Gary Gygax asserts in the opening chapter of the Dungeon Masters Guide that between the approaches of the realism simulation school and the pure gamist school, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons is primarily a game that does not seek to model realism or deeply simulate anything either. Originally, this statement made sense to me and instilled the notion that considerations of fun and smooth play took primacy over the necessity of laborious detailing of real world minutiae. But then, the rest of the 230 pages of the Dungeon Masters Guide are devoted to the simulation of a fantasy world, and laborious details of real world minutiae are precisely the sticking points of the text that have caused me to create this blog just to understand how they were intended to work. As with everything in the Guide, I find that the sentiment is fine but the practical implementation of the mechanic contradicts itself.
One thing I found fascinating was Delta's D&D's assertion that following the real world provided him with an elegant solution to most of the gaps with the OD&D system, explained in his post Realism in Game Design
Angry GM also makes an assertion that all rules firstly model the real world, then are modified and replaced by rules that seek to provide a more streamlined game experience, in this post Why Rules Exist , in which he also explicitly calls out Gary Gygax's assertions.
One of the things that drove me away from D&D 5th Edition was the lack of depth in the game system. I couldn't really articulate why I felt this way, because as much as anyone I dislike numerous and cumbersome rules, but I now take to the understanding that 5th Edition throw out many rules necessary for a comprehensive system, and its thin real world simulation is actually a design flaw.
Depth in gaming is a big, pervasive theme in this blog, whether I'm talking about tabletop RPGs or video games. Some of the deepest first person shooters have absolutely nothing to do with reality, such as Quake 3 Arena, but their simulation is so comprehensive that it stands by itself. On the other hand, 'realistic' shooters have gained unbelievable popularity in recent years and have almost completely supplanted pure game shooters, and that trend doesn't seem to ever be going away.
I feel that AD&D leans much harder into the real world simulation camp than Gygax would have you believe, probably as a result of general trends in wargaming from the 70's, and definitely more than modern editions of D&D.
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