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Deffers
2019-05-11, 08:40 AM
Hey All,
So for a few years now, I've realized something. As narrativist, abstract, story-focused RPG systems have risen in and out of prominence (FATE and PbtA being the two big ones that come to mind, but there's others I'm forgetting), I've come to discover that none of them ever really tickle my fancy. I don't see that as a knock on them. But they've all felt like they've lacked something that I was looking for in a role-playing game.

There's something I want out of RPGs that I don't get from them.

So, which RPGs do I like? I like GURPS, and I like DnD (D20 as a whole, really). I have a soft spot for some of the WoD games too. I even like 2nd ed. Exalted, for all the bustedness it brings with it. Shadowrun has some neat stuff as well (chunky salsa rule never fails to delight), and who can really fault Call of Cthulhu for its rules even if you can't stat your way out of cosmic horror? What I tend not to like is time wasted-- time wasted checking arcane rules, time wasted on too many rolls, time spent bookkeeping to an insane degree. GURPS, then, as much as I love it, also bothers me significantly. In combat heavy games of DnD, the initiative system starts becoming a drag. To that end, I also have an appreciation for rules-light systems that try to be crunchy too. I was particularly fond of Microlite 20, but didn't find something like GURPS Ultralite to be a satisfying condensation of rules that I strongly appreciated. What irks me is... I can't say what I like about them in an elegant way, or what is lacking from those experiences I dislike. I realized, in short, I couldn't figure out the essentials of the rules-heavy experience that I think is so neat.

Over the years, I've tried to make my own rules-lite-but-simulationist RPG, to try and pare down that core experience that clicks with me. It's never really gone anywhere, and part of the conclusion that I've reached is that it never goes anywhere because I don't have a decently refined understanding of what it is I actually like about crunchy RPG systems, or what other people enjoy. I can't boil down my positive experiences into a set of coherent design principles-- and my discussions with others have led to dissatisfaction. My DM for GURPS was a true fan, but when it came time to explain why he chose this as his favored system over others, especially since he liked medieval settings, he couldn't explain more than a general love for the detail that the rules gave. Maybe that's all you need, but it seems like a lot of extra baggage there, then, since GURPS is such a blue ocean of possibilities with point buy. I remain kind of stumped. And what detail is worth keeping, anyways?

I was hoping that, by having some discussion with a big enthusiast crowd like we have here, maybe I could finally figure out what that special thing is that I like about crunchy simulationist systems.

I figure that since I need to improve my general understanding, I'll start with general elements from crunchy games that I like that I don't feel I can find in more abstract games. I think of these as disparate bits, rather than any one coherent design philosophy or paradigm. If you'd like to follow after this example, feel free. Or if you know you DO have a design philosophy you're drawn to, let it rip. But these are my little things:

I like when items in crunchy games seem to be more real or substantial. One of my favorite moments in GURPS was statting out a gorget for a combat-focused modern character based on some supplementary rules in one of the magazines because the general rules have the throat as a hit location but no armor for it. The DM thought it was overkill, but it ended up saving one of my characters when a spear successfully tagged him, the DM rolled for location, and he discovered that it had nailed me in the throat. And I just love that about rules-heavy games. I love the way a ten-foot pole is an adventurer's lifeline in DnD even when you don't have a grid system. I've read PbPs and listened to adventures taking place in more abstract systems and items just lack the character and specificity they get in rules-heavy games-- but I see no specific reason why that has to be. Is my gorget any better because it came into play organically when called on a hit location table? Why do I like that more than if the DM described me getting attacked, I mention I have that special item, and between the two of us we come up with a description of how the fight plays out? That's effectively how items often tend to work in abstract systems, but the resolution never quite feels as satisfying to me. Also, even when there's no specific rules for the action you're trying to take with an item, sometimes the mechanical framework in which the action takes place produces some fascinating results-- when I decided to brew up some molotovs with lantern oil in a 3rd edition DnD one-off, we could use the thrown weapon rules to figure out a baseline for effectiveness, and use some of the fire spells as a broad template of what could happen. And I just like the certainty of rules-heavy systems were you make your inventory ahead of time instead of having some ability that describes you having a helpful item when you need it. I like the fact that my character had something useful listed in my character sheet's exhaustive, ridiculous list of materials.

I like the way characters can feel diverse in crunchy games. I like having a build with a set of moves. Gonna be real, I like things like spell slots or power points that differentiate characters from each other. Even in point buy games, I like making characters who have special things going on with them. My GURPS character from the previous example had combat reflexes and quick-draw skills for all of his weapons, making him difficult to deal with in a fight. He also had stuff going on with his very high Will stat and autohypnosis skills that let him ignore pain and fatigue, so he could take risks in a fight other characters wouldn't be able to make without compromising their effectiveness. I enjoy when a character has these synergies that come together and reinforce each other to make something stronger than the sum of their parts. I love playing and creating and reading about odd gimmick builds, or having weird specializations. This is where my love for Exalted comes in, too. Sure, it may not be balanced-- but the general presumption is, your character can do at least one ludicrous thing and may have charms that help him to do other weird and ludicrous things, all as a charm set-- and that ludicrous thing can be pretty specific. In short, there's a certain puzzle element to builds that gets lost very easily with simplicity, I think. Broadly speaking, I like tactical combat, but I think it's unfair to games like PbtA to imply that there's no tactical decision-making whatsoever. But it's just not enough for me, so I'm trying to define this maybe on the basis of specialization? Even then, I tend to play generalists-- but generalists with gimmicks, so that's why I feel like builds are maybe that special thing that I enjoy.

I enjoy when crunchier systems have better rules for playing out extremes of power. I know DnD often doesn't do this as well with crit fails and successes on attack rolls, but there's something really satisfying about being able to roll a 24 after modifiers because your character's an OG at a skill check or being able to stack a ton of dice on an attack. A lot of abstract or narrative games just don't have the raw, nerdy joy of hurling a casino's worth of dice at a problem-- and with stuff like Roll20, this isn't even that much of a time-consuming process. There's something excellent about a monster with more than 18 strength, or realizing that the way math works out in GURPS your character will fail like one time in a hundred at a given skill check. Someone was waxing poetical about getting an 18/99 in older-school DnD-- I get the feeling like there's just something there.

So, in the spirit of discovery-- what is it that you guys like about crunchy systems? It can be a specific element you feel you get in those systems that you don't get elsewhere. It can be a broader design tendency you recognize in those systems that doesn't exist in narrativist systems. Or it can just be something you adore from a specific crunchy rule system. I mean, there are people who unironically enjoy rifts. That has to be for a reason. If possible, let's try to focus on crunchy games, and keep narrativist/abstract system discussion more as references to refine what it is that we like about crunch. Ultimately, when you make a thread, barring a major derail, it really turns into what other people make of it, so I leave that ultimate determination to you. Let's enjoy and discuss, above all!

Dimers
2019-05-11, 12:13 PM
Fairness and accountability. In light games, sweet-talking or haranguing your GM or fellow players can yield benefits that the character didn't earn. Alternatively, in a low-crunch game your character might suffer in unfair ways too, because there aren't rules to prevent it. IRL I take pride in earning what I get and satisfaction from getting what I earn. Not all of my characters feel that way IC, but OOC I still feel that way about them -- I want fair results based on how I've built the character. I want to know I've earned it.

That's also why I prefer games with less reliance on luck. I don't like to win just because the dice came up big for me, and I don't like to lose from getting bad card draws. Let me win or lose fair-and-square.

Telok
2019-05-11, 10:15 PM
For me: predictability and reliability.

In real life you can broadly predict certain trends and results. Likewise a competent, skilled, or professional person can produce reliable sets results that make sense while an incompetent neophyte can't approach either the level of success or reliability.

As such I tend to prefer systems that use bell curve probabilities and a more defined task resolution system. Games where a dex-whore acrobat professional soldier gun nut character is only 30% more likely to hit a target or dodge a thrown rock than an out of shape bookish professor character... Those annoy me. Or things like devoting significant character building resources towards something and moving from 13+ on a d20 to 8+, so that random no-bonus mooks still beat the "expert" about 1/6th the time.

This also means that I prefer systems that give more guidance and explicit, clearly explained, options to the GMs. Especially because so many people have little or no real understanding of how probabilities work and how what gets rolled versus what target number can affect how the game plays. I've played in games where the GM thought that three 33% chances to succeed equaled 99%, oh where the 'heros' were more like the Three Stooges because all the checks that had DCs weren't supposed to be rolled for (I still don't get that design philosophy).

Kurald Galain
2019-05-12, 04:03 AM
I find that crunchy rules make for a more consistent world, and this creates more immersion and role-playing.

For instance, if you see an NPC in action, you can get a pretty good idea of what he's capable of, and your character can probably learn to do the same if you train for it. Or if you regularly meet a kind of monster or obstacle, your character will figure out what it does. Or if you build a character that is good at, say, sailing, then this will be mechanically true even if the GM doesn't know about sailing himself, and it won't be the case that every other PC is equally good at sailing (because they'll fast-talk the GM into using their best skill for sailing instead).

Kaptin Keen
2019-05-12, 05:45 AM
For me, the answer is: Nothing. More rules are more book keeping, deeper, denser rules are more micro management.

I don't even like it in strategy games.

And that's not to derail the discussion. I just feel it's a valid point: Crunchy simulationism certainly isn't for everyone.

Lucas Yew
2019-05-12, 07:56 AM
A consistent Scale of things to measure everything in the game world.

I share your sentiments in struggling with making up the perfect ruleset, as two of my favorite rules are also major heartbreakers for various reasons ( GURPS is legally not free, and D&D has its non-magic characters disappointingly weak for my Wuxia tuned scale).

Malphegor
2019-05-13, 05:56 AM
I enjoy consistency. The ability to not flounder and look up a player handbook for a class, not to metagame exactly, but to get a sense of what keeps the game running, probably keeps me interested. Like, you can build a wizard in a way that makes them a drag on the game, unable to do much more than magic missile.

Or you could be a God. Carefully balancing your power over all with just enough humility to make others succeed on your behalf. To not just play the game, but engineer events with careful planning that everyone is having a fun time.

And that is why characters I play seem to buy innoccuous little things as we go. Bandages. Marbles. Piles of dry sticks. Pig fat. Crockery. Glass vials. Waxed papers. Because I can see the uses for these ordinary, simple things in an adventure, and am there to be a fun-continuing person, to ensure the facilitation of maximum fun for me and fellow players, so we never end up looking at a locked door and be stuck without a thief, to never encounter a dragon egg that needs electricity to hatch and lack amber and cat fur, to never be unable to set up a rube goldberg device to gain the attention of the princess.

A more loose system lets you do these things, but it's less of a surprise to your fellow players. You just have this stuff to hand.

Having to meticulously build up your pile of hoarded junk in the hope of pulling a win through impossible odds... That, to me, makes for a strange and wonderful experience.

VonKaiserstein
2019-05-13, 12:31 PM
For me, the crunchier the game, the more it encourages the DM and the players to go all out. Hackmaster was my crunchiest DnD crawler equivalent, and the character creation could take hours and result in ridiculously troubled characters, and absolute powerhouses that couldn't be hit by anything but +5 weapons at level 1. It was wild, extreme, and utterly indifferent to the idea of fairness. You were supposed to build the most lethal character you could, and the GM was supposed to try their best to kill them. It was adversarial, and glorious after you ran through the roguelike experience accrual process and finally got a survivor to start leveling up.

The best Whitewolf style game I played was Streetfighter STg. No celerity 5 turn instakills, just hundreds of moves in a variety of styles where combat was like high impact chess against other streetfighters, and that video of the dad slapping EVERYONE at the party when you fought anyone else. The characters were totally customizable- you could have 3 sumos, one of the lightest maneuver styles, and all of them be distinct. So for me, customizability, and lethality.

Man_Over_Game
2019-05-13, 01:21 PM
Adapting through tactics is big for me.

I want to adapt. I don't want my strategy to require the same move every single session. I don't want to have to come up with another random funny quip to grant me a small boon to the generic things I do.

I want to look at a situation, see that I have a limited number of options to do, and have to choose which of them is going to provide my team the most benefit. It should be something I choose, not something chosen for me.

A Barbarian's Rage, for example, doesn't work for me, because I always want to be Raging. It's a simple question of "Can I?", rather than "Should I?".

Good crunch encourages adapting.
Bad crunch is when character development is complex, but actual play is akin to a toddler's game of putting triangle-shaped blocks into triangle-shaped holes (AKA 3.5 Fighters).

TaiLiu
2019-05-13, 01:47 PM
I've played in games where the GM thought that three 33% chances to succeed equaled 99%...
This is a really marginal question, but why wouldn't it equal 99%? By the probability calculus, the pr(.33) + pr(.33) + pr(.33) would equal the pr(.99), no?

EDIT: Or do you mean that the DM thought that each chance to succeed was pr(.99)? Cuz that would definitely be an error.

2D8HP
2019-05-13, 02:05 PM
Call of Cthulhu


I've never found any "rules-heavy" RPG as easy to "Keeper" (GM) as Call of Cthullu and the other "BRP" games that derived their rules from '78 RuneQuest (Pendragon, Ringworld, Stormbringer, et cetera) as they were very intuitive, I even used CoC to substitute for Top Secret! instead of bothering to learn new rules.

Willie the Duck
2019-05-13, 02:07 PM
This is a really marginal question, but why wouldn't it equal 99%? By the probability calculus, the pr(.33) + pr(.33) + pr(.33) would equal the pr(.99), no?

EDIT: Or do you mean that the DM thought that each chance to succeed was pr(.99)? Cuz that would definitely be an error.

Reading Telok straight, I am gathering that the DM though that, if you had three tries to do something, and a 33% chance of succeeding each time, then your chance of getting (at least one) successful outcome was 99% (as opposed to 1-(67%^3) =70%).

jindra34
2019-05-13, 03:40 PM
This is a really marginal question, but why wouldn't it equal 99%? By the probability calculus, the pr(.33) + pr(.33) + pr(.33) would equal the pr(.99), no?


Assuming independent events the probability that at least ONE of 3 33% outcomes is successful is 1-(1-.33)*(1-.33)*(1-.33) which is about 70%. Very different. Basic thing to remember with probability is it generally is multiplicative not additive.

TaiLiu
2019-05-21, 06:09 PM
Reading Telok straight, I am gathering that the DM though that, if you had three tries to do something, and a 33% chance of succeeding each time, then your chance of getting (at least one) successful outcome was 99% (as opposed to 1-(67%^3) =70%).

Assuming independent events the probability that at least ONE of 3 33% outcomes is successful is 1-(1-.33)*(1-.33)*(1-.33) which is about 70%. Very different. Basic thing to remember with probability is it generally is multiplicative not additive.
Okay, either my understanding of statistics has been wrong the entire time, or I misunderstood what Telok said. Why wouldn't Kolmogorov's third axiom – σ-additivity – apply here? I'm honestly confused.

Hytheter
2019-05-22, 12:42 AM
Okay, either my understanding of statistics has been wrong the entire time, or I misunderstood what Telok said. Why wouldn't Kolmogorov's third axiom – σ-additivity – apply here? I'm honestly confused.

Same reason you aren't guaranteed to get heads after two coin flips...

The third axiom is about mutually exclusive events in a given trial, not successive trials at constant probability.

Psyren
2019-05-22, 02:04 AM
A lot of my reasons for preferring crunchy/rules-heavy have been given, but here's some I didn't see. For all of these, I'm not saying rules light can't do them, I'm saying rules heavy lets me express it more deeply.

1) Being the rules-guru. I've always loved the feeling of having the right answer at my fingertips when people ask a question - I was very much the "Hermione" growing up, with my hand constantly shooting skyward during class. Crunchy RPGs scratch that same itch for me; when another player asks something like "can I try to grab him as he runs past me?" or "can I peek around the corner to throw my grenade without getting shot?" or "can I swim down to her, get the scroll out of her pouch, and use it to help us escape", the rest of the group - and sometimes even our DM - turn and look at me, and there are few feelings in my gaming life that can compare to that :smallcool:

(Note however that being a rules guru is very different than being a rules lawyer; I strive for the former.)

2) Builds, builds, builds. I find little challenge or metagame to building a character in a rules-light system - my abilities (and limits) there are more based on what I can convince the DM I get away with than my knowledge of the system. If I want to make Captain America in a rules-heavy system for example, I get the challenge of diving through several books and planning out what exactly I want him to be able to do, which innate abilities and external items best enable that, which parts of my build come online when etc. Rules light meanwhile gets me to the end result faster but it feels all the more hollow as a result.

Playing something I can't think of. This one's loaded actually so I'll unpack, because it covers two distinct scenarios:

a) I have no idea what I want to play. I'll flip through this sourcebook, look up cool abilities, and then build a character around them. (Most of the time though, I end up stuck on the first two steps.) In a rules-light game, I can be anything, but that is a double-edged sword because that much choice can be as paralyzing as it is freeing.

b) I know what I want to play - someone smarter, wiser, and/or more charismatic than I am in real life. But I have no idea what this person would actually say, think of, or notice. In a rules-light game, if I the player can't be persuasive, then my character never will be either, no matter what my sheet or concept say. In rules-heavy though, I can say what I'm trying to do, roll the dice, and then depending on the result, folks who are better at that sort of thing can just fill in the gaps for me. (Amusingly, this works in reverse too - I can be pretty good at something and then a bad die roll can cause failure, which my fellow players will be all too happy to narrate for ensuing hilarity.)

Mr Beer
2019-05-22, 02:23 AM
Okay, either my understanding of statistics has been wrong the entire time, or I misunderstood what Telok said. Why wouldn't Kolmogorov's third axiom – σ-additivity – apply here? I'm honestly confused.

So if I have a 50% chance to succeed at something and I try twice, my chance of success = 50% + 50% = 100%?

Satinavian
2019-05-22, 02:48 AM
Okay, either my understanding of statistics has been wrong the entire time, or I misunderstood what Telok said. Why wouldn't Kolmogorov's third axiom – σ-additivity – apply here? I'm honestly confused.

If you try a thing 3 times with 1/3rd chance each time, you will have 1 success on average.

But there is still a chance of no success which is offseet by the chance of having two or three successes.

Spore
2019-05-23, 05:43 AM
I have yet to discover a system that doesn't screw up one or another aspect of "reality" (as in versimillitude or believability) but I really enjoy normalized systems of chance. D&D's d20 might be simple enough but a critical success or failure is as likely as just being competent/mediocre at your thing. I much rather prefer dice pools.

Another one are systems that actively discourage combat/fair fights - as well as systems that put enemies on the same level as the player. D&D is fun and all but it puts the monsters/enemies at a disadvantage. I am bored to all hell fighting things destined to loose. Of course that is true for almost any combat in RPGs ever so I am partially okay with it. But I feel combat should be impactful and not "we can win 3-4 fights until we have to rest". We had a campaign where we had about 10-15 fights in a 2 year span (I include blatant fleeing sequences and the occasional "a pack of mutated wolves is hunting you" in these too since they are necessary) and I can about remember all of them. Comparatively I feel we had about 45+ fights in my Pathfinder campaign and while I can remember the plot, I cannot remember for the life of me what we fought.

Willie the Duck
2019-05-23, 07:35 AM
Another one are systems that actively discourage combat/fair fights - as well as systems that put enemies on the same level as the player. D&D is fun and all but it puts the monsters/enemies at a disadvantage. I am bored to all hell fighting things destined to loose.

Hmm? TSR-era D&D, certainly oD&D pre-supp. 1 and most of the basic/classic line, were set up such that a 4th level fighter and a 4 HD monster were pretty similar. Clearing out most of the modules or a dungeon built with the dungeon-building tools in the books would create situations where marching into fair fights would be a really bad idea. The intent (along with most of the xp being from treasure, and the dearth of healing) was to discourage combat/fair fights. Of course, since fighting is what a lot of gamers want to do, a lot of DMs changed that around somehow, and later D&Ds have moved away from that. But I certainly wouldn't say that monsters/enemies being at a disadvantage was a universal D&D trait.

Quertus
2019-05-23, 07:39 AM
Well, I certainly care about and enjoy the "fairness" aspect, but I think that what I enjoy of crunch had been missed by asking about Simulationist crunch. See, I enjoy that there is a game. So, I like Gamist crunch.

Yes, said Gamist crunch should also be Simulationist - there should be versimilitude of the crunch matching the fluff - buy that is separate from what I like about the crunchiness of the system.

Max_Killjoy
2019-05-23, 11:14 AM
When I say "simulationist", what I mean, is that the game mechanics and the fiction layer are in sync. They produce similar results, so that the known facts about what's going on in the fiction layer give the player a good chance of understanding the possible and likely outcomes from the system layer.

The same exact system can be more or less "simulationist" depending on the setting and characters and "power level" you're using it for.


Rules I like tend to be on the crunchy side, but I have very little use for "crunch for the sake of crunch", or book-spam, or splat-spam.

If I had to pick a single system, it would be HERO 5th, because it's versatile, and the rules are very straightforward despite being detailed. It's a bid book, but really everything you need is in that one big book. For character creation... does the character fit the setting and scope and so forth put forward in the fiction layer? Does it within the points total and build guidelines set by the GM? Yes and yes? Then that character is fine.

No digging through half-a-dozen books looking for just the right splat or subclass or whatever.
No referencing special rules across a multitude of sources.
No trying to wedge a concept into a misbegotten framework.

Kyutaru
2019-05-23, 11:18 AM
Rock Paper Scissors

As with real life, certain things just counter other things. Different systems use different approaches. D&D uses a wide range of these for different elements and some things are either complete hard counters while others are just most effective available tactic.

Hard Counter - Polearm beats Cavalry. Period. You get either a huge bonus to your roll or you flat out dominate the unit. It's simple and to the point with little variance. But it's realistic.

Vulnerabilities - Polearms deal Piercing damage, some Cavalry are weak to Piercing. Playing out the scenario ultimately involves matching up types and with customization you can avoid your common weakness, such as by giving Cavalry armor that deflects stabs or carries with it longer lances or just uses a stronger mount (elephants).

Mathhammer - Polearms have 30 ATK vs Horses, Cavalry have 20 DEF. The fight continues along similarly to any other just with more math involved. Maybe instead it's a matter of stacking Strength to overcome a high Armor Class but it's all about the numbers.

Most Effective Available Tactic - Polearms have the Anti-Charge ability, Cavalry use Charge. The battle is more dependent on using what skills and talents are available to the unit that may offset some abilities other units use, either explicitly like the example or otherwise such as by disabling a beholder by blinding it.

Mordar
2019-05-23, 06:13 PM
RoleMaster is one of my all time favorite games. I think it is crunchy, but perhaps not too simulationist.

One of the reasons I like it is that it melds a level of detail (particularly in skills) with the idea of "character levels" well. It really presents a system in which 2 characters of the same race, profession ("class") and experience can be wildly different in execution/theme/style. It allows the player to really develop the character's mechanical idiom and have it represented in performance, unlike more generalist games (like Savage Worlds) where the differences are more like "skins" for video game characters. No offense to Savage Worlds or its fans. I think it was a really wonderful idea with great execution! For me and the long running group I played with it really allowed for rules- and mechanics-based customization beyond any other RPG and in a very balanced and structural fashion.

I also loved the combat and experience systems. Yup, they were time-consuming but (for us) in a very good way. Once you get over the learning curve it was easy to understand, really seemed to take in account the multiple factors that could influence combat (including being an active defender).

By today's standards I think it would be viewed as unwieldy, but I think its much like driving a manual transmission vs. an automatic. Once you know how to do it it will still take a little more attention, but your performance can be much improved.

- M

Max_Killjoy
2019-05-23, 06:23 PM
Another thing to keep in mind is that a system can be crunchy and huge and detailed and buried in dozens of books... and that doesn't make it "simulationist".

3.x is a mountain, but it leans very heavily "gamist"... there's almost nothing "sim" about it.

aaron819
2019-05-23, 08:47 PM
I don't have many crunchy systems I like other than GURPS, but I like that system because the crunch can be scaled up or down. I usually play medium crunch, but the option to go more or less complex is there.

Kyutaru
2019-05-24, 02:49 AM
Another thing to keep in mind is that a system can be crunchy and huge and detailed and buried in dozens of books... and that doesn't make it "simulationist".

3.x is a mountain, but it leans very heavily "gamist"... there's almost nothing "sim" about it.
Though even within a gamist system you may find something simulationist you enjoy about it.

Max_Killjoy
2019-05-24, 08:40 AM
Though even within a gamist system you may find something simulationist you enjoy about it.

The two aren't mutually exclusive, of course -- the idea that they must be or should be is one of the great fallacies that "RPG theory" has had to deal with.

Which specific elements in 3.x would you consider significantly "simmy"?

Willie the Duck
2019-05-24, 09:33 AM
The two aren't mutually exclusive, of course -- the idea that they must be or should be is one of the great fallacies that "RPG theory" has had to deal with.

Which specific elements in 3.x would you consider significantly "simmy"?

They put a bunch of stuff into the martial game like picking up dropped weapons and getting up from prone drawing Attacks of Opportunity. One can read that as being done 'because it is realistic.' Same with moving (more than 5') meaning one can only get in less attacks. Overall, a lot of the 3.x-introduced or 3.x-worsened things we've been complaining about in the 'martial/caster' and 'guy at gym' threads are examples of 3e D&D moving in a 'simmy' direction (with martials getting penalties for actions 'because it would be realistic' while casters do not because who knows what restrictions are appropriate for magic, the guy at gym issue in a nutshell). Likewise, I think 3e is the first time when certain objects in the physical world got specified stats -- square feet of dungeon/castle walls/doors got specified hardness and hit points based on material used, as did weapons (wooden-hafted axes had different sundering profiles than a metal hafted mace or a sword blade). I would say that 3e, like all of D&D it's still solidly in the gamist camp (if you believe in the RPG theory categories to begin with), but 3e is definitely farther in the sim direction than what it came from.

2D8HP
2019-05-24, 09:53 AM
When I say "simulationist", what I mean, is that the game mechanics and the fiction layer are in sync.....


I've found that the "BRP" games that derived their rules from '78 RuneQuest, such as [I]Call of Cthullu, King Arthur Pendragon (which is my favorite), Ringworld, and Stormbringer, just hew closer to both the fiction, and what I'd expect "If this were real" than the other games I've played, except for maybe Champions, but that was comic book superheroes, so no "If this were real" (I also just don't like that genre as much).

In terms of "Sword & Sorcery" magic Stormbringer was spot on, and for doing settings like Howard's Conan stories I think Call of Cthullu magic system is closer to genre conventions than any version of D&D, even though it's default setting is the 1920's with monsters rather than the "Hyborian Age", and I've never found a game that did Sir Gawain and the Green Knight "morality tests" as well as Pendragon (or at all really).

As far as modelling combat the RuneQuest derived rules seem more "realistic" to me than maybe all but Arm's Law/MERP/Rolemaster.

I like D&D (except for 3.x, as requiring me to choose a "Feat" to play a Fighter is a bridge too far!).but for more "gamist" reasons, and mostly as a player, as a GM and for "simulation" it's BRP.

Mordar
2019-05-24, 11:52 AM
I've found that the "BRP" games that derived their rules from '78 RuneQuest, such as [I]Call of Cthullu, King Arthur Pendragon (which is my favorite), Ringworld, and Stormbringer, just hew closer to both the fiction, and what I'd expect "If this were real" than the other games I've played, except for maybe Champions, but that was comic book superheroes, so no "If this were real" (I also just don't like that genre as much).

In terms of "Sword & Sorcery" magic Stormbringer was spot on, and for doing settings like Howard's Conan stories I think Call of Cthullu magic system is closer to genre conventions than any version of D&D, even though it's default setting is the 1920's with monsters rather than the "Hyborian Age", and I've never found a game that did Sir Gawain and the Green Knight "morality tests" as well as Pendragon (or at all really).

Word. Truth. Correct. (How many characters are necessary for a reply? :smallsmile:)

Given that RoleMaster and CoC (and the related spawn) were always my favorite games, I guess that means I like skill-based games and think they better emulate and differentiate characters than level-based games. And to me I guess that also means they are more "sim" and less "gamist".

- M

Rhedyn
2019-05-24, 11:58 AM
Point of order. Narrative storyteller systems like Fate or PbtA are vastly different than traditional RPGs like D&D, GURPS, or Savage Worlds.

Much of what OP describes is true of all traditional RPGs.

Anywho, I love crunch because it lets me know as a player what I can do and as a GM it lets my players make plans without having to spoil it for me. I GM only to be surprised.

Max_Killjoy
2019-05-24, 12:00 PM
Word. Truth. Correct. (How many characters are necessary for a reply? :smallsmile:)

Given that RoleMaster and CoC (and the related spawn) were always my favorite games, I guess that means I like skill-based games and think they better emulate and differentiate characters than level-based games. And to me I guess that also means they are more "sim" and less "gamist".


Not just emulate, but differentiate.

A character who is highly skilled and experienced, should somehow differentiate from a character who is lightning quick, and both from a character who is immensely strong, and etc.




Point of order. Narrative storyteller systems like Fate or PbtA are vastly different than traditional RPGs like D&D, GURPS, or Savage Worlds.

Much of what OP describes is true of all traditional RPGs.

Anywho, I love crunch because it lets me know as a player what I can do and as a GM it lets my players make plans without having to spoil it for me. I GM only to be surprised.

Counter-point... it's not true of all "traditional" RPGs. D&D isn't that "simmy", even though it's damn crunchy particularly in certain editions. It does a horrible job differentiating between different types of characters in several spots, such as when it comes to Armor Class.

In contrast, GURPS tries to be a lot more "simmy" than D&D.

PairO'Dice Lost
2019-05-24, 12:08 PM
but 3e is definitely farther in the sim direction than what it came from.

I'd disagree. AD&D is full of (and notorious for) rules on monster ecology, combat morale, very fine-grained non-weapon proficiencies (all priced by "how complex is this to learn" rather than "how useful is this mechanically"), the logistics of encumbrance and transporting large treasure hoards, endless historically-accurate polearms with fiddly weapon vs. armor tables, chances of catching diseases and parasites after adventuring through swamps....


I also disagree that D&D is heavily gamist and barely simulationist. It's important to divorce simulationism (focus on internal consistency, interaction with the setting as an independent self-consistent entity, player-as-actor rather than player-as-author, and so forth) from verisimilitude (modeling the real world and prioritizing that model over genre/mythical/etc. conceits, modeling things in sufficient detail to give how-things-work-in-real-life outputs, and so forth). It's possible to have high levels of one or the other, both, or neither, and while D&D doesn't really focus on verisimilitude (though it certainly is verisimilar in some areas, level ranges, and "zoom levels") it does lean strongly simulationist in many areas.

It's entirely possible for a game to be both heavily gamist and heavily simulationist at the same time, and in fact I'd say many of the wonky corner cases in the rules and many of the parts people call out as being nonsensical are places where D&D's gamism runs face-first into its simulationism and the conflicting goals and design principles cause those problems.

EDIT: It's also important to distinguish "this game isn't (or isn't trying to be) G/S/N" from "this game is trying to be G/S/N but is failing/making concessions/etc. in this particular area." AC is a good example: AD&D had a much more simulationist take on armor class and armor/weapon interactions and 3e compromised that for ease of use, but 3e still tries to distinguish between different kinds of armor, differentiate making contact with the armor vs. harming someone in armor, and so on. A purely gamist approach might condense the armor types to just light/medium/heavy and balance them so they're relatively equal choices with different tradeoffs, incorporate level into the AC calculation so attacks and AC rise at more similar rates, or similar.

Max_Killjoy
2019-05-24, 12:17 PM
Verisimilitude is not about modeling "the real world".

It's about making a fictional world feel as if it could be real.

Where it breaks from "genre" and "mythic" is not in any attempt to model the real world, but rather in that settings which heavily emphasizes "genre" or "mythic" elements very much tend to do so at the expense of internal consistency, internal coherence, and internal plausibility.

noob
2019-05-24, 01:03 PM
I've found that the "BRP" games that derived their rules from '78 RuneQuest, such as [I]Call of Cthullu, King Arthur Pendragon (which is my favorite), Ringworld, and Stormbringer, just hew closer to both the fiction, and what I'd expect "If this were real" than the other games I've played, except for maybe Champions, but that was comic book superheroes, so no "If this were real" (I also just don't like that genre as much).

In terms of "Sword & Sorcery" magic Stormbringer was spot on, and for doing settings like Howard's Conan stories I think Call of Cthullu magic system is closer to genre conventions than any version of D&D, even though it's default setting is the 1920's with monsters rather than the "Hyborian Age", and I've never found a game that did Sir Gawain and the Green Knight "morality tests" as well as Pendragon (or at all really).

As far as modelling combat the RuneQuest derived rules seem more "realistic" to me than maybe all but Arm's Law/MERP/Rolemaster.

I like D&D (except for 3.x, as requiring me to choose a "Feat" to play a Fighter is a bridge too far!).but for more "gamist" reasons, and mostly as a player, as a GM and for "simulation" it's BRP.

You can play a barbarian: it is like a fighter but with less choice.
That or a rogue: rogues works well without feats.(Just pick up acid flasks(that can deal sound damage depending on the source of the acid) and alchemist fire at mid to high level)
By the time you picked up all the "mandatory" rogue skills you no longer have skill points unless you have quite high int.

Man_Over_Game
2019-05-24, 01:14 PM
Verisimilitude is not about modeling "the real world".

It's about making a fictional world feel as if it could be real.

Where it breaks from "genre" and "mythic" is not in any attempt to model the real world, but rather in that settings which heavily emphasizes "genre" or "mythic" elements very much tend to do so at the expense of internal consistency, internal coherence, and internal plausibility.

The issue I find there is that it's hard to balance the whole "magic is science" concept, for consistency, and the fact that you're playing a game.

For example, does magical fire always burn things like normal fire? Can you enchant a sword with it? A lamp? A torch? A statue? Can I put a sheath over it? Can I put out the fires it makes (if any?). Are fire-creatures on fire, immune to fire, and how do they generate fire?

It's a lot of ambiguity. Either the rules are strict, and you can't do something you want to do, or the rules are lenient, and balance is out the window.

I could see a rules-light TTRPG using consistent magic, which maintains balance and consistency with the narrative, but that's exactly the opposite of the topic at hand. I would like to see a system that used consistent, coherent magic, while also being fairly rules heavy in a way that's fun.

Mordar
2019-05-24, 01:52 PM
Word. Truth. Correct. (How many characters are necessary for a reply? :smallsmile:)

Given that RoleMaster and CoC (and the related spawn) were always my favorite games, I guess that means I like skill-based games and think they better emulate and differentiate characters than level-based games. And to me I guess that also means they are more "sim" and less "gamist".

- M


Not just emulate, but differentiate.

A character who is highly skilled and experienced, should somehow differentiate from a character who is lightning quick, and both from a character who is immensely strong, and etc.

Is that your way of adding emphasis or did you miss that I did say "emulate and differentiate"? :smallbiggrin:

To address a bit further...what I was thinking as I typed the original line was something more like the following:

...and think they better emulate famous fantasy fiction characters/trope (like allow us players to create our Conan, or Lancelot, or Aragorn, or Inigo Montoya, or Gray Mouser, or Garet Jax, or Bruce Lee) as well as allowing us to differentiate our own uniquely developed characters such that you could have a handful of 5th level half-elf warriors that are hugely different in style, theme and ability while still being functional in a traditional FRPG as warrior characters instead of just being one of two or three variants where the rest of the "differences" are just a skin.

But that seemed a little long winded.

To add something slightly new: I like crunch when it allows players to be mechanically rewarded for differences in character design and development. I don't mean "rewarded = be more successful" or some sort of charop kind of reward...I mean see valid mechanical differences, not necessarily better or worse, as a result of the decisions they made. This is as a supplement, not a replacement, to the impact of role-playing decisions.

- M

noob
2019-05-24, 02:03 PM
The issue I find there is that it's hard to balance the whole "magic is science" concept, for consistency, and the fact that you're playing a game.

For example, does magical fire always burn things like normal fire? Can you enchant a sword with it? A lamp? A torch? A statue? Can I put a sheath over it? Can I put out the fires it makes (if any?). Are fire-creatures on fire, immune to fire, and how do they generate fire?

It's a lot of ambiguity. Either the rules are strict, and you can't do something you want to do, or the rules are lenient, and balance is out the window.

I could see a rules-light TTRPG using consistent magic, which maintains balance and consistency with the narrative, but that's exactly the opposite of the topic at hand. I would like to see a system that used consistent, coherent magic, while also being fairly rules heavy in a way that's fun.

There is some magic as science stuff that end up being electricity but with a different name and weird looking engineers.

Max_Killjoy
2019-05-24, 02:23 PM
Is that your way of adding emphasis or did you miss that I did say "emulate and differentiate"? :smallbiggrin:

To address a bit further...what I was thinking as I typed the original line was something more like the following:

...and think they better emulate famous fantasy fiction characters/trope (like allow us players to create our Conan, or Lancelot, or Aragorn, or Inigo Montoya, or Gray Mouser, or Garet Jax, or Bruce Lee) as well as allowing us to differentiate our own uniquely developed characters such that you could have a handful of 5th level half-elf warriors that are hugely different in style, theme and ability while still being functional in a traditional FRPG as warrior characters instead of just being one of two or three variants where the rest of the "differences" are just a skin.

But that seemed a little long winded.

To add something slightly new: I like crunch when it allows players to be mechanically rewarded for differences in character design and development. I don't mean "rewarded = be more successful" or some sort of charop kind of reward...I mean see valid mechanical differences, not necessarily better or worse, as a result of the decisions they made. This is as a supplement, not a replacement, to the impact of role-playing decisions.


My way of saying "not only this thing you said that I agree with, but also this other thing as well".

If I create a character, and they're quick, I want them to have extra actions or whatever in the system reflects that quickness, because they're quick -- not because I choose "Fighter" and "Fighter" gets extra actions.

PairO'Dice Lost
2019-05-25, 04:11 AM
Verisimilitude is not about modeling "the real world".

It's about making a fictional world feel as if it could be real.

Where it breaks from "genre" and "mythic" is not in any attempt to model the real world, but rather in that settings which heavily emphasizes "genre" or "mythic" elements very much tend to do so at the expense of internal consistency, internal coherence, and internal plausibility.

Yeah, when I said "modeling the real world" I meant defaulting to real-world physics unless otherwise specified, as opposed to running on Rule of Cool, story logic, or the like, not literally trying to replicate reality; I should have phrased that differently.

The point stands, though, that simulationism != verisimilitude. To use your extra-actions-due-to-quickness example, getting extra actions due to class instead of Dex or whatever can be simulationist ("this is the Speedster class, only it gets speedy stuff") or gamist ("this is the Fighter, it gets more actions because it needs them to keep up with other martial classes"), and it can be verisimilar ("increasing combat skill lets you attack faster, and some characters advance faster than others") or not ("fighters--and only fighters--get more attacks, because reasons"), and in fact the same mechanic can be simulationist and gamist and verisimilar and implausible all at the same time by varying degrees, all depending on the context of the surrounding setting and system.

So D&D isn't "not simulationist" just because it's trying to balance that with gamism and there are more simulationist games out there, it just means that, well, D&D is more of a G/S mix where e.g. RoleMaster may be more S or S/g.

Morty
2019-05-25, 10:42 AM
The biggest illusion 3E D&D sold to people isn't that they can be heroes and adventurers in a magic world, but that it can consistently simulate a world. Or anything.

On a less glib note, I have observed that I've gravitated towards lighter systems over the years, but I do still enjoy crunch and detail. I do play Exalted 3E, and it's as crunchy as it gets. I suppose I'm just more picky about where this crunch gets applied. Creating complex and rules-heavy systems carries a risk of creating complexity for complexity's sake. Shadowrun, for example, is absolutely rife with thick rules that serve little purpose.

My preference for crunchy rules is what people have talked about here already. It allows for a greater variety in character creation and many hooks to hang cool abilities off of. Or it can, at least. It's also possible to create a system full of exceptions and rules that prevent you from freely creating your character. It's also possible to create a lot of material that just won't see a lot of use - the FFG WH40K RPGs are pretty notorious about it. How likely is a talent that helps you resist seduction to come up in an Only War game? Not very.

Simulation isn't something I want anymore. In fact, I'm not even sure what it's supposed to mean. Rules will never be physics.

Mechalich
2019-05-26, 12:16 AM
Simulation isn't something I want anymore. In fact, I'm not even sure what it's supposed to mean. Rules will never be physics.

Rules can approximate physics, and an ideal rules system could do so to the point that you would never actually face a physics error. This doesn't actually happen, even in video games that strictly limit inputs in order to make the possible outputs they need to model collapse into a viable set of possibilities they occasionally crash when encountering something that doesn't work. That said, you can functionally play No Man's Sky forever and never break it's engine, it's just you'll end up doing things that are functionally the same an endless number of times.

In terms of simulation based goals, you want a system that can functionally model as high a percentage of your potential outputs as possible, while accepting that sometimes the rules will throw out an incompatible or nonsensical result in an edge case and the GM will have to effectively instant-patch the game engine by making a ruling. And there's a distinctive trade off between how comprehensive you make your rule set to reduce edge cases versus how unwieldy the rules become. There's also the problem that, if a rules set grows to large and the rules modifications are not properly thought out in order to integrate effectively then additionally rules may actually produce more nonsense than reduce it. That particular problem afflicts D&D in spades and one of the reasons 5e is (for now) more stable in some ways than previous editions is simply that it has fewer rules.

The more inputs and outputs you try to simulate the harder it becomes to make a simulation possible. The simpler the game world is, the easier it is to try and construct a viable representative model of it. That's why fantasy games are generally easier to try and simulate than science fiction ones - space travel's a b**** - and low-magic, low-power games are easier than high-powered ones. D&D is a fantasy kitchen sink, it has a stupidly huge amount of inputs, so it is indeed a poor choice to try and simulate in any reasonable way. I firmly believe that the best D&D setting in Planescape, largely because it's the one that doesn't try to offer a simulation of a quasi-medieval world and embraces the crazy, while Spelljammer, which actually tried to simulate how its bizarre 'ships in space' scenario would work down to orbital paths and air consumption times, might actually be the worst (nobody actually played it that way, I believe, everyone played it as planescape with ships instead of portals).

Quertus
2019-05-26, 07:38 PM
Spelljammer, which actually tried to simulate how its bizarre 'ships in space' scenario would work down to orbital paths and air consumption times, might actually be the worst (nobody actually played it that way, I believe, everyone played it as planescape with ships instead of portals).

… ?

So, I'm pretty sure I played Spelljammer that way. It was a unique minigame with unique crunch, which made it interesting.

Please explain why you consider it "worst D&D".

Max_Killjoy
2019-05-26, 10:59 PM
Yeah, when I said "modeling the real world" I meant defaulting to real-world physics unless otherwise specified, as opposed to running on Rule of Cool, story logic, or the like, not literally trying to replicate reality; I should have phrased that differently.

The point stands, though, that simulationism != verisimilitude. To use your extra-actions-due-to-quickness example, getting extra actions due to class instead of Dex or whatever can be simulationist ("this is the Speedster class, only it gets speedy stuff") or gamist ("this is the Fighter, it gets more actions because it needs them to keep up with other martial classes"), and it can be verisimilar ("increasing combat skill lets you attack faster, and some characters advance faster than others") or not ("fighters--and only fighters--get more attacks, because reasons"), and in fact the same mechanic can be simulationist and gamist and verisimilar and implausible all at the same time by varying degrees, all depending on the context of the surrounding setting and system.


Whereas to me "simulationist" and "verisimilitude" go hand in hand, because either one is hard without the other.

But, "simulationist" and "crunchy" are orthogonal -- in theory a GM could go completely diceless and freeform, run entirely on "rulings" to use the 5e term, and if their guiding principle for each ruling was fiction-layer in-setting continuity, consistency, and coherence, if their decisions were based on cause-and-effect and the probability of outcomes at each decision point, they'd be more "simulationist" than a GM strictly abiding by a very complex set of rules that were designed for the sake of being a game and working like a game, or a very complex set of rules designed for the sake of "creating story" (and "exploring theme", meh).




So D&D isn't "not simulationist" just because it's trying to balance that with gamism and there are more simulationist games out there, it just means that, well, D&D is more of a G/S mix where e.g. RoleMaster may be more S or S/g.


No actual RPG is completely not!sim, or completely not!gam, or completely not!nar (although there are actual RPGs that are completely not!nar if one uses the very narrow and peculiar pseudo-definition of "narrative" that RE ended up with). To label a game like D&D simulationist in any meaningful way, it would have to be more sim than anything else, and that never has been the case throughout any of the editions.

Earthwalker
2019-05-27, 04:41 AM
Weirdly I find myself disagreeing with what people are getting out of crunchy systems. That is to say I don't get the same things from them, not that people are wrong for finding that bit.

More crunch = More character options.

I find as the number of rules go down, then the more different kinds of character I can make. I find when presented with a list of options you end up being limited to those options.

I do enjoy crunchy games tho. I switch between systems and groups. What I like about the more crunch heavy games from a GM or Player perspective is...

I end up playing the game a lot more. I spend more time as a player hunting options. Playing the game when not at the table thinking about what I am going to do next. As a GM its the same spending more time finding interesting rules to use / shape the next session with. Making NPCs.

When playing (well GMing) Fate.. I am pretty much only playing the game for the 3 hour session we have each week.
When GMing Pathfinder I was constantly making NPC within the system. Looking up rules.

This is both an advantage and a disadvantage depending on how much free time you have.

Satinavian
2019-05-27, 05:07 AM
I could see a rules-light TTRPG using consistent magic, which maintains balance and consistency with the narrative, but that's exactly the opposite of the topic at hand. I would like to see a system that used consistent, coherent magic, while also being fairly rules heavy in a way that's fun.
Have you tried Ars Magica ? It certainly aims to be that.

Mordar
2019-05-29, 02:24 PM
Weirdly I find myself disagreeing with what people are getting out of crunchy systems. That is to say I don't get the same things from them, not that people are wrong for finding that bit.

More crunch = More character options.

I find as the number of rules go down, then the more different kinds of character I can make. I find when presented with a list of options you end up being limited to those options.

If this is referring to my points (as I think it is), consider this potential rewrite: "More character crunch = more ability to mechanistically model character differences".

Imagine you have a game where the available combat skills are "Hit Things", "Hit Things with Things", "Hit Things with Stuff from a Distance". You are allowed to "skin" the skills so that "Hit Things" could be punch, kick, brawl, pro-wrestle, karate, slam dance or any other option you can come up with. However, all of them work the exact same way with the same relative potency. Your archer, mage-blaster, gunslinger, shuriken flinger and old-school-bomb-thrower are likewise all the same, mechanically. You have unlimited options that all result in the exact same mechanistic effect. The same discussion could be had for knowledge, social or other active skills as well.

Now imagine a game where there are discrete rules for 10 items within each of the "Hit..." categories. Brawling is handled differently than Dance Fighting is handled differently than expertise in Shin Kicking. One is not inherently intended to be better than another, but they are designed to have their own strengths and weaknesses while still using a system that is generalized enough to not be unwieldy. Now you could rightly say that you are limited to 30 options (10 each for the three categories), but I could respond that there are now actually 30 options instead of just 3.

That's what I meant, at least, when I was advocating that more crunch can provide more playable options.

- M

LibraryOgre
2019-05-29, 03:31 PM
My big one? Modularity.

It is great to have systems to cover everything and integrate well, but I think it is just as important to have system that dis-integrate well... where removing a few things you don't care to deal with doesn't upset the entire system.

For example, if I don't care too much about encumbrance or fatigue, I don't want to have to fight the system to not care about them... I want a robust system that can survive me deeming some parts of it non-essential.

PairO'Dice Lost
2019-05-29, 04:07 PM
Whereas to me "simulationist" and "verisimilitude" go hand in hand, because either one is hard without the other.

But, "simulationist" and "crunchy" are orthogonal -- in theory a GM could go completely diceless and freeform, run entirely on "rulings" to use the 5e term, and if their guiding principle for each ruling was fiction-layer in-setting continuity, consistency, and coherence, if their decisions were based on cause-and-effect and the probability of outcomes at each decision point, they'd be more "simulationist" than a GM strictly abiding by a very complex set of rules that were designed for the sake of being a game and working like a game, or a very complex set of rules designed for the sake of "creating story" (and "exploring theme", meh).

The latter wouldn't make the game simulationist, though, since some other GM could go diceless-and-freeform and get the opposite result.

Fate is a good example of simulationism != verisimilitude != crunch. It's highly verisimilar since it runs entirely on "what's plausible and makes sense in the fiction" for invoking and such, but you can run it as low-crunch simulationism or high-crunch narrativism or anywhere in between depending on what you do with it, depending on how you interpret Aspects vs. skills, how heavily the group leans on making declarations, and so forth.

Now, if your stance is that simulationism and verisimilitude are highly correlated such that running things in a more simulationist manner is going to lead to better verisimilitude and lacking simulationism hurts verisimilitude, then I completely agree, but talking about how individual groups/campaigns/etc. run is different from talking about how games as a whole lean or are intended to play.


To label a game like D&D simulationist in any meaningful way, (A) it would have to be more sim than anything else, and (B) that never has been the case throughout any of the editions.(Bolded points added.)

Hardly. Regarding point A, games can be "mostly narrativist" or "simulationist with a dash of gamism" or "too gamist for me" or whatever and you can talk about what you enjoy about those games, just like someone who likes murder mysteries might e.g. like a sci-fi mystery novel or a historical fiction mystery short story but not like a horror mystery.

And regarding point B, D&D is plenty simulationist despite all the protestations to the contrary. You said yourself that GURPS tries to be a lot more simulationist than D&D, but at the base level they really have a lot in common (at least with the core and fantasy portions of GURPS)--ability scores, hit points, narrow skills, grid-based combat (heck, the "turning radius by aerial maneuverability on a hex grid" diagram in the GURPS book is ripped right out of the 1e DMG), environment-specific rules, and so on and so forth.

Where they differ is in their level of detail and customizability, since GURPS is intended to handle tons of different settings and campaign styles while D&D is only intended to handle D&D settings (that is, the implicit D&D meta-setting upon which the published settings are variations) and archetypal-fantasy-story campaigns, and a lot of D&D's comparative lack of detail or simulation come down to that (for instance, D&D has never put much effort into simulating long-term injuries for PCs because it assumes that healing magic is common and easily accessible). It's much more accurate to say that GURPS and D&D are both simulationist and gamist but that GURPS is farther along the simulationist axis than D&D than it is to try to come up with some arbitrary dividing line where a given game is "more S than G or N" and try to divide games up appropriately.


If this is referring to my points (as I think it is), consider this potential rewrite: "More character crunch = more ability to mechanistically model character differences".

Imagine you have a game where the available combat skills are "Hit Things", "Hit Things with Things", "Hit Things with Stuff from a Distance". You are allowed to "skin" the skills so that "Hit Things" could be punch, kick, brawl, pro-wrestle, karate, slam dance or any other option you can come up with. However, all of them work the exact same way with the same relative potency. Your archer, mage-blaster, gunslinger, shuriken flinger and old-school-bomb-thrower are likewise all the same, mechanically. You have unlimited options that all result in the exact same mechanistic effect. The same discussion could be had for knowledge, social or other active skills as well.

Now imagine a game where there are discrete rules for 10 items within each of the "Hit..." categories. Brawling is handled differently than Dance Fighting is handled differently than expertise in Shin Kicking. One is not inherently intended to be better than another, but they are designed to have their own strengths and weaknesses while still using a system that is generalized enough to not be unwieldy. Now you could rightly say that you are limited to 30 options (10 each for the three categories), but I could respond that there are now actually 30 options instead of just 3.

That's what I meant, at least, when I was advocating that more crunch can provide more playable options.

- M

Agreed. Fate is often touted as this wonderful game where you can play anything you can imagine without the rules "getting in the way," but whether you're playing Superman or a ninja turtle, every game of Fate runs similarly mechanically no matter how you flavor things. The various Fate hacks tweak things a bit with the rules they add and change, but combat still basically comes down to build up Fate points -> create advantages -> attack and maneuver, for instance.

I know that works for a lot of people, but personally I can't run Fate for more than a few sessions before I need a break from the monotony and anything lighter than Fate is out of the question. If I'm going to play the same game multiple times, I want different mechanics to keep things interesting, the same way that when I play a board game like, say, Pandemic I want to use different variants and expansions every time to mix things up and I find games like Ticket to Ride repetitive and boring even with expansions that change the underlying map.


My big one? Modularity.

It is great to have systems to cover everything and integrate well, but I think it is just as important to have system that dis-integrate well... where removing a few things you don't care to deal with doesn't upset the entire system.

For example, if I don't care too much about encumbrance or fatigue, I don't want to have to fight the system to not care about them... I want a robust system that can survive me deeming some parts of it non-essential.

Agreed. Lots of people aren't a huge fan of the 3e skill system, for instance, but because it's its own thing you can easily houserule changes to it without overly affecting the rest of the game, or even wholesale replace it with something else as long as you decide what spell/feat/etc. effects like "+5 to Knowledge (Arcana) checks" and "take 10 on Hide checks" mean in the context of the new system. Same with how you can run with any set of allowed classes from "Clerics only, no alternate class features, Final Destination" to "anything goes, Dragon Magazine included" and the game won't break in half.

ErdrickOfAliaha
2019-05-29, 06:24 PM
Piloting.

Whether you are at the controls of a mech, at the helm of a spacecraft, or behind the wheel of a car. Chase scenes and vehicle combat especially Need crunch. Even more so in 3d spaces. You need the game mechanics to support you so that you can know relative position, the effects of your manuevers, even taking evasive action. Without sufficient crunch, almost everything in a vehicle interaction falls apart.

To me, this was the greatest failing of FFG's Star Wars. Without hard distance numbers, it just didn't "feel" right.

Max_Killjoy
2019-05-29, 09:15 PM
To avoid a long back-and-forth, I'll put my position this way. Maybe at some point D&D was trying to be "simulationist", maybe not... but if so, every edition of the game thus far has failed miserably in that regard.

It's the game that's had hyperscaling hit points, deeply abstracted combat*, mushing together evasion and resilience, and them smearing them across multiple mechanics (AC, saving throws, etc), linear resolution probability, etc.

* I forget which edition now, but in one it was directly stated that each round of combat represented a significant amount of proving, evading, feinting, parrying, etc, and that the attack rolls were simply to see if you got a hit out of all that stuff going on.

You'll never convince me that any system built the way D&D is built is successfully "simmy".





If this is referring to my points (as I think it is), consider this potential rewrite: "More character crunch = more ability to mechanistically model character differences".

Imagine you have a game where the available combat skills are "Hit Things", "Hit Things with Things", "Hit Things with Stuff from a Distance". You are allowed to "skin" the skills so that "Hit Things" could be punch, kick, brawl, pro-wrestle, karate, slam dance or any other option you can come up with. However, all of them work the exact same way with the same relative potency. Your archer, mage-blaster, gunslinger, shuriken flinger and old-school-bomb-thrower are likewise all the same, mechanically. You have unlimited options that all result in the exact same mechanistic effect. The same discussion could be had for knowledge, social or other active skills as well.

Now imagine a game where there are discrete rules for 10 items within each of the "Hit..." categories. Brawling is handled differently than Dance Fighting is handled differently than expertise in Shin Kicking. One is not inherently intended to be better than another, but they are designed to have their own strengths and weaknesses while still using a system that is generalized enough to not be unwieldy. Now you could rightly say that you are limited to 30 options (10 each for the three categories), but I could respond that there are now actually 30 options instead of just 3.

That's what I meant, at least, when I was advocating that more crunch can provide more playable options.


I find myself agreeing in general with this -- yet one of my favorite systems is HERO, where the distinctions in your attack(s) and other abilities are largely in how you build them within the context of the setting and the GM's campaign limits.

Kurald Galain
2019-05-30, 01:51 PM
To avoid a long back-and-forth, I'll put my position this way. Maybe at some point D&D was trying to be "simulationist", maybe not... but if so, every edition of the game thus far has failed miserably in that regard.

Nah.

To any player who actually cares about simulationism, a system that tries but fails (1E,2E,3E) is preferable to a system that doesn't even pretend to try (4E,5E). Generally speaking, "failing miserably" just means that there are a few obscure corner cases where the sim breaks down; that may be important in forum discussion but it's not in actual gameplay.

Max_Killjoy
2019-05-30, 02:32 PM
Nah.

To any player who actually cares about simulationism, a system that tries but fails (1E,2E,3E) is preferable to a system that doesn't even pretend to try (4E,5E). Generally speaking, "failing miserably" just means that there are a few obscure corner cases where the sim breaks down; that may be important in forum discussion but it's not in actual gameplay.

This isn't about edge cases, it's right down to the core of the system, how the mechanics work, and the results produced. To be clear, what I'm saying is that 1e, 2e, 3.x, etc, all fail miserably if taken as attempts at simulationism, for the reasons already spelled out in my previous post.

The system does not produce anything like "simmy" results unless the setting (fiction layer) is nothing like anything we'd be familiar with, let alone the quasi-medieval melange typical of D&D settings. D&D "simulates" what we'd consider a bizarro world, and no, that has nothing to do with the magic or the dragons or the orcs.


I think perhaps there's some conflation of "has crunch for everything" or "has minutely detailed crunch" with "simulationist" going on. Whether a system having rules for how to do "everything" is largely orthogonal to what a system is trying to accomplish with its rules.


I don't even care much for the whole GNS thing, GDS is less loaded and a bit more useful but still not great -- but going by what "simulationist" is supposed to mean, there's no way to call a heavily "gamist" oddly-abstracted system like any edition of D&D "simulationist" in any regard.

jjordan
2019-05-30, 04:06 PM
I like the attempt at providing a balanced representation of the game setting, even when it fails, because it's easier for me to balance my modifications. I like the granularity because it allows for subtle customization of characters, settings, and environments. I like the level of non-narrative detail provided by a system because I can turn that into the narrative detail I like. And part of me simply enjoys reading a well designed system. Or criticizing a poorly designed system.

Man_Over_Game
2019-05-30, 05:02 PM
I like the attempt at providing a balanced representation of the game setting, even when it fails, because it's easier for me to balance my modifications. I like the granularity because it allows for subtle customization of characters, settings, and environments. I like the level of non-narrative detail provided by a system because I can turn that into the narrative detail I like. And part of me simply enjoys reading a well designed system. Or criticizing a poorly designed system.

Well said.

Player: "I throw the guy across the edge of the portal, like a blade. How much damage do I do?"
DM: "Uh...a lot, I guess?"

This kind of stuff happens a lot, and there's often not a lot of guidance as to how to rule it.

Although, if I remember correctly, 13th Age does exactly this, although I've heard it's a nightmare to DM.

Psyren
2019-05-30, 05:54 PM
I think perhaps there's some conflation of "has crunch for everything" or "has minutely detailed crunch" with "simulationist" going on. Whether a system having rules for how to do "everything" is largely orthogonal to what a system is trying to accomplish with its rules.


I don't even care much for the whole GNS thing, GDS is less loaded and a bit more useful but still not great -- but going by what "simulationist" is supposed to mean, there's no way to call a heavily "gamist" oddly-abstracted system like any edition of D&D "simulationist" in any regard.

This seems like a crazy-high bar. If the fidelity of the simulation to every or even most aspects of the real world is the only thing that matters, rather than the attempt to at least model various concepts like gravity and bleeding, then almost no tabletop game (certainly no d20 ones that I'm aware of) can be truly called "simulationist."


Nah.

To any player who actually cares about simulationism, a system that tries but fails (1E,2E,3E) is preferable to a system that doesn't even pretend to try (4E,5E). Generally speaking, "failing miserably" just means that there are a few obscure corner cases where the sim breaks down; that may be important in forum discussion but it's not in actual gameplay.

Yeah, speaking personally I value the effort much more. Especially when more recent trends have been to further abandon and and all attempts at simulating anything.

Max_Killjoy
2019-05-30, 07:39 PM
This seems like a crazy-high bar. If the fidelity of the simulation to every or even most aspects of the real world is the only thing that matters, rather than the attempt to at least model various concepts like gravity and bleeding, then almost no tabletop game (certainly no d20 ones that I'm aware of) can be truly called "simulationist."


First, it's fidelity to or synchronicity with the fiction-layer, real-world-like or not -- "the real world" just makes for a useful baseline or ballpark when sans other information about the setting. That is, the results of whatever rule or system need to feel like the thing they're supposed to be representing, and produce a generally similar range and distribution of outcomes as one would expect given the facts at the time within the fiction layer. If the system routinely produces "wonky" results, creating a "wait, what?" reaction in players, then it has failed in whatever attempt it was making to be "simmy".

Second, there are degrees of success, it's not as if the entire system needs to be a physics simulator, or be intensely crunchy and detailed.

Third, correct, no d20 system -- at least of those I've ever picked up and read, or heard described, or actually played -- is going to pass muster as "simulationist" by that standard, unless one creates the setting from scratch to match the what the system does. None of the quasi-medieval melange settings that are typical to D&D count as the sort of world for which D&D would be even marginally "simmy".

It doesn't just try and fail, it fails so spectacularly at being a simmy system for those quasi-medieval melange settings that either it wasn't ever trying in the first place, or something went horribly wrong.

Satinavian
2019-05-31, 02:36 AM
I've found that the "BRP" games that derived their rules from '78 RuneQuest, such as [I]Call of Cthullu, King Arthur Pendragon (which is my favorite), Ringworld, and Stormbringer, just hew closer to both the fiction, and what I'd expect "If this were real" than the other games I've played, except for maybe Champions, but that was comic book superheroes, so no "If this were real" (I also just don't like that genre as much).

That might be true for you, but it is certainly not true for me.

I don't find BRP games particularly good at simulation or versimilitude. Sure, better than every D&D, but that is a rather low bar. I have not played all of them, but for every one i played i got better results with certain more modern games. (admittantly not all of them in English). I don't think i would use BRP for anything really.

Now some kind of exception is "King Arthur Pendragon" because i have never played another game that really tries to do the same thing. But even there are many other games that do moral struggles and do them better. But they would require some tinkering to do knightly tales and knightly morals.

Kurald Galain
2019-05-31, 06:04 AM
Third, correct, no d20 system -- at least of those I've ever picked up and read, or heard described, or actually played -- is going to pass muster as "simulationist" by that standard
Since no system printed meets your standard, that means that your definitions are simply not useful for discussion. Given how wildly popular 3E was, and PF still is, it should be obvious that most players have a standard wildly different from yours (and that by most players' standards, 3E/PF is one of the most simulationist games on the market).

Max_Killjoy
2019-05-31, 07:01 AM
Since no system printed meets your standard, that means that your definitions are simply not useful for discussion. Given how wildly popular 3E was, and PF still is, it should be obvious that most players have a standard wildly different from yours (and that by most players' standards, 3E/PF is one of the most simulationist games on the market).

OK, explain exactly how it is you think 3e/PF is "simulationist".

MrSandman
2019-05-31, 09:14 AM
Since no system printed meets your standard, that means that your definitions are simply not useful for discussion. Given how wildly popular 3E was, and PF still is, it should be obvious that most players have a standard wildly different from yours (and that by most players' standards, 3E/PF is one of the most simulationist games on the market).

D&D being popular doesn't mean it's simulationist. It just means it's popular. Unless, of course, you can back your claim that most players find it one of the most simulationist games on the market with some actual data.

Personally, even when D&D was the only thing I played, I never found it particularly simulationist.

kyoryu
2019-05-31, 11:51 AM
No actual RPG is completely not!sim, or completely not!gam, or completely not!nar (although there are actual RPGs that are completely not!nar if one uses the very narrow and peculiar pseudo-definition of "narrative" that RE ended up with). To label a game like D&D simulationist in any meaningful way, it would have to be more sim than anything else, and that never has been the case throughout any of the editions.

Really a label like that is only useful understood as “when there is a conflict, which priority wins?”


Since no system printed meets your standard, that means that your definitions are simply not useful for discussion. Given how wildly popular 3E was, and PF still is, it should be obvious that most players have a standard wildly different from yours (and that by most players' standards, 3E/PF is one of the most simulationist games on the market).

He didn’t say no system, he said no d20 system. Which I’d agree with.

If “most popular” (has 5e eclipsed it?) means “most simulationist” then shouldn’t “most popular” mean “most narrative” and “most gamist” as well?

Which seems a bit silly.


That might be true for you, but it is certainly not true for

What game do you find sumulationist then? BRP certainly developed from simulationist roots in the Perrin Conventions, which were Steve’s attempts to reconcile D&D with his SCA experiences.

Psyren
2019-06-01, 03:15 AM
First, it's fidelity to or synchronicity with the fiction-layer, real-world-like or not -- "the real world" just makes for a useful baseline or ballpark when sans other information about the setting. That is, the results of whatever rule or system need to feel like the thing they're supposed to be representing, and produce a generally similar range and distribution of outcomes as one would expect given the facts at the time within the fiction layer. If the system routinely produces "wonky" results, creating a "wait, what?" reaction in players, then it has failed in whatever attempt it was making to be "simmy".

Sure, I can agree with that - if a given game is set on an alien planet with low gravity for example, you could say there's no such thing as falling damage and still have it be a decently crunchy simulation. So it doesn't have to be trying to model the real world.

Where I think we're not quite aligned is on what provokes a "wait, what?" reaction, as per below:



Second, there are degrees of success, it's not as if the entire system needs to be a physics simulator, or be intensely crunchy and detailed.

Third, correct, no d20 system -- at least of those I've ever picked up and read, or heard described, or actually played -- is going to pass muster as "simulationist" by that standard, unless one creates the setting from scratch to match the what the system does. None of the quasi-medieval melange settings that are typical to D&D count as the sort of world for which D&D would be even marginally "simmy".

It doesn't just try and fail, it fails so spectacularly at being a simmy system for those quasi-medieval melange settings that either it wasn't ever trying in the first place, or something went horribly wrong.

On one hand you say that degrees of success do matter, but then on the other you say that D&D and other d20 systems don't have even marginal success as simulations. Which takes me right back to my original judgement, that your bar for such success/degrees of success seems to be extremely high. Now, that isn't a problem, it's your bar after all... but I then have to question its usefulness to anyone who isn't you.


D&D being popular doesn't mean it's simulationist. It just means it's popular. Unless, of course, you can back your claim that most players find it one of the most simulationist games on the market with some actual data.

I don't think it's the most simulationist by any stretch. But I do think it manages to hit the sweet spot between "simulationist enough to be immersive" while also "abstract enough to not let minutiae interfere with gameplay." That spot is pretty subjective, but Kurald's point appears to be that enough people seem to agree that its legacy (particularly 3e/PF) has continued to endure to this day.

I mean, for a true simulation I could go whole-hog and get some tabletop equivalent of Manual Samuel, where you take penalties for not breathing or blinking or something. That would certainly be a higher-fidelity simulation, but I doubt it would be a better game.

Devils_Advocate
2019-06-01, 08:10 AM
D&D is heavily faux simulationist.

Take melee attack accuracy, for example. I once saw the way that this works humorously described as "I'm SO STRONG, I can cut a fly in half!" Of course, the reason for this is that strength does help attack accuracy to a degree, since it's possible not to be strong enough to wield a weapon effectively. And more simulationist systems handle that by giving weapons Strength ratings and imposing penalties on wielders with insufficient Strength. D&D instead has weapon proficiencies, which tend to put heavier weapons in the hands of stronger characters, because characters with higher Strength tend to have "character classes" that grant proficiency with those weapons. But this is done via treating the use of an extra large sword as a different skill requiring different training (rather than simply greater strength) than the use of a just large sword. Also, a dude can be so strong he can cut a fly in half.

Speaking of accurate attacks, I remember once seeing the question "Shouldn't a Sneak Attack be a critical hit?" Which seems like a valid question, since a Rogue's Sneak Attack seems like it's supposed to involve hitting someone pretty critically. But critical hits themselves aren't necessarily all that critical if it's possible to roll lower damage on a crit than on a non-crit. Which... doesn't really seem to make sense if a critical hit is, conceptually, supposed to be a better hit. How is it better, if it's doing less damage? And if it's not, what is it supposed to represent...? And why do you jump from rolling damage normally to rolling double damage at a particular cutoff point, with nothing in between?

Contrast to Exalted, 2nd Edition (the only one I'm really familiar with; not sure how different it is from the other editions in this regard). That system just... uses the idea that better rolls represent better attacks. So rolling higher on your attack roll just lets you roll proportionately more damage because you're hitting the peoples more gooder. And if you attack before someone can react, that character's dodge or parry isn't subtracted from your attack, allowing you to strike for massive damage. Doing more damage with better-aimed strikes is just part of how combat works, so there's no need for extra rules that treat this as an exceptional case.

(Mind you, this is terribly unbalanced, with high Dexterity and surprise being infamously overpowered. Which is a point to bear in mind: A system can easily provide a variety of mechanically distinct options without those options being anywhere near equally viable. And so far as simulation is concerned... realism, setting conceits, and so forth may demand that some options are far more useful than others.)

D&D achieves the illusion of simulation through a great big pile of kludges, each designed to make something behave more appropriately. To a certain extent, these patches cover so much of what one is likely to deal with that unpatched interactions do represent "corner cases". But this fidelity to what the mechanics are supposed to represent doesn't emerge organically from the system. In a genuine simulation, the relations and interactions between representations mirror the relations and interactions between the represented. D&D contrives roughly appropriate outputs for various cases, but will never genuinely simulate. Because if it weren't the same basic familiar core system plus a whole bunch of kludges, it wouldn't be D&D! Dungeons & Dragons is wedded to certain design decisions that aren't particularly good for anything other than "being D&D", because those elements are parts of its identity.

Anyway, semantics aside, the underlined sentence above is something that I like about simulationist systems, regardless of whether other systems may also be called "simulationist". Like, if X is supposed to represent 1, Y, is supposed to represent 2, and Z is supposed to represent 3, I want the system to have X + Y = Z, and I don't want it to do that by having a specific special rule that says "X + Y = Z". Dig what I'm sayin'?

Kurald Galain
2019-06-01, 09:31 AM
D&D achieves the illusion of simulation through a great big pile of kludges, each designed to make something behave more appropriately. To a certain extent, these patches cover so much of what one is likely to deal with that unpatched interactions do represent "corner cases". But this fidelity to what the mechanics are supposed to represent doesn't emerge organically from the system.

A system that fakes simulation so well that the average player is unable to tell the difference, is ipso facto simulationist.

kyoryu
2019-06-01, 12:44 PM
A system that fakes simulation so well that the average player is unable to tell the difference, is ipso facto simulationist.

Except D&D doesn't.

See: Moderate level fighters being able to fall down cliffs with -zero fear- of anything resembling death.

Look at all the hp threads where half the people can only come to the conclusion that HP is literally meat, and that high level characters are basically nonhumans and practically gods because that's the only way to reconcile all the ways hp works.

If your simulation only makes sense if you presume that the beings being simulated are essentially semi-divine, then that is not a good simulation. The only thing that D&D (specifically 3.x/PF) simulates reasonably well is D&D-World.

LibraryOgre
2019-06-01, 01:05 PM
Anyone else remember drowning someone to heal them?

Dimers
2019-06-01, 01:26 PM
Sure I do! And I also remember that there's no mechanical way to ever stop drowning. :smallsmile:

Kurald Galain
2019-06-01, 03:50 PM
Except D&D doesn't.

It does to the average player. Not the average user of a forum that spent fifteen years overanalyzing and nitpicking the game :smallamused:

Willie the Duck
2019-06-01, 04:17 PM
Anyone else remember drowning someone to heal them?

Yes, but I don't know how much I consider it precedence for anything. It's a linguistic glitch. The writer did not think about the situation where someone started drowning with hit point totals below zero, silly them. Makes a great amusing anecdote, to be sure.

Mr Beer
2019-06-01, 05:30 PM
It does to the average player. Not the average user of a forum that spent fifteen years overanalyzing and nitpicking the game :smallamused:

I don't believe that is true, at least for adult players.

kyoryu
2019-06-01, 06:24 PM
It does to the average player. Not the average user of a forum that spent fifteen years overanalyzing and nitpicking the game :smallamused:

Nah. The obvious illogicalness of the game was obvious when I was like 12, and was part of what drove me to GURPS. And that was 1e, so it was the big stuff, not the little weirdo edge cases like drown-healing.

I care a lot less about that stuff nowadays, to be honest. While D&D isn't my favorite game, I don't actively dislike it (except maybe 3.x) and any reasons for it not being a favorite have nothing to do with simulationism.

I mean, I don't think anyone here is arguing D&D is a bad game. Just that it's not a very good simulationist game.

One could even argue that that's one of the strengths of D&D - by not being a very strong "simulationist" or "narrative" or "gamist" game it opens itself to being enjoyed by a wider audience.

PhoenixPhyre
2019-06-01, 06:54 PM
Nah. The obvious illogicalness of the game was obvious when I was like 12, and was part of what drove me to GURPS. And that was 1e, so it was the big stuff, not the little weirdo edge cases like drown-healing.

[...]

One could even argue that that's one of the strengths of D&D - by not being a very strong "simulationist" or "narrative" or "gamist" game it opens itself to being enjoyed by a wider audience.

It's obvious to my brand new (to TTRPGs, to RPGs, and to D&D) teenage players, basically from the start. D&D doesn't attempt to be anything other than a fun way to be able to pretend to be heroes doing heroic things. Or not. For me, that's a large part of the draw. It's not anything-ist--it's free from pretensions to following any theory or school of thought. It's absurd in parts, serious in parts, and a giant amalgam of "hey, that seems cool, let's do it!" And always has been. And, for me, that's the charm.

Is it simulationist? Nope. Not at all. And 4e and 5e make that explicit and intentional (where the others flailed around in their own amusing ways). And they're better for being explicit. I prefer games that
a) state what they're trying to do
b) do it well.

If you can't get beyond a half-donkey simulation, don't even try. Just be a good game and none of the rest really matters. To me, at least.

kyoryu
2019-06-02, 02:07 AM
And to be clear, again, saying that D&D is not a strong simulationist game is not the same as saying it’s a bad game.

Hell, I’ve gravitated to a bunch of games that are even less simulationist than D&D. It’s not a criticism.

Satinavian
2019-06-02, 05:39 AM
What game do you find sumulationist then? BRP certainly developed from simulationist roots in the Perrin Conventions, which were Steve’s attempts to reconcile D&D with his SCA experiences.
I have a problem with the basic resolution system for skills, which is a percentage chance. It is basically impossible to have difficulties where a professional will most likely (90%+) succeed and an amateur will most likely fail and similar things. It is basically impossible to tweak difficulties and skills in a way that skill tests would give results you would expec.

Yes, the system cops out with "only rolling under stress" and similar stuff but that only means you can't use your skills to model routine tasks and skill differences in not stressfull situations.

The authors knew very well that their system would give loads of counterintuitive results. And their solution is "well, don't use our mechnics if the outcome is rubbish and just narrate a success (or failure)".
The skill systen is at the very core of BRP. And you can't really use it for simulation.

I also never said that BRP was not simulationist. That seems to be the main design philosophy. I instead said it was not particularly good at simulation. That many other, more modern games (not even that modern games) just do it better. For example TDE4 and TDE5 are both more geared towards simulation both in design and result. SIFRP is rather rules light and gets a better simulation without even wanting to be simulationist. I would argue that most Shadowrun versions are better for simulation but that would be a very close call. Then there are games like GURPS which can be better at simulation - if one chooses the right optional rules. And games that have a very narrow fokus but simulate that one quite well while failing everywhere else (various Mechwarrior RPGs, Ars Magica)

I played a couple of BRP games. But it never worked for me. Because the simulation aspect was inferior to those of other games i was familiar with and the games had not much to make up for it.

Max_Killjoy
2019-06-02, 08:58 AM
I have a problem with the basic resolution system for skills, which is a percentage chance. It is basically impossible to have difficulties where a professional will most likely (90%+) succeed and an amateur will most likely fail and similar things. It is basically impossible to tweak difficulties and skills in a way that skill tests would give results you would expec.

Yes, the system cops out with "only rolling under stress" and similar stuff but that only means you can't use your skills to model routine tasks and skill differences in not stressfull situations.


For better or worse, "only roll under stress, never roll otherwise" and "the system only needs to deal with things that are in doubt, not the entire span of the possible" and similar have become sacred cows for a large swath of the RPG industry and gamers.

Personally, I want a system that can tell me about the characters more broadly, not just within a narrow range of special circumstances. I should be able to put any character on a character sheet in full detail and have the system represent or map their abilities and limitations -- not just PCs. I don't care if the lab rat professor of magic or the court jester or the sheltered prince or the limping shopkeeper are not "appropriate" PC for most campaigns or the sorts of things that the designers foresaw PCs getting up to; the system should still be able to encompass that character as a "person" in the "world" of the game if the GM determines a need to completely write them up.

Pleh
2019-06-02, 10:12 AM
I skimmed the glut of simulationist arguments. Seems like a train of thought that's sitting in the mud, spinning wheels to dig itself in deeper without going anywhere.

Crunch isn't that valuable to me, because I can readily improvise and freehand it with Roleplaying. To some extent, I value the ability to do so.

But for the moments I've appreciated the crunch of a game, it's been where the crumch was able to evaluate an outcome that I was either on the fence about or drawing a blank on, and do so in a manner that is convincing and informs my understanding of the system.

Basically, I value crunch that is both rigorously, and simply designed. Rigor is less valuable if I can't understand it or it requires too much effort to understand. Simplicity is less valuable when oversimplifications lead to uninspiringly nonsensical conclusions

(like how SWSE originally had collision rule that had both colliding objects/creatures taking damage based on the size of the larger object/creature, meaning you could launch an Ewok at the Death Star to cause the Death Star to take damage as if it had collided with another Death Star... it was errata'd).

Basically, I view rule crunch like power tools. If they are too finnicky and require me to literally rennovate my work space to accomodate them, it might not matter how powerful or useful they are. Likewise, if they are too cheap and have little power to perform various tasks or break easily, I'm probably not using it to build anything I care deeply about.

jjordan
2019-06-02, 10:27 AM
I have a problem with the basic resolution system for skills, which is a percentage chance. It is basically impossible to have difficulties where a professional will most likely (90%+) succeed and an amateur will most likely fail and similar things. It is basically impossible to tweak difficulties and skills in a way that skill tests would give results you would expect.It's not impossible. Building on the works of others you can fairly simply modify the existing system, behind the scenes, by adding on a few rules/concepts to tweak the DC target.



Skill Level
DC Multiplier
Note


Unskilled
x 3
No knowledge of this skill.


Skilled
x 2
Casual acquaintance with the skill. Book learning


Proficient
x 1
Education and practice


Expert
x 0.5
High degree of knowledge and skill practiced thousands of times.


Master
x 0.25
You wrote the book on this subject. You dream about this skill.



This provides you with a DC that slides according to the level of proficiency someone has at a particular skill. You might also allow accumulative DC attempts. If someone is trying to accomplish a task with a DC of 200, for example, there's no way they are going to accomplish this first try. You can allow them try multiple times and add their roll to their cumulative attempt to accomplish this task. The time required for each attempt is multiplied by attempt number. First attempt the time is multiplied by one. Second attempt the time required is multiplied by two. And so on. Incredibly difficult tasks effectively become impossible for people without the appropriate skills. If someone put in all the time needed to accomplish this task I'd actually bump up their skill level once they successfully completed it.

Sorry for the tangent.

Satinavian
2019-06-02, 10:52 AM
It's not impossible. Building on the works of others you can fairly simply modify the existing system, behind the scenes, by adding on a few rules/concepts to tweak the DC target.
If you change it enough that system works completely differently, it can give the results of a better skill system, yes.

Not that your example is that good. Now you have skill DCs and skill levels as distinct things that more or less mean the same. And you have weird jumps in the probability distributions in a very detailed system. And you made the stuff way more complicated than it needs to be. You multitly the DC for skill level and you multiply it again for difficulty (which is tracked separately) before you do a D100.

Instead of trying to rescue the BRP system with such fixes, i would sooner take another resolution method, there are many.

Psyren
2019-06-03, 01:40 AM
Except D&D doesn't.

See: Moderate level fighters being able to fall down cliffs with -zero fear- of anything resembling death.

Look at all the hp threads where half the people can only come to the conclusion that HP is literally meat, and that high level characters are basically nonhumans and practically gods because that's the only way to reconcile all the ways hp works.

If your simulation only makes sense if you presume that the beings being simulated are essentially semi-divine, then that is not a good simulation. The only thing that D&D (specifically 3.x/PF) simulates reasonably well is D&D-World.

Which is fine if that's your bar, but again, I find that to be an impossible standard for most TTRPGs (and certainly all the d20 ones) to be held to. D&D models so many things other games don't bother to try, like bleeding, starvation/thirst, exhaustion, suffocation, heatstroke, frostbite, gravity, light levels, states of awareness, hazardous surfaces, cover/concealment, to say nothing of more fantastic terrains, conditions or abilities. If none of that counts as a simulation, I can only hope you've found a game that does, and enough other people to play it with regularly.

Satinavian
2019-06-03, 03:42 AM
Which is fine if that's your bar, but again, I find that to be an impossible standard for most TTRPGs (and certainly all the d20 ones) to be held to. D&D models so many things other games don't bother to try, like bleeding, starvation/thirst, exhaustion, suffocation, heatstroke, frostbite, gravity, light levels, states of awareness, hazardous surfaces, cover/concealment, to say nothing of more fantastic terrains, conditions or abilities. If none of that counts as a simulation, I can only hope you've found a game that does, and enough other people to play it with regularly.Going back to my examples, TDE does model all of those too and more (with the exception of gravitation which does not vary relevantly in the covered settings). And still provides a better simulation for pretty much every aspect.

Actually most crunchy systems get the majority of that list done.

Morty
2019-06-03, 07:19 AM
Dark Heresy 2E covers most of those as well, clunky as it is. And unlike D&D, starvation and thirst don't become non-issues with enough XP gain.

LibraryOgre
2019-06-03, 07:30 AM
Hackmaster is pretty on point with things like that, too.

Psyren
2019-06-03, 09:40 AM
Going back to my examples, TDE does model all of those too and more (with the exception of gravitation which does not vary relevantly in the covered settings). And still provides a better simulation for pretty much every aspect.

Actually most crunchy systems get the majority of that list done.

1) Define "better."
2) I never said other systems are not also simulations. A game can be a "worse simulation" (whatever that ultimately means) and still be a simulation.

And again, it's the attempt that matters most to me, the crunch itself can be easily tweaked if I feel it needs it - if I want starvation or a fall to be more lethal for example, I can do that. I paid the designers for the framework, adjusting that framework is then something I can easily do on my own.


Dark Heresy 2E covers most of those as well, clunky as it is. And unlike D&D, starvation and thirst don't become non-issues with enough XP gain.

You call that a bug, but I call that a feature. D&D characters become what we would consider superhuman at high levels, and given the challenges they have to face, that's expected. If you can't cross a regular desert/tundra at high levels, what hope would you have to make it across somewhere like Abaddon or Stygia?

Segev
2019-06-03, 09:49 AM
Given the level of simulation Max_Killjoy seems to be demanding, I'm curious what systems he thinks ARE simulationist. Is GURPS the only one? Does GURPS even manage it? I mean, I doubt he thinks any tabletop wargame is simulationist by the level of abstraction he refuses to tolerate.

That said, I argue that it's a question of what you're trying to simulate. Are you trying to simulate the physics down to the biological effects of a blunt object hitting at this precise muscle group, or a piercing tear through these organs? Are you trying to simulate just whether each individual maneuver "hits" and "does damage" to a "hit zone" or the whole body?

I think, for a useful discussion of "what we enjoy in crunchy...RPGs," we need to accept that the crunch is going to be abstracted to some degree, and not reject it if it's not "simulationist" if we're going to define "simulationist" too finely.

I mean, I agree with Max's earlier comment about liking having speed be represented somewhat differently than skill in terms of what it enables. Crunchy systems give more knobs to turn to more precisely describe options in the mechanics. I love that D&D 3e, for instance, has a difference in mechanics between psionics and spellcasting; that psychic magic in PF is just more spellcasting is irksome to me.

Satinavian
2019-06-03, 09:54 AM
1) Define "better."Actually giving results that match reality when real world stuff is simulated. Or being at least consistent in itself and with the setting for fantastical stuff.

You know, actually simulating these things, not just having rules for it.

D&D is not good at simulation but doesn't try to be one particularly hard either.

If you think otherwise you probably have not tried many other very crunchy RPGs.

Max_Killjoy
2019-06-03, 10:20 AM
1) Define "better."
2) I never said other systems are not also simulations. A game can be a "worse simulation" (whatever that ultimately means) and still be a simulation.

And again, it's the attempt that matters most to me, the crunch itself can be easily tweaked if I feel it needs it - if I want starvation or a fall to be more lethal for example, I can do that. I paid the designers for the framework, adjusting that framework is then something I can easily do on my own.


At what point is a system so bad at being "simulationist" for anything at all, let alone a particular setting or type of setting, that it just doesn't count as "simulationist"?

Willie the Duck
2019-06-03, 10:32 AM
At what point is a system so bad at being "simulationist" for anything at all, let alone a particular setting or type of setting, that it just doesn't count as "simulationist"?

Honestly, bearing a 'simulationist' (/'narrativist'/'gamist') flag is fairly meaningless. I'd almost say that none of them mean anything except on a relative scale -- i.e. 'X is more simulationist than Y (at least with regards to qualities which are important to me or my group),' or 'A is not simulationist enough for my needs, while B is (but....).'

We're back to the point they were bitd of the Forge where these categorizations of game qualities have taken on importance in and of themselves, and they are just ways of carving up an analysis.

kyoryu
2019-06-03, 10:44 AM
Which is fine if that's your bar,

Personally, no, but it’s a reasonable target for a simulationist system.


but again, I find that to be an impossible standard for most TTRPGs

Not really, for simulationist systems. But not all systems are or should be simulationist. “Simulationist” is not a synonym for “good”.


(and certainly all the d20 ones) to be held to.

Pretty much. It’s not a standard d20 really goes for. It prioritizes certain types of heroic action.


D&D models so many things other games don't bother to try, like bleeding, starvation/thirst, exhaustion, suffocation, heatstroke, frostbite, gravity, light levels, states of awareness, hazardous surfaces, cover/concealment, to say nothing of more fantastic terrains, conditions or abilities.

Comprehensiveness if rules is less important for a simulationist system, I think, than fidelity.

If your drowning rule is “someone immersed in water loses one hit point per hour, and if they run out of hp they die” and a typical character has 100hp, then that is not simulationist.

Saying D&D isn’t simulationist isn’t a criticism any more than saying that a blue car isn’t a black one is. It’s an attribute of the system that some people may look for or not, not a statement of quality.


If none of that counts as a simulation, I can only hope you've found a game that does, and enough other people to play it with regularly.

I’ve found a number of games more simulationist than D&D. I don’t really play many of them any more. I’m actually playing more non-simulationist games these days (though truth be told many of them have more “realistic” results than D&D.

I don’t play many hardcore simulationist systems these days.

Me not playing D&D isn’t because it’s not simulationist.

I play more “narrative” games than anything, but will play GURPS, Savage Worlds, D&D, or pretty much anything depending on the situation.

Not being simulationist isn’t a criticism, any more than saying a Ferrari is bad at off-roading is a criticism of a Ferrari

Max_Killjoy
2019-06-03, 10:51 AM
Given the level of simulation Max_Killjoy seems to be demanding, I'm curious what systems he thinks ARE simulationist. Is GURPS the only one? Does GURPS even manage it? I mean, I doubt he thinks any tabletop wargame is simulationist by the level of abstraction he refuses to tolerate.

That said, I argue that it's a question of what you're trying to simulate. Are you trying to simulate the physics down to the biological effects of a blunt object hitting at this precise muscle group, or a piercing tear through these organs? Are you trying to simulate just whether each individual maneuver "hits" and "does damage" to a "hit zone" or the whole body?

I think, for a useful discussion of "what we enjoy in crunchy...RPGs," we need to accept that the crunch is going to be abstracted to some degree, and not reject it if it's not "simulationist" if we're going to define "simulationist" too finely.

I mean, I agree with Max's earlier comment about liking having speed be represented somewhat differently than skill in terms of what it enables. Crunchy systems give more knobs to turn to more precisely describe options in the mechanics. I love that D&D 3e, for instance, has a difference in mechanics between psionics and spellcasting; that psychic magic in PF is just more spellcasting is irksome to me.


I don't think it's a stringent level or a high bar... I'm simply saying that the mechanics should feel like the "fiction" and that the results should be in line with what's reasonably expectable given the facts at hand when the mechanical determination occurs.

There will always be edge cases where adjudication is necessary, unless the rules are so cumbersome that they're not practically playable. But so much of the rejection or criticism of "simulationism" seems to be a matter of deliberately making the perfect the enemy of the good -- they come across as "Well, you'll never get a perfect simulation so simulationism is useless and stupid".

My experience with GURPS was less than stellar, and made it seem exceedingly clunky, but that could well have been the GM rather than the system. I have a copy of the main book to dig through when I get time this summer.

I do think that "crunch" is too often conflated with "simulationist", and "simplicity" is too often conflated with "narrativist" -- FFG Star Wars is full of crunch and complexity, but it's also pretty much antithetical to anything "simulationist", being entirely concerned with emulate "Star Wars stories" to the extent that the "classes" are given "story level" powers that the players interact with rather than the characters themselves.




Honestly, bearing a 'simulationist' (/'narrativist'/'gamist') flag is fairly meaningless. I'd almost say that none of them mean anything except on a relative scale -- i.e. 'X is more simulationist than Y (at least with regards to qualities which are important to me or my group),' or 'A is not simulationist enough for my needs, while B is (but....).'

We're back to the point they were bitd of the Forge where these categorizations of game qualities have taken on importance in and of themselves, and they are just ways of carving up an analysis.


Thing is, I think I've been arguing for a relative scale or a multi-axis spectrum, whereas those calling D&D "simulationist" have been arguing for a binary flag, and then claiming that any attempt to simulate some stuff is enough to check the box and apply the flag to D&D.

(Recall that I've said many times that to be an actual RPG, a game has to be within the fully overlapping part of a Venn diagram of the elements that the Forge tried to split off into three exclusive categories.)

So of course D&D is going to have some "simmy" elements -- but as far as I'm concerned it's also simply not accurate or reasonable to say that D&D rests in the "simmy" part of the diagram.

kyoryu
2019-06-03, 11:17 AM
I think it's useful to define "simulationist"* at this point. As someone that's not a primary simulationist, here's my take:

1) The system has, as a goal, accurate simulation of events
2) The system tracks the things that would be important factors into a situation.
3) The things tracked in a simulation of situation have the impact that they would - for instance, armor makes you take less damage on a hit-by-hit basis **
4) The system tells you what happens in reasonably concrete terms ***
5) The results from the system are generally plausible ****
6) The most probable results from a situation in reality ***** are also highly likely in the system
7) A character making a decision in a situation considers similar things to what a person in reality would be considering ******

Note that I am not including comprehensiveness as a goal - a simulationist system that only tackles hand-to-hand combat is still simulationist.

* Simulationism can arguably include things like "fiction simulation". Since generally most people wanting simulationism are interested in simulating reality, or reality+stuff, we'll use "reality-simulationist" as the baseline. After all, if what you're simulating is the rules that the game describes, that's a bit circular and doesn't give a benchmark as used by several of the points. IOW, D&D simulating "D&D-world" or generally, Game X simulating "Game-X-World" don't really count.

** There's some argument that armor mostly negates hits, and forces people to find weak spots to actually do damage.

*** This is opposed to something like Fate, which mostly gives you constraints on what can happen, while letting the table decide what did happen. Note that this is fairly close to the "hit points are whatever I say they are that makes sense at the moment" model of hit points, which seems to be one of the two primary contenders (the other being "meat points")

**** I am completely unconcerned with weird edge cases and loopholes and stuff like "drown healing". Systems are finite and made by humans and extremely complex. Edge cases happen

***** this is highly subjective, as few of us are actually experts in this stuff.

****** at least for situations that are possible, and extrapolated for other things - like, if you assume that a fireball is possible, what would happen as a result?

kyoryu
2019-06-03, 11:23 AM
Thing is, I think I've been arguing for a relative scale or a multi-axis spectrum, whereas those calling D&D "simulationist" have been arguing for a binary flag, and then claiming that any attempt to simulate some stuff is enough to check the box and apply the flag to D&D.

Sure. And every game will try to mostly hew to "reality" - until something else conflicts with it. A "simulationist" game will still, generally, stick with the realistic option, and if needing to do something for gameplay or other reasons will generally try to work around that in some way, while maintaining the core fidelity.

A good simple measure for how "simulationist" a game is is "how often, when needs other than realism come up, does the game choose to stick with realism?" (Note that 'realism' is shorthand for 'fidelity to whatever it is we're simulating')

Willie the Duck
2019-06-03, 11:51 AM
My experience with GURPS was [less] than stellar, and made it seem exceedingly clunky, but that could well have been the GM rather than the system. I have a copy of the main book to dig through when I get time this summer.

Answering assuming that there is a missing word in there, similar to my own recent omission.
GURPS certain can be clunky, or just slow, and is a lot of complexity that only might provide a benefit to a group. It is useful for discussions like these in that it had a design goal of 'realism' (including some fairly educated-in-field individuals working on the source books), and tends to be clear where it makes assumptions to the otherwise (such as the default sci fi Tech Levels pointing out how to modify it to make it harder science fiction, or the like). For that reason alone it's at least useful in discussion as a benchmark. Kind of "This was a serious attempt at realistically (and where unrealistic, is well explained) present a real character navigating through a real world." That's a decent signpost metric, if nothing else.



I do think that "crunch" is too often conflated with "simulationist", and "simplicity" is too often conflated with "narrativist" -- FFG Star Wars is full of crunch and complexity, but it's also pretty much antithetical to anything "simulationist", being entirely concerned with emulate "Star Wars stories" to the extent that the "classes" are given "story level" powers that the players interact with rather than the characters themselves.

I think there is a historical precedence that people who wanted crunch wanted sim that set that expectation*, but indeed there is no specific need for the two to be correlated.
*Examples include GURPS, but also something like Aftermath, which was crunchy and appealed to simmy post-apocalyptic gaming, where someone who wanted less crunch and little sim would play something like Gamma World.



Thing is, I think I've been arguing for a relative scale or a multi-axis spectrum, whereas those calling D&D "simulationist" have been arguing for a binary flag, and then claiming that any attempt to simulate some stuff is enough to check the box and apply the flag to D&D.
(Recall that I've said many times that to be an actual RPG, a game has to be within the fully overlapping part of a Venn diagram of the elements that the Forge tried to split off into three exclusive categories.)


That I have quoted you does not being I'm disagreeing with you, only that I am responding to you. I do recall you making the point about Venn diagrams. I dislike the grouping of 'those calling D&D "simulationist"' being grouped as monolithic, but you are correct that there has been some posts that have argued for yes/no categorization. And I personally do not think it is a meaningful categorization, except in comparison (and even then, one thing can be more sim than another in only certain aspects, or the like).

Pertaining to D&D, people have brought up hp and falling and a bunch of old chestnuts that both are correct and also common there have to be other examples! But I think you had the best critique of its simmyness -- that it's own fiction has to change the rules of how things work to get it to align with the stories it supposedly tells.

Max_Killjoy
2019-06-03, 12:00 PM
Pertaining to D&D, people have brought up hp and falling and a bunch of old chestnuts that both are correct and also common there have to be other examples! But I think you had the best critique of its simmyness -- that it's own fiction has to change the rules of how things work to get it to align with the stories it supposedly tells.


That's probably the best example / evidence -- D&D the system won't give you what's going on in D&D the novels.

Segev
2019-06-03, 12:31 PM
That's probably the best example / evidence -- D&D the system won't give you what's going on in D&D the novels.

To be fair, I cannot think of a single game system, ever, which adequately models the number of variables that are present in fiction that are chosen somewhat at random from scene to scene to be important, based on what's most dramatic. The best I've seen enables a group of players to map the system mechanics to narrative effects.

GURPS is clunky precisely because of how much it tries to directly simulate. "Tries," because at some point, it gives up without quite admitting it did so, but not before having 3-4 separate rolls per attack on each side, with an equal number of tables to reference.

I'm actually toying with a system for my own amusement (started as based on L5R, morphed a bit to try to accommodate the hard-to-model One Power casting system in Wheel of Time, and now just exists as a sort of mental exercise) which attempts to track individual wounds on general hit locations, and models their effects not as hit point damage against a maximum, but as penalties to actions they'd impede. I think it far too cumbersome for public airing at this stage, but it probably is as simulation-true as I'd want to get, if not beyond it.

I also cribbed the concept behind Exalted 3e's withering/decisive attacks, having Momentum and Advantage as things combatants build up and exhaust to protect themselves from the truly damaging blows that leave the above-mentioned wounds. These serve as a cross between hit points (of the "whatever it is that keeps me from being seriously hurt" variety) and a resource that determines your ability to inflict harm on others. From the L5R influence, I also have Focus, which I'm repurposing to a more generic resource for death attack/sneak attack like precision strikes.

Armor is really messy at the moment, and needs revamping considerably, especially with a change to the way I measure a core factor of dice mechanics.

In short: simulationism will always be deeply crunchy, even if not all crunchy systems are simulationist.

Kyutaru
2019-06-03, 12:41 PM
Too crunchy and it's no longer simulation because no rulebook can contain reality.
Too abstract and it's no longer simulation because no roleplay can be consistent.

Either way, the more or less you try, the easier it is to fail. Better to be arbitrary and half-succeed.

PhoenixPhyre
2019-06-03, 12:43 PM
Single-author fiction and RPG rule-sets have completely different purposes and require completely different approaches. It's unlikely that you can have a rule-set that actually gives the fiction result...and have a playable rule-set. It's also unlikely that you can have a fictional result that matches the in-game play...and is good to consume. They're just completely separate things with separate tools and techniques and concerns.

Max_Killjoy
2019-06-03, 01:03 PM
Single-author fiction and RPG rule-sets have completely different purposes and require completely different approaches. It's unlikely that you can have a rule-set that actually gives the fiction result...and have a playable rule-set. It's also unlikely that you can have a fictional result that matches the in-game play...and is good to consume. They're just completely separate things with separate tools and techniques and concerns.


I agree, and would say that RPGs that try to recreate the way a lot of authorial fiction works are actively anti-"sim".

But that doesn't change that the world implied by D&D novels etc, and the world implied by the D&D system, are very clearly NOT the same world.

Pleh
2019-06-03, 01:08 PM
Single-author fiction and RPG rule-sets have completely different purposes and require completely different approaches. It's unlikely that you can have a rule-set that actually gives the fiction result...and have a playable rule-set. It's also unlikely that you can have a fictional result that matches the in-game play...and is good to consume. They're just completely separate things with separate tools and techniques and concerns.

I agree, however, there is something to be said for rigorous worldbuilding. If you can make the fiction sufficiently robust, wouldn't the same rules make RPG experience feel rather similar? That is to say, RPGs are basically Multi Author Thought Experiments with some RNG for good measure. It makes sense it uses different tools than a Single Author Fiction. When creating Multi Author Fiction, all authors have to concede certain rules to keep the co authored fiction cohesive. Isn't this essentially the same as an RPG's Gentleman's Agreement? And once a Gentleman's Agreement becomes codified and printed in the rulebook, isn't it now a playable ruleset?

What's the failure point here? Seems only a matter of execution that remains elusive.

kyoryu
2019-06-03, 02:11 PM
GURPS is clunky precisely because of how much it tries to directly simulate. "Tries," because at some point, it gives up without quite admitting it did so, but not before having 3-4 separate rolls per attack on each side, with an equal number of tables to reference.

Huh? A melee attack in GURPS generally will take four rolls and one fairly quick chart lookup (hit location if using those rules). It’s really not that clunky to run. Most of those rolls can be done at one time too.

(Firearms, especially automatic ones, can increase this a bit, admittedly).

A lot of complexity in GURPS is at creation time. While a given result can take longer to calculate than Other Games, there’s also generally fewer options - total turn time is often less when I play D&D than most modern D&D variants.


In short: simulationism will always be deeply crunchy, even if not all crunchy systems are simulationist.

That seems reasonably fair. Making a non-crunchy simulationist system seems like an interesting design challenge.

Segev
2019-06-03, 02:25 PM
Huh? A melee attack in GURPS generally will take four rolls and one fairly quick chart lookup (hit location if using those rules). It’s really not that clunky to run. Most of those rolls can be done at one time too.

(Firearms, especially automatic ones, can increase this a bit, admittedly).

A lot of complexity in GURPS is at creation time. While a given result can take longer to calculate than Other Games, there’s also generally fewer options - total turn time is often less when I play D&D than most modern D&D variants.In my experience, GURPS takes even longer than other systems, because even with all the creation time, you never seem to have all the numbers for all the variables that come up for the specific nuance of the situation you're in when you take your turn. And then it's 4 rolls that you have to look up different (conditional) bonuses for, checking each that they apply to this circumstance. It's really, really clunky.


That seems reasonably fair. Making a non-crunchy simulationist system seems like an interesting design challenge.It might be doable, depending on what you want to simulate. Old wargames - and even modern ones like Warhammer - can have reasonably lightweight core rules (the crunch is in a lot of the special rules for particular units) because what they're simulating is battle attrition, not individual wounds. They just assume, as has been mentioned, that a hit is enough to kill (barring exceptional beings).

One could argue that d20 is simulationist, if one wished to specify a selection of elements to simulate that it does well. I don't care to.

The point is that, if you want a non-crunchy highly-simulationist game, you need to be very specific about what you're simulating, and choose that specific thing or set of things carefully for ease of simulation. The more high-level the thing being simulated, the more abstract you can make the simulation, and the simpler it can be.

PhoenixPhyre
2019-06-03, 02:28 PM
I agree, however, there is something to be said for rigorous worldbuilding. If you can make the fiction sufficiently robust, wouldn't the same rules make RPG experience feel rather similar? That is to say, RPGs are basically Multi Author Thought Experiments with some RNG for good measure. It makes sense it uses different tools than a Single Author Fiction. When creating Multi Author Fiction, all authors have to concede certain rules to keep the co authored fiction cohesive. Isn't this essentially the same as an RPG's Gentleman's Agreement? And once a Gentleman's Agreement becomes codified and printed in the rulebook, isn't it now a playable ruleset?

What's the failure point here? Seems only a matter of execution that remains elusive.

I disagree that it's practical to turn multi-author fiction into a game set. Specifically, the types of rules that a group of authors need are completely different than what a group of players need. There is no role for random chance in multi-author fiction, but there's a major role for chance in a game. Authors can take months or years polishing a single fight scene...but players can't. One can refer to books of references as frequently as needed, and can go back and tweak "past" (from the perspective of the characters, but unpublished) pieces to fit what should happen in the future. The other can't.

The two are completely separate, and the basics of the worlds they demand are different. Movies made from games (and many made from novels) usually suck. Because the demands of a visual medium (film) and a written one (books) are too disparate. The same is true, but to exponentially greater degrees between authored fiction (even multi-author fiction) and an RPG. Shoe-horning one into the other makes both bad.

There are many fictional worlds I find greatly interesting...but would make crappy settings. Because they're not designed with holes in the map. And games need holes.


I agree, and would say that RPGs that try to recreate the way a lot of authorial fiction works are actively anti-"sim".

But that doesn't change that the world implied by D&D novels etc, and the world implied by the D&D system, are very clearly NOT the same world.

They're not the same because they can't be the same, not without compromising one, the other, or both (which is the most frequent case). That is, "fiction simulation" isn't something that RPGs can do by simulating the world, because the world that they're simulating doesn't follow "natural" laws. It follows fictional ones (ie the laws of writing fiction) instead. And so you need fictional tools. Tools for a character (or a player) to directly affect the fiction/narrative. And that doesn't go well with "world simulation."

Willie the Duck
2019-06-03, 02:58 PM
In my experience, GURPS takes even longer than other systems, because even with all the creation time, you never seem to have all the numbers for all the variables that come up for the specific nuance of the situation you're in when you take your turn. And then it's 4 rolls that you have to look up different (conditional) bonuses for, checking each that they apply to this circumstance. It's really, really clunky.

It depends on the setting/style. Fantasy-era GURPS is often very much like D&D combat (except that the rounds are 1 second long) in that there usually aren't that many bonuses or penalties, and you end up with one attack roll and one defense roll (vs D&D where it is condensed into a single attack-vs-defense roll), and then damage (with some specifics about bleeding and stunning). It's when you get to modern settings, where you can have two trains running at slightly different speeds on parallel tracks, with two guys shooting at each other from one train to another, with relative speed, distance, size of (exposed) target, visibility and lighting, weather/wind, along with firearm-specific modifiers that you are taking a couple of simple skill checks and applying so many modifiers that you have no confidence that the end result roll is actually anything meaningful. I've been told that 4e simplified things a bit, but still, a lot of the rigor that GURPS is highly suspect, particularly if the DM is simply pulling the time of day (and thus lighting modifier) out of their posterior once someone thinks to ask and they realize they never established that one answer.

GURPS is very much what you make of it, and it is definitely easy to make too much of all those solidly defined numbers.

Kyutaru
2019-06-03, 03:05 PM
They're not the same because they can't be the same, not without compromising one, the other, or both (which is the most frequent case). That is, "fiction simulation" isn't something that RPGs can do by simulating the world, because the world that they're simulating doesn't follow "natural" laws. It follows fictional ones (ie the laws of writing fiction) instead. And so you need fictional tools. Tools for a character (or a player) to directly affect the fiction/narrative. And that doesn't go well with "world simulation."

Plus even if it did go well with world simulation and you managed to keep the fluff consistent, if the mechanics were that detailed then you'll inevitably run into strange exceptional behavior because no RPG author wants to create a million page rulebook to handle every exception. Mechanics are like Newtonian physics laws... they're best left simple and straightforward but then they only work most of the time. Along comes some weird black hole that wrecks the whole system logically speaking.

Max_Killjoy
2019-06-03, 03:30 PM
They're not the same because they can't be the same, not without compromising one, the other, or both (which is the most frequent case). That is, "fiction simulation" isn't something that RPGs can do by simulating the world, because the world that they're simulating doesn't follow "natural" laws. It follows fictional ones (ie the laws of writing fiction) instead. And so you need fictional tools. Tools for a character (or a player) to directly affect the fiction/narrative. And that doesn't go well with "world simulation."


First, I think I've made it clear how I feel about authorial fiction that works on the supposed "rules of fiction" that put The Plot or The Story ahead of the internal consistency of the setting or characters (never mind my opinion of games that try to do so).

Second, I'm not explaining my point very well, it seems. It's not about how well D&D's rules emulate D&D's fiction -- it's about whether the world implied by D&D's rules matches the world we see in D&D's fiction. D&D fiction typically implies a world where the magic has little effect on the daily lives of most people, where for the most part it's a quasi-medieval mashup but not that fantastic for the most part. D&D's rules imply something very different about the world, starting with the Fantasy Superheroes and going well onward from there.

PhoenixPhyre
2019-06-03, 03:37 PM
First, I think I've made it clear how I feel about authorial fiction that works on the supposed "rules of fiction" that put The Plot or The Story ahead of the internal consistency of the setting or characters (never mind my opinion of games that try to do so).

Second, I'm not explaining my point very well, it seems. It's not about how well D&D's rules emulate D&D's fiction -- it's about whether the world implied by D&D's rules matches the world we see in D&D's fiction. D&D fiction typically implies a world where the magic has little effect on the daily lives of most people, where for the most part it's a quasi-medieval mashup but not that fantastic for the most part. D&D's rules imply something very different about the world, starting with the Fantasy Superheroes and going well onward from there.

Stories always work on story rules. That's implicit. Trying to do it otherwise ends up with horribly written, horribly boring stories. Great worlds, but boring stories. At least IMO.

Only if you make the fundamental mistake of assuming that the frequency with which adventurers encounter threats is anywhere near the modal frequency for everyone else. Adventurers are rare. Sure, the game follows them...because that's what it's about. And the "quasi-medieval mashup that's not that fantastic" is rather not what most D&D settings claim. They're fantastic, thru and thru. They're a bit gonzo, a bit silly, with weird quirks that make you go :sideways_owl:. By construction. That's what it promises. It doesn't promise a "realistic" (or even coherent first-principles) world. It promises a place with lots of holes that adventures can fill. It promises tropes and archetypes and the power of friendship. I know that's not something you personally like, but it's what the system and the settings promise. And deliver. That makes it not to your taste, but not bad. Nor inconsistent with its design...because it's not designed to be consistent.

Segev
2019-06-03, 03:39 PM
First, I think I've made it clear how I feel about authorial fiction that works on the supposed "rules of fiction" that put The Plot or The Story ahead of the internal consistency of the setting or characters (never mind my opinion of games that try to do so).

Second, I'm not explaining my point very well, it seems. It's not about how well D&D's rules emulate D&D's fiction -- it's about whether the world implied by D&D's rules matches the world we see in D&D's fiction. D&D fiction typically implies a world where the magic has little effect on the daily lives of most people, where for the most part it's a quasi-medieval mashup but not that fantastic for the most part. D&D's rules imply something very different about the world, starting with the Fantasy Superheroes and going well onward from there.

Ehhh. I always hate this argument. It stems from a rather poor assumption that PCs are not exceptional, and that mid-to-high level characters are everywhere. If we actually look at the settings described in the gamebooks, characters above 4th or so level become much rarer much faster than most people assume. There ARE scads of high level NPCs, but they're all already important people running powerful organizations, if not entire city-states and nations. We also tend to assume hyper-optimization, and that everybody can just pop on down to the library and pick whatever spells they want, then over to the magic item shoppe to buy any gear they want (including custom orders), then, if that's too costly for them, use their garage hobby shed to whip up any old custom item they happen to have room in their build for the feats to support.

In reality, if you were to build as accurate a simulation as possible of the real world to simulate an RPG of normal human life on Earth, you'd have hyper-optimal builds that don't waste money on going out to eat, on seeing movies, or any other hobbies that aren't directly pertinent to the core mechanics of the major subsystems of the game. Money would only be spent on optimal lifestyles to achieve maximum bonus to socializing; and then on gear for hacking or what-have-you. Nobody would waste time on video games or novels or internet forum debates, except to further their social manipulation of the masses. We'd all be Donald Trump and Steve Jobs and Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson, with work ethics to make the Ahmish blush with shame at their sloth.

The "reality" of the D&D game worlds similarly reflects this dearth of hyper-optimal characters and creatures. There are powerful individuals, but they have quirks and frailties and imperfect builds due to choices they made as real people. And the super-powerful ones are super rare.

Tippyverse - the usual go-to around here for what D&D would "really" look like with the mechanics of the game - assumes a plethora of high-level NPCs who know the mechanics of the game inside and out and exploit them to the nth degree. Even areas where the game itself admits it's not a very good simulation, because the point isn't to be an economic simulator.

Max_Killjoy
2019-06-03, 03:52 PM
Stories always work on story rules. That's implicit. Trying to do it otherwise ends up with horribly written, horribly boring stories. Great worlds, but boring stories. At least IMO.


Whereas I find most stories written to the the present standardized "rules" of storytelling that too many books, and most TV shows and movies, are written to these days to be transparent, predictable, cliched, and trite. See, previous discussions on Narrative Causality, etc.




Only if you make the fundamental mistake of assuming that the frequency with which adventurers encounter threats is anywhere near the modal frequency for everyone else. Adventurers are rare. Sure, the game follows them...because that's what it's about. And the "quasi-medieval mashup that's not that fantastic" is rather not what most D&D settings claim. They're fantastic, thru and thru. They're a bit gonzo, a bit silly, with weird quirks that make you go :sideways_owl:. By construction. That's what it promises. It doesn't promise a "realistic" (or even coherent first-principles) world. It promises a place with lots of holes that adventures can fill. It promises tropes and archetypes and the power of friendship. I know that's not something you personally like, but it's what the system and the settings promise. And deliver. That makes it not to your taste, but not bad. Nor inconsistent with its design...because it's not designed to be consistent.

Most D&D fiction (as in, the authorial fiction, as in novels and such) doesn't seem to promise that, or the Hyperscaling Heroes of the level-based system, or anything of the sort.




Ehhh. I always hate this argument. It stems from a rather poor assumption that PCs are not exceptional, and that mid-to-high level characters are everywhere. If we actually look at the settings described in the gamebooks, characters above 4th or so level become much rarer much faster than most people assume. There ARE scads of high level NPCs, but they're all already important people running powerful organizations, if not entire city-states and nations. We also tend to assume hyper-optimization, and that everybody can just pop on down to the library and pick whatever spells they want, then over to the magic item shoppe to buy any gear they want (including custom orders), then, if that's too costly for them, use their garage hobby shed to whip up any old custom item they happen to have room in their build for the feats to support.

In reality, if you were to build as accurate a simulation as possible of the real world to simulate an RPG of normal human life on Earth, you'd have hyper-optimal builds that don't waste money on going out to eat, on seeing movies, or any other hobbies that aren't directly pertinent to the core mechanics of the major subsystems of the game. Money would only be spent on optimal lifestyles to achieve maximum bonus to socializing; and then on gear for hacking or what-have-you. Nobody would waste time on video games or novels or internet forum debates, except to further their social manipulation of the masses. We'd all be Donald Trump and Steve Jobs and Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson, with work ethics to make the Ahmish blush with shame at their sloth.

The "reality" of the D&D game worlds similarly reflects this dearth of hyper-optimal characters and creatures. There are powerful individuals, but they have quirks and frailties and imperfect builds due to choices they made as real people. And the super-powerful ones are super rare.

Tippyverse - the usual go-to around here for what D&D would "really" look like with the mechanics of the game - assumes a plethora of high-level NPCs who know the mechanics of the game inside and out and exploit them to the nth degree. Even areas where the game itself admits it's not a very good simulation, because the point isn't to be an economic simulator.


No, it only "assumes" that the PCs are not unique, that they are not special snowflakes simply by the dint of being the PCs. It only "assumes" that the PCs are not the only beings capable of leveling or having classes, that the PC Wizard is not the first Wizard or last Wizard in the world, that the PC Fighter is not the only "martial superhuman" to ever have lived, that if it's possible for the PCs, it's possible for some others, too.

It does not assume any sort of optimization, hyper or otherwise.

Segev
2019-06-03, 03:54 PM
Most D&D fiction (as in, the authorial fiction, as in novels and such) doesn't seem to promise that, or the Hyperscaling Heroes of the level-based system, or anything of the sort.

I have admittedly read relatively little D&D-specific fiction, but the Drizz't books and the Dragonlance novels seem to follow those conventions, at least.

Max_Killjoy
2019-06-03, 04:02 PM
I have admittedly read relatively little D&D-specific fiction, but the Drizz't books and the Dragonlance novels seem to follow those conventions, at least.


The Dragonlance novels, at least the first several, appeared to follow a group of very mortal, very fragile, very limited people... other than the one proto-emo megalomaniac.

From what I recall of the Drizz't books (it's been YEARS, they're just not good enough to earn a second read), if Drizz't takes an actual wound, it's life threatening, he can't shrug off a bunch of wounds that would kill a normal person -- this is not what the HP system "promises".

PhoenixPhyre
2019-06-03, 04:21 PM
Whereas I find most stories written to the the present standardized "rules" of storytelling that too many books, and most TV shows and movies, are written to these days to be transparent, predictable, cliched, and trite. See, previous discussions on Narrative Causality, etc.


That's a complaint about implementation, not concept. And Sturgeon's Law applies here as well as to everything else.




Most D&D fiction (as in, the authorial fiction, as in novels and such) doesn't seem to promise that, or the Hyperscaling Heroes of the level-based system, or anything of the sort.


One word for Hyperscaling Heroes. Elminster.

And yes, the fiction does tend to say that powerful (they don't use "high level", because that's a game conceit) people are super powerful. They avoid/shrug off/counter attacks that slaughter thousands of "NPCs" on a daily basis.



No, it only "assumes" that the PCs are not unique, that they are not special snowflakes simply by the dint of being the PCs. It only "assumes" that the PCs are not the only beings capable of leveling or having classes, that the PC Wizard is not the first Wizard or last Wizard in the world, that the PC Fighter is not the only "martial superhuman" to ever have lived, that if it's possible for the PCs, it's possible for some others, too.

It does not assume any sort of optimization, hyper or otherwise.

You're thinking of things that are specific to one particular play-style of 3e D&D, the playstyle that's done the worst at fitting the fiction. And no, I see fiction characters doing exactly what I'd expect from a PC of moderate optimization. Which is what they are, because they're real people instead of the min-maxed playing pieces that some people make of RPG characters.


The Dragonlance novels, at least the first several, appeared to follow a group of very mortal, very fragile, very limited people... other than the one proto-emo megalomaniac.

From what I recall of the Drizz't books (it's been YEARS, they're just not good enough to earn a second read), if Drizz't takes an actual wound, it's life threatening, he can't shrug off a bunch of wounds that would kill a normal person -- this is not what the HP system "promises".

Let's not do the HP = meat thing again? Please? It's rather senseless.

Max_Killjoy
2019-06-03, 04:49 PM
That's a complaint about implementation, not concept. And Sturgeon's Law applies here as well as to everything else.


The problems arise from the writing following those "rules" in the first place.

I'll tack some links on here later when I'm at home.




One word for Hyperscaling Heroes. Elminster.

And yes, the fiction does tend to say that powerful (they don't use "high level", because that's a game conceit) people are super powerful. They avoid/shrug off/counter attacks that slaughter thousands of "NPCs" on a daily basis.


Some of them, yes. Others do not, despite also having significant levels.

And the worlds don't really reflect the presence of the former, despite their world-bending power levels.




You're thinking of things that are specific to one particular play-style of 3e D&D, the playstyle that's done the worst at fitting the fiction. And no, I see fiction characters doing exactly what I'd expect from a PC of moderate optimization. Which is what they are, because they're real people instead of the min-maxed playing pieces that some people make of RPG characters.


OK, now I have no idea how that ties into my stated position at this point, or how to address it. The concern about optimization has nothing to do with my original point, and again, it's not about the stories, it's about the worlds depicted in the stories vs the world implied by the game rules, which to me seem very divergent.




Let's not do the HP = meat thing again? Please? It's rather senseless.


I agree, it is senseless. :smallconfused:




When the question asks what I enjoy about "simulationist" systems, and there's mention of D&D as a "simulationist" system, then that's an immediate sign of a deep and fundamental disconnect... even if someone really believes that D&D is "simulationist", it does pretty much NONE of the things that make "simulationist" system appealing to me.

Segev
2019-06-03, 04:55 PM
The Dragonlance novels, at least the first several, appeared to follow a group of very mortal, very fragile, very limited people... other than the one proto-emo megalomaniac. Have you actually played low-to-mid-level D&D?


From what I recall of the Drizz't books (it's been YEARS, they're just not good enough to earn a second read), if Drizz't takes an actual wound, it's life threatening, he can't shrug off a bunch of wounds that would kill a normal person -- this is not what the HP system "promises".It is; you just don't like it that way.


Let's not do the HP = meat thing again? Please? It's rather senseless.


I agree, it is senseless. :smallconfused:

Then at least acknowledge that there exists an interpretation - however little you like it - that doesn't require the "senseless" results you're insisting must exist.

Or, if you're not trying to be snarky, and actually agree that arguing about it is senseless, stop bringing it up when I know you're intelligent enough to know better.

PhoenixPhyre
2019-06-03, 04:59 PM
The problems arise from the writing following those "rules" in the first place.

I'll tack some links on here later when I'm at home.


Formulaic anything is formulaic. Formulaic "simulationist" worldbuilding is exactly as bad. But the problem is not the "rules" (which aren't really rules, but commonly-observed design patterns), but in the formulaic following of them.



Some of them, yes. Others do not, despite also having significant levels.

And the worlds don't really reflect the presence of the former, despite their world-bending power levels.


Examples?

And despite their "world-bending" power levels, they are quite constrained in fiction. Mainly because they don't really have that much power and there are many creatures yet more powerful who have a vested interest in the status quo.



OK, I have no idea how that ties into my stated position at this point. The concern about optimization has nothing to do with my original point, and again, it's not about the stories, it's about the worlds.


Can't separate the worlds from the stories. And optimization is everything here--your view on "what the mechanics say" is clouded by a particular mindset that assumes:
* Every option that has ever been printed exists in each setting
* The most generous interpretation of rules text (even if that requires significant bending to achieve) is indisputably true and known in all its particulars to the characters
* Characters in-fiction get to choose the levels, spells, feats, etc. same way that players do.
* No other creature has agency.

And that's neither part of the mechanics nor the fiction. Basically, the assumption that lets D&D characters be god-like beings, unconstrained by any other force, is an artifact of a non-canon mindset.



I agree, it is senseless. :smallconfused:

Discussion is only fruitful if people can change their minds as a result. That particular debate (among many on this topic) has no such potential. So the discussion is pointless.

Psyren
2019-06-03, 05:02 PM
At what point is a system so bad at being "simulationist" for anything at all, let alone a particular setting or type of setting, that it just doesn't count as "simulationist"?

Good question, though I suspect it's one that's unlikely to get consensus in this or any thread.


Actually giving results that match reality when real world stuff is simulated.

This is still vague; "matching reality" could include all sorts of things. Say I stab a bandit in the gut with my sword. His involuntary flinch plus the sweat on my palms causes the hilt to twist in my hands, roll against disarm. The resulting smell is quite awful, roll against nausea. A spurt of gore from the wound goes for my (*rolls*) face, roll reflex vs. blind. Successfully jerking away from that caused my feet to slip in the mud underfoot, roll to save vs. prone. I failed that one, he gets pulled down onto me, roll strength vs. pin. And the smell is even worse down here, roll for nausea yet again...

Could all of that happen in "reality," absolutely, but I for one don't think it makes the game better.



If you think otherwise you probably have not tried many other very crunchy RPGs.

I certainly acknowledge I have a lower bar for that than some of the other participants here, and I'm okay with that. Life is too short for me to try everything, especially stuff I'd have to scour players for.


Personally, no, but it’s a reasonable target for a simulationist system.


Not really, for simulationist systems. But not all systems are or should be simulationist. “Simulationist” is not a synonym for “good”.


Pretty much. It’s not a standard d20 really goes for. It prioritizes certain types of heroic action.

I disagree that it's a reasonable target, but I do agree with you that simulation != good.




Comprehensiveness if rules is less important for a simulationist system, I think, than fidelity.

If your drowning rule is “someone immersed in water loses one hit point per hour, and if they run out of hp they die” and a typical character has 100hp, then that is not simulationist.

I think it takes a bit of both. Plenty of systems have no drowning rules at all. Others have ones as toothless as described in this example. D&D however is neither.



Saying D&D isn’t simulationist isn’t a criticism any more than saying that a blue car isn’t a black one is. It’s an attribute of the system that some people may look for or not, not a statement of quality.



I’ve found a number of games more simulationist than D&D. I don’t really play many of them any more. I’m actually playing more non-simulationist games these days (though truth be told many of them have more “realistic” results than D&D.

I don’t play many hardcore simulationist systems these days.

Me not playing D&D isn’t because it’s not simulationist.

I play more “narrative” games than anything, but will play GURPS, Savage Worlds, D&D, or pretty much anything depending on the situation.

Not being simulationist isn’t a criticism, any more than saying a Ferrari is bad at off-roading is a criticism of a Ferrari

I agree it's not a criticism either. I just don't agree with where the line is currently drawn. There is more than a bit of No True Scotsman flying around from where I'm sitting.

Max_Killjoy
2019-06-03, 05:11 PM
Formulaic anything is formulaic. Formulaic "simulationist" worldbuilding is exactly as bad. But the problem is not the "rules" (which aren't really rules, but commonly-observed design patterns), but in the formulaic following of them.


And how is that different from my original statement? "First, I think I've made it clear how I feel about authorial fiction that works on the supposed "rules of fiction" that put The Plot or The Story ahead of the internal consistency of the setting or characters (never mind my opinion of games that try to do so)."




Examples?

And despite their "world-bending" power levels, they are quite constrained in fiction. Mainly because they don't really have that much power and there are many creatures yet more powerful who have a vested interest in the status quo.


It's been 30+ years, if I can manage to dredge up examples of specific characters etc from memory or poking at Wikipedia I'll post them.

What I recall is the impression of total disconnect between what was presented in the game rules and what was presented in the novels that immediately struck my much younger self.




Can't separate the worlds from the stories. And optimization is everything here--your view on "what the mechanics say" is clouded by a particular mindset that assumes:
* Every option that has ever been printed exists in each setting
* The most generous interpretation of rules text (even if that requires significant bending to achieve) is indisputably true and known in all its particulars to the characters
* Characters in-fiction get to choose the levels, spells, feats, etc. same way that players do.
* No other creature has agency.

And that's neither part of the mechanics nor the fiction. Basically, the assumption that lets D&D characters be god-like beings, unconstrained by any other force, is an artifact of a non-canon mindset.


That has very little to do with my position or its origin. I think you have mistaken me for someone else.

Recall that my mind was made up about D&D before 3.x even existed.


As for separating the worlds from the stories -- of course we can. A book about a setting need never reference or invoke stories told in or about that setting.

Quertus
2019-06-03, 05:27 PM
That's probably the best example / evidence -- D&D the system won't give you what's going on in D&D the novels.

Often as not, that's just a sign that the novelists don't know the system.


I disagree that it's practical to turn multi-author fiction into a game set. Specifically, the types of rules that a group of authors need are completely different than what a group of players need. There is no role for random chance in multi-author fiction, but there's a major role for chance in a game. Authors can take months or years polishing a single fight scene...but players can't. One can refer to books of references as frequently as needed, and can go back and tweak "past" (from the perspective of the characters, but unpublished) pieces to fit what should happen in the future. The other can't.

The two are completely separate, and the basics of the worlds they demand are different. Movies made from games (and many made from novels) usually suck. Because the demands of a visual medium (film) and a written one (books) are too disparate. The same is true, but to exponentially greater degrees between authored fiction (even multi-author fiction) and an RPG. Shoe-horning one into the other makes both bad.

I dunno - I think I might enjoy playing Authorship: the RPG, or Author, the Shipping - an RPG that attempts to simulate narrative logic, giving players the option to edit past events to create the story, or narrate past events to polish up a fight scene.


There are many fictional worlds I find greatly interesting...but would make crappy settings. Because they're not designed with holes in the map. And games need holes.

Explain - why do maps need holes?


Second, I'm not explaining my point very well, it seems. It's not about how well D&D's rules emulate D&D's fiction -- it's about whether the world implied by D&D's rules matches the world we see in D&D's fiction. D&D fiction typically implies a world where the magic has little effect on the daily lives of most people, where for the most part it's a quasi-medieval mashup but not that fantastic for the most part. D&D's rules imply something very different about the world, starting with the Fantasy Superheroes and going well onward from there.

I've yet to see a PC solve world hunger, or otherwise make the impact you imply is not only inevitable, but ought to have already happened.

Why do you view the worlds that (hundreds? thousands?) of my parties would have created as unviable unrealistic?


Can't separate the worlds from the stories. And optimization is everything here--your view on "what the mechanics say" is clouded by a particular mindset that assumes:
* Every option that has ever been printed exists in each setting
* The most generous interpretation of rules text (even if that requires significant bending to achieve) is indisputably true and known in all its particulars to the characters
* Characters in-fiction get to choose the levels, spells, feats, etc. same way that players do.
* No other creature has agency.

And that's neither part of the mechanics nor the fiction. Basically, the assumption that lets D&D characters be god-like beings, unconstrained by any other force, is an artifact of a non-canon mindset.

"Can't separate the worlds from the stories." - really? I had a world that existed for around a decade before I ran PCs on it. So, the world seemed pretty independent of any stories to me.

And I don't really follow the rest of that, either.


Discussion is only fruitful if people can change their minds as a result. That particular debate (among many on this topic) has no such potential. So the discussion is pointless.

I find debate quite useful, in that articulating my points often helps me to understand my points better.

Max_Killjoy
2019-06-03, 05:32 PM
Have you actually played low-to-mid-level D&D?


Yes, starting around the time that the aforementioned original Dragonlance novels first came out, but well before I'd ever heard of them.

What I recall was a sense that the original Dragonlance characters must not be getting much in the way of XP, because they never seemed to get past that "OMG we're in over our heads and we're all going to die and everything is falling apart" that a couple levels cured for PCs unless the DM was just an adversarial jerk bully DM.




It is; you just don't like it that way.

...

Then at least acknowledge that there exists an interpretation - however little you like it - that doesn't require the "senseless" results you're insisting must exist.

Or, if you're not trying to be snarky, and actually agree that arguing about it is senseless, stop bringing it up when I know you're intelligent enough to know better.


I guess I'll just have to keep disappointing you. :smallannoyed:

Constructman
2019-06-03, 05:39 PM
{Scrubbed}

Willie the Duck
2019-06-03, 07:03 PM
{Scrubbed}

What. the. hell. man?

Constructman
2019-06-03, 07:16 PM
What. the. hell. man?
{Scrubbed}

Max_Killjoy
2019-06-03, 07:41 PM
On "narrative (https://filmcrithulk.blog/2011/10/06/hulk-explains-why-we-should-stop-it-with-the-hero-journey-****/) structure (https://filmcrithulk.blog/2011/07/07/hulk-presents-the-myth-of-3-act-structure/)".

On tropes and genre conventions (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThePlotDemandedThisIndex).


On postmodernism (https://areomagazine.com/2017/03/27/how-french-intellectuals-ruined-the-west-postmodernism-and-its-impact-explained/), the dumpster fire of philosophy (https://theconversation.com/the-surprising-origins-of-post-truth-and-how-it-was-spawned-by-the-liberal-left-68929).

PS, I'd call it a badge of honor and irony to be called a "puffed up sophist" by a postmodernist.




As for why I like "simulationist" systems? Because I want the decisions and challenges facing the character on the system layer to be the same as those facing the character on the fiction layer, and I hate disconnects. I hate seeing the result of a roll and comparing it to what was going on in front of the character and getting that gut-level "what the hell, that makes no damn sense" reaction. I hate being kicked out of the moment for the character and made to stop and think about some other layer of stuff going on.

And really, that's the not far from reason I hate narrative causality and tropes and genre conventions in general, because I'll be sitting there and suddenly realize that what's about to happen next won't be anything that makes sense for the situation at hand and what we know about the characters, but instead will be the utterly banal and transparent and predictable thing that the writer would think needs to happen next. Like when I'm watching a mystery and I can tell that the killer or the solution to the puzzle was made obvious by the "narrative structure" and "story beats" and blah blah blah about 10 minutes into the show.

And that's my problem with the attempt to present D&D as "simulationist" -- because it's so damn good at producing those "what the hell?" moments, with outcomes from rolls that don't really reflect what's going on, with rules that produce comically strange results when taken at face value. I'm not in this thread to directly trash D&D, but if the assertion is made that D&D is really a "simmy" system, I'm going to tear that assertion down even if D&D itself gets caught in the flames.

And if someone's only defense of the idea that D&D is simmy is "your standards are unrealistic and unattainable", I'm not sure they have a defense of the idea at all.

Mr Beer
2019-06-03, 08:54 PM
I don't think it can reasonably be disputed that D&D is not a simulationist system, unless what it is simulating is D&D itself, in which case every system is simulationist.

KineticDiplomat
2019-06-03, 09:38 PM
If I might, it seems there are actually multiple axes of “simulation”, the difference between which is the cause of many a circular firing squad. I would suggest that it can actually be broken down to the following categories:

Granularity: The precise accounting and tracking of everything from which ankle has armor on it, to just how many bullets are left in that magazine, to exactly how many miles a camel can go in the desert carrying 100kg without water. While some people may just love accounting, I suspect fans of this part of simulationism enjoy the fact that it places deliberate constraints on players to encourage prep work, planning, and avoidance of narrativium. You don’t fire on constant full auto because you will run out of ammo; you don’t trek across the desert on a whim, and the reason you buy greaves is not for s some obscure 5% change in the chance you’ll be hit, but because sharp metal meeting shins is bad. It feels like the player had to “earn” something.

Of course, it’s also potentially incredibly dull to implement.

Personal Capability: Fundamentally, we know that certain acts so exceed human capacity in scale that they are “unrealistic”. We know that no matter how bad ass you are, you are unlikely to survive being pincushioned with arrows, and you probably can’t convince Churchill to surrender Europe to the Soviets. In systems with magic, we know that if everyone could “snap fingers for lightning”, the world wouldn’t work as written, so simulationism for here means limiting Magic’s availability or practicality.

Again, the sense here is that it isn’t letting the player “cheat”. If it’s hard, and “realistic” (you know, for professional delta force elves gone rogue to fight megacorps), you have to earn your win rather than have it handed to you. We like to feel like as a result the player has to be more clever, more creative, and make better decisions.

Maybe a tiny never to be admitted part thinks that while our fat butts could never really be a sorcerer, there is pleasure in thinking we could at least think our way through a situation with more human constraints. Of course, the average gamer is about as likely to be turned a vampire as they are to wake up one day and be an MMA champion, but it’s a pleasant fiction.

Cause and Effect World As a third axis, the world itself should behave in a rational and supportable manner. Well and good to have trans dimensional spirits, but let’s not forget economics, politics, ethnic hatred, and the like. Again, the joy comes in knowing you don’t get a Mary Sue pass - and that you will almost certainly have to think beyond “who can I fireball today” because a realistic world system is usually tied directly or implicitly to a realistic consequence system.

Realism this is simply a measure of how much things act like they would in earth, minus the setting directed suspensions of disbelief. If you have a system where most firefights devolve into people hiding behind cover, hurling lead, panicking, and then spending the rest of the game without three fingers because they got hit once, you have “realism”. Likewise if that fireball crackling from the guys fingertips leaves a flaming and hideous corpse, or attempting to block a dragon claw with a shield ends with shattered arm bones.

Sometimes we love this because it is the right medium for the story (can you imagine crossing Twilight’s gritty, plausible, post nuclear Europe with HP and instant healing?), but a lot of times it falls back to the real faithful points of simulationism. It doesn’t let you be a Sue. The implication then becomes that as a not-sue, the player must take a greater part in solving the issue, and not rely on a character sheet to do it for him.

Of course, since many people WANT to be unstoppable heroes of the day, they tend to be less in favor of these.

Of note, whether you are playing a realistic commando in a world perfect setting, or a dragonborn sorcerer in D&D, or simply trying to see if you can do better at invading Russia than Napoleon did, you are engaged in power fantasy. The question is how much, what kind, and how do you like your stories. (Well, unless you are Heinz Guderian’s ghost, in which case I guess you actually know about that last one).

Deffers
2019-06-03, 10:20 PM
I guess since things got a little bit heated, I should explain why I decided to namedrop D&D as a crunchy, simmy system.

So first thing I want to clear up, I actually think the Gamist-Narrativist-Simulationist triangle thing is an arbitrary construct. Most people don't define their goals when designing an RPG in terms of "Hey, I'm going for a gamist-narrativist medley here," and very rarely are these goals actually at cross purposes. Remember, even GURPS suggests your character should be allowed to do something dramatic on death, and it has affordances for re-rolls and things like that not directly tied to modeling some ability or another. Those are pretty gamist constructs, yet GURPS doesn't shy from them despite being one of the most decisively sim systems of all. Logically, it follows that terms like "gamist" and "simulationist" are actually fuzzier than they look at an initial appraisal. What someone will find as transparently gamist won't jar another person's sense of verisimilitude at all, so they'll perceive the robust set of scenarios modeled as simulationist. But it's a useful set of terms to couch things in.When I made this thread, I knew in a broad sense what kind of crunch I liked. I didn't like crunch for the sake of crunch-- that's why I mention rules-lite systems like Microlite in the OP as something that really jives with me, because I like snappy gameplay and that's something a lot of crunchier systems are bad at delivering. I'm willing to put up with added clunkiness for the sake of good rules that add depth and value to a game system (in my eyes), though. And there are systems that, despite offering light rules and snappy resolutions, just don't do anything for me. THESE games are broadly understood to be narrativist-- they sell themselves in terms of making stories. FATE, FUDGE, PbtA games-- they all don't do it for me. Even Savage Worlds doesn't do it for me! They're all missing something-- for me. Even though they all obviously have a design elegance I'm drawn to, it's their lack that makes me stay away and has made me try to formulate a system that blends all the things I like. So I knew there were two ways I could ask for other people's input to try and pin down the je ne sais quoi in more strict terms-- make a thread about why narrativist games don't do it for people and try to pin down what's missing that way, or make a thread about what we appreciate in the systems that DO have that je ne sais quoi even if it comes at the expense of making the game a little chunky. I figured that a more positively-focused thread was the safer bet-- people would likely not feel as much of a need to defend their preferred system, and people who knew what they liked might have deeper insights than people who knew they didn't like something but maybe not why. So crunchy, simulationist games it was.

I included DnD in that OP because multiple editions highlight certain kinds of rules that I like which I was trying to understand more about. For one, the race and class system, combined with (depending on the edition) feats and (always) skills, generates a vast array of character options that feel mechanically distinct from each other. That doesn't directly relate to simulationism, but it is recognizably connected to the feeling I get in building characters who can do wacky stuff in a system like GURPS which is closer to simulationist-in-strict sense, and it highlights the odd joy that can be found in deep rules. Additionally, DnD (and especially old school DnD and OSRs) provide a pile of rules for scenarios not quite bounded by just the more-gamist realm of character creation-- something akin to a physics engine that narrative games almost certainly lack. For example, there's rules for how easy it is to break down walls made of certain materials, or how much strength you need to bend iron bars. There's rules for how much stuff carts of different kinds can haul. Older-school editions (and OSRs) have rules for being a ruler or leader and for making keeps or the like. There's also generative rules for things like town construction. Rules on rules on rules, of all sorts, typically meant to model a world or a dungeon, that stand independent of the characters. There's even things like NPC classes, meant to model human beings that make certain places run. Harder sims like GURPS also have analogous rules-- rules for destroying materials, rules for carrying stuff on vehicles, rules for city types, rules for using wealth to build structures. And both DnD and GURPS have one big thing-- rules supplements. You want MORE rules, kid? Here. The former gives you more classes but has also included stuff like ancient rituals and new races and new factions and new character starting kits in the 5th edition. The latter loses its mind and lets you model the effects of a skeletonized frame on your battle rifle and gives you rules for constructing a trenchcoat out of para-aramid weave. And I find both kinds of content delicious.

Even if DnD isn't simulationist because it doesn't simulate things well, it matches simulationist systems in its ambitions and areas of focus immediately outside of character creation/behavior. Even within the constraints of character creation and behavior, it still attempts to provide a rich rules grammar to describe what's going on, erring on the side of complexity rather than sparseness. It may stumble in its end results, depending on the tastes of the individual playing the game, but it follows the same broad arc and design tendency. For me, personally, DnD definitely counts as crunchy, though there are crunchier, and simulationist, though there are more rigorous simulations. But that doesn't matter, much; that's a subjective and arbitrary metric because how well it succeeds at simulating things is going to depend on individual tastes, because gamist-simulationist-narrativist paradigms are arbitrary to begin with. It follows the same arcs and design tendencies as more simulationist systems as opposed to the narrativist trend, though, and that makes it useful as an illustrative example.

Anyways, this particular strand of conversation isn't quite off topic or unproductive (it's more that it's less productive than it could be, IMO), but it does highlight another thing that I like about crunchy and simulationist systems.

Bad crunch (objectively or subjectively) is pretty immediately recognizable and often entertaining. Have you ever heard of a bad narrativist game? Can you really think of one? I mean, I'm sure they exist-- they must-- but it's harder to tell what works and what doesn't once you enter the qualitative realms of design. Meanwhile, almost all infamously bad RPGs are crunchy on some level. Even a nightmare like FATAL, which is objectionable because of the horrible, horrible things written in its pages... has bad crunch to boot. And you read the crunch, and you can tell RIGHT AWAY it sucks. World of Synnibar is a similar thing-- five hundred pages of self-referential insanity better suited for the Necronomicon than any games table. Something like deadEarth is practically built on how broken it is. RIFTS may have its fans, but you can tell (especially in the older editions) where the authors' ambition well outstripped the rules they made. But it's not limited to those things which are either obviously statistically jacked up, it's a consistent axiom for the subjective realm too; if there's rules you don't like in a crunchy system, you can tell right away you don't like them, either on first reading or during your first encounters in play. If you don't like what DnD does, there's immediate fun to be had in pointing out its quirks. Trying to pin down good crunch is, IMO, pretty difficult. Trying to pin down bad crunch? Could not be simpler and could not be more entertaining. This is neat if you have to houserule or patch something. If something's objectively borked, people can just use a resolution system from a different game. If everyone agrees on something not working for them, they can just modify it until it does. Some really modular systems already come out of the box with expectations that you'll tweak them to suit your needs.

Spriteless
2019-06-03, 10:30 PM
Hay guys! Is there still space to talk about what I enjoy in crunchy, simulationist RPGs?

Of the games I have played, only Aftermath and Shadowrun fit the bill. I think what I like about them, is your actions can have unintended, but logical, consequences. For instance, to use a bow in Aftermath, you must have a bracer on your arm. Makes sense, as real humans have to too. The bracer gives armor bonus, makes sense, as it is stiff. Somewhere, someone has avoided getting killed because of that. (Well, avoided getting hit, and assumed the hit would carry an infection, etc.) What are the odds? What a story to tell!

In Shadowrun, my shaman sent her wind spirit on a mission and was immediately shot down. Street Sam ally picked me up and saw that my clothes were still perfect like a picture out of a fashion magazine, though he could see the blood under me and feel that I was wearing sweat-clothes. He couldn't apply first aid because my disguise magic was bound such that I didn't have to concentrate. The whole cluster**** was priceless. (wind spirit helped yay I picked the right action that make the enemy prioritize ending me for a reason)

So it is that sense of verisimilitude that helps.

I can make a bunch of links too!: Here is an interview with a writer of Dragonlance, in which she mentions that it was a first book a fan read in which a hero fires an arrow, and it misses (https://www.twitch.tv/videos/393934556?filter=all&sort=time). In this sense, D&D is more simulationist than some fantasy, but it is still far less so than aftermath. Here is a vlog from Tim Cask, first employee of TSR, saying HPs are not meat points (https://youtu.be/jhFjo_mFuIo?t=36).

Ravnica and Eberron have world changing magic. Warhammer Fantasy has magic with such costs such that if you use it to solve hunger, then everyone you feed will go mad. If the disparity between power and setting seems to break versimilitude, consider, maybe those with power have dishonest motivations (that even the author doesn't know about) (http://yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good). Also, I myself have played a gnome who gave away a magic item to save a village from starving. In Mage, I came so close to stopping death that an alternate timeline me tried to share a buggy singularity with everyone. If you want a setting that is stuck in a single, romanticized point in history to change, then the setting will disappoint you over and over. You feel free to introduce irrigation to Athas in your own game, though, if that's your bag.

Max_Killjoy
2019-06-03, 11:54 PM
If I might, it seems there are actually multiple axes of “simulation”, the difference between which is the cause of many a circular firing squad. I would suggest that it can actually be broken down to the following categories:

Granularity: The precise accounting and tracking of everything from which ankle has armor on it, to just how many bullets are left in that magazine, to exactly how many miles a camel can go in the desert carrying 100kg without water. While some people may just love accounting, I suspect fans of this part of simulationism enjoy the fact that it places deliberate constraints on players to encourage prep work, planning, and avoidance of narrativium. You don’t fire on constant full auto because you will run out of ammo; you don’t trek across the desert on a whim, and the reason you buy greaves is not for s some obscure 5% change in the chance you’ll be hit, but because sharp metal meeting shins is bad. It feels like the player had to “earn” something.

Of course, it’s also potentially incredibly dull to implement.

Personal Capability: Fundamentally, we know that certain acts so exceed human capacity in scale that they are “unrealistic”. We know that no matter how bad ass you are, you are unlikely to survive being pincushioned with arrows, and you probably can’t convince Churchill to surrender Europe to the Soviets. In systems with magic, we know that if everyone could “snap fingers for lightning”, the world wouldn’t work as written, so simulationism for here means limiting Magic’s availability or practicality.

Again, the sense here is that it isn’t letting the player “cheat”. If it’s hard, and “realistic” (you know, for professional delta force elves gone rogue to fight megacorps), you have to earn your win rather than have it handed to you. We like to feel like as a result the player has to be more clever, more creative, and make better decisions.

Maybe a tiny never to be admitted part thinks that while our fat butts could never really be a sorcerer, there is pleasure in thinking we could at least think our way through a situation with more human constraints. Of course, the average gamer is about as likely to be turned a vampire as they are to wake up one day and be an MMA champion, but it’s a pleasant fiction.

Cause and Effect World As a third axis, the world itself should behave in a rational and supportable manner. Well and good to have trans dimensional spirits, but let’s not forget economics, politics, ethnic hatred, and the like. Again, the joy comes in knowing you don’t get a Mary Sue pass - and that you will almost certainly have to think beyond “who can I fireball today” because a realistic world system is usually tied directly or implicitly to a realistic consequence system.

Realism this is simply a measure of how much things act like they would in earth, minus the setting directed suspensions of disbelief. If you have a system where most firefights devolve into people hiding behind cover, hurling lead, panicking, and then spending the rest of the game without three fingers because they got hit once, you have “realism”. Likewise if that fireball crackling from the guys fingertips leaves a flaming and hideous corpse, or attempting to block a dragon claw with a shield ends with shattered arm bones.

Sometimes we love this because it is the right medium for the story (can you imagine crossing Twilight’s gritty, plausible, post nuclear Europe with HP and instant healing?), but a lot of times it falls back to the real faithful points of simulationism. It doesn’t let you be a Sue. The implication then becomes that as a not-sue, the player must take a greater part in solving the issue, and not rely on a character sheet to do it for him.

Of course, since many people WANT to be unstoppable heroes of the day, they tend to be less in favor of these.

Of note, whether you are playing a realistic commando in a world perfect setting, or a dragonborn sorcerer in D&D, or simply trying to see if you can do better at invading Russia than Napoleon did, you are engaged in power fantasy. The question is how much, what kind, and how do you like your stories. (Well, unless you are Heinz Guderian’s ghost, in which case I guess you actually know about that last one).


Add Consistency.

Based purely on my own internal gut reaction to the three notions in question.

"Sim"... if my character turns this dial X clicks, the result in the rules and the "fiction" will be X, or X+/-, each time, reliably.
"Nar"... if my character turns this dial X clicks, the result can vary depending on what someone thinks will create the "best story".
"Gam"... if my character turns the dial X clicks... someone will try to get me to wager on the outcome.

Psyren
2019-06-04, 01:06 AM
On "narrative (https://filmcrithulk.blog/2011/10/06/hulk-explains-why-we-should-stop-it-with-the-hero-journey-****/) structure (https://filmcrithulk.blog/2011/07/07/hulk-presents-the-myth-of-3-act-structure/)".

Tangent to tangent: Lindsay Ellis counterpoint to Film Crit Hulk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0QO7YuKKdI) ("Now, Hulk has written some great film journalism over the years, but on this, well, I pretty much disagree with most of his assertions")


I don't think it can reasonably be disputed that D&D is not a simulationist system, unless what it is simulating is D&D itself, in which case every system is simulationist.

It's modeling, or at least attempting to model, aspects of the real world that most games (even most tabletop games) either don't or can't. For me that's enough.



Even if DnD isn't simulationist because it doesn't simulate things well, it matches simulationist systems in its ambitions and areas of focus immediately outside of character creation/behavior. Even within the constraints of character creation and behavior, it still attempts to provide a rich rules grammar to describe what's going on, erring on the side of complexity rather than sparseness. It may stumble in its end results, depending on the tastes of the individual playing the game, but it follows the same broad arc and design tendency. For me, personally, DnD definitely counts as crunchy, though there are crunchier, and simulationist, though there are more rigorous simulations. But that doesn't matter, much; that's a subjective and arbitrary metric because how well it succeeds at simulating things is going to depend on individual tastes, because gamist-simulationist-narrativist paradigms are arbitrary to begin with. It follows the same arcs and design tendencies as more simulationist systems as opposed to the narrativist trend, though, and that makes it useful as an illustrative example.

Indeed, and I'd add two more points:

1) D&D is useful as a common language, because most of us are familiar with it (even if we don't play anymore, or barely ever did.) Especially 3rd edition, since a certain webcomic most of us (presumably) came here to see uses it.

2) Even if the crunch of a particular aspect being simulated produces amusing or confounding results, I reiterate that that's easily fixable. Maybe I consider a Barbarian who can hold his breath for 4 whole minutes unaided to be unreasonablel; I can still use the rule for that situation as a starting point to land on something that feels better.

Willie the Duck
2019-06-04, 08:43 AM
{Scrub the post, scrub the quote}

I am not a mod. Please take this all as personal position and opinion, and certainly not telling others what to do (except as an avenue of greater respect from me).
First of all, I'm not going to choose between puffed-up sophist and name-caller, as they are both things-I-expect-us-all-to-have-grown-out-by-high-school. There are plenty of people on these boards who are various strains of doing-things-I'd-be-more-impressed-if-they-didn't. There are people who are here just to argue. There are one-true-wayists. There are people who make unverifiable appeals to IRL expertise as their argumentation support. There are people who genuinely seem to think that their position regarding elfgames is a position of impressive moral greatness. There are people who seem to think that they are bastions of brilliance bringing truth and light to the rest of the unwashed masses.
In that light, Max just seems like a bitter old crank (no idea if old is accurate, but we all know the 'old man yells at cloud' stereotype).
Does he have clear axes to grind? Yes. Does he pick out D&D for selective obsession and derision well above its level of transgression compared to other games? Yes, clearly D&D ran over his puppy as a kid or somesuch. Does he throw around $10 words and phrases like their use has inherent weight? Sometimes. Is he arrogant and a sophist? uh... Honestly, if he wanted us all to think that he was a big damn deal, you'd think he'd do a heck of a lot different.


{Scrub the post, scrub the quote}

Some other guy on the internet mistakes a niche form of literary, artistic, and architectural critique as the downfall of civilization, references two of the most lazily written articles I've ever read as his proxy argument for why it is horrible, drags it into multiple gaming discussions (including where it has no relevance to the discussion at hand, and the initial one where everyone but him realized that he was being trolled by the OP), and you're worried about his opinion of you? Rise above that, man!

The rest of his ideas about narrative structure and storytelling are a lot more well argued, and honestly those are the kinds of arguments I would think you would want to be debating if you are a literature study-type. Not agree with, mind you, but certainly these are the things you went back and forth with with your professors and classmates, right?


<all of it>

Thank you for this! This is the kind of thing I wish I had time and focus to write!

Kurald Galain
2019-06-04, 09:04 AM
If I might, it seems there are actually multiple axes of “simulation”, the difference between which is the cause of many a circular firing squad. I would suggest that it can actually be broken down to the following categories:

That was insightful, thank you for posting.

Max_Killjoy
2019-06-04, 09:51 AM
Some other guy on the internet mistakes a niche form of literary, artistic, and architectural critique as the downfall of civilization



If it were just the first part, I wouldn't care, it would just be critics gazing at their own navels and demonstrating their own pompous foolishness to each other.

But it's not. Instead of debating based on fact or engaging in the pursuit of fact, it has infested the social sciences and politics and philosophy in general with the toxic notion that there are no facts, just subjective perception and the manipulation of meaningless data. Postmodernism is nothing more and nothing less than solipsism writ large, and it's the crack through which the "post-truth" notions of the propoganda-state have oozed back into our society from the darkest days of the 20th century.

Even on just its impact on the social sciences themselves...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_Studies_affair


As for the rest... I appreciate the sense of fairness involved, but no need to stand up for me (even if it's backhanded).

If low-minded attacks were going to hurt me or whatever, they'd have done it by now.

Roland St. Jude
2019-06-04, 10:02 AM
Sheriff: Let's keep it more civil in here.

Segev
2019-06-04, 10:28 AM
Back on topic, I like crunchy systems because they give me more toys to play with. I can customize characters, use the ways the crunchy bits do suggest something about the underlying rules of the setting to make character concepts, and toy with fun and different ways to do things.

I am comfortable with abstraction, but want there to be some clear idea of what it's abstracting and why. As we move to less crunchy systems, that abstraction becomes more personal, but I still try to tie it in for what my character is actually doing. BESM invites this kind of thing, and even requires it, because it's only asking you to pay for what your characters can do; how they do it is entirely irrelevant to the system, and thus something the designer of the character must invent. This can lead to frustration when theoretical thematics should impose limits that you didn't get a discount for, making you choose between breaking theme or nerfing yourself when you paid for more than you're getting, but that's the trade-off for a less crunchy system.

PairO'Dice Lost
2019-06-04, 05:43 PM
Regarding the "Do the D&D novels match the D&D system?" question, I'd say that the novels certainly do reflect the rules, and where they don't it's an issue with the particular novels in question, not any sort of rules/setting disconnect. Firstly, regarding Dragonlance:



Have you actually played low-to-mid-level D&D?Yes, starting around the time that the aforementioned original Dragonlance novels first came out, but well before I'd ever heard of them.

What I recall was a sense that the original Dragonlance characters must not be getting much in the way of XP, because they never seemed to get past that "OMG we're in over our heads and we're all going to die and everything is falling apart" that a couple levels cured for PCs unless the DM was just an adversarial jerk bully DM.

Actually, it's exactly as if the Dragonlance novels had a terrible and adversarial DM. The original modules required you to use pregens instead of custom characters, were railroaded to the Abyss and back, had mostly over-leveled encounters (the DL modules topped out at 10th level or so, but every NPC was higher-level, dragons came in groups of Nd6 at a time, and so forth), and just generally were a published version of that one DM who should really have written a book but instead decided to run you through his plot as a D&D campaign and you're going to sit back and follow the plot breadcrumbs, dammit.

So it's no surprise that the tie-in books were kinda crap, and the setting/mechanics disconnects there are more due to Weis and Hickman being hacks than any issues with the rules.


Regarding settings in general, I'm not sure where the idea that the novels portray a setting that's "a quasi-medieval mashup but not that fantastic for the most part" comes from. Dragonlance is high fantasy in the vein of LotR, Eberron is more magipunk/magitech, FR is fairly varied but mostly high-magic Renaissance on the Sword Coast, Dark Sun is even more post-apocalyptic than all the other post-apocalyptic settings...there's really nothing approaching Medieval, quasi-Medieval, or even Medieval-meets-X to be seen. Sure, you have swords and vaguely Catholic churches and hereditary monarchs, but the weapons range from late Roman to late Renaissance, the churches don't have anywhere near the social clout of Medieval Catholicism, and there's no feudal setup with vassals, fiefs, and/or landed knights in any setting I can think of.

As far as particular novels go, I can't think of any that don't have at least two of (A) prominent groups of magic-using individuals who make daily life for the average person notably better (magewrights, Harpers), worse (Templars, Red Wizards), or at least different (Wizards of High Sorcery, Halruaan elders), (B) obviously-magical and/or -fantastic cities like Sharn, Waterdeep, Menzoberranzan, or the like, (C) common magic that impacts everyday life (Eberron's "wide magic" and dragomarked heirs running industries, Dark Sun's very common psionics, etc.), (D) implicit setting details that assume D&D's high magic/power levels in the background (universal literacy, very little threat from disease or contamination thanks to clerics, Authority Equals Asskicking, etc.), or (E) highly non-Medieval governmental structures from the more modern vassal-less monarchies of most FR and Eberron nations to the more magical Halruaan magical-teleconference oligarchy and Aereni undeadocracy. Even in the series that focus more on intrigue and city life than adventuring and dungeon delves, there are plenty of mentions and examples of the fantastic things in the world.

Psikerlord
2019-06-11, 11:28 PM
I like a bit of simulation in my game because I like combat to be dangerous. Sometimes I also like a simulationist bent because I like the attrition aspect - that the party is being worn down over time. This sort of thing is good for dungeon crawls, for example. Other times however I don't want too much attrition - eg in a shadowrun game where you play per scene, the dungeon crawl type situation doesnt really exist.

I think the main benefits of crunchiness are:

(i) resolving actions is more certain: players understand how their actions will be resolved and can plan accordingly, rather than relying on a ruling.
(ii) greater PC customisation

For me there is definitely a balance to be struck. Too much crunch = too confusing, and combat gets too slow - too many modifiers etc. Lots of crunch also - usually - means the game is harder to improvise, which is a major setback imo.

More than simulationist, or crunchy, my prefernce is typically (i) quick combat, (ii) that's dangerous, (iii) with lots of PC options, and (iv) decent mechanics framework so I can plan my actions reliably, and (v) easy improvisation by the GM when needed. Which I think for me tends to end up being "medium crunch" games are my sweet spot.

Pleh
2019-06-12, 04:58 AM
For me there is definitely a balance to be struck. Too much crunch = too confusing, and combat gets too slow - too many modifiers etc.

Hm. I hadn't been thinking about it this way. Sure, a crunchier game will *likely* have more modifiers, but I didn't see that as something that had to happen.

Seems to me like excessive modifers is an example of an inefficiently crunchy game. Look at any guide to character creation in 3.5 and you'll probably find advice to avoid "situational modifiers." If you don't have the bonus frequently enough, you'll be likely to forget that you have them when they finally apply (and so you have effectively spent build resources for no benefit).

So, in my mind, a crunchy game isn't about lots of modifiers, but in a highly technical and mechanical use of the modifiers it has.

A counter example of something I'd say is decidedly NOT crunchy modifiers is Action Points (and their various equivalents, like 5e's Inspiration). It may be a modifier, but it's not a crunchy game element. It's just meta currency. You can *make* it more crunchy by making an in universe justification for it (like calling them Force Points in SWSE), but you still have to make their acquisition and use highly technical for it to become truly crunchy.

I've always felt that the absolute best crunchy games, while possibly bulky, will be as streamlined as absolutely possible. Flawlessly technical, but reduced to a manageable set of data to track.

And your fear that crunchy games leave less room for improvisation is somewhat unfounded. The perfect crunchy system wouldn't need improvisation because it would readily apply to any conceivable scenario. Though you're right that most attempts by real humans to make a crunchy game are very far from this ideal.

Harkness
2019-06-12, 10:18 AM
Hey All,
So, in the spirit of discovery-- what is it that you guys like about crunchy systems? It can be a specific element you feel you get in those systems that you don't get elsewhere. It can be a broader design tendency you recognize in those systems that doesn't exist in narrativist systems. Or it can just be something you adore from a specific crunchy rule system. I mean, there are people who unironically enjoy rifts. That has to be for a reason. If possible, let's try to focus on crunchy games, and keep narrativist/abstract system discussion more as references to refine what it is that we like about crunch. Ultimately, when you make a thread, barring a major derail, it really turns into what other people make of it, so I leave that ultimate determination to you. Let's enjoy and discuss, above all!

I'd have to say it's this;

Just enough boundaries to give you a framework of how the universe works, and enough rulebending/power of DM to allow for creatively broken choices.

I don't do many campaigns, but I love the mix of roleplay and having untold power. You also tend to spend a lot of time fleshing out your character's goals and mannerisms; I suppose you begin to feel attached to the character, as if you are them. That connection to identity might be what you get out of it.

Aside from that, I adore hearing broken character stories. Stories where someone creative enough bent the rules or used them to achieve untold power, or a DM that was very generous with the results of a Nat 20.

Gideon Falcon
2019-07-03, 05:50 PM
Character Building. I have honestly not had a very large amount of experience playing D&D, though I have had some, but I have done a lot of character building and optimization just on my own time for no other purpose than to see how overpowered I can get them. This is much more satisfying in crunchier systems where there is more room to optimize, more room to customize, more room to align all the fiddly details like a combination of LEGO and Transformers coming together in my metaphorical hands. It gets all the better with Homebrew, which is also much easier with the complex systems that have actual room to make something new, although this has led to the realization with some of my more excessive homebrew-inclusive builds that they'd managed to turn melee combat into rocket tag as their HP hopelessly lagged behind the damage output of a single off-hand smack. That's only a minor detriment to the glee I get from seeing that damage output climb, seeing as the only DMs that have ever allowed the stuff I put into it have been PbP campaigns that peter out before the characters even finish hearing the first quest prompt, so I likely won't ever have to deal with that asymetry.

Duff
2019-07-03, 09:45 PM
Anyone else remember drowning someone to heal them? Yes.
I laughed.
The DM laughed.
The drowned character's player had a hissy fit

It was a good time.

Duff
2019-07-03, 10:05 PM
Another thing which can appeal is the fact that a crunchier game is more likely to be run with a "let the dice fall where they may" attitude from the GM.
So failure do to poor rolling is more of an option, adding tension and meaning to rolls and sometimes forcing the party to innovate wildly.

EG, the plan is to sneak in and steal the MacGuffin.
Crunchy game, the thief rolls stealth, knowing if they fail. the character will probably have to flee and may die.When you make your stealth check you are grateful for every single bonus you grafted hard to get by choosing the right things (skills, magic, etc). Failure can badly derail the plot, maybe even lead to failure of the mission.
If they think quickly and can still salvage the win, it feels like a real against-the-odds victory probably involving some lucky rolling.

Narrative game - Failure would compactly derail the story. Players know that if this attempt fails, there will be consequences. But there's not much chance the actual mission will fail. The GM should allow another chance - maybe capture the thief who then has to try to escape from the dungeon while the rest of the party tries another approach.

GMing style come into this a fair bit and there's elements of chicken and egg here.
Also, I can appreciate both styles, so I'm not saying one's better, but the difference may be part of what the OP prefers.

Duff
2019-07-03, 10:07 PM
Also, I've never been involved in a TPK in a non-crunchy game. I suspect this is another manifestation of "let the dice fall where they may" GMing being more likely in games with crunch

Psyren
2019-07-05, 03:04 AM
EG, the plan is to sneak in and steal the MacGuffin.
Crunchy game, the thief rolls stealth, knowing if they fail. the character will probably have to flee and may die.When you make your stealth check you are grateful for every single bonus you grafted hard to get by choosing the right things (skills, magic, etc). Failure can badly derail the plot, maybe even lead to failure of the mission.
If they think quickly and can still salvage the win, it feels like a real against-the-odds victory probably involving some lucky rolling.

Narrative game - Failure would compactly derail the story. Players know that if this attempt fails, there will be consequences. But there's not much chance the actual mission will fail. The GM should allow another chance - maybe capture the thief who then has to try to escape from the dungeon while the rest of the party tries another approach.


My experience often entails the opposite; character creation tends to be a much, much more involved and time-consuming process in a crunchier game than it is in a narrativist one, so the GM of the crunchy game is a lot more likely to allow failure to have alternative outcomes besides the character(s) dying and their sheet(s) getting ripped up due to some unlucky rolls.

kyoryu
2019-07-05, 06:46 PM
Narrative game - Failure would compactly derail the story. Players know that if this attempt fails, there will be consequences. But there's not much chance the actual mission will fail. The GM should allow another chance - maybe capture the thief who then has to try to escape from the dungeon while the rest of the party tries another approach.

Eh, maybe it's the groups I play with, but with narrative games while death is usually less of a thing (because, hey, you can't screw with dead characters any more), failure at various levels is usually more common than in "traditional" or "crunchy" games, not less.

Narrative games, in general, have less of a planned story than other types of games, so there's nothing to derail.

Where you really get "derailing" is in adventure-path style games, which tend to be a pre-designed story laid on top of a usually-fairly-traditional-or-crunchy game. Most of the popular narrative games explicitly advise against having a planned story.

Telok
2019-07-05, 08:06 PM
My experience often entails the opposite; character creation tends to be a much, much more involved and time-consuming process in a crunchier game than it is in a narrativist one, so the GM of the crunchy game is a lot more likely to allow failure to have alternative outcomes besides the character(s) dying and their sheet(s) getting ripped up due to some unlucky rolls.

I dunno. I can't correlate chargen length with TPK rates.

Traveller and Paranoia are both five minute character generation and I've seen TPKs in both. Traveller was played very 'the dice fall as they may' and trying to fight two actual warships at close range with a free trader that had a single laser was... suicidal. In Paranoia the players get a six pack of clones and are generally given R&D weapons that they don't have sufficient security clearance to read the user manuals of (because it's funny). Likewise in AD&D, running it pretty much straight, 1e chargen was short and there were TPKs.

Then AD&D 2e + Skills & Powers, through to D&D 5e plus Pathfinder, Starfinder, and HERO system all have a pretty long process of character generation. I've only ever seen TPKs in D&D 3.5e, the others tend to get deus ex machina saved or the DM just waffles off and makes a weak excuse. Although in HERO it's actually pretty explicit that when all the heroes go down it's time for a jailbreak story arc. Several times in Shadowrun I've witnessed TPKs (I've actually missed out on two, one where I missed a session and they all died, the other where I said "Yeah, no. <char_name> goes somewhere else and gets drunk").

What I do notice about crunchy systems, regardless of chargen, is that I know what my character can do. If I want or have a character that's an expert in something I can generally do that in a crunchy system. In something less crunchy I usually have to either convince the DM to pump up the character as an expert or hope I roll consistently well any time I want to try something in the character's area of 'expertise'. Although I did note that D&D 4e and Starfinder had a similar issue of having to roll high to be good at something, but that was because they use a sliding scale of target numbers that keeps increasing as the characters get more 'skilled', sort of the Truenamer problem writ across the entire system.

Max_Killjoy
2019-07-05, 09:48 PM
What I do notice about crunchy systems, regardless of chargen, is that I know what my character can do. If I want or have a character that's an expert in something I can generally do that in a crunchy system. In something less crunchy I usually have to either convince the DM to pump up the character as an expert or hope I roll consistently well any time I want to try something in the character's area of 'expertise'.


Yeap -- I'd rather my character's abilities rely as little as possible on my ability to convince the DM to that the character "just should have" this or that ability without any mechanical support, or my ability to evade actually having to roll.




Although I did note that D&D 4e and Starfinder had a similar issue of having to roll high to be good at something, but that was because they use a sliding scale of target numbers that keeps increasing as the characters get more 'skilled', sort of the Truenamer problem writ across the entire system.


Ah yes, illusory progress / negated progress -- also the bane of many a video game, where everything scales exactly with the character, making the "progression" mainly a mirage.

Lucas Yew
2019-07-05, 10:45 PM
What I do notice about crunchy systems, regardless of chargen, is that I know what my character can do. If I want or have a character that's an expert in something I can generally do that in a crunchy system. In something less crunchy I usually have to either convince the DM to pump up the character as an expert or hope I roll consistently well any time I want to try something in the character's area of 'expertise'. Although I did note that D&D 4e and Starfinder had a similar issue of having to roll high to be good at something, but that was because they use a sliding scale of target numbers that keeps increasing as the characters get more 'skilled', sort of the Truenamer problem writ across the entire system.

Wow, you nailed one of my biggest gripes with the 4E system in a single phrase... :smalleek:

Pleh
2019-07-06, 07:17 AM
What I do notice about crunchy systems, regardless of chargen, is that I know what my character can do. If I want or have a character that's an expert in something I can generally do that in a crunchy system. In something less crunchy I usually have to either convince the DM to pump up the character as an expert or hope I roll consistently well any time I want to try something in the character's area of 'expertise'.

Meh. Depends on the quality and readability of the crunch along with the quality and permissiveness of the DM.

Crunch can be so dense as to be incomprehensible, leading you to overlook options because they are convoluted (I can't tell you how many times I've heard thoughts of using grappling in 3.5 shot down just because people got tired of trying to figure out how it applies in the situation).

Crunch can also be more limiting than helpful. Granular skills tend to generate an awful lot of gatekeeping abilities. I have almost never used skill points put into forgery or appraise. Bluff and disguise (or straight invisibility) are much more commonly useful than Forgery and we usually don't care how much the treasure is worth, because we're looting it anyway. These skills could have easily been packaged into other skills to save on inefficient crunch.

Telok
2019-07-06, 12:59 PM
Granular skills tend to generate an awful lot of gatekeeping abilities.

I don't find that it's having lots of skill options that gates off abilities, but more the pass/fail and task resolution paradigms that's used in a system.

The Paranoia edition I run has easily 40+ skills plus player defined skills. But it's a d20 "roll under skill" with a margin of success/failure built in. The character gets a score in each of the six or so major categories (generally 5 to 15) and then chooses which individual skills they'll be better or worse at. Everyone effectively has all skills at some level and never at less than about a 25%ish success rate (unless you chose to be complete rubbish at something). Plus failing a check is never just 'nothing happens', but should always involve the situation snowballing like a Three Stooges comedy.

Contrast that with D&D 3.p or 5e where there are things you can't do because you don't have a skill or proficency or some character option written on your sheet. You can't even attempt a forgery check without ranks, or a DC 21 check if you don't have bonuses. And those games don't build in the 'fail forward' or add a complication types of stuff, they might mention it once somewhere but it's not a native part of the game system.

A lot of stat+skill dice pool systems also tend to avoid that sort of gating effect, although I have seen at least one where you couldn't make attempts at some things unless you had points in a skill. What I find to be much more restrictive is the d20 style of feats. Those almost always include some form of gating for character abilities. I think the d20 style feat paradigm combined with the rules style of narrow and explicit abilities with exceptions has a nasty tendency towards making characters unable to act unless they buy the ability to act with a limited resource. Which is what I think leads to both the magic/martial issues and air-breathing mermaid problems that those systems have.

Psyren
2019-07-06, 02:14 PM
Traveller and Paranoia are both five minute character generation and I've seen TPKs in both.

While you CAN make a character in 5 minutes in Pathfinder, realistically I've seen it take a lot longer; most PF games I've played have had a "session zero", the bulk of which is spent on this activity. This is especially true when you consider that most deaths or TPKs happen after first level, so the replacement characters now need to be created with multiple levels worth of feats, gear, spells etc across all the allowed splats for that campaign, and then the whole sheet audited for legality. And none of this takes into account the time needed to develop a backstory for the new character, incorporate them and their goals into the world, or even just explain how the surviving members of the party come across them.

So I can't exactly blame a GM who would rather skip all that and simply say something like "you all just barely survive..."



Although I did note that D&D 4e and Starfinder had a similar issue of having to roll high to be good at something, but that was because they use a sliding scale of target numbers that keeps increasing as the characters get more 'skilled', sort of the Truenamer problem writ across the entire system.

Starfinder "scales" in the same sense that almost all games do, i.e. expecting high level characters do be doing high-level things. There are plenty of challenges that don't scale, e.g. hacking a random stooge's datapad probably becomes routine at some point, but by the time you can do it automatically the party has probably moved on to needing to hack something much more elaborate, like an entire corporation's data vault or security system. I wouldn't call it the Truenamer problem at all, whereby even your most entry level utterances stay difficult to use.

Telok
2019-07-06, 03:28 PM
Starfinder "scales" in the same sense that almost all games do, i.e. expecting high level characters do be doing high-level things. There are plenty of challenges that don't scale, e.g. hacking a random stooge's datapad probably becomes routine at some point, but by the time you can do it automatically the party has probably moved on to needing to hack something much more elaborate, like an entire corporation's data vault or security system. I wouldn't call it the Truenamer problem at all, whereby even your most entry level utterances stay difficult to use.

Thats fine except that in all the 4e and Starfinder games I played it was never the mook data pads or dilapidated wood doors that you were dealing with anyways. Every time you rolled it was for an actual "level appropriate challenge", as soon as you leveled up the data was no longer on the mooks and the treasure was no longer behind the wood door. As much as people say that the DC of a door or hack doesn't change what really happens in play is that the adjective in front of the word 'door' or 'computer' changes, the DC goes up to be 'level appropriate', and you still need to roll 13+ to accomplish the exact same task as before.

Saying the characters get better is ok and giving them bigger numbers is ok. But if the way the game plays means that your "expert" character still fails just as many rolls to do the same things at high levels as at low levels then your 'advancement' is essentially zero. Hiding it by changing a couple adjectives (wood door, steel door, magic door, etc.) is where the illusion of advancement appears.

But that's not a function of crunchy rules either. It's a result of the "level appropriate everything" craze that's shown up in game design recently. Although I think it is easier to spot that kind of thing in a crunchy system. D&D 5e may have the same issue, but it's such a squishy system that it's harder to quantify.

Psyren
2019-07-06, 03:44 PM
Thats fine except that in all the 4e and Starfinder games I played it was never the mook data pads or dilapidated wood doors that you were dealing with anyways. Every time you rolled it was for an actual "level appropriate challenge", as soon as you leveled up the data was no longer on the mooks and the treasure was no longer behind the wood door. As much as people say that the DC of a door or hack doesn't change what really happens in play is that the adjective in front of the word 'door' or 'computer' changes, the DC goes up to be 'level appropriate', and you still need to roll 13+ to accomplish the exact same task as before.

I'm not saying this doesn't happen, I'm questioning what about this scenario is supposedly unique to Starfinder. 3.5 also doesn't have many ordinary wooden doors in high level areas (like Baator) last time i checked - the expected challenge elements scaling with the party happens just as often there. And in both systems, you are perfectly free to pit the party against something that isn't going to challenge them much if you want them to feel powerful.



But that's not a function of crunchy rules either. It's a result of the "level appropriate everything" craze that's shown up in game design recently. Although I think it is easier to spot that kind of thing in a crunchy system. D&D 5e may have the same issue, but it's such a squishy system that it's harder to quantify.

5e is in my opinion even worse at this; Bounded Accuracy means you're almost never going to actually outlevel a decent challenge, whether that be a lock or a militia, because having your stats capped at 20 means that lots of smaller things will continue to challenge you long after they ceased to be a challenge for a different edition's character.

Jakinbandw
2019-07-06, 04:15 PM
5e is in my opinion even worse at this; Bounded Accuracy means you're almost never going to actually outlevel a decent challenge, whether that be a lock or a militia, because having your stats capped at 20 means that lots of smaller things will continue to challenge you long after they ceased to be a challenge for a different edition's character.

5e is weird because classes that are good at skills will tend to so massively outgrow other options that they trivialize challenges. That said this only happens because everyone else is locked into not having good growth for their skills so challenges tend to have to stay wooden doors because if they were set to where a rouge would have a challenge succeeding then no one could ever succeed on challenges.

Like i said, wierd

Devils_Advocate
2019-08-19, 07:10 PM
So, in 5E, skill experts increasingly reliably succeed at the types of challenges that they specialize in as they level up, and other characters don't? That that would be considered "bad" or "weird" seems rather illustrative of how expectation is shaped by experience.


A system that fakes simulation so well that the average player is unable to tell the difference, is ipso facto simulationist.
Well gosh golly gee willikers, Kurald Galain! I didn't know that the word "simulationist" really means something other than I what intended it to mean! But obviously it only has exactly one precise meaning, of which you clearly have expert knowledge, so I must have been wrong!

Furthermore, whether D&D can accurately be described by the word "simulationist" is all that I was concerned with! I totally wasn't talking about stuff that someone might dislike about it regardless of whether a particular term applies!

"Sometimes sarcasm helps us think more clearly." - Dogbert

First of all, others have already noted that it's clear to ordinary players that D&D is not a simulation. But that's actually besides the point. See, a game's merits as a simulation aren't a matter of "This game isn't a simulation" vs. "This game is a simulation". It's a matter of "I dislike how this game isn't a simulation" vs. "I like how this game is a simulation" (https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/587/roleplaying-games/dd-calibrating-your-expectations-2). One upshot of this is that if you don't care how simulationist a game is, then how simulationist it is is a matter of how well it meets other people's standards. Regardless, you're unlikely to convince anyone that they hold different standards than they think they do.

I'd like to know what you'd like people to say in place of "I don't like how D&D isn't a simulation". It would be one thing if you didn't understand what someone meant, but when people explain what we mean, I'm not sure what your criticism of our word choice is meant to accomplish. If the term "simulation" isn't appropriate, what is? I must wonder whether perhaps you are not attempting to facilitate communication but to impede it, as through an insistence that freedom is slavery. Perhaps your issue is not in fact with the language that others are using but with the very ideas that that language is intended to express.


I think it's useful to define "simulationist"* at this point. As someone that's not a primary simulationist, here's my take:

1) The system has, as a goal, accurate simulation of events
2) The system tracks the things that would be important factors into a situation.
3) The things tracked in a simulation of situation have the impact that they would - for instance, armor makes you take less damage on a hit-by-hit basis **
4) The system tells you what happens in reasonably concrete terms ***
5) The results from the system are generally plausible ****
6) The most probable results from a situation in reality ***** are also highly likely in the system
7) A character making a decision in a situation considers similar things to what a person in reality would be considering ******

As for why I like "simulationist" systems? Because I want the decisions and challenges facing the character on the system layer to be the same as those facing the character on the fiction layer, and I hate disconnects. I hate seeing the result of a roll and comparing it to what was going on in front of the character and getting that gut-level "what the hell, that makes no damn sense" reaction. I hate being kicked out of the moment for the character and made to stop and think about some other layer of stuff going on.
To further expand on point 7: Making the decisions and challenges facing the character on the system layer the same as those facing the character on the fiction layer makes the decisions and challenges facing the player on the system layer the same as those facing the character on the fiction layer. That facilitates empathy with one's character, as the two of you are in the same boat, as it were. If instead you know that things that look like good ideas to characters in the game world are actually bad ideas and vice versa, because their world is an illusion that actually operates on different principles than the characters believe it operates on, then that indeed creates a disconnect. But it doesn't even have to come down to good idea versus bad idea.

Armor as uniform damage reducer isn't really all that much more realistic than armor as dodge enhancer. Combatants generally do not have armor of uniform thickness covering their entire bodies. But just treating armor as a damage reducer instead of a dodge enhancer makes it work differently from better dodging, and that brings player considerations much more in line with character considerations. It means that when the character is faced with a tradeoff between greater mobility and better armor, the player faces a tradeoff between greater mobility and better armor, not just a question of which option give the higher Armor Class.

So that's something that I like that seems to be positively correlated with simulationism, but isn't even inherently simulationist: Having that which is fluffed differently be crunched differently, such that things that conceptually work differently from each other actually play out differently. As another example, I would prefer that a cleric with high Intelligence and low Wisdom be more similar to a wizard with high Intelligence and low Wisdom than a cleric with high Wisdom and low Intelligence is. I want differences in those "game stats" to represent important differences between what characters can do, not for the same "stat" to mean different things for different classes!


Let's not do the HP = meat thing again? Please? It's rather senseless.
If losing hit points doesn't represent serious injury but still injury short of being dying on the ground, what does? If nothing does, but people in the setting are still supposed to sustain such injuries, then that's a failure as a simulation.

When the system outright literally describes hit point loss as "damage", it seems a bit disingenuous to suggest that the default fluff of losing hit points isn't damage to the character. Sure, it can be "refluffed" to "interpret" it as something else, but that's not simulation. Simulation makes the crunch match the fluff, not the other way around. It's easy to contrive appropriate fluff for crunch; player characters being superhuman by real life standards seems like the most straightforward approach here.


D&D models so many things other games don't bother to try, like bleeding, starvation/thirst, exhaustion, suffocation, heatstroke, frostbite, gravity, light levels, states of awareness, hazardous surfaces, cover/concealment, to say nothing of more fantastic terrains, conditions or abilities. If none of that counts as a simulation, I can only hope you've found a game that does, and enough other people to play it with regularly.
It's funny that you should mention bleeding, as I've noticed that, in D&D 3.5, a magic weapon with the Wounding property causes Constitution damage due to blood loss; and, indeed, Constitution damage seems to be how the d20 System handles blood loss in general.

One implication is that being stabbed good and hard with big sharp pieces of metal doesn't cause significant blood loss unless those big sharp pieces of metal are specially magically enhanced to do so, because there are no rules for that.

More generally, you seem to think that having unrealistic, verisimilitude-lacking rules for something is more simulationist than having no rules at all, whereas I am of precisely the opposite opinion. If you leave out morale entirely, that's one thing. It's not terribly feasible to attempt to model even everything that would likely have a significant impact on a battle. But if you put in special fear effects, then you're choosing to include fear in your game, in which case I want it to be handled plausibly.

D&D seems to have an ongoing theme of treating things as more special cases than they would be. I assume that that's because the designers approach things from an angle of "Hey, it would be cool if a character could do X" or "Let's make a monster that can do Y" or "It would be interesting if the PCs were subject to condition Z". Rather than "Who realistically could do X?" or "What would be the implications of something that could Y?" or "Let's try to believably model Z". Big honking difference in design philosophy there. The former approach isn't necessarily bad, but simulationist it ain't.


This is still vague; "matching reality" could include all sorts of things. Say I stab a bandit in the gut with my sword. His involuntary flinch plus the sweat on my palms causes the hilt to twist in my hands, roll against disarm. The resulting smell is quite awful, roll against nausea. A spurt of gore from the wound goes for my (*rolls*) face, roll reflex vs. blind. Successfully jerking away from that caused my feet to slip in the mud underfoot, roll to save vs. prone. I failed that one, he gets pulled down onto me, roll strength vs. pin. And the smell is even worse down here, roll for nausea yet again...
The idea is to give each possible result the same approximate likelihood as it has in real life. That "approximate" qualifier is important because it allows lots of probabilities to be rounded down to zero, which renders design much more tractable. Excluding fairly unlikely possibilities is generally fine, not only because "close enough is good enough" but because a more exhaustive list would be cumbersome; a fully exhaustive list is probably impossible. Of course, good estimates of probabilities may be hard to come by, especially if the system designer lacks any relevant expert knowledge. But so long as players don't know any better themselves, they probably won't notice the difference.

Complete and total realism is an unattainable ideal. Nothing less complex than reality itself can perfectly simulate reality. What you want to avoid more than anything else is wildly implausible results that are clearly wrong. In the above example, the bandit's head should not explode unless something else is going on.


I disagree that it's a reasonable target
What's unreasonable about trying to make a game realistic enough to avoid regular "What the hell?" moments?


I just don't agree with where the line is currently drawn. There is more than a bit of No True Scotsman flying around from where I'm sitting.
You seem to think that having a rule for something is "simulating" that thing so long as the rule doesn't routinely produce flagrantly wacky results. Not giving plainly inappropriate outcomes most of the time doesn't mean that a rule is simulating something.

And frankly, in exactly what sense does D&D even have rules "for" all of the things you mention? Does just using the word for something mean that a rule is "for" that thing, or e.g. does the thing called a sword need to actually work like a sword in order for the rules for it to be rules for a sword? And how much like a sword does it need to work? Is it enough for it to damage enemies when you swing it at them?

For example, D&D has player characters become more skilled as they gain experience, which sounds realistic enough. By overcoming difficult challenges, they get better at overcoming challenges. Totally reasonable so far!

But the skills that PCs improve at aren't necessarily the ones that they've been using. Regardless of whether it tends more towards a fixed class progression or an array of options to pick from at level up, I don't think that any edition has ever made PCs better at only stuff they've been practicing. Heck, sometimes a class progression contains weird changes without a real basis in what the class did up until then, like a Ranger suddenly gaining spellcasting.

Characters needing training in addition to XP from adventuring is a patch on this problem that doesn't really render the system realistic. If they get their skills from non-adventuring training, then what do they need all of that XP for? And the answer of course is that leveling up isn't there to realistically represent character development, but as a reward for players.

The fact that the system works like this is a plot point in On the Origin of PCs (https://www.amazon.com/Order-Stick-Vol-Origin-PCs/dp/0976658011). Like, it's not just a throwaway joke about how silly the rules are; the fact that the characters live in a world that operates under the rules of a non-simulationist gave system plays a role in the story going the way that it does. (Yes, if the rules had been different, Rich would have given Haley and Vaarsuvius different backstories to explain their joining the Order of the Stick without really altering the course of the comic, but it would have changed that part of the plot of that prequel.)

On a very high level of abstraction and very low level of resolution, there are rules "for" characters getting better at what they do. There are broad similarities to how people get better at stuff in real life. But there are also broad similarities between chess and a military battle. Does chess simulate a military battle? If not, could you make it a simulation of a military battle if you gave its pieces and its moves sufficiently evocative names? That's not even a rhetorical question; I wouldn't be shocked if some of the participants in this thread answered "Yes".


It's modeling, or at least attempting to model, aspects of the real world that most games (even most tabletop games) either don't or can't.
D&D doesn't attempt to model things in the sense of trying to capture the ways that those things work. It uses those things as inspiration for its rules, and it borrows the words for those things. To the limited extent that it does seek to give plausible results, D&D doesn't pursue them through modeling per se, it just contrives to give results that "seem good enough" in most of the cases that not particularly simulationist players are likely to care about. It has rules "for" lots of individual things, but often they aren't treated as more specific instances of more general types of things. The rules are chosen because they give "good enough" results, not to make the relationships between game constructs mirror the relationships between the things that they represent.

It would be a poorly coded simulation as a video game where whose internal functioning is unknown to the player, but it's worse as a tabletop game where you have to wrestle with its inelegant rules and see how fake they are. When I see how game "stats" and game interactions don't actually correspond to in-setting properties and in-setting interactions, that feels fake. Doing an unreliable job of giving correct results is frankly more forgivable when a system is trying to legitimately simulate, i.e. to make all of the stuff that it's tracking correspond directly to stuff in the setting. That way the rules are at least more intuitive and the problems should be relatively easy to fix: Just figure out which value or interaction somewhere is wrong!

Dungeons & Dragons just isn't a simulation in a truly simulationist sense. It fails to simulate adequately simtastically. It's not, you know, a simmy sim! A simmy sim that feels... simmy.


D&D is useful as a common language, because most of us are familiar with it (even if we don't play anymore, or barely ever did.) Especially 3rd edition, since a certain webcomic most of us (presumably) came here to see uses it.

One could even argue that that's one of the strengths of D&D - by not being a very strong "simulationist" or "narrative" or "gamist" game it opens itself to being enjoyed by a wider audience.


It's obvious to my brand new (to TTRPGs, to RPGs, and to D&D) teenage players, basically from the start. D&D doesn't attempt to be anything other than a fun way to be able to pretend to be heroes doing heroic things. Or not. For me, that's a large part of the draw. It's not anything-ist--it's free from pretensions to following any theory or school of thought. It's absurd in parts, serious in parts, and a giant amalgam of "hey, that seems cool, let's do it!" And always has been. And, for me, that's the charm.

Honestly, bearing a 'simulationist' (/'narrativist'/'gamist') flag is fairly meaningless. I'd almost say that none of them mean anything except on a relative scale -- i.e. 'X is more simulationist than Y (at least with regards to qualities which are important to me or my group),' or 'A is not simulationist enough for my needs, while B is (but....).'
Well, here's the thing: The unqualified use of a relative term is implicitly in contrast to the norm. Someone who is three feet tall normally isn't called "tall" just because he has a height greater than zero. "People are stupid" is an absurd generalization, as obviously the average person is not of below average intelligence. (https://xkcd.com/1386/) And calling Dungeons & Dragons "simulationist" is likewise as absurd, because obviously Dungeons & Dragons isn't more simulationist than Dungeons & Dragons is. If D&D is the norm, then it's the implicit, default point of contrast, is it not?


A counter example of something I'd say is decidedly NOT crunchy modifiers is Action Points (and their various equivalents, like 5e's Inspiration). It may be a modifier, but it's not a crunchy game element. It's just meta currency. You can *make* it more crunchy by making an in universe justification for it (like calling them Force Points in SWSE), but you still have to make their acquisition and use highly technical for it to become truly crunchy.

I've always felt that the absolute best crunchy games, while possibly bulky, will be as streamlined as absolutely possible. Flawlessly technical, but reduced to a manageable set of data to track.

And your fear that crunchy games leave less room for improvisation is somewhat unfounded. The perfect crunchy system wouldn't need improvisation because it would readily apply to any conceivable scenario. Though you're right that most attempts by real humans to make a crunchy game are very far from this ideal.
You seem to be treating "crunchy" as a synonym for "simulationist". That's not what that means. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role-playing_game_terms#C_2) "Crunch" is the game rules used to decide what happens. Fluff is the descriptions of things in the setting. Simulationism is making crunch match fluff! A pure meta currency has no attached fluff and is pure non-simulationist CRUNCH that a player can use to bite down on stuff in the game world! Chomp chomp!


Narrative games, in general, have less of a planned story than other types of games, so there's nothing to derail.

Where you really get "derailing" is in adventure-path style games, which tend to be a pre-designed story laid on top of a usually-fairly-traditional-or-crunchy game. Most of the popular narrative games explicitly advise against having a planned story.
I seem to recall "narrativism" being defined as the story hinging on what players decide to have their characters do. And I'd certainly expect that determining where the story goes is what a "narrative ruleset" is for. And what's the point of building narrative conventions into the game rules if not to allow events to adhere to those conventions without having to follow a pre-planned plot?

Whereas a verisimilitudinous "the dice fall where they may" game by nature eschews narrative convention; e.g. the main characters can pointlessly die due to bad luck. And so imposing plotted story means fighting the system at its very heart and soul, in a sense. Thus does vigorous railroading become the order of the day.

But when such a system is free to be what it wants to be, not bound and enslaved by wicked modules for their foul purposes, the players not merely watching shadows on a cave wall but allowed to explore a world rather than the illusions of an ingenious demon... then the game becomes a complete and total glorious crapshoot that not only doesn't adhere to a pre-planned plot, but doesn't adhere to story tropes either.

Willie the Duck
2019-08-19, 07:50 PM
We were literally one day from the thread necro cutoff, Devils_Advocate. I don't think anyone is invested in their arguments anymore.