumped X distance depending on his skill and die roll.  How did he move from A to B?  He jumped.  Did he reach B?  Well, that depends on the check.  And, as an added bonus, the player can choose not to overshoot the mark if he rolls higher than the distance he wants to jump.  

That's a model.  That's a perfectly acceptable model of jumping.  You don't have to do it this way, but, as models go, it's pretty clear.

Now, for those of you telling me that combat mechanics work as a model answer me this:  The orc attacks successfully the PC for 7 points of damage.  I narrate it as the PC falling backwards away from the attack, shaking in fear.

Prove me wrong.  Show me how your model precludes my narration.


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## Andor (Aug 8, 2014)

evileeyore said:


> My only point in this thread is this:  D&D is a poor choice for simulationism.  Unless you're simulating a D&D world* and then it does it better than any other game system ever.
> 
> * See Order of the Stick for a radically meta take on this premise.




Thank you. That is the point I've been trying to get across this whole thread. The OP asked why you would ever treat D&D rules as sim, and the answer is because it does a great job of simming D&D, and it's fun. So I'm glad you agree. 

BTW I'd rank Goblins as more Meta than OotS. While OotS will openly discuss rules and genre expectations, you never move up past the level of the characters. In goblins they've openly discussed the GMs name and the players genders.


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## Andor (Aug 8, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Now, for those of you telling me that combat mechanics work as a model answer me this:  The orc attacks successfully the PC for 7 points of damage.  I narrate it as the PC falling backwards away from the attack, shaking in fear.
> 
> Prove me wrong.  Show me how your model precludes my narration.




Because in 2e or 3e (but not 4e or 5e so constraints on narration vary by edition.) I could heal some of that damage with the medicine skill, but not all of it.

In fact in 2e without treatment it would take a week to heal that damage fully. Have you ever been so badly frightened that you could still feel it a week later?

Plus of course there are rider effects that go along with damage like poison or disease checks from a dirty blade. If the PCs go slogging through a swamp and you make the wounded save vs getting infected wounds it's hard to justify without rolling back your original narration. If after the fight the haler bandaged a wound, it's hard to justify without rolling back the narration. 

You can cite Gary's HP explanation in the DMG all you want, but the fact is that Gary's intent is not the rules. Disease checks and bandages are the rules, and they break the narrative if you describe a blow which would cut a commoner in half as a frightening near miss. 

Oh, actually one more way it breaks narrative, many editions actually define shaking with fear with specific in game consequences ranging from failed morale checks to the 'shaken' condition. So unless you impose that condition in spite of the rules not calling for it, your breaking another set of rules by that narration.

In any event you keep asking question, and I see no sign that you are listening to the answers so I think I'm going to bow out of this thread. Enjoy the game, in whatever way you like to play it.


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## Imaro (Aug 8, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Here's an example, from 3e, of a mechanic I consider to be a pretty good "modelling" mechanic.
> 
> The Jump skill.  When I use the jump skill (presuming a running start), my distance is my final score in feet.  The entire event is modelled by the mechanics and we know mostly what happened.  The character moved at least ten feet, and then jumped X distance depending on his skill and die roll.  How did he move from A to B?  He jumped.  Did he reach B?  Well, that depends on the check.  And, as an added bonus, the player can choose not to overshoot the mark if he rolls higher than the distance he wants to jump.
> 
> ...




What did the orc attack the PC with... did the PC take damage from the damage dice of the weapon or did he take falling damage?  Is the PC suffering the fear condition?  Did he move backwards on the grid or in theatre of the mind? Were those the PC's last 7 hp's?  Was the PC below 0 hp's?


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## Hussar (Aug 8, 2014)

Imaro said:


> I'm curious if your 15-25% sim D&D takes into account the various rules options that arose in 3.x, or even stuff like the Skills & Powers/historical splats in AD&D 2e? I mentioned the optional 3.5 rules earlier because I think it's a pretty important point.
> 
> I also am curious what percentage narrativist would you say D&D is?
> 
> Finally if these optional rules can get D&D to 60% or more sim then is it still a poor choice for simulationism, especially given such factors as the size of it's fanbase, familiarity with rules, availability, etc.?




I believe this is proving my point.  In order to get D&D to a point where you actually have a sim model based game, you pretty much have to eject most of the core elements of the game and replace them with other mechanics, all of which are based on the idea of the mechanics modelling events.

At that point, are you even really playing D&D anymore?  Once you've rewritten HP, reworked the combat system, added in a skill system that actually models activity, rejiggered stats, reconfigured levels and what levels mean in the game, I'd argue you aren't even playing D&D anymore.  

But, be that as it may, that's my point.  D&D is a very poor fit for sim style games to the point where you have to go out and buy several supplements just to get it to the point where it's equal to another system.  Not better, just equal.  Why not start with that other system?


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## evileeyore (Aug 8, 2014)

Bluenose said:


> I'd love to see someone try and defend turn-based combat as a mechanic that simulates what's actually happening, which I don't think even OotS has touched on.



They've touched it.  Made a number of "Suprise round" jokes about turn sequencing.




Imaro said:


> I'm curious if your 15-25% sim D&D takes into account the various rules options that arose in 3.x, or even stuff like the Skills & Powers/historical splats in AD&D 2e? I mentioned the optional 3.5 rules earlier because I think it's a pretty important point.



I don't know all the options.  My group was playing _GURPS_ and Shadowrun when the real glut of supplements came out for 3e.



> I also am curious what percentage narrativist would you say D&D is?



First I define Narrativist as "Having mechanics to place the power of scene Narration in the Players hands".  It's why I've been seperating "narration" (what the DM does all the time) from "narrativist" in my arguments.

OD&D, AD&D, BECMI, 3e = Basically none.  The PCs have little to no narrative control outside their own characters actions, much of which may require actual skill checks.  While I do understand that by GNS Theory this still means they have some Narrative control, I'm not counting it.

4e = I'm not sure.  I think there were some narrative powers, but little of it exist outside combat and mostly serves the gamist side of the house.  I'm willing to accept I may be wrong in labeling 4e "little to no narrativism".

5e = There is a clear Narrativist Mechanic in the Inspiration points.  Not sure how much it'll play in 5e, we'll see.

GURPS = I've been remis in mentioning that _GURPS_ has a strong Narrativist mechanic in EXP expenditure in game.  It's fairly broad in the narrative powers it places in PCs hands, but it requires ST/Player negotiation and is limited by how many EXP the Player wants to spend (and _GURPS_ awards far, far less EXP than D&D does, like 5 points per session).

It doesn't come into play often, so I tend to forget it until something extreme comes up (like impending character death).



> Finally if these optional rules can get D&D to 60% or more sim then is it still a poor choice for simulationism...



If it could hit 60% sim (in my eyes) then sure, I'd be happy to call it sim.

It would need to lose levels, classes, proficiencies, and redo HP to get passed 30-40% though, so I doubt it could happen.



> ...especially given such factors as the size of it's fanbase, familiarity with rules, availability, etc.?



None of this matters in the least to me.

Monopoly is popular, has a vast rules familiarity and availability and it's still a [GRANDMA FILTER] economics sim.  And a terrible game, but the later is purely my opinion.




Imaro said:


> I don't think 2-3 rules (hit points, initiative, and well I can't think of another offhand that's been brought up) out of all the rules in D&D are enough to ruin that for most people.



For most people?  Clearly not as D&D is the "most popular" tabletop rpg on the market.

But of the top of my head:  Levels, Classes, HP, turn sequencing, AC, Magic, Healing, Proficiences, and Movement rates all fall pretty deeply into "gamist/non-sim" for me.


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## Hussar (Aug 8, 2014)

Andor said:


> Because in 2e or 3e (but not 4e or 5e so constraints on narration vary by edition.) I could heal some of that damage with the medicine skill, but not all of it.
> 
> In fact in 2e without treatment it would take a week to heal that damage fully. Have you ever been so badly frightened that you could still feel it a week later?




PTSD?  I imagine having some knife wielding monster trying to carve out my spleen might leave some emotional scars.



> Plus of course there are rider effects that go along with damage like poison or disease checks from a dirty blade. If the PCs go slogging through a swamp and you make the wounded save vs getting infected wounds it's hard to justify without rolling back your original narration. If after the fight the haler bandaged a wound, it's hard to justify without rolling back the narration.




Interesting you mention bandaging the wound.  What skill would that be?  Could the healer not simply give the wounded PC a good talking to, make him feel better?  What wound?  Where is this wound?  What kind of wound is it?  



> You can cite Gary's HP explanation in the DMG all you want, but the fact is that Gary's intent is not the rules. Disease checks and bandages are the rules, and they break the narrative if you describe a blow which would cut a commoner in half as a frightening near miss.
> 
> Oh, actually one more way it breaks narrative, many editions actually define shaking with fear with specific in game consequences ranging from failed morale checks to the 'shaken' condition. So unless you impose that condition in spite of the rules not calling for it, your breaking another set of rules by that narration.
> 
> In any event you keep asking question, and I see no sign that you are listening to the answers so I think I'm going to bow out of this thread. Enjoy the game, in whatever way you like to play it.




Fear only results in the shaken condition or a failed morale check?  Really?  How do you explain dying from fear spells then?  Phantasmal Killer lets me kill you with fear.  Even standard illusions can render you unconscious through fear.  

"A blow that would kill a commoner" is being described as a minor scratch in your version though.  How is that consistent?  Oh, right, HP are also turning serious wounds into minor ones.  Only, sometimes they aren't.  Sometimes HP are just gobs of meat.  Only, thing is, we never really know which is which.


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## Hussar (Aug 8, 2014)

Imaro said:


> What did the orc attack the PC with... did the PC take damage from the damage dice of the weapon or did he take falling damage?  Is the PC suffering the fear condition?  Did he move backwards on the grid or in theatre of the mind? Were those the PC's last 7 hp's?  Was the PC below 0 hp's?




What difference do any of these questions make, other than the one where the attack kills the PC?  We've already said that the combat mechanics will tell you alive from dead, but nothing else.  

I'm sorry, but, what's the difference between weapon damage dice and falling damage dice?  It's all just ablating HP.  There's no "falling damage" type.  The different damage types in 3e and 4e are a nod towards simulation, I suppose, but, largely, they're gamist elements so that you can play rock/paper/scissors with various damage reductions.  Barring damage reduction, there is absolutely no difference between a slashing weapon that does d8 damage and a piercing or bludgeoning weapon that does d8 damage.  They are all identical.  All of them reduce the target's HP by the same amount.

So, again, show me how I am precluded from this narration?  Andor gave a pretty decent shot at it with the healing rates.  But, even then, I can come up with narration that fits.  It's certainly as believable as any other narration.  Just because you happen not to like it, doesn't really invalidate it.  Part of the damage is the PC twisting his ankle as he falls back, part of it is mental.  

Or, maybe, I describe the 7 HP loss as a complete miss.  All the attack did was ablate his God Protection.  Again, you cannot refute these narrations using the mechanics.  The healer talks to the PC and makes him feel better, utters a prayer over him, and he regains a d4 ((I misremember how first aid worked in 2e)) HP.  In a D&D world, why would the Heal skill not include invocations to gods?  After all, I'm being told that HP are real in the game world.  They are a measurable, quantifiable element.  We know that gods restore HP.  So, again, why would the Heal skill not include that as well?  Why does the Heal skill automatically mean Saint John's First Aid?


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 8, 2014)

Andor said:


> In fact in 2e without treatment it would take a week to heal that damage fully. Have you ever been so badly frightened that you could still feel it a week later?



 I haven't.  But it certainly happens to people.  Not just for a week but for /years/.  Psychological trauma.

By the same token, if you're stabbed you might fully recover in a few weeks - or, you might have a lasting impairment for years due to a nerve being severed or scar tissue restricting freedom of movement or whatever.

There's a /lot/ of things D&D hps don't remotely model well or accurately.   In fact, apart from plot armor, it's safe to say hps model /nothing/ accurately (probably part of Hussar's point, though I don't exactly agree with it).  

But you can't say 7hps of damage model a stab wound any better than a psuedo-hit that affects morale, fatigue, divine favor or other non-physical rationalizations that EGG outlined in the 1e DMG in 1979.



> Plus of course there are rider effects that go along with damage like poison or disease checks from a dirty blade.



 Again asked and answered (by EGG) in 1979:  a successful poison save represented a psuedo-hit with no actual wound to become envenomed.



> You can cite Gary's HP explanation in the DMG all you want, but the fact is that Gary's intent is not the rules. Disease checks and bandages are the rules, and they break the narrative if you describe a blow which would cut a commoner in half as a frightening near miss.



 He wrote the rules, and there was no clear line between rules and commentary on rules in 1e AD&D.   If the mechanics didn't match his intent as stated in the DMG, in your judgement, 35 years later, maybe he didn't write them well enough /for you/ (it was still the early days of the hobby, afterall).  But it was also his intent that those using the rules (DMs, that is) wouldn't let them get in the way of the greater game, but use them as a starting point.  So if the rules 'broke your narrative,' you'd've just tweaked them or created a less fragile or more flexible narrative.  EGG's treatise on hps was apparently in response to people taking some sort of all-meat view of hps, then asserting that gaining hps with level was somehow 'impossible.'  So he offered a more flexible explanation than all-meat.



> Oh, actually one more way it breaks narrative, many editions actually define shaking with fear with specific in game consequences ranging from failed morale checks to the 'shaken' condition. So unless you impose that condition in spite of the rules not calling for it, your breaking another set of rules by that narration.



 That /is/ an inconsistency - not that D&D rules haven't often been inconsistent.


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## Imaro (Aug 8, 2014)

Hussar said:


> What difference do any of these questions make, other than the one where the attack kills the PC?  We've already said that the combat mechanics will tell you alive from dead, but nothing else.




Yet just below this you admit certain editions tell you type of damage (regardless of your own personal views on why) so again you're wrong the game gives us more information than nothing... and that was my point. 



Hussar said:


> I'm sorry, but, what's the difference between weapon damage dice and falling damage dice?  It's all just ablating HP.  There's no "falling damage" type.  The different damage types in 3e and 4e are a nod towards simulation, I suppose, but, largely, they're gamist elements so that you can play rock/paper/scissors with various damage reductions.  Barring damage reduction, there is absolutely no difference between a slashing weapon that does d8 damage and a piercing or bludgeoning weapon that does d8 damage.  They are all identical.  All of them reduce the target's HP by the same amount.




Lol, so except for the differences... there are no differences.  Again it seems like you have some imaginary line you've created where some differences matter and others don't for purposes of proving your point... either there are differences (which means your assertion that we know nothing except whether someone is dead or alive is false) or there are no differences in which case you are correct.  But you don't get to dismiss the differences because they don't support your assertion...



Hussar said:


> So, again, show me how I am precluded from this narration?  Andor gave a pretty decent shot at it with the healing rates.  But, even then, I can come up with narration that fits.  It's certainly as believable as any other narration.  Just because you happen not to like it, doesn't really invalidate it.  Part of the damage is the PC twisting his ankle as he falls back, part of it is mental.




You can describe something however you want... I can call a cat a dog but that doesn't make it true.  Mechanically your character didn't take falling damage  and suffered no fear condition... it was pretty easy, the only reason I asked those questions was to show we actually do have more information than dead or alive... 



Hussar said:


> Or, maybe, I describe the 7 HP loss as a complete miss.  All the attack did was ablate his God Protection.  Again, you cannot refute these narrations using the mechanics.  The healer talks to the PC and makes him feel better, utters a prayer over him, and he regains a d4 ((I misremember how first aid worked in 2e)) HP.  In a D&D world, why would the Heal skill not include invocations to gods?  After all, I'm being told that HP are real in the game world.  They are a measurable, quantifiable element.  We know that gods restore HP.  So, again, why would the Heal skill not include that as well?  Why does the Heal skill automatically mean Saint John's First Aid?




Because the heal skill can be used by the faithless with the same result...


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## Imaro (Aug 8, 2014)

Andor said:


> In any event you keep asking question, and I see no sign that you are listening to the answers so I think I'm going to bow out of this thread. Enjoy the game, in whatever way you like to play it.




Yeah, I feel the same way about this thread, that there's no real desire for understanding of why... only a reason to try and prove people wrong.  well about to go grab a 5e PHB... Peace!!


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## evileeyore (Aug 8, 2014)

Imaro said:


> Because the heal skill can be used by the faithless with the same result...



Just because the character has rejected ZOD doesn't mean ZOD has rejected the character..


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## Hussar (Aug 9, 2014)

A cure light wounds spell works on the faithless as well.  What's your point?

A character takes damage from slashing or piercing or bludgeoning, all for the same HP damage.  What difference is there between those three wounds?  Do they heal at different rates?  Do they have different effects on the character?  AFAIK, they don't.  Taking 7 HP of bludgeoning, piercing or slashing damage makes absolutely no mechanical difference.  

So, [MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION], in your opinion, what's the point of having the three damage types?  I mean, that was a 3e addition to the rules.  Apparently we managed to play D&D for twenty years without it.  So, what did adding those three damage types add to the game and what impact did they have on combat mechanics?

And, again, what falling?  In my example, the character didn't fall, he stumbled back.  Sorry, the example was unclear, and that was my bad.  I meant that he stumbled back away from the attack, and got scared.  HP contain morale - the will to keep fighting -  do they not?  I'm pretty sure that the definition of HP does include that concept at least in some versions of D&D.

In AD&D, the loss of HP caused morale checks, so, there is definitely a correlation between HP and morale.


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## Savage Wombat (Aug 9, 2014)

Hussar said:


> In AD&D, the loss of HP caused morale checks, so, there is definitely a correlation between HP and morale.




I wouldn't include this in your example - the obvious implication is that an injured or threatened foe might flee, not that morale composes a portion of your HP total.  Pemerton's repeated use of Phantasmal Killer works better.


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 9, 2014)

Hussar said:


> In AD&D, the loss of HP caused morale checks, so, there is definitely a correlation between HP and morale.



 Well, except that PCs had hps, but didn't check morale.


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## Bluenose (Aug 9, 2014)

evileeyore said:


> First I define Narrativist as "Having mechanics to place the power of scene Narration in the Players hands".  It's why I've been seperating "narration" (what the DM does all the time) from "narrativist" in my arguments.
> 
> OD&D, AD&D, BECMI, 3e = Basically none.  The PCs have little to no narrative control outside their own characters actions, much of which may require actual skill checks.  While I do understand that by GNS Theory this still means they have some Narrative control, I'm not counting it.
> 
> ...




Would you class Action Points (either the 3e "I get a bonus to this roll" or the 4e "I get an extra action" version) as Narrativist or as Gamist? 

I'm amused to note that Inspiration Points are already being talked about as terrible metagaming in some places, btw. At least one person claims they're horribly anti-Sim, because trying harder when things that matter to you are involved is already taken into account by the die roll and you shouldn't get any bonuses for it.


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## Hussar (Aug 9, 2014)

Tony Vargas said:


> Well, except that PCs had hps, but didn't check morale.




Shhhh. Quiet. NPC's and pcs are identical dontchaknow. Pointing to their differences is taboo. 

And [MENTION=1932]Savage Wombat[/MENTION] - I dunno. You lose hp, your morale fails and you run away. Sure sounds like you Eleanor out of morale.


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## evileeyore (Aug 9, 2014)

Bluenose said:


> Would you class Action Points (either the 3e "I get a bonus to this roll" or the 4e "I get an extra action" version) as Narrativist or as Gamist?



Gamist.  It's a "results orientated" mechanic, not a "controls the narrative" mechanic.

Note, just because I lazily lump Inspiration Points under the "Narrativist" hood (as well as In Play EXP Expenditures in _GURPS_), doesn't mean that's all they can affect in my judgement.  Both can purely affect die rolls, which is gamist, both can inject player narration.  They do double duty, but for lazy conveince I toss the N label at them.

I r lazy game philosopher.




> I'm amused to note that Inspiration Points are already being talked about as terrible metagaming in some places, btw. At least one person claims they're horribly anti-Sim, because trying harder when things that matter to you are involved is already taken into account by the die roll and you shouldn't get any bonuses for it.



I laugh at them and draw mustaches on their avatars, that's about the level of respect I have for that way of thinking.*

Now, if someone hates it in and tosses it from their games, that's their biz.



* In _GURPS_ "trying harder" is incorporated into the rules via Fatigue expenditure (called Extra Effort - this is for physical actions only though**).  You can get a small bonus to a die roll but risk injuring yourself.  Granted D&D has always treated HP as Fatigue, so this solution might not work as well here.

** For any "extra effort" type bonus _GURPS_ allows for EXP Expenditure to affect die rolls.  But this is a costly solution over the long run.  But then when it's a "character death or spend a few EXP" situation... the cost is justified.


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## Greg K (Aug 9, 2014)

Hussar said:


> So, [MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION], in your opinion, what's the point of having the three damage types?  I mean, that was a 3e addition to the rules.  Apparently we managed to play D&D for twenty years without it.  So, what did adding those three damage types add to the game and what impact did they have on combat mechanics?




The damage types existed in 1e and 2e.

I don't have access to my 1e PHB so I can't say one way or the other if it specifically makes any mention of damage types.  I wouldn't be surprised if the weapon vs. armor table was taking damage type vs armor via the bonus and penalties to hit.

However, different damage types mentioned with different effects do appear in the Monster Manual skeleton entry:
Skeletons "suffer only one-half damage from sharp and/or edged weapons (such as spears, dagers,swords). Blunt weapons such as clubs, maces, flails, etc. score normal damage)".​

For 2e: Weapons are listed with a  Damage Type (or multiple types)  in the PHB"  B=Blunt, P=Piercing, and/or S=Slashing. The damage type could alter a weapon's effectiveness against different armor types if using the optional weapon type vs. optional type. 
Despite the optional  effectiveness vs. armor, the damage type again has varied effectiveness against some monsters. From the 2e Skeleton entry:
"The fact that they are mostly empty means that edged or piercing weapons (like swords, daggers, and spears) inflict only half damage when employed against skeletons. Blunt weapons, with larger heads designed to break and crush bones, cause normal damage against skeletons."​
So even if people ignored the weapon vs. armor table in 1e and the optional weapon type vs armor rule from 2e, certain monsters were affected differently by different weapon damage types in the 20 years before 3e.


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 9, 2014)

Bluenose said:


> I'm amused to note that Inspiration Points are already being talked about as terrible metagaming in some places, btw. At least one person claims they're horribly anti-Sim, because trying harder when things that matter to you are involved is already taken into account by the die roll and you shouldn't get any bonuses for it.



I'm not sure whether it's meta-gaming, but I still think it's _weird_. 

I mean, it seems kind of heavy-handed whenever the game mechanics tell you how your character is supposed to _feel_ about something. If it's _my_ character, then I should know how she would react to whatever situation, without the game needing to tell me. But there's also strong precedent for non-magical abilities that _make_ a character afraid (going all the way back) or inspired (going back at least as far as the 3.0 bard). So clearly that's not the issue.

I think the part that gets me is the _choice_. The part where you actually choose _how_ that inspiration manifests. The character is inspired, and we all agree on that, but that inspiration manifests in exactly one die roll of your choice.

And like I said, I'm not entirely sure that it's a meta-game thing. I can see how it's something that the character is aware of. I'm just not sure if the choice makes sense as something that the character would be aware of. I don't know that the _character_ can decide that it really wants to resist this one spell, or just really make sure that this next attack actually lands. It seems like something that would just _happen_​.


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## Hussar (Aug 10, 2014)

Greg K said:


> The damage types existed in 1e and 2e.
> 
> I don't have access to my 1e PHB so I can't say one way or the other if it specifically makes any mention of damage types.  I wouldn't be surprised if the weapon vs. armor table was taking damage type vs armor via the bonus and penalties to hit.
> 
> ...




So, yup, rock paper scissors vs damage reduction.  Note, oozes also had differing effects based on what you hit them with.  

Damage was never affected by damage type though otherwise.  

Note, I'm looking at the 1e PHB right now, and nope, no differentiation by weapon type.  And it was an optional rule in 2e which had zero affect on damage, which is what we're discussing.  At most, it gave you a bonus or penalty to hit.  IME, it was a rule that was not used, much like the weapon vs armour table in 1e.  But, to be fair, I didn't realise that they added this in in 2e.    Learn something new.

But, we were discussing an orc hitting a PC.  So, since he's already hit, the modifiers don't matter do they?  The orc did 7 points of damage.  What damage type was it?  You can't actually tell until you name the weapon, but, in any case, makes absolutely no difference mechanically.  7 points of piercing damage has an identical effect as 7 points of bludgeoning damage.  They heal at the same rate, they have the same impact on the character, everything is identical.  Again, it's rock-scissors-paper.  At best, we're talking a pretty thin veneer of simulation on a model that is a black box as soon as initiative is rolled.

Ok, since we're talking about models, explain this.  Fighter one takes 30 points of damage in a single hit.  Fighter two gets hit 5 times for 6 points each.  Why do they heal at exactly the same rate?  It's not like the body heals in serial.  Shouldn't fighter 2 heal faster?  

And, again, I'll ask, why can't both characters have simply lost morale HP?  What in your model precludes that?  Or entirely "God touched" HP?  I mean, if you have a simulation, you should be able to tell me, definitively, that some things didn't happen.  A model should exclude some results shouldn't it?


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 10, 2014)

Hussar said:


> The orc did 7 points of damage.  What damage type was it?  You can't actually tell until you name the weapon, but, in any case, makes absolutely no difference mechanically.



It was blunt trauma, because the armor you are wearing spreads the impact of either a sharp or bludgeoning weapon over a larger area. 



Hussar said:


> Ok, since we're talking about models, explain this.  Fighter one takes 30 points of damage in a single hit.  Fighter two gets hit 5 times for 6 points each.  Why do they heal at exactly the same rate?  It's not like the body heals in serial.  Shouldn't fighter 2 heal faster?



The body needs to spread its effort out over a larger area, in trying to recover from multiple wounds simultaneously. All six wounds heal at the same time, but at one-sixth of the rate of the single large wound.


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## Hussar (Aug 10, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> It was blunt trauma, because the armor you are wearing spreads the impact of either a sharp or bludgeoning weapon over a larger area.
> 
> The body needs to spread its effort out over a larger area, in trying to recover from multiple wounds simultaneously. All six wounds heal at the same time, but at one-sixth of the rate of the single large wound.




ROTFLMAO.  Now, how did I get poisoned then?  After all, all I took was blunt trauma.  Andor has gone to considerable lengths to claim that damage type matters because of poison.  Also, how does that work with a piercing weapon?  Or are you now claiming that a character in armour never actually takes any wounds other than bruising or blunt force trauma?

And, why am I healing slower?  Really?  And you have no problems with this?  That's your believable justification?  And, anything with regeneration heals slower if you cut it more times than if you just cut it once?  

That's some pretty straws you're grasping there.


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 10, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Or are you now claiming that a character in armour never actually takes any wounds other than bruising or blunt force trauma?



An unarmored combatant who gets hit by a greataxe would just die, and that makes for a poor game. Fortunately, as Gygax pointed out, even Conan wears armor in combat. 



Hussar said:


> And, why am I healing slower?  Really?  And you have no problems with this?  That's your believable justification?



Do four cracked ribs heal at the exact same rate as one cracked rib, or does it take longer? I'm not a doctor, so the concept isn't immediately intuitive, and I could be convinced either way.


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## Hussar (Aug 10, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> An unarmored combatant who gets hit by a greataxe would just die, and that makes for a poor game. Fortunately, as Gygax pointed out, even Conan wears armor in combat.
> 
> Do four cracked ribs heal at the exact same rate as one cracked rib, or does it take longer? I'm not a doctor, so the concept isn't immediately intuitive, and I could be convinced either way.




Unarmored combatants get hit by greataxes all the time in D&D though.  Or are you now saying that a "hit" is not necessarily a physical impact?

One cracked rib is hardly as serious an injury as four though.  We should be comparing 4 relatively minor wounds of equal severity (since HP damage doesn't get worse as we lose HP - does it?  Do we take a more serious wound if we've already taken previous wounds, even if the HP loss is the same) to a single, very serious wound.  Compare four fractured ribs to a five inch deep stab wound.  After all, our 30 point wound is enough to kill a horse, so it should be considerably more severe than a 6 point wound, shouldn't it?

See, this is my point.  The black box abstraction of D&D combat doesn't actually tell us the answer to any of this.  Not even a hint.  We really have no idea what a 20 point wound looks like.  We don't even know what a 1 HP wound looks like.  It's when we try to reify the abstraction, to make it real, that it falls apart.  A model, virtually any model, would tell us some of these answers.  Distinguishing between types of damage is a granularity issue, really, because it doesn't really matter what killed you, you're still dead.  But, we cannot even definitively say if a hit really makes physical contact or not.  Thus the whole Damage on a Miss thing.  To be fair, we also can't definitively state if a miss is a complete miss or just a non-damaging strike or something else.

The mechanics simply don't tell us this.  I just can't understand why you and others are claiming that the mechanics do tell us these things.  At best, at the very edge of things, you might have circumstantial evidence - the character was poisoned, so, he must have been injected somehow, but, then, even that's not necessarily true.  Maybe some of the poison flew off the weapon and into the target's mouth.  Maybe the weapon wiped some poison off on the target, dealing no damage, but, when the character touched the spot, he became poisoned through the open wounds on his hand.  I don't know.  

But, the point is, neither do you.


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 10, 2014)

Hussar said:


> The mechanics simply don't tell us this.  I just can't understand why you and others are claiming that the mechanics do tell us these things.



The thing that you're missing is that the mechanics _can_ tell us this, if we want them to. Because the players (and mostly the DM) are in charge of actually detailing the narrative, they _can_ entirely decide that X mechanic corresponds to Y situation in the game world. The game doesn't _require_ that you do this, but since the rules are consistent, you have that option to do so.

For some people, it is very important that the rules are consistent enough to allow for that.


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## pemerton (Aug 10, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> I'm not sure whether it's meta-gaming, but I still think it's _weird_.



Two RPGs that I know of in which a PC's prospect of success depends on the emotional stakes of the situation are HeroWars/Quest and The Riddle of Steel.

In TRoS, in an appropriate situation a player can invoke his/her PC's Spiritual Attributes, which confers bonus dice. The game is mechanically balanced such that PCs will tend to lose conflicts unless SAs are in play.

In HW/Q, relationships are rated just like any other ability, and can be used as augments just like any other ability. So when a PC is fighting his/her father's killer, for instance, "Revenge against my father's killer" rating can be used to add a bonus to the "Fighting" rating which otherwise wouldn't be available.

The idea is to give the player an incentive to take his/her PC into situations in which the emotional stakes are higher.



Saelorn said:


> as Gygax pointed out, even Conan wears armor in combat.



The first counter-example that comes to mind is Tower of the Elephant, in which Conan fights a lion, among other things.

As [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] points out, a lot of damage is dealt in D&D by deadly attacks against unarmoured PCs. And poisoning occurs, too.


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 11, 2014)

pemerton said:


> The first counter-example that comes to mind is Tower of the Elephant, in which Conan fights a lion, among other things.



I think Gygax's point was that the rules should be designed to work for the majority of situations, and merely hope to not fail catastrophically in those off cases. If the game rules don't work so great when modelling axe v bare flesh, then that's because they weren't designed to.

Which is fine, because it's not something that comes up much. Have you ever noticed how most of these arguments, on both sides, go down to corner-case examples? No model is perfect, and if we're going to make compromises for playability, that's where I'd want the sacrifices to be.


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## Hussar (Aug 11, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> The thing that you're missing is that the mechanics _can_ tell us this, if we want them to. Because the players (and mostly the DM) are in charge of actually detailing the narrative, they _can_ entirely decide that X mechanic corresponds to Y situation in the game world. The game doesn't _require_ that you do this, but since the rules are consistent, you have that option to do so.
> 
> For some people, it is very important that the rules are consistent enough to allow for that.




Oh, sure, you can.  I accept that.  But, that's not the rules.  That's entirely on you.  Essentially are free forming.  The table has a gentlemen's agreement that narration will follow a particular route.  However, that's not the mechanics doing that, that's you.

It's not consistency though since the consistency also comes from the players, not the rules.  It is 100% consistent to narrate a hit as a near miss.  You might not like that narration, and that's fine, but it is still consistent with the mechanics.


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## Hussar (Aug 11, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> I think Gygax's point was that the rules should be designed to work for the majority of situations, and merely hope to not fail catastrophically in those off cases. If the game rules don't work so great when modelling axe v bare flesh, then that's because they weren't designed to.
> 
> Which is fine, because it's not something that comes up much. Have you ever noticed how most of these arguments, on both sides, go down to corner-case examples? No model is perfect, and if we're going to make compromises for playability, that's where I'd want the sacrifices to be.




Wait, what?  Axe vs unarmored happens all the time.  Unless all you use in your game is armoured humanoids.  What happens when you hit a Mind Flayer, Minotaur, Medusa or Mummy with an axe?  After all, none of those are remotely armoured and a Minotaur especially is basically just a human.  The vast majority of monsters don't wear armour and most of them don't have much in the way of "natural armour" either.  What blunt force trauma am I doing to a Harpy?  And, note, that "natural armour" is a 3e only element as well.  

Hits vs unarmored opponents are hardly corner case.


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## Lwaxy (Aug 11, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> Do four cracked ribs heal at the exact same rate as one cracked rib, or does it take longer? I'm not a doctor, so the concept isn't immediately intuitive, and I could be convinced either way.




Sure they do. Why would they not? Cells grow back at the same rate in all ribs. And they take a few weeks to heal, so all the timing in D&D is generally off anyway unless you involve magic. People just don't heal damage overnight.


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## pemerton (Aug 11, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> I think Gygax's point was that the rules should be designed to work for the majority of situations, and merely hope to not fail catastrophically in those off cases. If the game rules don't work so great when modelling axe v bare flesh, then that's because they weren't designed to.
> 
> Which is fine, because it's not something that comes up much. Have you ever noticed how most of these arguments, on both sides, go down to corner-case examples?





Hussar said:


> Wait, what?  Axe vs unarmored happens all the time.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> Hits vs unarmored opponents are hardly corner case.



I have to say, I'm with Hussar here. He's given examples of NPCs/monsters.

Of AD&D character's I've GMed, I remember a slew of MUs (no armour), lots of thieves (leather armour or no armour, depending on magical items), a kensai (no armour) as well as, of course, heavily armoured clerics, fighters and similar warrior types.

In my Rolemaster campaign plenty of PCs have been unarmoured mages and monk/martial-artist types, who would similarly have been unarmoured in their AD&D analogues.

In my 4e campaign the unarmoured wizard took plenty of hits. And the unarmoured sorcerer still does! And two PCs are in hide armour, which is probably not converting all the damage from a frost giant's axe into blunt force trauma if you actually get collected by the sharp edge! Only the fighter and paladin wear heavy armour that is feasibly protecting the whole body. Even then, the largest amount of damage the paladin has taken recently is from being swallowed by a remorhaz (20 hp + 20 hp fire damage per round). When he finally cut himself out of the dead remorhaz, having taken, I would guess, well over 100 hp of damage, I'm not 100% sure what he looked like - a bit singed at least! - but I find it hard to conceive of that in terms of his armour protecting him from otherwise fatal damage.


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 11, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Wait, what?  Axe vs unarmored happens all the time.  Unless all you use in your game is armoured humanoids.  What happens when you hit a Mind Flayer, Minotaur, Medusa or Mummy with an axe?



Mind Flayers aren't part of the OGL, but Medusas have skin that is the equivalent of hide armor, Minotaurs have skin like chainmail, and Mummies are equivalent of +2 full plate. Even a Harpy has a natural armor bonus (or, in AD&D terms, an unarmored AC lower than 10).

The only things that _aren't_ armored, and can still conceivably take a few solid hits from an axe, are high-level wizards and monks. Who are magic.


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## Hussar (Aug 11, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> Mind Flayers aren't part of the OGL, but Medusas have skin that is the equivalent of hide armor, Minotaurs have skin like chainmail, and Mummies are equivalent of +2 full plate. Even a Harpy has a natural armor bonus (or, in AD&D terms, an unarmored AC lower than 10).
> 
> The only things that _aren't_ armored, and can still conceivably take a few solid hits from an axe, are high-level wizards and monks. Who are magic.




Hang on, that's shifting the goal posts.  You said that a hit from an axe was blunt force trauma due to armour.  A wizard can take a whack from an axe at 1st level with a decent Con score.  Are we now trying to say that wizards are inherently magical?  They're no longer just regular people because they study magic?

And, what does "skin like chain mail" actually mean?  Can I skin a Minotaur and make armour out of him?  Why or why not?  Why can't I make mummy armour?  That would be fantastic.  How does natural armour heal?  If it's as strong as steel, it shouldn't heal as quickly as flesh, more like breaking bone, so, do minotaurs heal slower?  A Harpy has a +1 natural armour bonus.  Ok, fine.  That's still weaker than any actual armour, so, how do you deal with axes hitting harpies?

"Because Magic" is a very, very poor answer in a simulationist model.  Do Monks and Wizards lose HP when in an anti-magic field?  Or if I cast Dispel Magic on either class, do they lose HP?  Note, also, people have gone to great lengths to tell me that they want to play the non-combat cleric who wears no armour but still adventures, so, that means that there are people out there who play unarmored characters who are not wizards or monks.  What do they do?

Trying to downplay this as "corner case" scenarios is not really fair IMO.  These aren't corner cases, these are pretty standard events that are likely going to come up every session.  An unarmored character isn't that rare is it?


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## Hussar (Aug 11, 2014)

Oh, and I'd point out that a Brown Bear has +5 Natural Armour bonus.  [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION], does that mean that I can't cut a bear with an axe in your game?  I hit a bear with an axe for 8 damage and it does only blunt force trauma, no actual bleeding wound?


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 11, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Hang on, that's shifting the goal posts.  You said that a hit from an axe was blunt force trauma due to armour.  A wizard can take a whack from an axe at 1st level with a decent Con score.  Are we now trying to say that wizards are inherently magical?  They're no longer just regular people because they study magic?



Yes, wizards are magical creatures, more resistant to injury than mere muggles. This is traditional lore. It need not be the case within every fictional reality, but it covers this one obvious gap within the D&D ruleset.

Or, more reasonably, the wizard has Mage Armor going, like the vast majority of wizards who expect combat at some point. Seriously, unarmored characters _are_ pretty rare. It's not worth adding substantial complexity to the ruleset in order to cover that.



Hussar said:


> Oh, and I'd point out that a Brown Bear has +5 Natural Armour bonus. @_*Saelorn*_ , does that mean that I can't cut a bear with an axe in your game? I hit a bear with an axe for 8 damage and it does only blunt force trauma, no actual bleeding wound?



The question was the type of wound suffered by a PC, which I posit would be blunt force, since the PC was wearing armor. Natural Armor doesn't necessarily work the same way as worn armor, even if we can model it in a similar way. In any simulation that is less complex than the underlying reality, you're going to get similar mechanics that represents multiple things within the game world. 

Bears are super tough, and it's unlikely to even feel an axe hit that isn't well placed. The bear's thick hide protects it in much the same way as chainmail, but they aren't identical. It's not necessary that it corresponds to an identical reality within the game world.


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## Hussar (Aug 11, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> Yes, wizards are magical creatures, more resistant to injury than mere muggles. This is traditional lore. It need not be the case within every fictional reality, but it covers this one obvious gap within the D&D ruleset.




What traditional lore would that be?  I'm drawing a blank here where wizards are more resistant to injury than anyone else.  Can you point me somewhere?



> Or, more reasonably, the wizard has Mage Armor going, like the vast majority of wizards who expect combat at some point. Seriously, unarmored characters _are_ pretty rare. It's not worth adding substantial complexity to the ruleset in order to cover that.




I get taken to task pretty hard for even beginning to claim any sort of universality to my experience.  I have to wonder why [MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION] and [MENTION=44640]bill[/MENTION]91 and [MENTION=957]BryonD[/MENTION] aren't taking you to task for the same thing.  Unarmored characters are not rare at all IME.  The wizard for one almost never has any armour on.  



> The question was the type of wound suffered by a PC, which I posit would be blunt force, since the PC was wearing armor. Natural Armor doesn't necessarily work the same way as worn armor, even if we can model it in a similar way. In any simulation that is less complex than the underlying reality, you're going to get similar mechanics that represents multiple things within the game world.




Note that your idea is actually directly in contradiction to what the rules say.  THere's absolutely nothing in the rules to support this.  The idea that if I put on a suit of armour, all damage becomes bludgeoning is not found anywhere in the mechanics and this is 100% on you.



> Bears are super tough, and it's unlikely to even feel an axe hit that isn't well placed. The bear's thick hide protects it in much the same way as chainmail, but they aren't identical. It's not necessary that it corresponds to an identical reality within the game world.




Umm, I think you really need to do a bit more research into this if you think a bear's skin is anywhere near as strong as riveted steel mesh.  You realise chain mail can actually stop bullets right?  Not high power rifle rounds, true, but, subsonic?  I'm pretty much going to stop subsonic rounds with chain mail.  Will likely hurt like hell, but, it will stop the round.  Bear skin will not stop bullets.  Heck, it won't even stop arrows and it certainly won't stop axe hits.

If it did, why on earth would I bother with chain mail?  Wouldn't it be a heck of a lot cheaper to use bear skins for armour if they were similar in effect?


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 11, 2014)

Hussar said:


> What traditional lore would that be?  I'm drawing a blank here where wizards are more resistant to injury than anyone else.  Can you point me somewhere?



 I vaguely remember one legend where the evil wizard had his heart in a casket somewhere, making him un-killable in person (you had to find the heart and destroy it).  Rather like the D&D lich and his phylactery.

And 'wizard' could be conflated with fey, spirit, or even god... and thus be immortal or incorporeal or some such.  

Finally, a wizard could be viewed as an elderly non-combatant.  So, and you had to just stand there and listen to the details of the curse he was putting on you, because killing him would be murder and shutting him up disrespectful to an elder.  ;P


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 11, 2014)

Hussar said:


> What traditional lore would that be?  I'm drawing a blank here where wizards are more resistant to injury than anyone else.  Can you point me somewhere?



If you recall the traditional arguments against Meat Points, magic is one of the many factors that go into Hit Points - magic is why you can have a wizard who doesn't die when hit by a frost giant's great axe. And since it's there, we might as well have it explain why that 40hp hit didn't cause your internal organs to go spilling. It's all connected.

Also: Harry Potter.



Hussar said:


> Unarmored characters are not rare at all IME.  The wizard for one almost never has any armour on.



I'm vaguely curious, back in Gygax's day, how many high-level Magic Users were wandering around with AC 10.



Hussar said:


> Note that your idea is actually directly in contradiction to what the rules say.  There's absolutely nothing in the rules to support this.  The idea that if I put on a suit of armour, all damage becomes bludgeoning is not found anywhere in the mechanics and this is 100% on you.



I didn't say that it became bludgeoning damage. I said that it inflicts blunt trauma. An axe deals slashing damage, which the body armor converts into blunt trauma. A maul deals bludgeoning damage, which the body armor converts into blunt trauma. Just because they have similar effects on an adventurer, that doesn't make it pointless to distinguish between them. For example, it's much easier to slash a rope than to bludgeon it, and skeletons don't particularly care about being pierced.



Hussar said:


> If it did, why on earth would I bother with chain mail?  Wouldn't it be a heck of a lot cheaper to use bear skins for armour if they were similar in effect?



It was just a quick example. Much of a bear's toughness also comes from its musculature and skeletal structure. The point is just that it's hard to hurt a bear, in much the same way that it's difficult to hurt someone wearing armor.

Also, armor in D&D is criminally under-valued. Good armor in real life is way better than its in-game statistics would have you believe.


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## Tony Vargas (Aug 11, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> I'm vaguely curious, back in Gygax's day, how many high-level Magic Users were wandering around with AC 10.



 High enough (16th) to make his own permanent magic items?  Or late enough in the game to cast Mage Armor?  None, obviously.  If you didn't get a brownie familiar or boots of speed for an 18 DEX /and/ bracers AC 2 (why, with it costing you a point of CON, either way, would you ever make anything but the best possible), not to mention any rings or cloaks of protection found on the way to such high level.  Negative AC was prettymuch inevitable.





> Also, armor in D&D is criminally under-valued. Good armor in real life is way better than its in-game statistics would have you believe.



 It does seem like AC has been awefully important in every version of D&D.  Maybe armor was never the only (nor even always best) way to get it, but it was certainly important.


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## innerdude (Aug 12, 2014)

I've been following this thread off and on, have caught most of the general "gist," but can't reply to any specific post. 

To reply to @_*Hussar*_'s original post / original question, "Why use D&D for a simulationist style game?" the answer is, because you don't know any better. 

Up until 2009, that's exactly where I would have been. I'd never seriously played any other game system other than D&D; my entire RPG history consisted of BECMI and 3.x. It would never have occurred to me to even attempt to use another system. If I was going to play a game, I would've wrangled D&D into what I wanted it to be.

It's interesting, because I read the post yesterday that statted up one of the Game of Thrones characters into a level 13 D&D 5 character. And I thought it was really cool. Until I saw that he had 147 hit points. And having now been thoroughly ensconced in Savage Worlds for a couple of years now, my mind just totally rebelled at the thought. Hit points? _And a 147 of them?_ Had the same reaction to 13th Age, when I found it wasn't uncommon for high-level enemies to have upwards of 300+ hit points. And I'm sorry, but just . . . no. I don't have any desire to try and track, justify, or otherwise rationalize how a 13th level fighter has 147 hit points any more. 

Savage Worlds has all kinds of gamist subsystems. Character advancement bears absolutely no relation to the "real world." The "soak a wound using an action point / benny" system is pure meta-game abstraction (though most of the rest of the damage system can be easily modeled to a reasonable "real world" analogue). But for all of its gamist / narrativist / meta-game "proud nails," Savage Worlds is BY FAR more "simulationist" in its approach to action resolution than D&D will ever be.

The reason is that where Savage Worlds feels the need to be simulationist, it generally adheres to those principles. When meta-game mechanics come front and center, they make zero attempt to weave their way into the rest of the game. It's not explicitly called out in the rules, but in play, the elements that are strictly metagame pretty much stay within the metagame, and don't intrude into other arenas. 

Frankly, I'm eternally grateful for the advent of 4e, for without it, I never would have been compelled to look at systems other than D&D. And discover systems that suited what I was looking for in an RPG much, much better than D&D---of any variety---ever will.

I think the confusion with D&D, 3.x in particular, comes because there's a dichotomy between the abstract combat elements of hit points and armor class, versus the more relatively "real world" modeling of the skill system. The skill system feels like it semi-accurately models a character's relative capability, and so suddenly the cry of "D&D is now simulationist!!" went up. As long as you limit your view of D&D's "simulationism" to that narrow component of the mechanics, it's actually reasonably accurate. It's fairly easy to envision how a particular bonus to a skill correlates to a "real world" equivalent. 

As soon as you expand your view to pretty much anything else in 3.x, claims of "simulationism" start to look dubious at best, or at the very least, rationalized by proponents through the view of an individualistic lens of what the "simulation" actually entails.


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## Hussar (Aug 12, 2014)

[MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] - can you point me to the D&D mechanics of "blunt force trauma"?


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 12, 2014)

Hussar said:


> @_*Saelorn*_  - can you point me to the D&D mechanics of "blunt force trauma"?



Why would you need specific mechanics for such a situation? The game effect is much like being burned or shocked - you take hit point damage, and then don't suffer penalties or meaningful debilitation because this is just a simplified model.


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## Hussar (Aug 12, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> Why would you need specific mechanics for such a situation? The game effect is much like being burned or shocked - you take hit point damage, and then don't suffer penalties or meaningful debilitation because this is just a simplified model.




Which is my original point - the addition of different damage types is largely pointless.  There's no difference between one or another.  You can add in the idea of "blunt force trauma" or "morale damage" or "loss of god protection" and it doesn't matter to the model because the model is not actually modelling anything.  It's abstract to the point where it isn't telling us anything.


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## pemerton (Aug 12, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> the wizard has Mage Armor going, like the vast majority of wizards who expect combat at some point.



The Armour spell was introduced into AD&D with UA. Before that, MUs relied on DEX or items.



Saelorn said:


> I'm vaguely curious, back in Gygax's day, how many high-level Magic Users were wandering around with AC 10.



Why are _high level_ MUs the relevant category? Most play is at low to mid-levels.

An AC of 8 (+1 DEX, +1 ring or cloak of protection) was pretty common for such characters up until 5th or higher level.


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 12, 2014)

Hussar said:


> Which is my original point - the addition of different damage types is largely pointless.  There's no difference between one or another.



There are still some meaningful differences when it comes to specific rules, but adding in damage types can allow you to bypass a whole lot of clutter on individual interactions. Things like skeleton not being stab-able, or rope being cut-able, are much easier to write out when you have damage types than when you need specific sentences for each thing. At some point, they decided that this method would save time and effort.

You could easily simplify it further, and just not care that skeletons are mostly empty space that doesn't care about being stabbed. The designers disagreed, though, because they thought it makes for a better game if you take those sorts of things into account.


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## pemerton (Aug 12, 2014)

innerdude said:


> I think the confusion with D&D, 3.x in particular, comes because there's a dichotomy between the abstract combat elements of hit points and armor class, versus the more relatively "real world" modeling of the skill system. The skill system feels like it semi-accurately models a character's relative capability, and so suddenly the cry of "D&D is now simulationist!!" went up. As long as you limit your view of D&D's "simulationism" to that narrow component of the mechanics, it's actually reasonably accurate.



My only quibble with this is that, once DCs for skill checks grow above 30, they have ceased to be simulationist in any deep sense: like the sky-high natural armour bonuses of high-CR creatures, the numbers are being chosen purely for gameplay purposes, and not with any conception of what they actually correlate with in the gameworld.


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 12, 2014)

pemerton said:


> Why are _high level_ MUs the relevant category? Most play is at low to mid-levels.



Because low-level Magic-Users, prior to the Death's Door optional rule, were actually really good about dying if an ogre hit them with an axe.


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## pemerton (Aug 12, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> Because low-level Magic-Users, prior to the Death's Door optional rule, were actually really good about dying if an ogre hit them with an axe.



Isn't AD&D or B/X ogre damage 1d10? (That's what OSRIC puts it at.)

So a 5th level MU has a pretty good chance of surviving a hit from an ogre. Especially if s/he has 15 CON.


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## The Crimson Binome (Aug 12, 2014)

pemerton said:


> Isn't AD&D or B/X ogre damage 1d10? (That's what OSRIC puts it at.)
> 
> So a 5th level MU has a pretty good chance of surviving a hit from an ogre. Especially if s/he has 15 CON.



I honestly can't say, since I started with AD&D 2E, but that edition had an ogre deal damage "by weapon +6" -- to account for their 18/00 Strength score. Or they could do 1d10 if they were unarmed, for some reason.

That puts an ogre with a great-axe at ~13 damage, which will outright kill a level 5 wizard lacking exceptional Constitution.


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## BryonD (Aug 12, 2014)

Hussar said:


> I have to wonder why ... and [MENTION=957]BryonD[/MENTION] aren't taking you to task for the same thing.  Unarmored characters are not rare at all IME.  The wizard for one almost never has any armour on.



Because I'm not paying any attention to this thread?
But, Hussar, it is good to know that going forward I can presume you agree with every statement you don't personally smack down.  It will make effective communication so much easier.....


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## pemerton (Aug 13, 2014)

Saelorn said:


> I honestly can't say, since I started with AD&D 2E, but that edition had an ogre deal damage "by weapon +6" -- to account for their 18/00 Strength score. Or they could do 1d10 if they were unarmed, for some reason.



This is quite different from OD&D and AD&D - which were Gygax's two editions!


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## Hussar (Aug 13, 2014)

And also not entirely accurate either:



			
				2e Monstrous Manual said:
			
		

> Ogres wielding weapons get a Strength bonus of +2 to hit; leaders have +3, chieftains have +4. Females fight as males but score only 2-8 points of damage and have a maximum of only 6 hit points per die. Young ogres fight as goblins.




Note, the +6 to damage with weapons is true.  However, here we have a perfect example of monsters and PC's using different rules.  If a monster has an 18/00 strength, why is he only getting a +2 to hit and not +3?  

The fact that Saelorn talks about a Greataxe (which doesn't appear in 2e), I think shows that he's working from memory, rather than actually from the rules.  Plus, his math seems very off, since a 5th level MU has a max HP of 20, and an average of 13 (well, 12.5) which means that an average 5th level MU has a pretty good chance of surviving a hit from our Ogre.  A 15 Con (which is what was posited) makes this largely guaranteed as our 5th level MU now has 17 HP on average.  

Never minding, of course, that our ogre would be using a club or battle axe for d6 or d8 damage.  At best a two handed sword for d10.  There wasn't anything bigger than that in 2e.

---------------

But this is all largely besides the point.  The thing is, Saelorn is perfectly fine with interpreting damage that way.  There's absolutely nothing preventing him from doing so.  Which is my point.  There's also nothing preventing me from interpreting it in a completely opposite manner.  The mechanics are 100% silent on the issue.  We simply don't know.

And that's the problem if you're trying to claim some sort of simulation model.  Since the model doesn't preclude any interpretation, it's pretty useless as a model.  I can say it's blunt force trauma or losing God Points, and nothing in the mechanics gainsays that.


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## Hussar (Aug 13, 2014)

BryonD said:


> Because I'm not paying any attention to this thread?
> But, Hussar, it is good to know that going forward I can presume you agree with every statement you don't personally smack down.  It will make effective communication so much easier.....




Heh.  You spent several posts taking me to task about something you thought I was saying that you thought was too broad.  I've yet to see you do this to anyone else.  I'm kind of wondering why you are so intent on what I say, but, completely ignore others doing the same thing.  It's almost like you're arguing the poster and not the post.


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## MichaelSomething (Aug 13, 2014)

Cause making a game really sim is hard...

http://www.polygon.com/2014/7/23/59...ush-your-cpu-because-creating-history-is-hard

With some basic rules and some DM elbow grease, D&D can get close enough to simulation for most peoples' taste (and for a fraction of the work that hard sim requires).   

It's also easier to get people to play D&D and add sim elements then it is to get people to play a sim game...


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## Dausuul (Aug 13, 2014)

I mostly hang out in the 5E forums, and didn't notice this thread until today. Since I'm the guy being quoted in the OP, I figure I should probably weigh in. I'll start by saying that I don't believe in simulationism.

And by that, I don't mean "I don't like simulationism" or "I don't think simulationism makes for a good game." I mean that I actually do not believe there is any such thing. More precisely, I think that "simulationism" is lumping together a whole lot of different goals one might pursue in an RPG--verisimilitude, immersion, historical accuracy, the narrative flowing naturally from the rules, high granularity in the rules--and treating them as a coherent agenda when they're nothing of the sort. Some people happen to value all those things, and you could call them "simulationists*," but you're not describing a distinct category of people, just picking the middle of a Venn diagram and slapping a label on it. I don't believe in gamism either, or narrativism, for much the same reasons.

So: With regard to my rant quoted in the OP, where am I coming from? Not "simulationism," certainly. I'd say my agenda is a combination of "immersion," "challenge," "verisimilitude," "ease of play," and "popularity." I want a game that is immersive, that allows me to "step into my character" and make decisions as my character would. I want a game that offers me (through my character) interesting choices, both tactical and personal. I want a game in which the fictional reality presented to me is a convincing facade, one that doesn't cause me to question what's going on during play**. I want a game where the mechanics are relatively light and I don't have to spend a lot of mental energy manipulating numbers. And finally, I want to be able to find other people to play it! D&D meets these requirements pretty well--not perfectly on any of them, but well enough on all that I don't feel the need to go through the time and effort of finding a game that meets them better and convincing my group to switch.

The question at issue was, "If you take ranger spells, and reskin them as non-magical abilities, does it matter that they have odd daily limits on their use?" I should first of all note that my rant suggests I care a lot more about this specific issue than I do; it's a nuisance, not a deal-breaker. It's been in D&D since days of yore, it's been bugging me that entire time, I live with it. But, I do object to many per-day abilities on immersion grounds. During play, I want to make decisions as my character would. If I am using a per-day ability, one of the factors weighing heavily in my decision-making is the knowledge that I only get limited use out of that ability per day--if I use it now, it may cost me a chance to use it later.

If my character has no such knowledge, that's a problem for me, because now I'm making decisions on the basis of out-of-character knowledge. My character doesn't have to know the exact numbers; when I play a barbarian, the barbarian doesn't have to know that she gets exactly 3 rages per day. (This is an acceptable concession for ease of play.) But she knows that raging is tiring and if she does it too much, she'll be too tired to do it again. I object to limits I can't easily explain in character.

[SIZE=-2]*Or possibly "narrativists," or maybe "gamists." My other problem with GNS is that the definitions of the words change radically depending on what hobbyhorse Ron Edwards is riding that day.

**The words "during play" are crucial here. I do not require that the rules be realistic; I only require that they don't make me stop and go "Huh?" in the heat of the game. I also don't mind making out-of-character decisions, like picking feats on level-up, when not at the table.[/SIZE]


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## Sword of Spirit (Aug 13, 2014)

Just now saw this thread, and am reticent to jump into a giganta-thread without reading it, but since the topic is something I've thought a lot about I thought I'd give a (relatively) brief response to the general topic.

D&D has varied widely b edition in which playstyles it is best suited to support. I'm going to go further and say that D&D is _unique_ in how much it has varied. I'm personally unaware of any other system that has had a complete switch from best supporting narrativist play to best supporting simulationist play (for example) due to an edition change. That's a huge part of the problem. D&D's supported playstyles has been a moving target by edition, and so you have people who see D&D so much differently than others do.

You don't, for instance, get people arguing that GURPS should be played in a narrativist manner, or Marvel Heroic Roleplaying should be viewed as a simulationist game, or Battletech is really best played if the GM takes the rules as loose guidelines and focuses on improvising. It's pretty simple to figure out what most systems are best able to support (which may actually be contrary to the intent of the designers! The field is still in its infancy and a high degree of design insight is a rare and elusive thing.)

So D&D suffers because it has run across the spectrum and has gamers seeing their version as the way D&D is supposed to be. It also has the issue of being egregiously incoherent in its design. Some systems are pretty far in one direction, and other systems pretty far into a different direction in a way that is incompatible. This leads to vast disagreement about the more "neutral" systems, based on your overall emphasized personal perspective on the game, colored by your own initial or defining experiences with anything that had the Dungeons & Dragons label on it.

Taking for granted that _all_ editions of D&D are incoherent (some parts of the system support one playstyle, while others support another, and they all have some systems that best support each style) my estimation of the overall support for the various playstyles by edition follows.

OD&D: I can't comment much on OD&D--I have no direct experience.
BECMI: Primarily gamist.
AD&D 1e: Simulationism with a minor in gamism.
AD&D 2e: The focus was on simulationism, with a minor in both narrativism and gamism.
3e: A hybrid of simulationism and gamism.
4e: A hybrid of narrativism and gamism.
5e: Appears to major in incoherence, with minors in all three of the styles.

Now, you have to also realize that D&D has always been only _moderate_ in any style. There has never been hard simulationism, strong narrativism, or finely-tuned gamism in _any_ edition of D&D (with the possible exception of allowing 4e to claim finely-tuned gamism).

So no one has grounds to claim that D&D has been hard/strong on any of the spectrums. At the same time, claiming that D&D of a particular edition _wasn't_ a particular style because it wasn't hard or strong in that style is a textbook strawman. Claims that D&D was simulationist or narrativist in edition X are only feasible when intepreted in meaning as saying this sort of thing: "3e D&D best supports a hybrid style of moderate simulationism and moderate gamism, while 4e best supports a hybrid style of moderate narrativism and moderate (though stronger) gamism." 

Trying to play a game outside of its intended style is a recipe for frustration. Unfortunately, due to the nature of D&D's incoherence, it is almost guaranteed that you will face that frustration if you attempt to play it with any sort of coherence. If you play it in a more casual manner and don't think too much about it, you may be able to avoid that. In other words, D&D is a game that is hard to play seriously, but which many of us are seriously passionate about.

5e is particularly difficult, because it attempts to more or less consciously support all three styles, and ends up supporting none of them all that well (er...even less well than other editions, I mean). The good news about 5e though, is that you can often make a few house rules (or hopefully apply some modules when the DMG comes out) to add or remove components that will diminish the elements of the game that are most discordant to your personal playstyle, and leave you with (what I personally consider) the best cross-edition expression of the D&D experience.

So, a few thoughts.


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## Neonchameleon (Aug 14, 2014)

Sword of Spirit said:


> OD&D: I can't comment much on OD&D--I have no direct experience.
> BECMI: Primarily gamist.
> AD&D 1e: Simulationism with a minor in gamism.
> AD&D 2e: The focus was on simulationism, with a minor in both narrativism and gamism.
> ...




You can only make that claim because you have no oD&D and limited BECMI experience.  oD&D is the most finely tuned and playtested gamist RPG in the history of RPGs, and was destruct-tested by hardcore wargamers.  AD&D 1e (pre-Dragonlance and pre-Lorraine Williams) is largely gamist - with the simulation in service of a better game.  D&D has been hard on the spectrum - hard gamist.


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## Hussar (Aug 14, 2014)

MichaelSomething said:


> Cause making a game really sim is hard...
> 
> http://www.polygon.com/2014/7/23/59...ush-your-cpu-because-creating-history-is-hard
> 
> ...




I think this is probably the closest to the truth answer.


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## Hussar (Aug 14, 2014)

Sword of Spirit said:


> /snip
> 
> OD&D: I can't comment much on OD&D--I have no direct experience.
> BECMI: Primarily gamist.
> ...




Wow.  I strongly disagree with this.  AD&D 1 is pretty much purely gamist with maybe a tiny veneer of simulation going on.  The rules are almost entirely gamist in nature.  What about AD&D 1 would you point to to consider it a simulationist bent game?


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## Dausuul (Aug 14, 2014)

Sword of Spirit said:


> OD&D: I can't comment much on OD&D--I have no direct experience.
> BECMI: Primarily gamist.
> AD&D 1e: Simulationism with a minor in gamism.
> AD&D 2e: The focus was on simulationism, with a minor in both narrativism and gamism.
> ...





Hussar said:


> Wow.  I strongly disagree with this.  AD&D 1 is pretty much purely gamist with maybe a tiny veneer of simulation going on.  The rules are almost entirely gamist in nature.  What about AD&D 1 would you point to to consider it a simulationist bent game?



This exchange right here? This is why I don't believe in simulationism, gamism, or narrativism. Nobody can agree on what the terms mean because they *DON'T. MEAN. ANYTHING*. Each one is a collection of unrelated ideas that Ron Edwards dumped in a bucket. There is no core meaning to any of the three and I wish the RPG community would quit pretending there is.


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## Hussar (Aug 14, 2014)

Dausuul said:


> This exchange right here? This is why I don't believe in simulationism, gamism, or narrativism. Nobody can agree on what the terms mean because they *DON'T. MEAN. ANYTHING*. Each one is a collection of unrelated ideas that Ron Edwards dumped in a bucket. There is no core meaning to any of the three and I wish the RPG community would quit pretending there is.




To me, a simulation is a set of mechanics that model an event.  The model tells you something about how that event occurred.  We've sometimes drifted into Ron Edwards territory, but, I've been pretty clear about what I'm talking about.

This is why I don't buy D&D as a simulationist game.  The mechanics of D&D don't actually tell you very much about what's happening in the game world, if they tell you anything at all.  To rehash a current discussion, the combat mechanics only tell you whether an opponent is alive or dead.  They don't tell you anything about how you changed from one state to the other.  

To me, that's not modelling anything.  The argument has been raised that this is a granularity issue.  That I'm complaining about having more or less information based on which model we use. To me, that's not the issue.  The issue is between having any information and no information at all.


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## Hussar (Aug 14, 2014)

To me, the basis of my issue in the OP was this bit:



			
				Dasuul said:
			
		

> *Because the rules are tools for answering questions about the fiction, however, they can't be separated from it. *When the rules say that Batman can only throw 3 Batarangs per day, that is a statement about the fictional world. It shouldn't be necessary for the kids to dream up ad hoc rationalizations for why Batman is choosing not to throw any more Batarangs. The rules have no authority over what Batman chooses to do, only over the results of his decisions.
> 
> Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...-for-a-Simulationist-style-Game#ixzz3AKGIsn6d




Bold mine.  

See, that right there is my issue.  The mechanics in D&d don't actually answer questions about the fiction in many, many cases.  That's because those mechanics aren't really modelling anything.  They're purely game constructions for playing a game, not for making statements about the fictional world.  The reason Batman can't throw more than 3 batarangs per day is because the game says so.  End of story.  You can narrate it however you like, but, that's up to you.

It's no different than most of D&D's mechanics.  As soon as you start asking questions like why and how, the models completely fall apart or fail to answer the questions at all.  If they cannot answer these questions, then they aren't models for simulating anything.  They are game constructs.  Why do knights move the way they do?  Because the rules say so and it makes for a better game to have a jumping piece.  Why can Batman only throw three batarangs?  Because the rules say so and it makes for a better game.

And that's the answer to virtually all of D&D's rules.  Because the rules say so and it makes of a better game.


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## Sword of Spirit (Aug 14, 2014)

Remembering that I'm only jumping in without having read this particular thread from the beginning...



Dausuul said:


> This exchange right here? This is why I don't  believe in simulationism, gamism, or narrativism. Nobody can agree on  what the terms mean because they *DON'T. MEAN. ANYTHING*.  Each one is a collection of unrelated ideas that Ron Edwards dumped in a  bucket. There is no core meaning to any of the three and I wish the RPG  community would quit pretending there is.




My usage of the terms doesn't necessarily correspond to Mr. Edwards'  usage, and in some cases it intentionally differs. I read his stuff and  it was thought provoking, and then I went from there where my own mind  took me. So the real issue is merely, "what do you mean when you use  those terms?"

Ron Edwards had a good idea. He had some insights. He got the ball rolling, and then he got out of the way. The terms _do_ mean different things to different people, because they have escaped into the wild and we are allowed to use or abuse (hopefully not the latter) the ideas as we wish, just like other theories or philosophies. I don't see how there is any more reason to shun using these poorly defined terms than there is regarding any other poorly defined terms. And if we stop using poorly defined terms, we'll have to stop communicating with anything other than mathematics and formal analytical logic. Maybe I can learn to speak in binary.

The point is that we have to use words to communicate, and these are a good choice for a starting point. Like philosophical jargon, they are also useful in theorizing once the immediate group of participants can define how _they_ are using them.

For me, I apply the terms to an RPG first as an overall impression of the game rather than to specifics manifestations. The same term can apply differently in entirely different areas of the game. 

For example, simulationism (I prefer the term "Explorationism") can manifest in a desire to have action resolution systems emulate physics in some manner, or it can manifest as a desire to represent an explorable world that moves along on its own without PC intervention, or it can refer to a rough sense of believability. A game can be simulationist in one way and not in another, as I said.

Narrativism can manifest as rules systems that produce results consistent with dramatic narratives rather than consistent with physics or probability, or it can manifest as giving the GM encouragement to design everything around the story, ignore the rest of the setting if it isn't relevent, and fudge things as needed, or it can manifest as a shared authorial control, perhaps even breaking down the concept of players and GMs.

Gamism is represented by anything that defines the play experience by a quantifiable challenge. It can manifest in a scene by scene narratively structured story where the goal is for the players to overcome a challenge in each scene via in-character role-playing, allowing them to advance to the next scene. It can manifest in the character creation minigame, when the goal is to make an effective character with the resources allotted. It can manifest in a system designed with a high degree of balance between characters, or with a strong set of resources for determining the precise degree of challenge presented, or which rewards player tactics over character tactics, or any number of manifestations.

So I'm primarily looking at an "overall picture," rather than the particulars, and I freely admit that anyone can validly disagree with my categorization of the editions of D&D based on giving more or less weight to particular elements. I do think I have something of value to add to understanding, and I'm not attempting to be obscure or unclear here.



Neonchameleon said:


> You can only make that claim because you have no oD&D and limited BECMI experience.  oD&D is the most finely tuned and playtested gamist RPG in the history of RPGs, and was destruct-tested by hardcore wargamers.  AD&D 1e (pre-Dragonlance and pre-Lorraine Williams) is largely gamist - with the simulation in service of a better game.  D&D has been hard on the spectrum - hard gamist.




Again, no comment on OD&D. 

My experience with BECMI was Red Box, Rules Cyclopedia and Wrath of the Immortals. While I agree it it primarily gamist, I can't call it hard gamist. There is too much world simulation in there that has nothing to do with the game, arbitrary restrictions that make some options purely better than others for simulation considerations more than game consideration, and undefined areas that the DM needs to make rulings concerning, for me to count it as hard gamism. That said, I don't think there are many RPGs that qualify as hard gamist. Most role-playing games hardly qualify as games.

On AD&D...sure, you could say that Gygaxian-style* AD&D is gamist in the sense of a player vs. DM competition to see whose characters can survive falls into gamism. But there are a lot of elements that are much more simulationist than gamist. Take weapon and armor lists. They are designed to emulate (sometimes flawed) impressions of historical armaments, rather than to provide a variety of meaningful yet equivalent options. That's why there are so many obviously sub-optimal choices. The Wilderness Survival Guide (and her subterranean brother) has the right to claim bragging rights for simulationism. Random wilderness encounter tables are very much world simulationism (though they might be used in some situations as gamist tools).

I agree that Dragonlance made a change, throwing in more narrativist high fantasy sentiment.



Hussar said:


> Wow.  I strongly disagree with this.  AD&D 1 is pretty much purely gamist with maybe a tiny veneer of simulation going on.  The rules are almost entirely gamist in nature.  What about AD&D 1 would you point to to consider it a simulationist bent game?




See above.

It bears mention that I personally put _a lot_ of weight on world simulation in my estimations--probably much more so than many others--and I don't consider physics emulation at all necessary for simulationism, as long as results are within believable bounds and aren't overridden by gamist or narrativist goals. 

Based on the overall impression my experience has given me of the various editions, I have to stand by my assessments.

* Dungeons designed to kill the players make _great_ one-shot games, though not really my style for long term campaigns.


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