And yes, SSS can be faked, with Nodes I believe.

Everyone, who has commented, you are invited to submit any tutorials that you are considering for this subject.

There are some video examples on my site : Waterfall, with animated texture with High Spec factor and wave, Crazy boat and After the Ship Wreck, using displacement modifier and waves.

Currently, I'm simulating fire (candle and open fire, at the bottom of the video list) , using Displacement modifier and Softbody flames animated by a vertical Wind effect.

I'd want to make a tutorial, but in fact the truth is that it uses basic features. The main difficulty is not the use of Softbody or the use of the displace modifier. These tools are well explained in the manual. The really difficult part is mainly the setup of the textures.
My open fire flames have no less than 9 layers. So, making a tutorial hasn't much sense, because the tricky thing will change with what you really want to create. I fear that there is no universal recipe. A good knowledge of Blender tools is the firststep, but to achieve the exact wanted result, you have to tweak a lot of material and texture parameters, and often draw alpha textures by hand. It will need hours and days and sometimes weeks (Well, I know, I'm slow :o) to get the right (or almost) visual effect.