PDA

View Full Version : Luck, simulationism, retroactive narratives, and Wild Bill Hickok.



Talakeal
2019-07-14, 10:20 AM
Bear with me here, three anecdotes that tie together:


I once read an article talking about Wild Bill Hickok that said that, in retrospect, he was the best the gun-fighter who ever lived, having won more showdowns than anyone else. The article posited that it wasn't because he was faster, stronger, smarter, or more skilled than anyone else, but merely because he was the luckiest. Someone had to have a lucky streak and win more than anyone else, just like someone has to win the lottery, but when he started out he had no greater odds than anyone else; it is only when you look back at his story in isolation that he appears to be this legendary badass.


Likewise, I once had a discussion about RPGs and how the PCs need to feel like the underdogs, but for the game to function as a game or a narrative, the odds have to be stacked in the PCs favor. For example, if every fight was "fair", the odds of a party surviving to level 20 in 3.5 D&D would be the same as winning 247 coin flips in a row, a miniscule number to be sure. So, the game is stacked in the players odds, and many of the more literal minded people argue that this is a world where PCs are unstoppable demigods, and that even dragons should live in fear of them, and that they are in fact the tyrants and bullies of the world rather than the plucky underdogs who heroicly defy death that the narrative would have you believe.


Third, many games have some sort of in game luck mechanic. Many otherwise simulationist systems give players luck or fate points that allow them to reroll or modify dice or even just ignore something bad that happens to a character. Even D&D claims that its abstract HP mechanics represent a large amount of luck. Now, the question is, do these mechanics have any in game reality? Are the players chosen by destiny or the gods, do they have some sort of tangible luck field that can be examined in a laboratory? Or are they just badass?


I posit that if we look at these three points together, we can get a new way of looking at RPGs. If, when the game starts, you come into it with the assumption that you are telling a story about people who will eventually become heroes, then you can still have a simulationist system where the PCs are the underdogs and have metagame luck powers without it breaking anything. Not all PCs are special, the world is littered with thousands of them who died or failed their quest, but we aren't focusing on their stories because they aren't as interesting. Instead we are looking at the guys who made it, or who atleast got far enough to tell an interesting story. Those metagame luck powers simply represent the fact that we are looking at the guys who made it rather than the losers.


Anyway, that's my ramble. Just a lot of thoughts that I had brewing in my head for a while that I wanted to get out there. Thanks for reading! Thoughts?

erikun
2019-07-14, 10:44 AM
Well, the first problem with this idea is that encounters almost never are a coin flip between TPK or coming out completely unscathed. Wild Bill might've survived by just being lucky enough to not be hit by a single bullet, but that's not how an adventuring party comes out of fights. Most combat encounters end up with some loss of HP and resources, and the goal in most adventures is to just avoid losing all of those HP before all the fights are complete. At higher levels, even a partial team kill is something the party can recover from with little problem. It is less 247 coin flips and more 247 battles of slowly being worn down with the players deciding when they want to rest up and recover to full. It sounds a bit less dramatic that way, sure, but it makes for a better game.

The game is tilted in the player's direction so that the players can determine how much risk they feel like putting out, and how they want to manage it. If every fight had a 50% or 60% to TPK, it would be much less about managing resources and much more about just being lucky enough to get through each one.

As for the Luck Point mechanic, these are fairly system-dependent so it's hard to say much in general. D&D has introduced luck mechanics, such as through Cleric domains or through prestige class bonuses, and those are described specifically as the character having divine protection or as them "storing" luck to use later. Some games, like Burning Wheel or WoD, have the luck described as exceptional effort or willpower that is expended, either being limited or being an obstacle to them later. Other games, like Fate, don't even have an in-game explanation for their luck mechanic; Fate Points can be used to take advantage of advantageous situations, or spontaneously generating new ones, or even spontaneously generating new characters or encounters on the scene. None of those are related to what a character can or cannot do in the system.


Those metagame luck powers simply represent the fact that we are looking at the guys who made it rather than the losers.
The problem I have with this statement is that it assumes the PCs will make it. That's kind of a dangerous assumption to make, as unless you are running a system where it is actually not possible for a character to get killed off without the player's express decision (Fate, HeroQuest) it is entirely possible that the PCs will fail and even die. If you go into most games with the assumption that the PCs are going to win, then you're setting up for either a contrivance to achieve that or to possibly end up disappointing people who anticipate that.

Pleh
2019-07-14, 12:24 PM
I think the problem is that luck seems to be an exclusively retroactive phenomenon. The moment you plan for luck and it works consistently, it's not luck. It's magic powers of some kind. Even with meta currency flavored as luck, it creates a disjointed cognitive sense for the player, knowing that to some extent, THEY are roleplaying a sentient personification of luck on behalf of their character, which feels less lucky and more like their character has cosmic benefactors. It can work, but it's inherently flawed, so the flaws need to be accounted for.

The best luck mechanics will involve rolling more dice, so it doesn't feel as much like the players have more control over their player's fate and more like the dice are uncharacteristically favorable to the character, letting them occassionally reroll.

Inchhighguy
2019-07-14, 01:59 PM
Is luck a thing though? I sure don't believe in it. The idea that things ''just happen" and if they are good we can look back and say ''wow you were lucky". It's more ''chance" then ''Luck". Worse ''luck" in an RPG is where the DM changes and fudges things.....like when the foe rolls a 20, and the DM goes ''your character is lucky, the attack roll was a six".

The odds must be stacked in the PCs favor? Well...is this not going to a classic railroad game then? The DM just tells the players to sit back and relax....they have already susscfully finished the quest/adventure...now lets just play through some motions to see how the PCs did it.

People that house rule D&D 3.5 to be ''balanced all the time" often have the least fun and many game problems. Most other games, and even D&D editions don't have the ''balance" problem.

To be an ''underdog" is not something most modern, or younger, players want to do. In modern RPGs characters are born demigods.

Most meta game luck effects are just a silly waste of time. So sure, like a couple times a game a player can re roll something.....wow...what an amazing power.

Talakeal
2019-07-14, 02:28 PM
Is luck a thing though? I sure don't believe in it. The idea that things ''just happen" and if they are good we can look back and say ''wow you were lucky". It's more ''chance" then ''Luck".

That was exactly my point.


Worse ''luck" in an RPG is where the DM changes and fudges things.....like when the foe rolls a 20, and the DM goes ''your character is lucky, the attack roll was a six".

Not sure where you are getting that from. I certainly wasn't talking about any sort of fudging.


The odds must be stacked in the PCs favor? Well...is this not going to a classic railroad game then? The DM just tells the players to sit back and relax....they have already sucsesfully finished the quest/adventure...now lets just play through some motions to see how the PCs did it.

No, not really. A classic railroad is generally a lot more linear and negates player choice. If anything, giving the players an edge and letting them choose how to use it gives them more freedom to influence the plot that they would have in an old school "meatgrinder" game.


People that house rule D&D 3.5 to be ''balanced all the time" often have the least fun and many game problems. Most other games, and even D&D editions don't have the ''balance" problem.

Are you saying that people don't know how to balance things and are making it worse? If so I agree. If you are merely saying that balance itself is a detriment to the game... yeah, no.


To be an ''underdog" is not something most modern, or younger, players want to do. In modern RPGs characters are born demigods.

Unfortunately this does seem to be the case.


Most meta game luck effects are just a silly waste of time. So sure, like a couple times a game a player can re roll something.....wow...what an amazing power.

I don't know what game you are talking about. For example, players in WHFRP tend to treasure fate points like precious gold, and a high level AD&D fighters HP are going to win the day time and again.

halfeye
2019-07-14, 02:33 PM
Is luck a thing though? I sure don't believe in it.

Luck is in hindsight only.

For every real life lucky person, there are ten, or twenty, or a thousand corpses. Going into the situations there is no telling which one will come through, but it is almost certain at least one will. Afterwards you can say the ones that made it were lucky, but there's no telling before hand. Skills help, but it's still random chance that does most of the work/damage in real life.

Tanarii
2019-07-14, 03:19 PM
It seems like what you are saying is the fights PCs engage in are actually a coin flip of danger in-universe, but the mechanics stacked in their favor to make it dangerous through resource attrition and not the individual battle can be attributed to the retroactive fact that they are the lucky surving heroes / protagonists. Or at least, it can be viewed that way.

That works well enough as an explanation in a single party non-sandbox set of adventures / adventure path where the players aren't really totally free to choose their challenges, and the progression of combat and other challenge difficulty 'just happens' to be tailored to them, easy enough they aren't in serious danger, unless they stupidly over-extend themselves.

IMO in a true sandbox combat-as-war environment, it's less necessary as an explanation. Because if the players make a particularly poor choice for their characters, they're dead, consequences ensue in-universe, and they roll new characters.

Inchhighguy
2019-07-14, 03:29 PM
Not sure where you are getting that from. I certainly wasn't talking about any sort of fudging.

My point was that as luck is not real....and it sure not something you can just ''put" in the game some how.....the only way to do it is to fudge.




No, not really. A classic railroad is generally a lot more linear and negates player choice. If anything, giving the players an edge and letting them choose how to use it gives them more freedom to influence the plot that they would have in an old school "meatgrinder" game.

But it's not really about choice...not matter what the players decided to do, they have already succeeded. It really makes choice pointless, there are 25 paths to the goal....but don't worry, whatever one you pick will lead to the goal.




Are you saying that people don't know how to balance things and are making it worse? If so I agree. If you are merely saying that balance itself is a detriment to the game... yeah, no.

Yes, the first one. But it's also very 3X specific.



I don't know what game you are talking about. For example, players in WHFRP tend to treasure fate points like precious gold, and a high level AD&D fighters HP are going to win the day time and again.

Guess it depends on the fate/luck system. I sure see a lot more ''I use a luck point to jump over the snake pit" then I see "I use a luck point on the hit roll to smash the liches scepter of bone!"

Talakeal
2019-07-14, 03:51 PM
My point was that as luck is not real....and it sure not something you can just ''put" in the game some how.....the only way to do it is to fudge.

Fudging implies ignoring the rules of the game, where as I am saying a properly done luck mechanic is integrated into the mechanics from the start. For example, as I said previously, most editions of D&D claim that HP represent luck, at least in part. Saying that a high level character has too many HP to be slain by a single hit from a sword isn't fudging, its just following the rules, even if in the fiction that the rules represent a high level fighter is just as mortal as anyone else.


But it's not really about choice...not matter what the players decided to do, they have already succeeded. It really makes choice pointless, there are 25 paths to the goal....but don't worry, whatever one you pick will lead to the goal.

Its not about any one goal, or even success, but rather about having an exciting story. The assumption from the start is "This is the story of heroes who had a cool adventure, rather than the dozens of wannabees who died in the first room after taking a random arrow in the guy."

kyoryu
2019-07-14, 05:57 PM
The biggest issue, and it's a huge D&D-ism, is that the assumption is that a game is a series of combats, and that the only realistic results of any combat are that one side will be wiped out.

This doesn't make sense.

Most combats involve the risk of life. Any situation where it's a 50/50 chance of death, you have to really ask why each side is willing to put their lives at risk for this - because most of the time they shouldn't. ANd in the case of an obviously superior force, they should definitely run, in almost every situation.

Part of this is also a rules issue, where in D&D death is the most likely result from combat (besides "nothing", which just means people will stay in combat). A system where people could take some level of injuries and then reasonably retreat would result in more retreats, etc. For instance in Fate, where anyone can Concede, it is extremely rare for any significant character (good guy or bad guy) to fight til the bitter end - there's just no percentage in it.

Also, a lot of challenges should be things other than fights.

But at the end of the day, the fights exist because D&D is a fun combat game, so we want the fights there, even if they don't make any sense.

Inchhighguy
2019-07-14, 10:42 PM
Its not about any one goal, or even success, but rather about having an exciting story. The assumption from the start is "This is the story of heroes who had a cool adventure, rather than the dozens of wannabees who died in the first room after taking a random arrow in the guy."

I think we are talking about diffrent things.

Anyway, I see a lot of games where the players expect an easy time. They WANT the soft, casual game where the characters have already ''done" whatever needs to be done, and they are just ''playing through the montions of the game" to see HOW it was done.

They want the ''oods" stacked in their favor so much that they have already WON. It's the classic Little Brother Syndrome: He is all for playing a game until you get a higher score, he lands on your Boardwalk with two hotels, sink his Battleship or take his queen....then ''suddenly" he does not want to play anymore(because now he ''can't win').


In game mechanics, ''luck or fate" is no diffrent then any other mechanic.

Pleh
2019-07-15, 10:15 AM
My point was that as luck is not real....and it sure not something you can just ''put" in the game some how.....the only way to do it is to fudge.

Well, yeah, but then again, Magic isn't real, either. In reality, it's just as much a product of hindsight as Luck is. The brain witnesses something it can't rationally explain and the illusion of magic is produced to fill the gaps.

But that's not what Magic is in D&D. Magic is supposed to be real in D&D. So it's not like the fact that luck doesn't really exist is a reason to not try to include it as a real element of RPGs.

I think the biggest problem is defining exactly what it is without ruining its mystique, same as had to be done for magic. It doesn't help that Luck now has to be defined around Magic, careful not to tread on the same territory too heavily. There are a couple of viable solutions, but as with magic, you need it to fit the setting.

The best one to define, as with the rest of RPG design, is the most generic, being the most suitable to a number of campaigns and least obtrusive. Ultimately, you want the mechanics for Luck to make it feel like the myth we experience is real.

Now, you say the only way to do it is to fudge, but I don't think so. Some games have tried a middle ground with meta currency, which lets players choose when to fudge and sets bounds on how much they are able to do so. I feel that it works with Force Points in SWSE, because there is some intention behind the idea that there is no Luck, just the will of the Force, which universally flows through all living creatures and that it listens somewhat to their will.

The best mechanic I've seen to represent the more common notion of luck being mindless, yet oddly influential, is Advantage from 5e. 3.5 used some similar mechanics for the Luck benefits from Complete Scoundrel.

I think it's possible to make rules around "luck based characters" that don't include Meta Currency by offering them bonus circumstances under which they experience Advantage. Just off the top of my head, it might be fun to see Luck Rogues who get to reroll a d20 that lands on a 1 (taking the second result). At later levels, they get to reroll on a 1 or a 2, then later 1-3. You know, something mechanical beyond the reach of DMs and Players that gives a sense that this character much more rarely experiences the cruel twist of fate.

NichG
2019-07-15, 11:26 AM
You could always run a game where after every encounter, the players take over playing characters on the surviving side. That'd emulate the survivorship bias without needing a metagame currency or to distort the underlying statistics.

Jakinbandw
2019-07-15, 11:57 AM
You could always run a game where after every encounter, the players take over playing characters on the surviving side. That'd emulate the survivorship bias without needing a metagame currency or to distort the underlying statistics.

Step 1: Be evil, then pick a fight with a bunch of ancient gold dragons....

Quertus
2019-07-15, 05:50 PM
The assumption from the start is "This is the story of heroes who had a cool adventure, rather than the dozens of wannabees who died in the first room after taking a random arrow in the guy."

I'm… not sure if I'd enjoy such a game.

I tell stores about the cool characters who survived, who are even more cool in contrast to the dozens to hundreds (I've lost count) of character corpses that litter their path to glory.

Normally, what I want is… hmmm… the tools to develop and act upon motivations centric to the game world, and for the GM to act as arbiter of our successes and failures. To explain that, I'll quote myself:


So, *here*, *these* rocks float. OK, why? Why just these rocks, why just here? Can we replicate this? Utilize this?

I don't want the GM to have already developed the "floating rock school of martial arts" - the one and only possible use for floating rocks in the campaign world ever. :smallyuk:

No, I'm interested in what we the players invent given this tool.

But that's wrong.

I don't want to be handed just one tool - I want to be handed dozens. Hundreds. An orcish invasion. A lonely Driad. Dungeon mummies who "just came in to get out of the rain". A kidnapped princess. An evil king and his noble vizier. Cabbage migrations. The elemental plane of taffy. Phoenix extinction. A new technique for ascension. Floating rocks. A Wizard war. An underwater portal to the elemental plane of taffy, with invisible, incorporeal guardians. Troll bridges viewed favorably. Sentient bats. Dragonfire legions. The library in the mirror realm. The source of freckles. Suicidal immortals. A beaten dog. An artifact ice cream truck. Contagious visions. A lake of gilding. Mass enslavement of Kaorti for their weapons. Pumpkin-headed zombies spontaneously appearing.

I want a world full of color and wonder, where we can write our own stories.

If the GM has already written the story, that defeats the point. They can go read that to their kids. Just give us the tools to write our own, and be the fair arbiter of our success or failure (or of our successes and failures).

I'm trying to figure out if I could enjoy, "OK, let's tell the story of how I became the god of snakes, mutation, and branching timelines", where, contrary to my usual desires, both the intended endpoint and the success of the journey are already written before the game starts.

EDIT: in short, this premise for RPGs sounds inherently unfun to me.

Man_Over_Game
2019-07-15, 06:19 PM
On this same topic, a lot of HP systems treat health less as "meat" (that is, literal blood and flesh, like Mortal Kombat levels), but rather as a form of luck, something that eventually wears thin, to the point where you have nothing left and that next attack is the one that hits an organ.

In this way, you could treat EVERYTHING as having a level of "luck", with the players just having "more". The problem with that is that players (and sometimes, characters) know exactly how much HP they have. In order to make a true "lucky" system work, the players wouldn't be allowed to know their own stats.


I'd like to see a system that recognized that everyone had "luck", or "fate" or something that kept them alive as an inherent energy value, something that could be tracked, and something you spend to do things that would defy reality.

NichG
2019-07-15, 08:57 PM
Step 1: Be evil, then pick a fight with a bunch of ancient gold dragons....

Well, if that's what you're interested in playing, why not? A campaign of this form would necessarily be sandbox without any kind of overarching planned structure. So once you do that it becomes a game about decade-long naps, protecting one's clutch from poachers, and driving off the occasional red dragon.

Or to put it another way, if you intentionally lose to a powerful retiree, you're saying 'I want to play a game about my character's retirement!'

Talakeal
2019-07-16, 07:30 AM
I'm… not sure if I'd enjoy such a game.

I tell stores about the cool characters who survived, who are even more cool in contrast to the dozens to hundreds (I've lost count) of character corpses that litter their path to glory.

Normally, what I want is… hmmm… the tools to develop and act upon motivations centric to the game world, and for the GM to act as arbiter of our successes and failures. To explain that, I'll quote myself:



I'm trying to figure out if I could enjoy, "OK, let's tell the story of how I became the god of snakes, mutation, and branching timelines", where, contrary to my usual desires, both the intended endpoint and the success of the journey are already written before the game starts.

EDIT: in short, this premise for RPGs sounds inherently unfun to me.

I hate to break it to you, but I am almost certain you already do play in such a game.

I honeslty can't think of a mainstream game where the rules aren't stacked in the PCs favor, even super gritty meatgrinders like WHFRP or OD&D.

My point is not about changing the nature of the rules or the explanation of the game, merely to offer an alternative way of looking at these rules as a measure of retroactive survivor bias rather than the assumption that the PCs are just demigods.

Willie the Duck
2019-07-16, 12:23 PM
<Wild Bill Story.>
Also (moved):
Third, many games have some sort of in game luck mechanic. Many otherwise simulationist systems give players luck or fate points that allow them to reroll or modify dice or even just ignore something bad that happens to a character.
Even D&D claims that its abstract HP mechanics represent a large amount of luck. Now, the question is, do these mechanics have any in game reality? Are the players chosen by destiny or the gods, do they have some sort of tangible luck field that can be examined in a laboratory? Or are they just badass?

The Wild Bill story is how luck works I the real world. In game terms, actual luck works the same way – you find a character who has made their saving throw twenty times in a row, look back at that winning streak and call it luck. In the game you can (as you mention) also declare other mechanism to be, by game description (so the same mechanism whereby an ‘area effect damage with save’ becomes a fireball), declared to be luck. The two are not the same, though. One is random chance working out for your character’s benefit, while the other is removing (or mitigating) the effect of random chance. From a thematic standpoint, it works, but it is luck in name only (or only within the game fiction).

As to Hit Points specifically, this is a great example of something being luck by declaration. Mind you, there is a real component to luck involved (since damage is a random roll and hit points per level usually has a random component. However, this is mostly an after-the-fact justification for why a high level fighter can survive multiple sword stabs or repeated 10 meter+ (so, usually fatal) falls and get up and fight. I used to be in regular forum conversation with Mike Mornard, one of the original group of D&D playtesters, and he was always adamant that ‘hit points were hit points and they represent hit points. They are a (gamist) pacing mechanism between full health and dead, and anything after that is retroactive justification.’

As to whether there is an in-game reality component to that… at some point, you do need an explanation for why Thogg the barbarian has been stabbed 23 times and shakes it off with a night’s rest. You can say that only luck was actually expended, that all the hits were merely scratches, or whatever else. Whatever works for your verisimilitude.


Likewise, I once had a discussion about RPGs and how the PCs need to feel like the underdogs, but for the game to function as a game or a narrative, the odds have to be stacked in the PCs favor.

Honestly, it really doesn’t. And, in fact, as a general rule stacking it is hard to hard-code into the game. Player characters, given sufficient agency, awareness, and meaningful choices, can pretty much dial up the amount of risk for their characters that they want. If you want to go find an even fight in most TTRPGs, you pretty much can provided the GM doesn’t say no. This is probably where the accusation of railroading comes from (although I consider it a needlessly inflammatory term for the situation). If the PCs can’t find themselves fights they only have a 50% chance of overcoming, it is because the GM has constrained their options away from that specific amount of danger.

What most games do is define the normative range of encounters, and set expectations such that players will choose to send themselves at challenges where they have a much greater than 50% chance of success. Mind you, all of that is dependent upon how one defines chance of success, of course, and how much you factor player ingenuity into the equations, more on that...


I hate to break it to you, but I am almost certain you already do play in such a game.

I honeslty can't think of a mainstream game where the rules aren't stacked in the PCs favor, even super gritty meatgrinders like WHFRP or OD&D.

For the most part, as I said above, both modern games and oD&D and the like are both situations where the players can dial up the difficulty that they want. oD&D was supposedly the era when you had to think your way through stuff and gp=xp made figuring out ways not to fight but still get the treasure the best option, and so forth. On the other hand, it is also the era where the term ‘Monty Haul gaming’ was coined and when the designers had to admonish the player base not to use the Gods and Demigods book as a high level monster manual, so it’s hardly a one-or-the-other situation.

That said, there were certain mechanical incentives for using a certain amount of player ingenuity in place of raw power. A 5th level fighting man, for instance, really didn’t have much going for them that a 5 HD monster didn’t have – same HP, same attack chance, same 1d6 damage, similar AC (greater chance of having magic weapons and armor, most likely, since they wouldn’t have survived the encounter with the wights two rooms back otherwise), magic user backup kind of a wash with the special powers the monsters might have. Given that there was no such thing as Challenge Rating, and the general assumption was that HD approximated level at which you were assumed to be ready to fight a monster, combat odds were not dissimilar to 50:50. If you fought fair, of course. So there was a strong incentive never to fight a battle unless your victory was a foregone conclusion. Fight dirty. Fight in numbers. Convince Monster group A over here to help you fight Monster group B over there. Sneak past Monster group C and take their treasure (and thus 90% of their XP) without bothering to fight. How well it worked was entirely DM and group dependent (since the early books were less-than-great at communicating this idea), but there were clear incentivization structures in place for that kind of gameplay.


and many of the more literal minded people argue that this is a world where PCs are unstoppable demigods, and that even dragons should live in fear of them, and that they are in fact the tyrants and bullies of the world rather than the plucky underdogs who heroicly defy death that the narrative would have you believe.

I, uh, don’t really know any of these people who argue this, barring on forums like this. PCs are powerful, no doubt. Those that survive to high level seem to always be able to make huge changes to the world around them. The exact number of them that act like bullies (or murderhobos, or petty demigods, or etc.) is entirely based on how the players play their characters.

Talakeal
2019-07-18, 02:51 PM
For the most part, as I said above, both modern games and oD&D and the like are both situations where the players can dial up the difficulty that they want. oD&D was supposedly the era when you had to think your way through stuff and gp=xp made figuring out ways not to fight but still get the treasure the best option, and so forth. On the other hand, it is also the era where the term ‘Monty Haul gaming’ was coined and when the designers had to admonish the player base not to use the Gods and Demigods book as a high level monster manual, so it’s hardly a one-or-the-other situation.

That said, there were certain mechanical incentives for using a certain amount of player ingenuity in place of raw power. A 5th level fighting man, for instance, really didn’t have much going for them that a 5 HD monster didn’t have – same HP, same attack chance, same 1d6 damage, similar AC (greater chance of having magic weapons and armor, most likely, since they wouldn’t have survived the encounter with the wights two rooms back otherwise), magic user backup kind of a wash with the special powers the monsters might have. Given that there was no such thing as Challenge Rating, and the general assumption was that HD approximated level at which you were assumed to be ready to fight a monster, combat odds were not dissimilar to 50:50. If you fought fair, of course. So there was a strong incentive never to fight a battle unless your victory was a foregone conclusion. Fight dirty. Fight in numbers. Convince Monster group A over here to help you fight Monster group B over there. Sneak past Monster group C and take their treasure (and thus 90% of their XP) without bothering to fight. How well it worked was entirely DM and group dependent (since the early books were less-than-great at communicating this idea), but there were clear incentivization structures in place for that kind of gameplay.

As I said to Quertus, I can't think of a system were heroic characters (usually but not always synonymous with PCs) have some sort of meta ability that makes the game rules treat them as special compared to normal people. It might be rerolls, action points, fate points, inflated HP, will points, or something else, but it is almost always there.

Whether or not this actually makes the game "harder" depends on the exact system.


I, uh, don’t really know any of these people who argue this, barring on forums like this. PCs are powerful, no doubt. Those that survive to high level seem to always be able to make huge changes to the world around them. The exact number of them that act like bullies (or murderhobos, or petty demigods, or etc.) is entirely based on how the players play their characters.

Its really more of how you frame the narrative. If there is a mortal dispute, the plucky underdog who stands up for what is right looks like a hero. If, on the other hand, you have the most powerful guy around forcing everyone else to live by his moral compass, it comes across as tyranny.

Likewise, a band of brave treasure hunters seeking to plunder a dragons lair and hoping they don't get incinerated looks a lot more heroic than a demigod who can slap a great wyrm around with no risk just looks like a thug performing a home invasion.

Quertus
2019-07-19, 10:44 AM
Its really more of how you frame the narrative. If there is a mortal dispute, the plucky underdog who stands up for what is right looks like a hero. If, on the other hand, you have the most powerful guy around forcing everyone else to live by his moral compass, it comes across as tyranny.

Likewise, a band of brave treasure hunters seeking to plunder a dragons lair and hoping they don't get incinerated looks a lot more heroic than a demigod who can slap a great wyrm around with no risk just looks like a thug performing a home invasion.

A parent is more powerful, and can slap their children around over a moral dispute. Nonetheless, not all patients rule through tyranny.

In other words, it doesn't take "plucky underdogs" to tell a story of moral superiority.

Talakeal
2019-07-19, 11:22 AM
In my oppinion anyone who uses force to resolve a moral quandry is at risk of looking like the bad guy.


Notice how most fantasy novels are about bands of unlikely heroes trying to overthrow a dark lord, how the most memorable super hero stories are about power and responsibility or threats that can.t be punched, or how we tell stories about outlaws who rob from the rich and give to the poor rather than a powerful autocrat who fixed socially inequality through mandatory taxation.

Heck, even the Devil looks sympathetic when the author portrays him as a hopeless rebel.

Arbane
2019-07-19, 11:49 AM
I think we are talking about diffrent things.

Anyway, I see a lot of games where the players expect an easy time. They WANT the soft, casual game where the characters have already ''done" whatever needs to be done, and they are just ''playing through the montions of the game" to see HOW it was done.

They want the ''oods" stacked in their favor so much that they have already WON. It's the classic Little Brother Syndrome: He is all for playing a game until you get a higher score, he lands on your Boardwalk with two hotels, sink his Battleship or take his queen....then ''suddenly" he does not want to play anymore(because now he ''can't win').


Filthy CASUALS. How dare they want to 'enjoy' a 'game' instead of SUFFERING THROUGH A BRUTAL CRUCIBLE WHERE HEROES ARE FORGED OR SLAUGHTERED. :smallamused:

Last night, I was playing D&D and we went through a period of about 5 rounds where the PCs COULD NOT roll higher than an 8 on a d20. And that was in mid-boss-fight.

FUN TIMES. :smallfurious: And one of those places where a luck mechanic would've been really handy.



Well, yeah, but then again, Magic isn't real, either. In reality, it's just as much a product of hindsight as Luck is. The brain witnesses something it can't rationally explain and the illusion of magic is produced to fill the gaps.

But that's not what Magic is in D&D. Magic is supposed to be real in D&D. So it's not like the fact that luck doesn't really exist is a reason to not try to include it as a real element of RPGs.

I think the biggest problem is defining exactly what it is without ruining its mystique, same as had to be done for magic. It doesn't help that Luck now has to be defined around Magic, careful not to tread on the same territory too heavily. There are a couple of viable solutions, but as with magic, you need it to fit the setting.



One of my many partly-baked ideas was an RPG setting where PCs can have magic or luck, but not both - if you're a magician, Fate Itself is out to get you to same degree...

I'd argue a lot of RPGs do a BAD job of not 'ruining the mystique' of magic. As some wiseguy put it, most D&D magic has all the awe and wonder of ordering a Wendy's Extra-Value Meal.

Jay R
2019-07-19, 12:20 PM
It's more fun to pretend to be somebody who's really competent on the heroic level than somebody who's just absurdly lucky.

Talakeal
2019-07-19, 02:15 PM
It's more fun to pretend to be somebody who's really competent on the heroic level than somebody who's just absurdly lucky.

I would say its kind of necessary to be both.

You can be competent, but you should still by pushing it so that you don't grow complacent, its hardly an adventure to routinely punch below your weight class to ensure that failure is not an option.

Tanarii
2019-07-19, 05:09 PM
Notice how most fantasy novels are about bands of unlikely heroes trying to overthrow a dark lord, how the most memorable super hero stories are about power and responsibility or threats that can.t be punched, or how we tell stories about outlaws who rob from the rich and give to the poor rather than a powerful autocrat who fixed socially inequality through mandatory taxation.One of my favorite modern fantasy novelists is Abercrombie, because he writes about everything being mud in the end, with lots of violence along the way. My favorite superhero is wolverine, because he so often just straight up murders stuff. And the best Star Wars movies were Empire Strikes back, where the heroes are mostly crushed, and Rogue One, where they win but die in the process.

(Edit: rereading that for typos, it strikes me that it's hardly surprising I'm usually the DM. :smalltongue:)

IMO the types of stories you're describing the simple & basic pablum. They feel fine and pass the time, but something is lacking.

I'll grant you on the mandatory taxation thing, mostly because it's not that exciting. It's be like playing a game based purely around spreadsheets or a ticketing system, stuff most of us do at work. Or playing Eve.

Talakeal
2019-07-19, 05:31 PM
And the best Star Wars movies were Empire Strikes back, where the heroes are mostly crushed, and Rogue One, where they win but die in the process.

It seems like you are disagreeing with me, but those examples are exactly the sort of thing I am talking about.

PhoenixPhyre
2019-07-19, 05:33 PM
One of my favorite modern fantasy novelists is Abercrombie, because he writes about everything being mud in the end, with lots of violence along the way. My favorite superhero is wolverine, because he so often just straight up murders stuff. And the best Star Wars movies were Empire Strikes back, where the heroes are mostly crushed, and Rogue One, where they win but die in the process.

(Edit: rereading that for typos, it strikes me that it's hardly surprising I'm usually the DM. :smalltongue:)

IMO the types of stories you're describing the simple & basic pablum. They feel fine and pass the time, but something is lacking.

I'll grant you on the mandatory taxation thing, mostly because it's not that exciting. It's be like playing a game based purely around spreadsheets or a ticketing system, stuff most of us do at work. Or playing Eve.

On the other hand, I see enough darkness and brutality in life around me. I don't need it in my stories. I like ones with action and tension, yes, but hope and where the good guys win. I'm even fine knowing that the good guys win and that none of them even die. Because to me, the narrative is what matters. The weave of action and words, the snarky witticisms, etc.

comk59
2019-07-19, 05:57 PM
I'll grant you on the mandatory taxation thing, mostly because it's not that exciting. It's be like playing a game based purely around spreadsheets or a ticketing system, stuff most of us do at work. Or playing Eve.

Hey now, Eve Online can become downright Machiavellian! Once you get past all the spreadsheets and profit margins and guild tithes and embezzlement...

Tanarii
2019-07-20, 01:26 AM
It seems like you are disagreeing with me, but those examples are exactly the sort of thing I am talking about.
I am disagreeing, because the ones I enjoy are the ones where the band of unlikely heroes get crushed. Even when they have some small successes.

Edit: came back to say disagree is probably the wrong statement. I don't disagree that the elements you were raising are common in stories, or the reasons why is because they appeal to many people. I just don't find them personally attractive. I even find them slightly distasteful at time when done particularly poorly or in a cliched way, ie by many Hollywood films.

Quertus
2019-07-20, 08:29 AM
its hardly an adventure to routinely punch below your weight class to ensure that failure is not an option.

That's… kinda a description of historic Gygaxian D&D. You don't engage things in - let alone above - your weight class if you want to live.


I am disagreeing, because the ones I enjoy are the ones where the band of unlikely heroes get crushed. Even when they have some small successes.

Things getting crushed by things above their weight class is the expected outcome. Deviate from that too much too often - and especially the wrong way - and the game world is not believable (and, therefore, for me, no fun).

Tanarii
2019-07-20, 08:54 AM
Things getting crushed by things above their weight class is the expected outcome. Deviate from that too much too often - and especially the wrong way - and the game world is not believable (and, therefore, for me, no fun).
Yeah that too. Hollywood ending can be a bit unbelievable, and destroy my sense of disbelief.

But my personal objection really kicks in why it's a simple morality tale based on the combination of two underlying assumptions:
- humans should be good
- being good means you'll ultimately find a way to win.

I like heroes that step outside the idea of good and evil. In short, I like protagonists in my stories, not heroes.

(I just added to my post a bit above, because disagree was the wrong way to state it. My preferences aren't common. Most people really believe those two assumptions, and stories based on them tickle their fancy.)

Roleplaying games are a little different though. They aren't stories, so they have to work as a game, not a narrative. Of course retroactive narrative framing / explanations, which is the point of this thread, don't hurt working as a game.

Talakeal
2019-07-20, 09:12 AM
That's… kinda a description of historic Gygaxian D&D. You don't engage things in - let alone above - your weight class if you want to live.

True. But that hasn't been the case since, what, Tracy Hickman started writing modules in the early 80s?



Things getting crushed by things above their weight class is the expected outcome. Deviate from that too much too often - and especially the wrong way - and the game world is not believable (and, therefore, for me, no fun).

Which was the point of my initial post; people want to feel like heroes, and they want to play a fair game, which are often contradictory.

I was merely suggesting a new way of looking at it; in the world most adventurers meet horrible deaths, but we aren't telling their story, we are telling the story of the one in a million guys who actually went on to be heroes.

As an example, I used Bill Hickock; if I am writing a biography of him he may seem to survive by "plot armor" but it isn't, it is instead just a case of survivorship bias, I am writing about the winner, not the scoresof wanna-be gunslingers who filled the graveyards of the old west.


Now, imagine I write the exact same book about a fictional hero; is it really "plot armor" that's keeping him safe or merely the fact that I wanted to tell a story about they guy who made it?


If not, why can that also not apply to RPGs?

Talakeal
2019-07-20, 09:18 AM
I am disagreeing, because the ones I enjoy are the ones where the band of unlikely heroes get crushed. Even when they have some small successes.

Edit: came back to say disagree is probably the wrong statement. I don't disagree that the elements you were raising are common in stories, or the reasons why is because they appeal to many people. I just don't find them personally attractive. I even find them slightly distasteful at time when done particularly poorly or in a cliched way, ie by many Hollywood films.

Ok, I totally agree with you then.

Koo Rehtorb
2019-07-20, 09:40 AM
I think "oh you're just the lucky ones who happened to make it" only works for so long before it becomes implausible anyway. After surviving 25 50% fights you're already one in 33 million, and I have a hard time believing that there's even that many adventuring parties in the entire world. And it only gets more implausible from there.

It's not really a solution.

Talakeal
2019-07-20, 09:44 AM
I think "oh you're just the lucky ones who happened to make it" only works for so long before it becomes implausible anyway. After surviving 25 50% fights you're already one in 33 million, and I have a hard time believing that there's even that many adventuring parties in the entire world. And it only gets more implausible from there.

It's not really a solution.

Those odds only work if you assume that all fights are 50/50 and that every loss results in a TPK.

Koo Rehtorb
2019-07-20, 09:56 AM
Those odds only work if you assume that all fights are 50/50 and that every loss results in a TPK.

If they're not then you're still the "bully" kicking downwards. The point is unless the game doesn't have a lot of fighting, or doesn't last very long, at some point the odds become unrealistic anyway. This is a band-aid solution at most.

Talakeal
2019-07-20, 10:05 AM
If they're not then you're still the "bully" kicking downwards. The point is unless the game doesn't have a lot of fighting, or doesn't last very long, at some point the odds become unrealistic anyway. This is a band-aid solution at most.

You're not wrong; but it really depends on the campaign structure.

Throwing in a few losses or fatalities along the way, as most campaigns have, really brings the numbers down to a more believable level.

Likewise, not every fight needs to have the PCs as the underdogs; as long as the "boss fights" still pose a serious risk to the PCs they will still look like the heroes while fighting their way through the boss' minions who really only serve to slow them down or tire them out on their way to the final confrontation.

Quertus
2019-07-20, 02:57 PM
its hardly an adventure to routinely punch below your weight class to ensure that failure is not an option.


That's… kinda a description of historic Gygaxian D&D. You don't engage things in - let alone above - your weight class if you want to live.


True. But that hasn't been the case since, what, Tracy Hickman started writing modules in the early 80s?

If it was an "adventure" back before Hickman, it still qualifies as an adventure.


Those odds only work if you assume that all fights are 50/50 and that every loss results in a TPK.

Heck, every "fair fight" you *win*, you should probably expect around 50% casualties. Depending on game physics, of course.


Which was the point of my initial post; people want to feel like heroes, and they want to play a fair game, which are often contradictory.

I was merely suggesting a new way of looking at it; in the world most adventurers meet horrible deaths, but we aren't telling their story, we are telling the story of the one in a million guys who actually went on to be heroes.

As an example, I used Bill Hickock; if I am writing a biography of him he may seem to survive by "plot armor" but it isn't, it is instead just a case of survivorship bias, I am writing about the winner, not the scoresof wanna-be gunslingers who filled the graveyards of the old west.


Now, imagine I write the exact same book about a fictional hero; is it really "plot armor" that's keeping him safe or merely the fact that I wanted to tell a story about they guy who made it?


If not, why can that also not apply to RPGs?


I hate to break it to you, but I am almost certain you already do play in such a game.

I honeslty can't think of a mainstream game where the rules aren't stacked in the PCs favor, even super gritty meatgrinders like WHFRP or OD&D.

My point is not about changing the nature of the rules or the explanation of the game, merely to offer an alternative way of looking at these rules as a measure of retroactive survivor bias rather than the assumption that the PCs are just demigods.

I've been trying to wrap my head around this for a while now.

But let's start simple - how do you mix "survival bias" with… hmmm… looks like I missed the quote… with some people dieing in the campaign anyway, making it more believable? Oh, and without GM favoritism, without losing the "fair game"?

I recall, one poster who was upset that the party sorcerer kept surviving, while "good" characters like the party barbarian kept dieing. Looking at how badly he botched the rules, over and over, I said that, IMO, the only good thing about his campaign was that the Sorcerer survived. At least there was one character who was there at the start of the campaign who was still alive, to give the campaign continuity. The Sorcerer died shortly after my comment. :smallfrown:

Some day, I may post "Quertus' big post of everything", where I try to explain, not just my theory of gaming, but everyone's theory of gaming. Yeah, probably too ambitions to ever happen. But, short version, there's different reasons to play games, and different kinds of games. There's war gaming & concern for rules, there's caring about versimilitude, there's love of story, etc etc. I get that, unless at least one character survives from start to finish, it's all but impossible to have continuity. But I don't get… this. Why solve crossing "heroic" and "fair game"… by removing "fair game"?

I recognize that my way - lack of balance, and Darwinian death to the weak / unlucky / squishy Wizards in bright red robes making themselves a target - isn't for everyone. If you want to tell the story of "these guys", then "these guys" have to survive, which all but necessitates unfair fights. If you want a good war game, you should have about 50/50 odds of a "TPK" (not that there's usually a "P" in a war game).

PhoenixPhyre
2019-07-20, 03:11 PM
Quertus, the deck is always stacked in the player's favor--were it not so, they could not win. When one combatant gets to set all the conditions by the rules, the other side is necessarily at a critical disadvantage. In a true contest between DM and players, the players cannot win, no more than you can win against the gods that make the gods. Some amount of assymetry/deck stacking is required for there to be a possibility of an adventure. Even without too many shenanigans, by the optimization standards of the 3e forum here, for example, the BBEG would know that the party was coming from level one and just scry/fry them each and every time. No chance of survival. But that's not fun for anyone. That's the worst kind of sadistic railroad.

That said, there's deck stacking and there's deck stacking. Some is better than others. But which kind will vary between individuals, groups, and play style. There is no right answer.

Arbane
2019-07-20, 03:33 PM
Luck Points are a Retroactive Anthropic Principle.

Since the PCs are the main characters of the game, their dying due to isolated random flukes of bad luck would make for a worse game (for most players).

Quertus
2019-07-20, 05:17 PM
Quertus, the deck is always stacked in the player's favor--were it not so, they could not win. When one combatant gets to set all the conditions by the rules, the other side is necessarily at a critical disadvantage. In a true contest between DM and players, the players cannot win, no more than you can win against the gods that make the gods. Some amount of assymetry/deck stacking is required for there to be a possibility of an adventure. Even without too many shenanigans, by the optimization standards of the 3e forum here, for example, the BBEG would know that the party was coming from level one and just scry/fry them each and every time. No chance of survival. But that's not fun for anyone. That's the worst kind of sadistic railroad.

That said, there's deck stacking and there's deck stacking. Some is better than others. But which kind will vary between individuals, groups, and play style. There is no right answer.

There's probably too many problems with this for me to address them all. In a balanced scenario (where your GM powers are a bad red herring), there's a 50/50 chance of TPK before accounting for differences in player skill. If we both play Ryu, the scenario is balanced. But one of us will likely have a decided advantage nonetheless. In an otherwise "balanced" scenario, the GM has the simultaneous advantage and disadvantage of only being one person. All his troops share the same mind, for better and worse.

When I run a sample party through an encounter, however, it is balanced in that regard, too. That allows me to determine if a scenario is "balanced". And then, if I'm working with a known group, with known skill level & known preferences for challenge level, I can attempt to adjust the challenge accordingly (more for war games than RPGs, but in theory the principle's the same).

So, for some groups, I can stack the deck against them statistically, and they'll still not just win, but roflstomp. So your belief that "the deck is always stacked in the player's favor--were it not so, they could not win" is demonstrably wrong.

That said, if you somehow take into account both power and tactics, can the PCs still win if the deck is stacked against them? Well, they can certainly still lose even with a deck stacked in their favor, due to a string bad rolls, for example. So, yes, even then, it is possible. But not exactly likely, and not something a GM should count on for their campaign.

"BBEG scry & fry" - vs a party at level 1 - is rather obviously far afield of a balanced scenario, and not really worth further analysis.

PhoenixPhyre
2019-07-20, 05:30 PM
Ah, but you said nothing about balanced scenarios. The DM, by design and by RAW, is omnipotent. He can do whatever he wants[1]. Unless he lets the players win, they cannot win. The number of unwinnable scenarios is virtually infinite compared to the number of winnable scenarios. Thus, by necessity, a "balanced" scenario must have the scales weighted very heavily in favor of the PCs to even give them a chance.

This is my big issue with CAW--it's fundamentally a lie. The DM has to pull his punches and hold the idiot ball for the party to even get off the ground.

And with scry-and-die--let's consider the world. There is a BBEG. By the standards of optimization displayed here, the minimal standard for a high-level spellcaster is to be virtually untouchable by anyone else and capable of scry-and-die. There are spells that are well within his capabilities that let him know of approaching dangers well before they can threaten him. Thus, not scrying-and-frying the party ASAP is him holding the idiot ball. It's straight from the Villain's Handbook. Thus, the very survival of the party, the fact that the BBEG doesn't even vector some of his elites to the party at very low levels (as soon as they start to make a name for themselves) and make them an offer they can't refuse, is a sign that the deck is stacked. All "heroic party of nobodies takes on Big Bad Empire and wins[2]" stories require a hefty amount of willful blindness.

[1] I'm not saying he should use this power capriciously. But he has it, and it is limited only by his players sticking around.
[2] or even making a dent, or even surviving to grow in power significantly.

Tanarii
2019-07-20, 05:31 PM
So, for some groups, I can stack the deck against them statistically, and they'll still not just win, but roflstomp. So your belief that "the deck is always stacked in the player's favor--were it not so, they could not win" is demonstrably wrong.His belief is based on simple math. If the players have even a 5% chance of a TPK (95% survival rate) per combat encounter, in 5e if we assume as little as half the encounters are combat, with 3 encounters per adventuring day, 6 adventuring days to level 5, there's a 60% chance of a TPK before reaching level 5. If there's a 1% chance of TPK (99% survival rate) per encounter, that drops to 16.5%, which is still unacceptably high to many people.

IRRC 3e used 13 encounters per level, so the chance of not wiping per encounter had to be even higher.


This is my big issue with CAW--it's fundamentally a lie. The DM has to pull his punches and hold the idiot ball for the party to even get off the ground.At the least, it does generally assume that the bad guys are unaware of the PCs until they allow themselves to become known to those specific bad guys. Or at least in small clumps of site-relevant bad guys.

For example, while I'd generally apply the terminology CaW to my campaign, the enemies in the T2 adventuring area don't gang up and wipe out the primary adventuring town while none of the players are in session. Or require me to periodically email everyone and say "yo we're having another mass battle this weekend with the region attacking the town, I need all 50 active players to gather and fight them off or die trying."

Talakeal
2019-07-20, 05:32 PM
"BBEG scry & fry" - vs a party at level 1 - is rather obviously far afield of a balanced scenario, and not really worth further analysis.

If you had time travel powers, why WOULDN'T you go back and kill your enemies when they were helpless? Heck, why even wait until they are level 1? Why not just change the past so they were never born?

PhoenixPhyre
2019-07-20, 05:52 PM
At the least, it does generally assume that the bad guys are unaware of the PCs until they allow themselves to become known to those specific bad guys. Or at least in small clumps of site-relevant bad guys.

For example, while I'd generally apply the terminology CaW to my campaign, the enemies in the T2 adventuring area don't gang up and wipe out the primary adventuring town while none of the players are in session. Or require me to periodically email everyone and say "yo we're having another mass battle this weekend with the region attacking the town, I need all 50 active players to gather and fight them off or die trying."

That's the thing. I was specifically taking 3e's standards here, where (by the standards of this community[1]), a late "Tier 2" BBEG should be well capable of determining that the party might be a threat sometime in the future and wiping them out without hope of survival. And certainly by the time they've started to make a name for themselves.

In 5e, that's a whole lot harder because most of the tricks are gone and scry and die is not nearly as powerful. But any kind of single-arc campaign requires a careful selection of BBEG plans so that the party has a chance of survival.

[1] I do not believe that this is a good thing. Merely that the minimal standards of optimization on this forum suggest that any 3e BBEG who does not have such capabilities would be massively and obviously holding the idiot ball.


If you had time travel powers, why WOULDN'T you go back and kill your enemies when they were helpless? Heck, why even wait until they are level 1? Why not just change the past so they were never born?

Exactly. And you don't even need time travel powers--all you need is a decent divination spell or three.

The basic idea is that the players (with capabilities limited by the rules and their own knowledge) can never hope to compete with a GM who has infinite power (he can, by RAW, rewrite the rules on the fly) and all knowledge about the scenario (he built it and can change the not-seen-yet parts at will). Any real competition here is futile and meaningless. You're not winning on your own merits any more than a 2-year-old can "out wrestle" an olympic wrestling pro. The only way for the GM to be neutral is to have a third party act as referee (basically being the player of the NPCs only, without any other knowledge or power). Because when a player is also simultaneously the referee, fair competition is impossible.

A much better way to play, IMO, is to abandon the idea of competition or "winning" and cooperate with the DM to play out an emergent narrative. Now everyone is working together--the GM to build scenarios that the party (this particular party) will find engaging and will give them a chance to make interesting decisions as well as play the NPCs as effective foils for the party, and the players to take it seriously and bring their characters to life. The exact shape that takes will differ very strongly between tables. Some want to overcome hard challenges. Others will want to talk funny. Yet a third type will want to explore strange new places and meet interesting creatures. A fourth might want to rack up the biggest numbers possible. A fifth might be there for the social part and not really care about the content as long as people are talking and laughing and having fun. All are valid ways to play. It's a game first and foremost. Everything else pales in comparison IMO.

Quertus
2019-07-20, 07:11 PM
His belief is based on simple math. If the players have even a 5% chance of a TPK (95% survival rate) per combat encounter, in 5e if we assume as little as half the encounters are combat, with 3 encounters per adventuring day, 6 adventuring days to level 5, there's a 60% chance of a TPK before reaching level 5. If there's a 1% chance of TPK (99% survival rate) per encounter, that drops to 16.5%, which is still unacceptably high to many people.

IRRC 3e used 13 encounters per level, so the chance of not wiping per encounter had to be even higher.

Sure, "the PCs cannot both have balanced encounters, and be guaranteed to reach level 5". Sure.


Ah, but you said nothing about balanced scenarios.

No? Then what would *you* mean by stacking the deck?


The number of unwinnable scenarios is virtually infinite compared to the number of winnable scenarios.

Eh, depends. I mean, He-Man and I live in different realities, and so a fight between the two of us is "unwinnable" by both sides. Ignoring that level of pedantry, I would argue that most any fight between two sides is theoretically winnable by at least one of them. Thus, the number of winnable encounters should outnumber the number of unwinnable encounters.


Thus, by necessity, a "balanced" scenario must have the scales weighted very heavily in favor of the PCs to even give them a chance.

Nope, you lost me. Come again?


This is my big issue with CAW--it's fundamentally a lie. The DM has to pull his punches and hold the idiot ball for the party to even get off the ground.

Wow. If "not using scry and die" qualifies as "holding the idiot ball", an awful lot of players were born with idiot balls.

So, here's a thought: not every campaign has a BBEG. So, all I need to do to not be "pulling my punches" (by your definition) and still let the party get off the ground is to not have a BBEG.

That said, this logic is exactly why the BBEG of my first campaign… did nothing. Because he knew/knows that if he interferes, the world burns. Long story.


And with scry-and-die--let's consider the world. There is a BBEG.

Again, no, there usually isn't - at least, not in games I run.


By the standards of optimization displayed here, the minimal standard for a high-level spellcaster is to be virtually untouchable by anyone else and capable of scry-and-die. There are spells that are well within his capabilities that let him know of approaching dangers well before they can threaten him. Thus, not scrying-and-frying the party ASAP is him holding the idiot ball. It's straight from the Villain's Handbook. Thus, the very survival of the party, the fact that the BBEG doesn't even vector some of his elites to the party at very low levels (as soon as they start to make a name for themselves) and make them an offer they can't refuse, is a sign that the deck is stacked. All "heroic party of nobodies takes on Big Bad Empire and wins[2]" stories require a hefty amount of willful blindness.

Only in certain systems, and under certain conditions (including the existence of a BBEG) does this line of thought even make any sense.

But, sure, in 3e, with a BBEG, the game wouldn't be any fun if the BBEG realistically used scry & die. So nobody (much) plays that game. Um, sure. Some GMs are better than others at picking believable reasons why the BBEG doesn't use Divinations, scry & die, etc. So… most GMs probably shouldn't use BBEGs, at least in 3e.

There are an infinite number of possible scenarios, not all of which are fun. Is choosing a fun scenario really "stacking the deck for the party"? Not by my definitions.

Now, forcing the party at 1st level into a box with an ancient Dragon, and not letting them out until one side is dead? Yeah, that CaW isn't much fun. But placing said ancient Dragon on the map where a 1st level party could encounter it? Much more acceptable CaW, IMO.

Inchhighguy
2019-07-20, 08:13 PM
Which was the point of my initial post; people want to feel like heroes, and they want to play a fair game, which are often contradictory.

Most players don't want a 'fair' game, and this is even more true in more modern games. Oh sure the players will say they want a ''fair" game...but there idea of ''fair" is with a super overwhemiling bias towards their special characters.




Now, imagine I write the exact same book about a fictional hero; is it really "plot armor" that's keeping him safe or merely the fact that I wanted to tell a story about they guy who made it?


If not, why can that also not apply to RPGs?

If you want to tell a story about a character that survived....well is THAT not what Plot Armor is? Or maybe worse, as it's not just armor...it's Plot Bias Reality.



Quertus, the deck is always stacked in the player's favor--were it not so, they could not win.

This simply is not true as a general statment: it is just a play style. Stacking the game in the players favor is a popular play stlye....but it's not the ONLY play stlye.


Ah, but you said nothing about balanced scenarios. The DM, by design and by RAW, is omnipotent. He can do whatever he wants[1]. Unless he lets the players win, they cannot win.


This is a very odd view, but guess the ''DM permission" would be yet another Play Stlye.



The number of unwinnable scenarios is virtually infinite compared to the number of winnable scenarios. Thus, by necessity, a "balanced" scenario must have the scales weighted very heavily in favor of the PCs to even give them a chance.

This is only true for the Easy Button Games. When players want to sit around, goof off, toss some dice and auto win the game. Again, it's a play stlye.




This is my big issue with CAW--it's fundamentally a lie. The DM has to pull his punches and hold the idiot ball for the party to even get off the ground.

Unfortunetly this is true...it's not even a play stlye, it's more just a Fact of Life. The vast majority of players/people are simply...er....not the sharpest tool in the box.

As a DM, it is beyond easy to TPK with just simple things like foes using guards, missle weapons or even the most basic tatics.

Myself, and a couple local groups, do the ''Stack Less" Stlye: The DM does NOT stack anything in favor of the characters or players. The players must do things, for real.

By ''average" standards...the folks that just want to goof off and toss some dice...it makes for a hard and impossible game. But for players that like the challange it's tons of fun.

NichG
2019-07-21, 12:33 AM
War itself is nowhere near as lethal as what is being described here. From what I can find, up to the 19th century the losing side of a battle suffers an average 30% mortality with wide swings. The stronger the winner compared to the loser, the fewer losses all around. So rather than a 50/50 live/die ratio, real balanced conflicts in a war would be more like a 50/50 to gain more progress or advantage than you lost or vice versa.

D&D in particular makes running away fairly suicidal at low levels, and because you can do so much with daily resources any encounter where you don't have deaths basically has zero long-term effect on your ability to project force. So this leads to a win or TPK mindset. But that's a property of D&D specifically - it need not apply in general to all tabletop games.

Knaight
2019-07-21, 01:25 AM
I've conceptualized this sort of thing as essentially an implicit frame story, where because you're focused on the PCs they're assumed to be people who interesting things happened to in setting (not that I haven't played around with explicit frame stories). Mostly this justifies playing around with plausibility a fair bit, as the sheer odds of something interesting happening can be jacked up to better fit the biographies of interesting people rates than the typical life rate. This "something interesting" filter can also be protective.

For instance, in a WWI setting the characters may well still all die. They probably won't be unceremoniously wiped out by artillery that they just know is vaguely out there somewhere though, despite that being historically pretty common.

Enixon
2019-07-21, 10:13 AM
If you had time travel powers, why WOULDN'T you go back and kill your enemies when they were helpless? Heck, why even wait until they are level 1? Why not just change the past so they were never born?

Not exactaly on topic but someday I so want to use that as the initial hook to a game.... :smallbiggrin:

"So you all meet in a Tavern, when suddenly the Lich Queen teleports into the middle of the common room! She casts her baleful gaze upon your table and utters "Yeah no, I'm nipping this one in the bud right here and now, Chain Lightning!"

You now suddenly find yourselves adrift in the Land of the Dead, what do you do?"

Quertus
2019-07-21, 11:25 AM
Looking at this exchange, it occurs to me that CaW must seem really strange from the PoV of CaS.

The basic premise CaS is that the GM has stacked the deck such that every encounter is a fight that is not just winnable, but the correct level of challenge to be fun.

Whereas CaW doesn't just say that there are no such guarantees of "perfect" game balance, that not every encounter is a fun fight, but that not every encounter has to be a fight in the first place.

CaW is fundamentally based on the premise of giving the players the agency, not just to adjust the difficulty of encounters, but to use all the tools at their disposal (where every encounter is fundamentally just another tool) to produce fun.

Want to pull 4 encounters together, and fight them all at once? Or team up with one encounter to kill a second? CaS would have a conniption fit, but that's the bread and butter of CaW.

Talakeal
2019-07-21, 01:25 PM
CaW is fundamentally based on the premise of giving the players the agency, not just to adjust the difficulty of encounters, but to use all the tools at their disposal (where every encounter is fundamentally just another tool) to produce fun.

Want to pull 4 encounters together, and fight them all at once? Or team up with one encounter to kill a second? CaS would have a conniption fit, but that's the bread and butter of CaW.

What about protecting players from their own stupidity?

Quertus
2019-07-21, 04:13 PM
What about protecting players from their own stupidity?

I would argue… hmmm, how can I say this in as biased a way as possible… that CaW gives players the agency to make mistakes, and to learn from them, whereas CaS coddles the players into stagnation. Alternately, CaW embraces "git good noob", whereas CaS takes (or, at least, should take) player skill into account when determining what is "sporting".

In short, that (protecting players from their own stupidity) sounds like a CaS thing to me.

NichG
2019-07-21, 09:16 PM
I think the disconnect here is in part that what is being called CaW is still actually some degree of CaS. In a real war with intelligent enemies, they should never stand and fight a losing battle unless they have something to gain. A group of PCs invading an orc military camp should not face a sequence of encounters unless they completely take out each set in a surprise round. Otherwise, the very first action should be to sound an alarm, followed by the camp either dogpiling them or retreating to fortifications or otherwise taking coordinated action. They should fight only battles in which they have either a significant advantage over the PCs or if forced to do otherwise, fight in such a way as to maximize some gain of control over the situation rather than just to die gloriously on the PCs swords.

If they do group up in convenient encounter-sized blobs, that's still CaS.

In a way, this helps me understand things like rust monsters. When facing drastic power gradients, the only way to get what you want from an unwinnable fight is to have ways to force your attacker to suffer disproportionate costs in their victory. A cornered out-leveled orc squad should absolutely spend their dying actions sundering the most valuable gear, to make the entire endeavor not worth it for the more powerful aggressor.

Tanarii
2019-07-21, 09:58 PM
A group of PCs invading an orc military camp should not face a sequence of encounters unless they completely take out each set in a surprise round. Otherwise, the very first action should be to sound an alarm, followed by the camp either dogpiling them or retreating to fortifications or otherwise taking coordinated action. They should fight only battles in which they have either a significant advantage over the PCs or if forced to do otherwise, fight in such a way as to maximize some gain of control over the situation rather than just to die gloriously on the PCs swords.
Not sure why you think that isn't what will happen, if the Pcs are stupid enough to invade a properly organized, say hobgoblin instead of Orc, encampment without taking proper precautions. (Orcs have some issues due to being naturally might makes right, somewhat disorganized/individualistic, and prone to want the glory for themselves that clever players can exploit.)

I found the caves of chaos particularly interesting to run last time I ran it with a much better understanding of what CaW entails. Holding/retreating actions while runners went for reinforcements was the standard tactic in the goblin & hobgoblin caves. And flanking attacks (since those caves are a loop). Fun times.

Koo Rehtorb
2019-07-21, 10:06 PM
I think the disconnect here is in part that what is being called CaW is still actually some degree of CaS. In a real war with intelligent enemies, they should never stand and fight a losing battle unless they have something to gain. A group of PCs invading an orc military camp should not face a sequence of encounters unless they completely take out each set in a surprise round. Otherwise, the very first action should be to sound an alarm, followed by the camp either dogpiling them or retreating to fortifications or otherwise taking coordinated action. They should fight only battles in which they have either a significant advantage over the PCs or if forced to do otherwise, fight in such a way as to maximize some gain of control over the situation rather than just to die gloriously on the PCs swords.

Why do you think these things don't happen?

NichG
2019-07-22, 03:27 AM
Not sure why you think that isn't what will happen, if the Pcs are stupid enough to invade a properly organized, say hobgoblin instead of Orc, encampment without taking proper precautions. (Orcs have some issues due to being naturally might makes right, somewhat disorganized/individualistic, and prone to want the glory for themselves that clever players can exploit.)

I found the caves of chaos particularly interesting to run last time I ran it with a much better understanding of what CaW entails. Holding/retreating actions while runners went for reinforcements was the standard tactic in the goblin & hobgoblin caves. And flanking attacks (since those caves are a loop). Fun times.


Why do you think these things don't happen?

In the context of 'is the BBEG holding the idiot ball if they don't scry & die the PCs in session 1?' Quertus made the argument (or assumption at least) that combat as war could still happen and be balanced or fair because it gives the PCs the tools to determine their own difficulty level and makes them responsible for it. I'm saying that 'applying that principle one-sidedly to the PCs without also applying it to enemies is actually combat as sport, not combat as war'. Giving PCs primary agency as to deciding what to do, preventing there from being similar obvious opportunities on the side of forces hostile to the PCS, etc are all ways that the deck gets implicitly stacked in favor of the PCs, even in a serious 'let the dice fall where they may' type of approach.

Maybe to refine this further, there's a bit of a double standard here. Because the high-resolution focus of the game follows the actions of the PCs and not the actions of off-screen NPCs, generally speaking it is seen as less immersion breaking when the PCs suddenly take action in some way than when offscreen forces suddenly take action some way. For every time an outriding goblin scout comes back to find that their camp was sacked by PCs, there should be a time when an travelling adventuring group returns to find that their home town was sacked by demons 10 levels higher than them when they were away - without them having had any warning or opportunity to interfere with that event.

As a matter of gameplay, that 'without warning or opportunity to interfere' part feels viscerally unfair (as if fair would be, you always get a chance to respond). But it's actually more fair in the sense of having narrative parity between PC and NPC forces.

Or to put it another way, in a really 'opponents understand that life and death is on the line' CaW game, the party should never be spontaneously attacked by anyone who doesn't have good reason to believe they have a >95% chance of winning.

Quertus
2019-07-22, 10:50 AM
@NichG - no, there is no disconnect. Yes, intelligent foes are intelligent, and will sound alarms, gang up, run, surrender, etc. And the players need to take that into account.

Where there might seem to be a bit of disconnect is twofold. One, CaW promises the potential for fun, not necessarily for balance - those are not synonyms.

Two, not all setups are created equal. CaW only promises the potential for fun. If, 10 seconds after the party meets (at 1st level), an ancient Dragon breathes on the inn, followed by a meteor wiping out all life on the planet, there's no real potential there. So, yes, the deck has to be stacked in the initial setup to not negate even the possibility of fun (for good CaW; bad CaW, I suppose, doesn't even do that).

The distinction, in my mind, is whether any given encounter is tailored to be "sporting" or not, whether trying to make the encounter easier - or avoid the encounter altogether - is welcome, or "cheating".

EDIT: also, note that, in D&D, at least, "things with class levels" can be harder to evaluate the threat potential it poses than those who wear their power visibly in their race.

NichG
2019-07-22, 12:50 PM
@NichG - no, there is no disconnect. Yes, intelligent foes are intelligent, and will sound alarms, gang up, run, surrender, etc. And the players need to take that into account.

Where there might seem to be a bit of disconnect is twofold. One, CaW promises the potential for fun, not necessarily for balance - those are not synonyms.

Two, not all setups are created equal. CaW only promises the potential for fun. If, 10 seconds after the party meets (at 1st level), an ancient Dragon breathes on the inn, followed by a meteor wiping out all life on the planet, there's no real potential there. So, yes, the deck has to be stacked in the initial setup to not negate even the possibility of fun (for good CaW; bad CaW, I suppose, doesn't even do that).

The distinction, in my mind, is whether any given encounter is tailored to be "sporting" or not, whether trying to make the encounter easier - or avoid the encounter altogether - is welcome, or "cheating".


To me though these are still gradations of sport. Having an ancient dragon destroy your home base when you're away isn't sporting, so you come up with reasons that that doesn't happen to be the game you're running.

I guess the deeper issue I have is the self-deception involved when CaW is held above CaS due to an ideological position about realism, authenticity, etc, when the actual distinctions that matter to the experience are not the ones being called out.

E.g. you mention avoiding encounters as being part of the game, which is reasonable, concrete, and I think likely to be true to what you're interested in having as part of the gaming experience. But the CaW/CaS distinction doesn't cover that very well - for me, for example, it's not that avoiding encounters is less fake, but rather that there are interesting decisions to be made there that get masked out if you hold that encounters are there to be fought.

In that line, it would be entirely reasonable and consistent to have a game in which in some specific ways, the deck is obviously stacked, but at the same time strategic diversity is preserved. If you blindly fight, you definitely won't die, but you're likely to obtain worse outcomes.

Quertus
2019-07-22, 01:31 PM
To me though these are still gradations of sport. Having an ancient dragon destroy your home base when you're away isn't sporting, so you come up with reasons that that doesn't happen to be the game you're running.

I'll accept that there are gradations, just like we can talk about how "sandboxy" a campaign is.

As an extremist, I run rather close to pure sandbox, and rather close to pure CaW. Thus, I'm confused by this crazy talk of the GM coming up with reasons that the ancient Dragon doesn't burn down the PCs' base while they're gone. If there's an ancient Dragon "in play" in one of my games, it's 100% on the players to figure out how to accomplish that. If i decide that the dragon wants to and can burn their base while they're gone, it will.


I guess the deeper issue I have is the self-deception involved when CaW is held above CaS due to an ideological position about realism, authenticity, etc, when the actual distinctions that matter to the experience are not the ones being called out.


E.g. you mention avoiding encounters as being part of the game, which is reasonable, concrete, and I think likely to be true to what you're interested in having as part of the gaming experience. But the CaW/CaS distinction doesn't cover that very well - for me, for example, it's not that avoiding encounters is less fake, but rather that there are interesting decisions to be made there that get masked out if you hold that encounters are there to be fought.


In that line, it would be entirely reasonable and consistent to have a game in which in some specific ways, the deck is obviously stacked, but at the same time strategic diversity is preserved. If you blindly fight, you definitely won't die, but you're likely to obtain worse outcomes.

… OK, so, somewhere in the grey area between pure CaW and pure CaS, there can exist a mostly CaS experience that still allows strategic decisions. Sure. But strategic decisions are the hallmark of CaW, and verboten to pure CaS. Because strategic decisions change the balance of the encounter - which is the meat & potatoes of CaW, and is cheating in CaS. Because you can't make balanced, sporting encounters if the players can change the balance of the encounter.

So, yes, I continue to contend that the strategic level is an element of CaW play.

Now, I don't hold that the strategic layer makes the game more real, more authentic, whatever. I have no idea where you got that from, but hopefully it wasn't from me. Whether the players interacting with the strategic layer increases the versimilitude of the game can go either way (largely depending on the group, somewhat depending on the party, occasionally depending on the scenario, world, or system). No, I just contend that having a strategic layer makes the game… more. More robust, exist in more dimensions. Which - just like playing "high school romance drama" in what is otherwise tactical basketball simulator, just like "the role-playing doesn't end when the dice come out" - things which let the game exist in more dimensions make the game more fun, for me.

All that said, what were you calling the "actual distinctions that matter to the experience" (and, if that has changed, what are you currently calling the "actual distinctions that matter to the experience")?

NichG
2019-07-22, 01:46 PM
I'll accept that there are gradations, just like we can talk about how "sandboxy" a campaign is.

As an extremist, I run rather close to pure sandbox, and rather close to pure CaW. Thus, I'm confused by this crazy talk of the GM coming up with reasons that the ancient Dragon doesn't burn down the PCs' base while they're gone. If there's an ancient Dragon "in play" in one of my games, it's 100% on the players to figure out how to accomplish that. If i decide that the dragon wants to and can burn their base while they're gone, it will.


The language 'in play' is a CaS concept. This is the asymmetry I mentioned: it is assumed that the PCs should have a chance to anticipate the dragon as a problem before it acts. This is a good assumption for sake of having a fun game, but it's very much about being sporting.

In war, given the choice between raiding an enemy that knows you're there and an enemy who doesn't, why wouldn't you always pick the one you can ambush?



… OK, so, somewhere in the grey area between pure CaW and pure CaS, there can exist a mostly CaS experience that still allows strategic decisions. Sure. But strategic decisions are the hallmark of CaW, and verboten to pure CaS. Because strategic decisions change the balance of the encounter - which is the meat & potatoes of CaW, and is cheating in CaS. Because you can't make balanced, sporting encounters if the players can change the balance of the encounter.

This is the flaw of the terms being a bad representation of what makes play engaging.

In the type of game I just described, it is neither CaW nor CaS. It is a hypothetical game where strategic decisions are important, balance is important, but metagame considerations are also important. The deck is intentionally stacked in an unrealistic way in order to expand strategic considerations beyond what would be possible in a realistic game, by giving guarantees that play continues even after a loss. This makes it possible to consider sacrificing a skirmish to win the war, for example.

But it's not CaW because when it comes down to it, it's not a situation where the decision calculus is driven by lives being on the line. And it's not CaS because the focus isn't on the motions and energy of the fight - it's on higher level strategic decisions.

It's 'combat as a rich and nuanced tabletop game experience', directly targeting that and embracing the fact of the metagame as important.



All that said, what were you calling the "actual distinctions that matter to the experience" (and, if that has changed, what are you currently calling the "actual distinctions that matter to the experience")?

The strategic depth, basically.

halfeye
2019-07-22, 02:42 PM
WTF are CaS and CaW?

kitanas
2019-07-22, 03:07 PM
WTF are CaS and CaW?

Combat As Sport and Combat As War.

Broadly speaking, CaS could be seen as arena or tournament fighting, where each fight is a "fair" "balanced" fight, whereas in a CaW is about screwing over your enemy as thoroughly as possible, and they are trying to do the same to you.

awa
2019-07-22, 03:39 PM
Not always but their is often an implied superiority to combat as war, suggesting that combat as sport is inferior or less real than combat as war.

If the dm careful plans out a battle looking to make certain that it is appropriately difficult, has interesting terrain and clever mechanics that engages every player that's combat as sport.

If the pcs learn about the foe and try to do everything possible to not actually fight such as flooding the cave or whatever (and the dm lets it happen) that's combat as war.

In practice its not a cut and dry distinction and many games are a mix of the two.

Tanarii
2019-07-22, 08:05 PM
WTF are CaS and CaW?
Internet hivemind labels du jour that supposedly are backed by semi-coherent theories on contrasting style of play.

Please understand that I say this as one who fully subscribes to this particular hive and has been assimilated. :smallamused:

They don't necessarily pan out. I know at least one other poster that describes his game as combat as war, as do I, and there are still lots of points we can't understand how each other runs the game certain ways and still call it that. ;)


Combat As Sport and Combat As War.

Oh yeah, that part too.

Quertus
2019-07-22, 11:31 PM
The language 'in play' is a CaS concept. This is the asymmetry I mentioned: it is assumed that the PCs should have a chance to anticipate the dragon as a problem before it acts. This is a good assumption for sake of having a fun game, but it's very much about being sporting.

Where do you keep getting these assumptions from?

"In play" means it exists, and is aware of the party. Or, it exists, and it's actions have ramifications that the party may notice (or vice versa). Or even, it exists, and the party is aware of it. In short, when I say "in play", I mean that it if no longer a purely background element, and I need to watch for interactions between its actions, and the party's.

The party has as much chance to anticipate the dragon as they have. Which may be zero. It's up to the party to make sure that their… how does the saying go… reach does not exceeded their grasp? If they make larger waves than they are prepared for, well, they reap the consequences. To oversimplify, the party that prioritizes "fame" over "knowledge"? They get their base burned down.

The only thing that is required for a fun CaW game is that the party had the opportunity to not have their base burned down, rather than it be an inevitable railroad. Good players, under and in sync with a good GM? They can look back, and say, "yeah, we brought that on ourselves". Which is why I often ask my GMs, "wtf, dude?" / "how were we supposed to…” / "how did you think this would be fun?" when I don't see what they were thinking with a given scenario / setup.


In war, given the choice between raiding an enemy that knows you're there and an enemy who doesn't, why wouldn't you always pick the one you can ambush?

That… sounds like a good reason why the dragon burns someone other than the PCs who are aware of him. So… congratulations on answering how the PCs protect themselves?


This is the flaw of the terms being a bad representation of what makes play engaging.

In the type of game I just described, it is neither CaW nor CaS. It is a hypothetical game where strategic decisions are important, balance is important, but metagame considerations are also important. The deck is intentionally stacked in an unrealistic way in order to expand strategic considerations beyond what would be possible in a realistic game, by giving guarantees that play continues even after a loss. This makes it possible to consider sacrificing a skirmish to win the war, for example.

But it's not CaW because when it comes down to it, it's not a situation where the decision calculus is driven by lives being on the line. And it's not CaS because the focus isn't on the motions and energy of the fight - it's on higher level strategic decisions.

It's 'combat as a rich and nuanced tabletop game experience', directly targeting that and embracing the fact of the metagame as important.

If I read you right, that's too gamey for my taste. You'll have to get someone who can stomach that to get a meaningful reply.


The strategic depth, basically.

Wait, you've really lost me.

See, to my mind, that's the distinction I've been pushing, where CaW is built on strategic depth, whereas CaS considers strategy to be cheating. So, I completely agree, and that's what I was trying to communicate.

Yet you claimed I was ignoring that important distinction between the two?

Or am I still missing something?


Not always but their is often an implied superiority to combat as war, suggesting that combat as sport is inferior or less real than combat as war.

If the dm careful plans out a battle looking to make certain that it is appropriately difficult, has interesting terrain and clever mechanics that engages every player that's combat as sport.

If the pcs learn about the foe and try to do everything possible to not actually fight such as flooding the cave or whatever (and the dm lets it happen) that's combat as war.

In practice its not a cut and dry distinction and many games are a mix of the two.

Lol. Yes, when the players go full CaW, it tends to result in flooding caves, and excavating the Tomb of Horrors, and otherwise usually producing a game most players don't enjoy.

Thus, my statement that pure CaW - from the GM's side - involves giving the players the tools to produce fun, and the agency to do so.

From the players' side? I think most players would enjoy players who play pure CaS (blindly walking into every encounter) over those who play pure CaW (strategize until victory is assured; if dice are ever rolled, it's a sign you've failed).

So, I personally prefer the GM to be set heavily towards CaW, but for the players to be in the broad range where they put at least some thought into their actions, but not so much that the Game no longer exists, at the tactical layer.

awa
2019-07-22, 11:40 PM
While not always the case
combat as war also tends towards old school hex crawl sand box style play, while combat as sport is more likely to be a more linear story focused game.

Some editions of the game (d&d) assumed one or the other, if you have an encounter based power it was probably intended for combat as sport with its more strict start and finish

Arbane
2019-07-23, 12:13 AM
Not always but their is often an implied superiority to combat as war, suggesting that combat as sport is inferior or less real than combat as war.


Yeah, it's like "ROLEplayers" looking down at "ROLLplayers".

They're easy to tell apart, seeing as war is one of the most awful things humans can do, whereas sports are occasionally fun to watch or play. :smallbiggrin:

NichG
2019-07-23, 02:05 AM
Where do you keep getting these assumptions from?

"In play" means it exists, and is aware of the party. Or, it exists, and it's actions have ramifications that the party may notice (or vice versa). Or even, it exists, and the party is aware of it. In short, when I say "in play", I mean that it if no longer a purely background element, and I need to watch for interactions between its actions, and the party's.

The party has as much chance to anticipate the dragon as they have. Which may be zero. It's up to the party to make sure that their… how does the saying go… reach does not exceeded their grasp? If they make larger waves than they are prepared for, well, they reap the consequences. To oversimplify, the party that prioritizes "fame" over "knowledge"? They get their base burned down.


But implicitly, even here you've implicitly judged this relative to the party. There could be a background element that a dragon exists (but one which has not come up at all in play), and that element could attack a given target specifically because the party is not aware of it yet and has done nothing in particular to invoke its wrath or involvement. Not because their reach exceeded their grasp, or they were too famous, or anything like that. Simply because the dragon wants to punch below its weight since that guarantees its survival, so explicitly targets things in a way to avoid any sort of entanglements, coordinated responses, and the like.

This is an element where the only way to have prevented it would have been to anticipate it from nothing: 'dragon attacks are a thing that would be dangerous, even though we have no specific reason to believe that a dragon is involved in anything, we're going to send scouts to find and monitor all the nearby dragon lairs'. And, when it comes to real warfare, such elements are quite common. Civilians get killed by shells or other byproducts of war, and its not like they did any specific thing to make themselves into a valuable military target, or that they could have discerned that they should have rented the neighboring apartment rather than the one that just happened to get hit by a stray shell.

It's much like the quandry of how to use game elements like the D&D 3.5 Assassin, where if they have a reason to target a PC the optimal strategy for them is to wait until the PC is sleeping, sneak in, take three rounds to prep their Death Attack, attempt to one-shot a sleeping PC, and if it fails immediately use their resources to escape. This gives the character no advance awareness that they are being targeted, and also no agency to act in a way as to really influence the sequence once it has been determined that the sequence can occur. It's extremely unsporting, makes for very bad gameplay, and is very much something the PCs regularly do to NPC forces in a 'combat as war' context.

So what DMs usually do is that they find an excuse to provide some hint in the description of the game world before the character goes to sleep to give them at least some chance to anticipate that they are being targeted. Even something like 'make a Spot check as you enter the tavern; okay, that failed' makes it so that if the character is in the end killed by this method, it was more of a 'fair challenge' rather than just an event that happened.

These are all elements that could readily be called 'sport'. They're modifying the fiction in such a way as to make sure that the decisions of the players matter more than they normally should, that failure happens because of errors that can be identified, and not simply due to chance or inevitability as baked into the scenario.



If I read you right, that's too gamey for my taste. You'll have to get someone who can stomach that to get a meaningful reply.

Wait, you've really lost me.

See, to my mind, that's the distinction I've been pushing, where CaW is built on strategic depth, whereas CaS considers strategy to be cheating. So, I completely agree, and that's what I was trying to communicate.


Whereas what I'm saying is that this is being misidentified as a property of CaS vs CaW, when actually its just it's own thing.

There's a claim here that CaW is built on strategic depth, which I am saying is wrong. CaW isn't built on strategic depth, it's built on all sides fully committing to the minimax game that they participate in. But the observation of game design is that this can actually severely reduce strategic depth in many cases - specifically, when the game has any kind of clear ordering of options. In that case, the diversity of moves drops, and so too does the diversity of responses that may be called for. If one of the players may sometimes intentionally play suboptimally, then it becomes easier for an optimal player to win but it also paradoxically becomes harder to be an optimal player.

An example of this would be in something like Go. If you play honte, you're always playing what seems like the best or most natural move in a situation. There's depth and sophistication in evaluating what honte should be. However, especially for intermediate and low expert level players, there's a time when you might have very good play against someone who is stronger than you, but actually be really weak to players who are weaker than you - because you've effectively memorized the proper responses to standard play, but you don't know how to actually figure out the proper response when someone else makes a sub-optimal play.

My claim is that strategic depth basically has nothing to do with the ideological CaW standpoint. I'm trying to demonstrate this by showing that you can actually increase the strategic depth of a game beyond what is possible in realistic scenarios by intentionally stacking the deck in very non-CaW ways (even if the result feels 'gamey' to you).

KineticDiplomat
2019-07-23, 02:46 AM
Re: CaW/CaS.

1) While players may like to be able to CaW their enemies, they rarely appreciate it returned. The shadowrun example being “the Corp drops a 500 pound bomb on you from a drone you never saw 30k feet up. Soak 50P”. Or for D&D “the enemy does not come in a CR appropriate group. He finds out where you’re caping and comes in a “you’re utterly screwed” group.

2) The point about CaW being min-max is completely wrong. The point of CaW is that if your individual “roll to hit and be a hero” is making a difference, you made a mistake. You don’t fight goblins in their lair. You kill them with fantasy nerve agents, pour oil down their holes and incinerate them, bury them like rats, drown them in caves, and only when it’s good and done do you go in and make sure to kill the hideously wounded and the desperate.

NichG
2019-07-23, 03:26 AM
Re: CaW/CaS.

1) While players may like to be able to CaW their enemies, they rarely appreciate it returned. The shadowrun example being “the Corp drops a 500 pound bomb on you from a drone you never saw 30k feet up. Soak 50P”. Or for D&D “the enemy does not come in a CR appropriate group. He finds out where you’re caping and comes in a “you’re utterly screwed” group.

2) The point about CaW being min-max is completely wrong. The point of CaW is that if your individual “roll to hit and be a hero” is making a difference, you made a mistake. You don’t fight goblins in their lair. You kill them with fantasy nerve agents, pour oil down their holes and incinerate them, bury them like rats, drown them in caves, and only when it’s good and done do you go in and make sure to kill the hideously wounded and the desperate.

Just to be clear, I'm using the term 'minimax' here in the game-theoretic sense, not in the tabletop 'min-maxing stats' sense. A minimax approach is one where in order for one side to win, the other must lose, and so (from the point of view of one of the sides) the way to evaluate a line of play is to say 'what is the best move I can make, under the assumption that my opponent's policy is to make those moves which minimize the best possible outcome I can achieve'. E.g. one player plays to maximize their score, the other player plays to minimize the maximum score that the first player can bring about.

This is used to, for example, evaluate lines of play in chess.

Talakeal
2019-07-23, 06:59 AM
The only thing that is required for a fun CaW game is that the party had the opportunity to not have their base burned down, rather than it be an inevitable railroad. Good players, under and in sync with a good GM? They can look back, and say, "yeah, we brought that on ourselves". Which is why I often ask my GMs, "wtf, dude?" / "how were we supposed to…” / "how did you think this would be fun?" when I don't see what they were thinking with a given scenario / setup.

I think this is exactly where NichG is coming from.

awa
2019-07-23, 07:23 AM
Now not always but most times I hear someone talking about a combat as war story it seems to rely on an entirely passive foe who never reacts. Just take flooding the goblin lair a common example. Goblins are a low level foe so I'm assuming no major magic is involved. It requires the goblins lair to have no drains something a large number of animals know how to make, it requires them to just sit there for however long it takes you to redirect a river it requires them not to retreat out any hidden exits and just allow themselves to drown.

Now I'm not against combat as war, although I lean more towards combat as sport, but I am sick of people pretending its better or more realistic, its not its just unrealistic in different ways.

It as other people said is stacked heavily in the pcs favor because the pcs are allowed to kill the monsters with no chance for the monsters to react or defend themselves but does not allow the reverse (for obvious reasons) but dont pretend its an even playing field and you are winning exclusively on your merit. Particularly dont talk down to pepole who like a well balanced fight with interesting mechanics as people who just want to win without any risks.

Talakeal
2019-07-23, 07:45 AM
Now not always but most times I hear someone talking about a combat as war story it seems to rely on an entirely passive foe who never reacts. Just take flooding the goblin lair a common example. Goblins are a low level foe so I'm assuming no major magic is involved. It requires the goblins lair to have no drains something a large number of animals know how to make, it requires them to just sit there for however long it takes you to redirect a river it requires them not to retreat out any hidden exits and just allow themselves to drown.

Now I'm not against combat as war, although I lean more towards combat as sport, but I am sick of people pretending its better or more realistic, its not its just unrealistic in different ways.

It as other people said is stacked heavily in the pcs favor because the pcs are allowed to kill the monsters with no chance for the monsters to react or defend themselves but does not allow the reverse (for obvious reasons) but dont pretend its an even playing field and you are winning exclusively on your merit. Particularly dont talk down to pepole who like a well balanced fight with interesting mechanics as people who just want to win without any risks.

I generally run a combat as sport game, but I don't stop my players from using combat as war tactics. It rarely goes well for them, and they typically have a gaping flaw in their plan that usually ends up with them fighting multiple encounters at once or getting their allies killed.

I am not sure why this is, (although I am sure my players would say it is because I get pissy that they are disrupting my plans and vindictively pull a screw-job out of my butt), it might be that I am smarter or know the game better than them, it might be because I have better knowledge of the game world, it might be that I have more room to improvise (for example, until the PCs tried flooding the goblin lair I wouldn't likely have any plans for their drainage system and would need to wing it on the fly), and probably some combination of all the above.

Satinavian
2019-07-23, 07:56 AM
Now not always but most times I hear someone talking about a combat as war story it seems to rely on an entirely passive foe who never reacts. Just take flooding the goblin lair a common example. Goblins are a low level foe so I'm assuming no major magic is involved. It requires the goblins lair to have no drains something a large number of animals know how to make, it requires them to just sit there for however long it takes you to redirect a river it requires them not to retreat out any hidden exits and just allow themselves to drown.

I do nearly exclusively run CaW but never has that kind of passivity been part of it.

I always run NPCs or monsters as i would run similar PCs. Individuals with abilities, goals, character traits and knowledge trying to do what they perceive as the best thing they can do in a given situation.

The way PCs win is rarely having the better tactics. They win because i make the antagonists weaker either ability wise or with setting constraints/information advantage.


And yes, in CaW PCs and NPCs usually try to avoid fights that are risky or where the reward does not justify the danger. Running CaW with intelligent enemies nearly always leads to a lot of diplomacy.



1) While players may like to be able to CaW their enemies, they rarely appreciate it returned. The shadowrun example being “the Corp drops a 500 pound bomb on you from a drone you never saw 30k feet up. Soak 50P”. Or for D&D “the enemy does not come in a CR appropriate group. He finds out where you’re caping and comes in a “you’re utterly screwed” group.In my SR groups players try to avoid giving a Corp a reason to drop a 500 pound bomb on them. But if that Corp ever had reason to do so, it would and players would not complain.

But that touches the mohawk-mirrorshade topic.



2) The point about CaW being min-max is completely wrong. The point of CaW is that if your individual “roll to hit and be a hero” is making a difference, you made a mistake. You don’t fight goblins in their lair. You kill them with fantasy nerve agents, pour oil down their holes and incinerate them, bury them like rats, drown them in caves, and only when it’s good and done do you go in and make sure to kill the hideously wounded and the desperate.
Just to be clear :

CaW is not "you have to do every warcrime thinkable or you are not serious enough"

CaW is also not "Winning at any cost".

awa
2019-07-23, 08:23 AM
I do nearly exclusively run CaW but never has that kind of passivity been part of it.

I always run NPCs or monsters as i would run similar PCs. Individuals with abilities, goals, character traits and knowledge trying to do what they perceive as the best thing they can do in a given situation.

The way PCs win is rarely having the better tactics. They win because i make the antagonists weaker either ability wise or with setting constraints/information advantage.


I'm not saying CaW is bad, I'm not saying it is always unrealistic I'm saying that often people run unrealistic games full of wacky antics (which is also fine) but then try and claim their wacky antics makes them better than a group that played in a more narrative style. Likely part of this is the nature of the internet more extreme stories get more attention than mundane ones.

Both CaW and CaS tend to be seen through their most extreme lenses particularly on the internet. They cater to different desires, I like the tactical challenges of moving my guy around and out fighting the enemy i like the epic showdown with a powerful enemy and perhaps its thin skinned on my part I dont like how often that style of play is looked down on by people running a different style.

Its not even this thread in particular its the collective weight of passed threads reiterating again and again that CaW is better even the name implies that one is serious business and the other a game.

Thinker
2019-07-23, 09:35 AM
A specific combat encounter being "As Sport" or "As War" is an alien concept to me. Combat encounters should be fair in that they are described as they actually are - if the GM says there are 10 goblins in the room and two break ranks and flee, there should only be 8 goblins remaining. At least until the other two return with reinforcements! Likewise, there shouldn't suddenly be a lava pit when the players are put into a bad spot. If the description is fairly light, it can be reasonable to add other elements to it. For example, a Great Hall is described, but no specific mention of a table, it wouldn't be unreasonable for a player to ask about a table to use as high ground. The combat encounter should be able to be defeated differently based on the players' tactics and strategy. If they found a secret passage that allows them to get behind the goblin guard, they might have an advantage if they decide to fight at all.

The players should be trying to gather as much information as possible about the places that they visit so that they can adequately prepare for the adventure. If they learn that they will be fighting vampires, they will load up on holy water and wooden stakes. If they hear about booby traps leading up to the ancient, evil temple, they'll bring 10-ft poles, a grappling hook, and rope. Their information can be wrong, of course, but unless they are forced into an adventure without a chance to prepare, the expectation is that they will try to figure out how to defeat the encounters in different ways.

Quertus
2019-07-23, 09:46 AM
I do nearly exclusively run CaW but never has that kind of passivity been part of it.

I always run NPCs or monsters as i would run similar PCs. Individuals with abilities, goals, character traits and knowledge trying to do what they perceive as the best thing they can do in a given situation.

The way PCs win is rarely having the better tactics. They win because i make the antagonists weaker either ability wise or with setting constraints/information advantage.


And yes, in CaW PCs and NPCs usually try to avoid fights that are risky or where the reward does not justify the danger. Running CaW with intelligent enemies nearly always leads to a lot of diplomacy.

In my SR groups players try to avoid giving a Corp a reason to drop a 500 pound bomb on them. But if that Corp ever had reason to do so, it would and players would not complain.

But that touches the mohawk-mirrorshade topic.


Just to be clear :

CaW is not "you have to do every warcrime thinkable or you are not serious enough"

CaW is also not "Winning at any cost".

+1 to all of this.

I'll add that I don't just run a game, I run a world, I run the major intelligent NPCs, even while they're off camera. And that I use a lot of unintelligent monsters, so that the party still has plenty of fights, if they want them.

Oh, and that even intelligent monsters can have a difficult time judging the power of human PCs, who are often much more powerful than the humans that they've encountered before. I believe MCU had a good scene of Thor demonstrating this with a rock man.


But implicitly, even here you've implicitly judged this relative to the party. There could be a background element that a dragon exists (but one which has not come up at all in play), and that element could attack a given target specifically because the party is not aware of it yet and has done nothing in particular to invoke its wrath or involvement. Not because their reach exceeded their grasp, or they were too famous, or anything like that. Simply because the dragon wants to punch below its weight since that guarantees its survival, so explicitly targets things in a way to avoid any sort of entanglements, coordinated responses, and the like.

Have you ever seen a Dragon burn down a town and live?

The Assassin with 50 ranks in hide, who survived a Meteor Swarm to the face? That's what Dragons look like in most of my games.

The Dragon (for most Dragons that live long) doesn't want to draw negative attention in the form of "revenge from potentially more powerful foes" to itself, either.

So, a Dragon who learns about my character, the apprentice of the 2000 year old, NI level Wizard? Yeah, it would wisely prefer to work through proxies, or assumed identities, or otherwise not have its name tied to anything that might bring revenge down on itself. And, yes, it would be prepared for diplomacy if necessary.


This is an element where the only way to have prevented it would have been to anticipate it from nothing: 'dragon attacks are a thing that would be dangerous, even though we have no specific reason to believe that a dragon is involved in anything, we're going to send scouts to find and monitor all the nearby dragon lairs'. And, when it comes to real warfare, such elements are quite common. Civilians get killed by shells or other byproducts of war, and its not like they did any specific thing to make themselves into a valuable military target, or that they could have discerned that they should have rented the neighboring apartment rather than the one that just happened to get hit by a stray shell.

Yes, in CaW, you can run a game where some other group is responsible for bringing the Dragon's wrath. And I've done that. And the party could look back on it and say, "yeah, we knew that there were other groups operating in the area. We knew our actions could have repercussions. We should have known that theirs could, too.".


It's much like the quandry of how to use game elements like the D&D 3.5 Assassin, where if they have a reason to target a PC the optimal strategy for them is to wait until the PC is sleeping, sneak in, take three rounds to prep their Death Attack, attempt to one-shot a sleeping PC, and if it fails immediately use their resources to escape. This gives the character no advance awareness that they are being targeted, and also no agency to act in a way as to really influence the sequence once it has been determined that the sequence can occur. It's extremely unsporting, makes for very bad gameplay, and is very much something the PCs regularly do to NPC forces in a 'combat as war' context.

Unsporting? Yeah, that's the whole of CaW gameplay. That's… you cannot really discuss CaW without getting that.

Bad gameplay? No, what you are describing is the end result, not the gameplay. The same way, "The monster hitting, and taking their last HP, killing the PC is bad gameplay". As Satinavian said, the gameplay is not giving the corps a reason to drop a 500 lb bomb on the PCs. If someone is sending assassins, you're (nearly) past CaW gameplay, you've (nearly) already lost the game. CaW gameplay is about positioning.

Something the PCs do? I've not really seen that in my games.


So what DMs usually do is that they find an excuse to provide some hint in the description of the game world before the character goes to sleep to give them at least some chance to anticipate that they are being targeted. Even something like 'make a Spot check as you enter the tavern; okay, that failed' makes it so that if the character is in the end killed by this method, it was more of a 'fair challenge' rather than just an event that happened.

Those GMs are still playing CaS.


These are all elements that could readily be called 'sport'. They're modifying the fiction in such a way as to make sure that the decisions of the players matter more than they normally should, that failure happens because of errors that can be identified, and not simply due to chance or inevitability as baked into the scenario.

Eh, it's important even - and perhaps especially - in CaW to choose a scenario, a set of starting conditions, that you believe that the players could enjoy.


Whereas what I'm saying is that this is being misidentified as a property of CaS vs CaW, when actually its just it's own thing.

There's a claim here that CaW is built on strategic depth, which I am saying is wrong. CaW isn't built on strategic depth, it's built on all sides fully committing to the minimax game that they participate in.

No. Completely wrong. Period. Let me explain.

In 3e, there are a vast array of possible power levels. Some people therefore believe that 3e is about min-maxing, about everyone fielding the strongest possible playing piece. And they are wrong. (I don't need to explain that to you, right?)

Same thing here.

A CaS GM needs to create a series of fair, sporting encounters. A CaW GM makes no such promises about the fairness of any given encounter, only that they believe that they have given the players the tools to make a fun, playable game.

Now, many GMs are idiots, and fail at that, whether that is CaW or CaS.

To disprove your thesis, let me give you the simplest example: none of the monsters in the CaW sandbox are intelligent. You agree that, in that scenario, the GM shouldn't be min-maxing the opposition's strategies, right? And that (depending on the relative strength of the party vs the monsters), optimal fun does not correspond to optimal strategy, right?

Just as I say, "balance to the table", I also will add, I guess, "plan to the table"? CaW gives the players the agency to make their own fun, just as "all sources available" gives the players the agency to make their own character. If the players respond to this by making something outside the party balance range, or by sucking the fun out of the game, then they have failed.


But the observation of game design is that this can actually severely reduce strategic depth in many cases - specifically, when the game has any kind of clear ordering of options. In that case, the diversity of moves drops, and so too does the diversity of responses that may be called for. If one of the players may sometimes intentionally play suboptimally, then it becomes easier for an optimal player to win but it also paradoxically becomes harder to be an optimal player.

Do people only play pun-pun at your tables?


My claim is that strategic depth basically has nothing to do with the ideological CaW standpoint. I'm trying to demonstrate this by showing that you can actually increase the strategic depth of a game beyond what is possible in realistic scenarios by intentionally stacking the deck in very non-CaW ways (even if the result feels 'gamey' to you).

Strategic depth is cheating in CaS. CaS is fundamentally about limiting the game to a series of sporting encounters, which is ruined if the players can change the challenge of the encounter.

Talk of "cannot die" is… I don't know what. A red herring? Goalpost moving? Because PCs can and do die, even in CaS.

Fundamentally, CaS says that the strategic layer is off-limits. It says that the responsibility for a good encounter rests solely in the GM's hands, and the players aren't allowed to **** it up.

Now, I couldn't really stomach your example, but if you were trying to say that there can be a strategic layer around ancillary goals, then those ancillary goals are, by definition, a CaW game, not a CaS one.

awa
2019-07-23, 09:52 AM
Most games are not hard one or the other but if the dm sets the conditions of the fight such that you have to just go in and fight it that's combat as sport. If the Dm sets the conditions that the pcs can find out about and significantly impact the foes ahead of time that's combat as war.

In a game I ran recently the boss tore his way through the floor the entrance collapsed trapping the pcs in with it. That is an example of combat as sport, they were stuck in a room with a monster incapable of negotiation and their only option was to fight it.

In a game i played a few years ago we interrogated a goblin to get the floor plan, sealing key doors with our assorted tools to slow reinforcements and then released an angry owl bear in the fort as a distraction. That is combat as war, we maneuvered around the enemy and acted to minimize the abilities and fought half the battle before we drew are blades.

Now you could combine those two have all that combat as war followed by a combat as sport final boss

NichG
2019-07-23, 11:20 AM
Have you ever seen a Dragon burn down a town and live?

The Assassin with 50 ranks in hide, who survived a Meteor Swarm to the face? That's what Dragons look like in most of my games.

The Dragon (for most Dragons that live long) doesn't want to draw negative attention in the form of "revenge from potentially more powerful foes" to itself, either.

So, a Dragon who learns about my character, the apprentice of the 2000 year old, NI level Wizard? Yeah, it would wisely prefer to work through proxies, or assumed identities, or otherwise not have its name tied to anything that might bring revenge down on itself. And, yes, it would be prepared for diplomacy if necessary.

Yes, in CaW, you can run a game where some other group is responsible for bringing the Dragon's wrath. And I've done that. And the party could look back on it and say, "yeah, we knew that there were other groups operating in the area. We knew our actions could have repercussions. We should have known that theirs could, too.".

You're still treating the dragon as a purely reactive force here. Here's a thought experiment: instead of a game with a DM and a set of players, imagine a game with two DMs and two sets of players. One set of players is playing the usual humanoid-type PCs in a room with one DM, who uses instant messaging to relay what they do to the other DM. The other DM is running a game for players who are playing monsters in the world, and do not specifically know that they're sharing the world with other PCs, or at least they don't get to know who is a PC and who is an NPC.

From a player point of view, a game session might look like:

- You hear that there's an increase in orc activity.
- You ask around, and find out that it's tied to an old abandoned fort outside of town
- You go to the fort and attack the orcs.

Total time elapsed might be a few days at low level, or an hour when teleportation comes online. From the point of people who aren't the PCs, this is as if you got into your car in DC, started driving to New York, and found that it was wiped off the map while you were on the road with no warning, no worrying signs indicating that it might happen, etc.

Now imagine this happening to you, because there are other PCs doing this who basically don't know that the game is about you and yours, and are just doing their stuff at the usual PC rates.

DMs almost never run games in a way that is symmetric to that idea, whether they claim to be CaS or CaW or whatever. If you want to really see it, you need players who accidentally create the events through actions that don't involve thinking about 'how is the other side going to deal with this?'. By and large, when I've had massive shocking disruptive events in games that I've run, it was because some player just decided to do something as a downtime action with massive ramifications. As a DM, even if I'm trying to run a totally symmetric world, I'm still going to subconsciously shy away from having NPCs press the nuke buttons because its not even possible for me to accurately evaluate 'what would it be like to be someone who doesn't know what that button does'. But, if I put that in front of a player, I'll get an honest answer to 'would someone push that button?'.



Unsporting? Yeah, that's the whole of CaW gameplay. That's… you cannot really discuss CaW without getting that.

Bad gameplay? No, what you are describing is the end result, not the gameplay. The same way, "The monster hitting, and taking their last HP, killing the PC is bad gameplay". As Satinavian said, the gameplay is not giving the corps a reason to drop a 500 lb bomb on the PCs. If someone is sending assassins, you're (nearly) past CaW gameplay, you've (nearly) already lost the game. CaW gameplay is about positioning.

Something the PCs do? I've not really seen that in my games.


You've never seen a party alpha-strike an opponent during a surprise round, or find a way of landing a guaranteed kill that doesn't permit an enemy any recourse or counter-move? I mean, I guess it's possible, but it seems a bit shocking to me. I'm not talking about Locate City bomb types of theoretical optimization shenanigans here - just something like, say, shooting the draugr before they finish their waking-up animation up in Skyrim.



No. Completely wrong. Period. Let me explain.

In 3e, there are a vast array of possible power levels. Some people therefore believe that 3e is about min-maxing, about everyone fielding the strongest possible playing piece. And they are wrong. (I don't need to explain that to you, right?)

Same thing here.

A CaS GM needs to create a series of fair, sporting encounters. A CaW GM makes no such promises about the fairness of any given encounter, only that they believe that they have given the players the tools to make a fun, playable game.

Now, many GMs are idiots, and fail at that, whether that is CaW or CaS.

To disprove your thesis, let me give you the simplest example: none of the monsters in the CaW sandbox are intelligent. You agree that, in that scenario, the GM shouldn't be min-maxing the opposition's strategies, right? And that (depending on the relative strength of the party vs the monsters), optimal fun does not correspond to optimal strategy, right?


That doesn't actually address my thesis, it's a non-sequitur. This makes no reference to the core point about strategic depth. You made a claim that 'strategic depth is created by CaW' and my counter-claim was that I could design a game that goes in the polar opposite direction of the ideals of CaW, but actually has more strategic depth as a result. You haven't addressed that point.



Do people only play pun-pun at your tables?


No, in fact they don't. But I also don't run or claim to run ideologically pure 'combat as war' games. I run games where the deck is stacked in favor of the PCs and I make explicitly sure that the players know it, but the deck is stacked more or less against 'the world' as a setting (as opposed to stacked against NPCs) in the sense that I choose a 'grand challenge' posed by the cosmology that I have no answer in mind for how it could possibly be solved. It's then the players' job to use their unfair advantage to counteract the unfair disadvantage incurred by the setting. Generally speaking, I run games where there's more power on the table for the PCs than the players feel comfortable taking, and so the primary challenges they face have to do with deciding what they want enough that they're willing to inflict existential horror on everyone else in order to make it come to pass (well, more or less). In terms of CaW vs CaS, it's neither and both.

If I do my job right, it shouldn't feel like one could define what 'winning' would mean until one finds that they have 'won' by defining it themselves. My most recent campaign involved facing off against the principle that 'if multiverse travel is possible, there will exist universe-spanning patterns of collective behavior that lead to individual universes being exploited for the purposes of the collective'. It's sort of like saying 'I want to stop the fact that politics is a natural consequence of human nature'. It ended when the PCs marshalled the collective blind faith in emergent order inherent in the concept of the invisible hand of the market in order to disempower the concept of 'cooption' by making it so that things necessarily dwindled in power in direct proportion to how far they were twisted away from their initial purposes. The penultimate session was almost entirely spent on a discussion of 'What would constitute a satisfactory outcome?' and 'We know we can do this, but do we want the result?'.

So no, my games are not generally zero-sum alternating optimization games...



Now, I couldn't really stomach your example, but if you were trying to say that there can be a strategic layer around ancillary goals, then those ancillary goals are, by definition, a CaW game, not a CaS one.

Ancillary goals don't mean one has to treat combat as war - that's really stretching definitions there. What I'm saying is that there's a false dichotomy if you try to say that a game must be either CaS or CaW, because those terms carry a lot of meanings that are far more specific than 'has a strategy layer'.

My extreme example is constructed to include things that absolutely do not belong in a CaW game (such as PCs who are immortal purely because of metagame considerations, which should pretty strongly exclude the 'as war' part of CaW at least in terms of what the English words mean), but at the same time show that it can have a rich strategic layer.

Tajerio
2019-07-23, 01:15 PM
This end of the thread is yet another example of how dichotomies can be useful, but usually aren't.

The so-called CaW approach requires a lot of pre-campaign work from the GM on balancing the world in such a way that the PCs have a chance to do something engaging and meaningful--or at least it does for the vast majority of players. Their luck is implicit, in that they have the knowledge and the power to have some agency in the selection and resolution of conflicts, which we might argue most people never really do. On the other hand, the so-called CaS approach decides that the PCs' luck is not that they can involve themselves in conflicts successfully, but that they can be successful in every conflict in which they involve themselves.

In reality, of course, I imagine there are vanishingly few games that don't land somewhere in the middle, and most of this talk about CaW and CaS smells of people looking for rhetorical sticks with which to beat one another, instead of trying to establish two scarcely-realized poles of a spectrum.

RedWarlock
2019-07-23, 04:51 PM
This end of the thread is yet another example of how dichotomies can be useful, but usually aren't.

The so-called CaW approach requires a lot of pre-campaign work from the GM on balancing the world in such a way that the PCs have a chance to do something engaging and meaningful--or at least it does for the vast majority of players. Their luck is implicit, in that they have the knowledge and the power to have some agency in the selection and resolution of conflicts, which we might argue most people never really do. On the other hand, the so-called CaS approach decides that the PCs' luck is not that they can involve themselves in conflicts successfully, but that they can be successful in every conflict in which they involve themselves.

In reality, of course, I imagine there are vanishingly few games that don't land somewhere in the middle, and most of this talk about CaW and CaS smells of people looking for rhetorical sticks with which to beat one another, instead of trying to establish two scarcely-realized poles of a spectrum.

Yeah, every time Quertus describes CaS, I have trouble not interpreting his phrasing as dripping with antipathy for that playstyle, strawmanning it into the worst possible thing EVER. I'm generally more CaS on the spectrum of the two, but seriously, I have NEVER seen anyone play with as reductive a style as he describes it.

PhoenixPhyre
2019-07-23, 05:19 PM
Yeah, every time Quertus describes CaS, I have trouble not interpreting his phrasing as dripping with antipathy for that playstyle, strawmanning it into the worst possible thing EVER. I'm generally more CaS on the spectrum of the two, but seriously, I have NEVER seen anyone play with as reductive a style as he describes it.

Agreed. But it's not just him. I find the whole distinction more of a "I'm better than you are" false dichotomy/excluded middle. Everyone plays a balance of the two--it's the difference between 49.99999% "CAW" and 50.00001% "CAW" (or vice versa).

Quertus
2019-07-23, 05:33 PM
Most games are not hard one or the other but if the dm sets the conditions of the fight such that you have to just go in and fight it that's combat as sport. If the Dm sets the conditions that the pcs can find out about and significantly impact the foes ahead of time that's combat as war.

In a game I ran recently the boss tore his way through the floor the entrance collapsed trapping the pcs in with it. That is an example of combat as sport, they were stuck in a room with a monster incapable of negotiation and their only option was to fight it.

In a game i played a few years ago we interrogated a goblin to get the floor plan, sealing key doors with our assorted tools to slow reinforcements and then released an angry owl bear in the fort as a distraction. That is combat as war, we maneuvered around the enemy and acted to minimize the abilities and fought half the battle before we drew are blades.

Now you could combine those two have all that combat as war followed by a combat as sport final boss


You're still treating the dragon as a purely reactive force here.

I'm really not.

I mean, sure, the dragon isn't going to burn down the PCs base unless it has knowledge of the base, and a reason to burn it down. Same as the PCs won't burn down the orc base / orphanage / whatever until they know that it exists, and have a reason to do so.

As for pace… I'll admit, I usually give the PCs an advantage there (because I don't want to account for their every potty break, I make sure that NPCs don't inherently outpace dedicated PCs). But I run a living world - players often find large changes that they are not responsible for.

Also, I've previously references the notion of games with no NPCs - where every character you can intact with is a fellow PC, and the GM exists solely to (create the initial scenario, and) adjudicate rules. So it's not like this is a completely foreign concept to me.


DMs almost never run games in a way that is symmetric to that idea, whether they claim to be CaS or CaW or whatever. If you want to really see it, you need players who accidentally create the events through actions that don't involve thinking about 'how is the other side going to deal with this?'. By and large, when I've had massive shocking disruptive events in games that I've run, it was because some player just decided to do something as a downtime action with massive ramifications. As a DM, even if I'm trying to run a totally symmetric world, I'm still going to subconsciously shy away from having NPCs press the nuke buttons because its not even possible for me to accurately evaluate 'what would it be like to be someone who doesn't know what that button does'. But, if I put that in front of a player, I'll get an honest answer to 'would someone push that button?'.

This section completely lost me. Why does ignorance of the effects of the nuke button matter? And what does any of this have to do with CaS vs CaW?


You've never seen a party alpha-strike an opponent during a surprise round, or find a way of landing a guaranteed kill that doesn't permit an enemy any recourse or counter-move? I mean, I guess it's possible, but it seems a bit shocking to me.

I took you more literally, and meant I'd never seen a party hire assassins. :smallamused:

I've… rarely seen a party kill or be killed during a surprise round. Maybe never. Not sure. Power + Stealth = not fun, so "balance to the table" and "strategize to the table" tend to avoid such parties.

I have, however, seen my BDH party, who often decided the fight before the opposition got to go. Hilariously enough, they were a CaS party, who took every encounter as it came, with no concern for strategy beyond their build choices. Thus their tagline, "We waded through them like they were humans".


That doesn't actually address my thesis, it's a non-sequitur. This makes no reference to the core point about strategic depth. You made a claim that 'strategic depth is created by CaW' and my counter-claim was that I could design a game that goes in the polar opposite direction of the ideals of CaW, but actually has more strategic depth as a result. You haven't addressed that point.

It's not "strategic depth is created by CaW", it's "strategic depth is anathema to CaS".

You can't talk about how you can get more colors on your black & white TV when, by definition, that TV limits your color pallet. (I mean, you can, and you can even be right, if you have more distinct shader of grey than the color TV had distinct colors, but it's still an odd position to take)

Any element that is CaS is fundamentally devoid of a strategic layer. So, any time you're talking about an impactful strategy, you inherently cannot be talking about something being run as CaS.


In terms of CaW vs CaS, it's neither and both.


Ancillary goals don't mean one has to treat combat as war - that's really stretching definitions there. What I'm saying is that there's a false dichotomy if you try to say that a game must be either CaS or CaW, because those terms carry a lot of meanings that are far more specific than 'has a strategy layer'.

My extreme example is constructed to include things that absolutely do not belong in a CaW game (such as PCs who are immortal purely because of metagame considerations, which should pretty strongly exclude the 'as war' part of CaW at least in terms of what the English words mean), but at the same time show that it can have a rich strategic layer.

CaW is not defined by its strategic layer, but CaS is defined by its lack thereof.

Is it a false dichotomy? Sure. I already talked about a spectrum, like "sandboxy". Is it a "false spectrum", like "California - New York", with things that don't fall neatly along that line? Perhaps. But I'm not seeing the reason to care about that distinction at this time (although it would be one more reason to poke fun at (what I believe to be) the original author of the dichotomy).

RedWarlock
2019-07-23, 05:37 PM
Okay, Quertus, honest question, how, in POSITIVE-ONLY terms (no "lacks X" declarations), how do you define Combat as Sport? Because I feel like your definition is WAY off from what anyone else uses.

Quertus
2019-07-23, 05:45 PM
This end of the thread is yet another example of how dichotomies can be useful, but usually aren't.

The so-called CaW approach requires a lot of pre-campaign work from the GM on balancing the world in such a way that the PCs have a chance to do something engaging and meaningful--or at least it does for the vast majority of players. Their luck is implicit, in that they have the knowledge and the power to have some agency in the selection and resolution of conflicts, which we might argue most people never really do. On the other hand, the so-called CaS approach decides that the PCs' luck is not that they can involve themselves in conflicts successfully, but that they can be successful in every conflict in which they involve themselves.

In reality, of course, I imagine there are vanishingly few games that don't land somewhere in the middle, and most of this talk about CaW and CaS smells of people looking for rhetorical sticks with which to beat one another, instead of trying to establish two scarcely-realized poles of a spectrum.

Wait, what? "Carefully balancing things" is the hallmark of CaS; CaW largely leaves such issues to the players.

Yes, most games probably lie somewhere in the middle. But that's irrelevant.

"Red" and "Blue" (and "Green" or "Yellow") are much easier to define and discuss as pure colors, even if you acknowledge that there are things in-between.

Those who want to discuss impure mixtures often come off as academically dishonest, regardless of the fact that they rarely exist as pure colors in nature.


Yeah, every time Quertus describes CaS, I have trouble not interpreting his phrasing as dripping with antipathy for that playstyle, strawmanning it into the worst possible thing EVER. I'm generally more CaS on the spectrum of the two, but seriously, I have NEVER seen anyone play with as reductive a style as he describes it.

Eh, I'm a war gamer. Most war games are inherently CaS. Yes, I prefer CaW, but CaS has its place. My BDH party was heck'a fun, and it was (functionally, if not intentionally) a CaS game.


Agreed. But it's not just him. I find the whole distinction more of a "I'm better than you are" false dichotomy/excluded middle. Everyone plays a balance of the two--it's the difference between 49.99999% "CAW" and 50.00001% "CAW" (or vice versa).

"Red" and "Blue" (and "Green" or "Yellow") are much easier to define and discuss as pure colors, even if you acknowledge that there are things in-between.

Those who want to discuss impure mixtures often come off as academically dishonest, regardless of the fact that they rarely exist as pure colors in nature.

Quertus
2019-07-23, 05:47 PM
Okay, Quertus, honest question, how, in POSITIVE-ONLY terms (no "lacks X" declarations), how do you define Combat as Sport? Because I feel like your definition is WAY off from what anyone else uses.

Combat as Sport (CaS): The GM creates a series of "sporting challenges", which the party faces "head on" / "as is", as tactical challenges.

2) a playstyle where the GM takes full responsibility for ensuring game balance.

Inchhighguy
2019-07-23, 07:46 PM
I think Combat as ''sport" or "war" is way too binary. More so, a lot of people only focus on one thing, like ''as war'' is only the DM backstabing the characters and ''as sport" is only fun. Or whatever.

It seems like most are saying ''as sport" is easy, and ''as war" is hard......but them many back up a bit to say ''as sport" is a "fun game" and "as war" is a DM hexcrawl meatgrinder. And then two, a lot of people are mixing things. If the goblins set up guards...that is "as war", that is doing reasonable, common sense life and death tatics. The ''as sport" way is the goblins just sit around as targets for the PCs, as this game is stacked in the players favor to give them ''luck".

I think this is dancing around the Game Difficulity. Like a simple ten scale: One is very easy, nine is hard, and ten is impossible. A typical game should have encounters all over the scale from one to ten.....but a LOT of players don't want such typical games: they flat out want the easy game. They want the game set at one always. Worse, they lower the sclae so two equals impossible. OR in other words if they the players don't have the huge advantage of "luck" in the game....the game is too hard.

Mechalich
2019-07-23, 08:01 PM
This end of the thread is yet another example of how dichotomies can be useful, but usually aren't.

The so-called CaW approach requires a lot of pre-campaign work from the GM on balancing the world in such a way that the PCs have a chance to do something engaging and meaningful--or at least it does for the vast majority of players. Their luck is implicit, in that they have the knowledge and the power to have some agency in the selection and resolution of conflicts, which we might argue most people never really do. On the other hand, the so-called CaS approach decides that the PCs' luck is not that they can involve themselves in conflicts successfully, but that they can be successful in every conflict in which they involve themselves.

In reality, of course, I imagine there are vanishingly few games that don't land somewhere in the middle, and most of this talk about CaW and CaS smells of people looking for rhetorical sticks with which to beat one another, instead of trying to establish two scarcely-realized poles of a spectrum.

A lot of narrative storytelling involves manipulating circumstances - off-screen and on-screen such that you generate fights that are 'even' in scope so that they appear sport-like in description even though everyone is trying their absolute utmost. The reason for this is quite simple - describing a curb-stomp by either the good guys or the bad guys is rarely satisfying and this is especially true in table-top which can't use pretty visuals, soaring music, or epic prose to describe the fact that one guy is getting their face pounded in by another person they cannot possibly harm (comic book movies do this fairly often).

However, in tabletop it is difficult to maintain the fog-of-war of combat-as-war in this way effectively, because the PCs control at least part of the story direction and it's too easy for the party to walk into a situation where the result is instant death - especially in games with large power scales like D&D. This is easy to observe because large numbers of video games allow players to do this with the explicit recognition that well, you'll just reload your most recent save and go grind some more before trying that again, but of course this is (usually) impossible in tabletop. As a result, most GMs put together a set of implicit guardrails about just what the PCs could potentially encounter at any point in their careers to avoid summary TPKs just because someone rolled 00 on the encounter table. If you're not going to do that, well, then as a GM it's essential to be extremely up-front that characters are going to die, and it's going to happen through no fault of their own, and the players had better be cool with that.

NichG
2019-07-23, 09:46 PM
It's not "strategic depth is created by CaW", it's "strategic depth is anathema to CaS".

You can't talk about how you can get more colors on your black & white TV when, by definition, that TV limits your color pallet. (I mean, you can, and you can even be right, if you have more distinct shader of grey than the color TV had distinct colors, but it's still an odd position to take)

Any element that is CaS is fundamentally devoid of a strategic layer. So, any time you're talking about an impactful strategy, you inherently cannot be talking about something being run as CaS.

CaW is not defined by its strategic layer, but CaS is defined by its lack thereof.

Is it a false dichotomy? Sure. I already talked about a spectrum, like "sandboxy". Is it a "false spectrum", like "California - New York", with things that don't fall neatly along that line? Perhaps. But I'm not seeing the reason to care about that distinction at this time (although it would be one more reason to poke fun at (what I believe to be) the original author of the dichotomy).

It's the California-New York thing specifically.

The original comments that started this discussion had to do with posts that conflated a motivation that (sounded like it) came from a desire to have strategically rich gameplay, and a mandate to run a game as CaW - in essence, a claim that in order to increase strategic complexity, one must move CaS/CaW axis towards the CaW pole. My response is that this is self-deceptive, because it assumes an equivalency between strategic depth and the coordinate on that axis, but actually:

1) Even if one stays on the axis, beyond a certain mixing ratio strategic depth will decrease in the CaW direction.
2) Movement perpendicular to the axis can be significantly more important to establishing strategic depth than the Sport/War distinction.

For these arguments, it mostly doesn't matter what the behavior of the game at the 'platonic ideal of a CaS/CaW game' would be, because this is about logical entailment and necessary/sufficient conditions, rather than about the specific definition of the extremes. 'I modified my games to be closer to the CaW ideal' does not entail 'my games gained additional strategic depth'.

Or to put it another way, someone who wants strategic depth is not necessarily going to be well served by framing the way they think about structuring their game in terms of CaS vs CaW, or by outright rejecting things that stack the deck or induce meta-game 'idiot ball' behaviors in some cases. Those remain methods which can be used to increase strategic depth if used correctly, even when they move you away from CaW ideologically.

Satinavian
2019-07-24, 02:06 AM
While there seems to be a huge overlap between my and Quertus' opinions, i don't treat "strategy" as the main difference detween CaW and CaS.

CaW is about treating combat as fictional conflict that occurs between fictional characters/beings. It is about immersion first. Of course there is strategy, but only because the fictional characters have the same reasons to use it as their real world counterparts. Combat is serious because the consequences of it are serious when seen from inside the fiction.

CaS is about fun challenging games for the players. Most of the times that includes tactical challenges. But there can be strategic elements and they can be even dominating. How you beet an encounter is tactics. But how you divide your ressources between challenges over the whole campaign or what build choices you make are strategy.

Inchhighguy
2019-07-24, 06:11 PM
CaW is about treating combat as fictional conflict that occurs between fictional characters/beings. It is about immersion first. Of course there is strategy, but only because the fictional characters have the same reasons to use it as their real world counterparts. Combat is serious because the consequences of it are serious when seen from inside the fiction.

CaS is about fun challenging games for the players. Most of the times that includes tactical challenges. But there can be strategic elements and they can be even dominating. How you beet an encounter is tactics. But how you divide your ressources between challenges over the whole campaign or what build choices you make are strategy.


Wait....I think your definitions are way off. Each of your definitions covers both types of games and does not have anything unique.

Combat As War-Is the hard game. It's ''realistic and nitty gritty. It has things like item loss, character damage(including long term) and character death. The DM runs the world as 'neutral ' with NO advantage given to the players or characters. Players must use their own real life skills, plus rule mastery to overcome any encounter. This game is serious and is played as close to ''real life" as an RPG can get.

Combat As Sport-Is an easy game. It's unrealistic and clean. It has things like house rules that overly favor the player characters, little or no loss and little or no character damage or death. The DM runs the world very 'positively ' with a HUGE advantage given to both the players and characters. The players by default don't have to do much, as if they make even a slight effort they will succeed. The game is light and fluffy, and is played as a relaxing diversion.

Now don't get me wrong, the above ways are different...but that is it: Neither is ''better".

Talakeal
2019-07-24, 07:01 PM
Wait....I think your definitions are way off. Each of your definitions covers both types of games and does not have anything unique.

Combat As War-Is the hard game. It's ''realistic and nitty gritty. It has things like item loss, character damage(including long term) and character death. The DM runs the world as 'neutral ' with NO advantage given to the players or characters. Players must use their own real life skills, plus rule mastery to overcome any encounter. This game is serious and is played as close to ''real life" as an RPG can get.

Combat As Sport-Is an easy game. It's unrealistic and clean. It has things like house rules that overly favor the player characters, little or no loss and little or no character damage or death. The DM runs the world very 'positively ' with a HUGE advantage given to both the players and characters. The players by default don't have to do much, as if they make even a slight effort they will succeed. The game is light and fluffy, and is played as a relaxing diversion.

Now don't get me wrong, the above ways are different...but that is it: Neither is ''better".

You are the first person I have ever heard who associates those terms with difficulty.

tomandtish
2019-07-24, 07:15 PM
Bear with me here, three anecdotes that tie together:


I once read an article talking about Wild Bill Hickok that said that, in retrospect, he was the best the gun-fighter who ever lived, having won more showdowns than anyone else. The article posited that it wasn't because he was faster, stronger, smarter, or more skilled than anyone else, but merely because he was the luckiest. Someone had to have a lucky streak and win more than anyone else, just like someone has to win the lottery, but when he started out he had no greater odds than anyone else; it is only when you look back at his story in isolation that he appears to be this legendary badass.


It's also important to note that "gun-fighter' in this case is simply someone who killed with a gun. Despite the legends, Hickok was only in ONE straight up gunfight as we tend to think of it (two opponents facing each other on the street). The rest of his killings were situations where someone shot at him without any formality and he returned fire, or flat out him shooting at someone else first, and at least two of his shootings resulted in formal inquests.

So it is important to understand that even if you want to apply the coin flip mentality to a classic gunfight, almost none of his fights fell in that category. His luck actually can be tied to the number of times someone shot at him first and just missed or (in one notable incidence) had a misfire when their gun was to his head.

Tanarii
2019-07-24, 08:32 PM
You are the first person I have ever heard who associates those terms with difficulty.

Meanwhile I very rarely see Combat as War proponents that don't, on some level, associate CaW as "hard mode".

Even though it absolutely can be easy mode if the DM gives too much leeway in control the situation and "rulings" (often actually on the fly house rules) that allow them to "be innovative" for huge mechanical benefits. And CaS hard mode is the DM just tunes everything to fairly high relative to party level.

Even the original article on CaW vs CaS made it pretty clear the writer thought Caw was hard mode.

(Edit: just to be clear, I'm currently a proponent of CaW. At least my version of CaW. But I'm not blind to the common underlying prejudice, including at times in myself.)

Also, I think we've official gone off topic :smallamused:

Inchhighguy
2019-07-24, 08:48 PM
You are the first person I have ever heard who associates those terms with difficulty.

Odd, as lots of others say it too.

War....is hard. It's Hell. You 'loose', you die.

Sport...is Easy. It's 'just a game'. You loose...eh..you are sad for a bit.


As some have said, a Combat as Sport gives the players a ''fair and balanced, sporting advantage". Combat as War is the harsh reality way.

Take a typical thing that happens in combat: The kobold thugs get a couple good rolls, so a poor PC now only has a couple HP left. So what happens next round?

Combat as War: The fight most likely continues chances are high a kobold will hit the PC.....and the character will die. Final.

Combat as Sport: The kobolds(aka the DM) will ''suddenly" give the ''player a sporting chance stacked in thier favor". Maybe the kobolds will stop to gloat...maybe they will ''suddenly" take the PC captive. Or any thing else...except character death.

Of course ANYTHING can happen in both types of games, depending on a lot of other things about the game and play stlye.

Talakeal
2019-07-24, 09:06 PM
Odd, as lots of others say it too.

War....is hard. It's Hell. You 'loose', you die.

Sport...is Easy. It's 'just a game'. You loose...eh..you are sad for a bit.


As some have said, a Combat as Sport gives the players a ''fair and balanced, sporting advantage". Combat as War is the harsh reality way.

Take a typical thing that happens in combat: The kobold thugs get a couple good rolls, so a poor PC now only has a couple HP left. So what happens next round?

Combat as War: The fight most likely continues chances are high a kobold will hit the PC.....and the character will die. Final.

Combat as Sport: The kobolds(aka the DM) will ''suddenly" give the ''player a sporting chance stacked in thier favor". Maybe the kobolds will stop to gloat...maybe they will ''suddenly" take the PC captive. Or any thing else...except character death.

Of course ANYTHING can happen in both types of games, depending on a lot of other things about the game and play stlye.

Yeah, that's not at all what any of those terms mean.

Inchhighguy
2019-07-24, 09:14 PM
Yeah, that's not at all what any of those terms mean.

Ok?

So is there some offical defination of terms you are using?

NichG
2019-07-24, 10:29 PM
Perhaps 'combat as end' vs 'combat as means' would be a cleaner comparison. Do fights occur because the purpose of play is to have fights, or do they occur because a given fight is one way to obtain a desired outcome. That removes considerations of immersion, difficulty, deck stacking, etc.

comk59
2019-07-25, 05:47 AM
Take a typical thing that happens in combat: The kobold thugs get a couple good rolls, so a poor PC now only has a couple HP left. So what happens next round?

Combat as War: The fight most likely continues chances are high a kobold will hit the PC.....and the character will die. Final.

Combat as Sport: The kobolds(aka the DM) will ''suddenly" give the ''player a sporting chance stacked in thier favor". Maybe the kobolds will stop to gloat...maybe they will ''suddenly" take the PC captive. Or any thing else...except character death.

Of course ANYTHING can happen in both types of games, depending on a lot of other things about the game and play stlye.

What? Since when does CaS actively change the difficulty of combat mid-battle? Isn't CaS all about pre-calculating a challenge?
If anything, groveling to make your opponent waste a turn gloating feels a lot more like a CaW thing, since scraping up every possible advantage to make combat as easy as possible seems more in that playstyle's wheelhouse.

Willie the Duck
2019-07-25, 06:41 AM
Odd, as lots of others say it too.

War....is hard. It's Hell. You 'loose', you die.

Sport...is Easy. It's 'just a game'. You loose...eh..you are sad for a bit.

In actual war, you die if you lose, whereas in actual sport you do not (or at least if you do, something has gone wrong with the sporting model). In TTRPGs, these are just terms to describe the basic setup of the playing table for what is, regardless of the framing, still a game.

Easy and Hard can exist in both contexts, it is not an inherent quality of one over the other. The distinction is whether or not there is an attempt to set up a fair fight. If you were starting out with a situational advantage in the CaW setup, a CaS setup would be harder.




Take a typical thing that happens in combat: The kobold thugs get a couple good rolls, so a poor PC now only has a couple HP left. So what happens next round?

Combat as War: The fight most likely continues chances are high a kobold will hit the PC.....and the character will die. Final.

Combat as Sport: The kobolds(aka the DM) will ''suddenly" give the ''player a sporting chance stacked in thier favor". Maybe the kobolds will stop to gloat...maybe they will ''suddenly" take the PC captive. Or any thing else...except character death.

If you have been playing in games where character death was not on the table, and they happened to be games that leaned CaS, I understand why you might think that, but I don't think anyone else believes that CaS has anything to do with that. CaS just means that the fight was set up to be balanced.


So is there some offical defination of terms you are using?

These are all terms thrown about by internet game analysts for use with each other. There are no definitions except those agreed upon by consensus.

Talakeal
2019-07-25, 06:52 AM
Ok?

So is there some offical defination of terms you are using?

This (https://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?317715-Very-Long-Combat-as-Sport-vs-Combat-as-War-a-Key-Difference-in-D-amp-D-Play-Styles)is the earliest guide to the subject I can find, it may be where the terms originated.

Thinker
2019-07-25, 08:52 AM
Wait....I think your definitions are way off. Each of your definitions covers both types of games and does not have anything unique.

Combat As War-Is the hard game. It's ''realistic and nitty gritty. It has things like item loss, character damage(including long term) and character death. The DM runs the world as 'neutral ' with NO advantage given to the players or characters. Players must use their own real life skills, plus rule mastery to overcome any encounter. This game is serious and is played as close to ''real life" as an RPG can get.

Combat As Sport-Is an easy game. It's unrealistic and clean. It has things like house rules that overly favor the player characters, little or no loss and little or no character damage or death. The DM runs the world very 'positively ' with a HUGE advantage given to both the players and characters. The players by default don't have to do much, as if they make even a slight effort they will succeed. The game is light and fluffy, and is played as a relaxing diversion.

Now don't get me wrong, the above ways are different...but that is it: Neither is ''better".


Odd, as lots of others say it too.

War....is hard. It's Hell. You 'loose', you die.

Sport...is Easy. It's 'just a game'. You loose...eh..you are sad for a bit.


As some have said, a Combat as Sport gives the players a ''fair and balanced, sporting advantage". Combat as War is the harsh reality way.

Take a typical thing that happens in combat: The kobold thugs get a couple good rolls, so a poor PC now only has a couple HP left. So what happens next round?

Combat as War: The fight most likely continues chances are high a kobold will hit the PC.....and the character will die. Final.

Combat as Sport: The kobolds(aka the DM) will ''suddenly" give the ''player a sporting chance stacked in thier favor". Maybe the kobolds will stop to gloat...maybe they will ''suddenly" take the PC captive. Or any thing else...except character death.

Of course ANYTHING can happen in both types of games, depending on a lot of other things about the game and play stlye.

Your tone makes you come off as rather smug and dismissive of Combat as Sport as you understand it. I also take from your explanation and extrapolation that you feel that Combat as Sport is more of a game while Combat as War is SERIOUS BUSINESS. I may not know much about CaS or CaW, but I have not read anything that suggests that CaS must be less lethal than CaW. From what I've read in this thread, the greatest difference is that CaS is intended to create combat encounters that are balanced around a capable party with the appropriate resources while CaW simply creates encounters that match the fiction of the current environment, without any regard for the party's capabilities. Neither seems any harder than the other. With CaS, it seems that the GM could plan several combat encounters (and several non-combat encounters) that are balanced for the party, but might whittle away the party's resources over the length of the adventure. That requires several assumptions by the GM and for the dice to land in a fairly average way. If the players in a CaS model choose to use up more valuable resources early, they might find themselves in a dire situation by the end of the adventure. CaS does not seem to dictate that the GM rebalance each encounter to match what the players currently have available to them. Additionally, CaS does not presume player success. It is merely balanced in a way that the at the start, the players have even odds of completing the adventure successfully.

Meanwhile, CaW presents situations as dictated by the fiction. If the campaign begins with a warlord raving the lands to the north and the party decides to investigate, the GM wouldn't match the adventure to the party's resources. They would be based on what makes sense for the warlord and her allies based on the established fiction. In this case, the players can still overuse their resources and find themselves in a dire situation by the end of the arc. The only difference is that they might not have had a fair shot in the first place.

I don't think either is particularly superior, nor do I consider these models to have very much value. It amounts to one being gamey (which makes sense when playing a game) while the other seems to have a narrative focus (which makes sense when playing a game where you roleplay characters in a fictional world).

Jakinbandw
2019-07-25, 12:34 PM
Combat is Sport and Combat is war are just different fantasies.

Combat as war folks think that it is incredibly clever to realize that there is a single stream of water flowing through a dungeon, then either poison it, or divert it, then close the entrance till everything inside dies. It sells the fantasy that you are smart and clever and you win because of it. Of course 90% of it is just a game of mother may I with the GM as it generally works by trying to work outside the rules as much as possible.

Combat as a sport folks go into a dungeon and clear the rooms one at a time in battles, with occasional rest breaks. It sells the fantasy that you are playing heroes that can best any challenge through strength of arms (and usually preplanning builds!). Of course it does requires challenges being built to the players, and that there is some way to mitigate a run of bad luck in one way or another, even if that way is paying for a rez after combat.

Of course these things are on a spectrum, but really, it's two different fantasies, and that's why people get so into them. They are invested that their fantasy is the right one.

Pedantic
2019-07-25, 12:49 PM
Combat is Sport and Combat is war are just different fantasies.

Combat as war folks think that it is incredibly clever to realize that there is a single stream of water flowing through a dungeon, then either poison it, or divert it, then close the entrance till everything inside dies. It sells the fantasy that you are smart and clever and you win because of it. Of course 90% of it is just a game of mother may I with the GM as it generally works by trying to work outside the rules as much as possible.

Combat as a sport folks go into a dungeon and clear the rooms one at a time in battles, with occasional rest breaks. It sells the fantasy that you are playing heroes that can best any challenge through strength of arms (and usually preplanning builds!). Of course it does requires challenges being built to the players, and that there is some way to mitigate a run of bad luck in one way or another, even if that way is paying for a rez after combat.

Of course these things are on a spectrum, but really, it's two different fantasies, and that's why people get so into them. They are invested that their fantasy is the right one.

I don't particularly think the two positions break down neatly on the rules engagement levels you're putting forward. Scry/fry is a very CaW tactic that emerges organically from a heavy ruleset and doesn't require DM permission. Meanwhile, CaS ideology doesn't particularly care if the players have built an optimized or even planned party composition, so much as the encounters the run into are tailored to be an interesting self-contained challenge for the capabilities they do have.

One step further than that, CaS encounters often include specific environmental or situational features for players to manipulate for advantage or work around, like specialized terrain or traps and so on that sound an awful lot like that single water source players can feel clever about manipulating in your CaW example.

I think the two positions have a lot more to do with how one conceptualizes of challenge/encounter design in the first place. In a CaW scenario, as a DM you're probably thinking about factions, and individual actors and assigning them capabilities well ahead of time without much regard for how any given "encounter" between those opponents and the players might go. CaS design leads to DMs conceptualizing specific challenges at the point of player interaction. It's less important to know the Kobold Warrens can field a total of 53 warriors, and more important to determine how many kobolds the guard patrol fight needs to have to be engaging for your players.

This is all to say nothing of the effect either viewpoint has on monster/challenge design in the first place. CaS makes it perfectly reasonable to design a 16th level Windlord, and then provide guidelines for adjusting that up or down, while CaW doesn't meaningfully take player level as a primary design point for monsters, except possible in a broadest sense of making sure you have some content that can be interacted with at all power levels in the world as a whole.

Jakinbandw
2019-07-25, 01:08 PM
I don't particularly think the two positions break down neatly on the rules engagement levels you're putting forward. Scry/fry is a very CaW tactic that emerges organically from a heavy ruleset and doesn't require DM permission. Meanwhile, CaS ideology doesn't particularly care if the players have built an optimized or even planned party composition, so much as the encounters the run into are tailored to be an interesting self-contained challenge for the capabilities they do have. True, but it is also very much an 'look how clever we are' thing, which is where my breaking point between them is.


I think the two positions have a lot more to do with how one conceptualizes of challenge/encounter design in the first place. In a CaW scenario, as a DM you're probably thinking about factions, and individual actors and assigning them capabilities well ahead of time without much regard for how any given "encounter" between those opponents and the players might go. CaS design leads to DMs conceptualizing specific challenges at the point of player interaction. It's less important to know the Kobold Warrens can field a total of 53 warriors, and more important to determine how many kobolds the guard patrol fight needs to have to be engaging for your players.

I guess that makes all campaign books that WoTC puts out setups for Combat as war, as each are made without the specifics of the characters in mind. It doesn't matter if the party is four fighters, or four coffeelocks there is only one troll.

Here is the real thing though. When I've seen combat as sport happen, usually the opponents of the party are more free to fight the party freely then when I've seen combat as war. Combat as war relies on opponents being stupid, and never actually reacting as they should the player characters.

I run a game that leans towards combat as sport. I build my dungeons to roughly the players power level, and give everyone in the dungeon a goal and let it run. Sometimes this can lead to situations where the players end up fighting an uphill battle and needing to retreat. However in a game with combat as war, all that happens is that the players 'Cleverly' find some exploit to win. I find combat as war kind of condescending to players honestly, and I prefer games that are able to react to players rather than just being a game of mother may I to cheese rules.

Pedantic
2019-07-25, 01:32 PM
True, but it is also very much an 'look how clever we are' thing, which is where my breaking point between them is.



I guess that makes all campaign books that WoTC puts out setups for Combat as war, as each are made without the specifics of the characters in mind. It doesn't matter if the party is four fighters, or four coffeelocks there is only one troll.

WotC products rely on the fantasy that their CR guidelines work, less than any particular orientation one way or the other. :p


Here is the real thing though. When I've seen combat as sport happen, usually the opponents of the party are more free to fight the party freely then when I've seen combat as war. Combat as war relies on opponents being stupid, and never actually reacting as they should the player characters.

I run a game that leans towards combat as sport. I build my dungeons to roughly the players power level, and give everyone in the dungeon a goal and let it run. Sometimes this can lead to situations where the players end up fighting an uphill battle and needing to retreat. However in a game with combat as war, all that happens is that the players 'Cleverly' find some exploit to win. I find combat as war kind of condescending to players honestly, and I prefer games that are able to react to players rather than just being a game of mother may I to cheese rules.

I....rather think you're just showing your biases here. I tend toward a pretty similar design ethos for my challenges (generally, I think campaign settings should contrive to present players with a series of level appropriate things to do, if not force the things players decide to interact with to engage at the players' level) but the vast majority of "gameplay" in my campaigns is about players finding a way to solve the problems in front of them as safely and efficiently as possible. Sometimes that leads to big fights, but I would say the most common outcome looks a lot more like heist planning and execution.

I don't see any particular reason that sort of thing requires the players to go outside the rules though. More, it's just applying the same analysis you would to any game, like say a board game or a strategy video game, to the RPG system you're in. No one thinks it's exploitative to say, optimize a deckbuilding game to produce a consistent hand every turn, or to select the correct damage type to target an enemy's weakness. TTRPGs are just another set of rules to play with, albeit they have historical design shortcomings and some weird conditions caused by their unbounded game length and shifting victory conditions.

Jakinbandw
2019-07-25, 01:44 PM
I run a game that leans towards combat as sport.

I don't see any particular reason that sort of thing requires the players to go outside the rules though.

That's because you run them as sport.

Try building a game where the players can choose what dungeon they go into at level one, but one has a hundred goblins, another has a group of giants, and a third is the cave on an ancient red dragon. The people that play combat as war love those scenarios because it makes them feel really clever when they manage to 'outthink' the dragon.

Or at least, I'm going by one group I was in, and comments from the 3.5e board.

Pedantic
2019-07-25, 02:00 PM
That's because you run them as sport.

Try building a game where the players can choose what dungeon they go into at level one, but one has a hundred goblins, another has a group of giants, and a third is the cave on an ancient red dragon. The people that play combat as war love those scenarios because it makes them feel really clever when they manage to 'outthink' the dragon.

Or at least, I'm going by one group I was in, and comments from the 3.5e board.

Oh sorry, I had my quote tags messed up. You're actually quoting yourself there. XD

The whole CaS/CaW is really caught up on a whole new/old school divide that I don't really think has much merit and muddies the issue (and frankly, I think is probably informing your dismissal of CaW as entirely mother-may-I nonsense), but if I was put at gunpoint, I'd say CaW is closer to my preferences.

Jakinbandw
2019-07-25, 03:15 PM
Oh sorry, I had my quote tags messed up. You're actually quoting yourself there. XD

The whole CaS/CaW is really caught up on a whole new/old school divide that I don't really think has much merit and muddies the issue (and frankly, I think is probably informing your dismissal of CaW as entirely mother-may-I nonsense), but if I was put at gunpoint, I'd say CaW is closer to my preferences.

How I feel right now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-eKR0GCwcI

Quertus
2019-07-25, 08:01 PM
This (https://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?317715-Very-Long-Combat-as-Sport-vs-Combat-as-War-a-Key-Difference-in-D-amp-D-Play-Styles)is the earliest guide to the subject I can find, it may be where the terms originated.

Yeah, that's what people keep pointing to, and the one I found on my own.

Now, technically, I only promised myself I'd ridicule and spoof the article if someone held it on a pedestal again, but I also didn't promise myself *not* to do so otherwise.

So, here's the part of the article that I think makes sense:

People who want Combat as Sport want fun fights between two (at least roughly) evenly matched sides. They hate “ganking” in which one side has such an enormous advantage (because of superior numbers, levels, strategic surprise, etc.) that the fight itself is a fait accompli. They value combat tactics that could be used to overcome the enemy and fair rules adhered to by both sides rather than looking for loopholes in the rules. Terrain and the specific situation should provide spice to the combat but never turn it into a turkey shoot. They tend to prefer arena combat in which there would be a pre-set fight with (roughly) equal sides and in which no greater strategic issues impinge on the fight or unbalance it.

The other side of the debate is the Combat as War side. They like Eve-style combat in which in a lot of fights, you know who was going to win before the fight even starts and a lot of the fun comes in from using strategy and logistics to ensure that the playing field is heavily unbalanced in your favor. The greatest coup for these players isn’t to win a fair fight but to make sure that the fight never happens (the classic example would be inserting a spy or turning a traitor within the enemy’s administration and crippling their infrastructure so they can’t field a fleet) or is a complete turkey shoot. The Combat as Sport side hates this sort of thing with a passion since the actual fights are often one-sided massacres or stand-offs that take hours.

Then here's the example:

I think that these same differences hold true in D&D, let me give you an example of a specific situation to illustrate the differences: the PCs want to kill some giant bees and take their honey because magic bee honey is worth a lot of money. Different groups approach the problem in different ways.

Combat as Sport: the PCs approach the bees and engage them in combat using the terrain to their advantage, using their abilities intelligently and having good teamwork. The fighter chooses the right position to be able to cleave into the bees while staying outside the radius of the wizard’s area effect spell, the cleric keeps the wizard from going down to bee venom and the rogue sneaks up and kills the bee queen. These good tactics lead to the PCs prevailing against the bees and getting the honey. The DM congratulates them on a well-fought fight.

Combat as War: the PCs approach the bees but there’s BEES EVERYWHERE! GIANT BEES! With nasty poison saves! The PCs run for their lives since they don’t stand a chance against the bees in a fair fight. But the bees are too fast! So the party Wizard uses magic to set part of the forest on fire in order to provide enough smoke (bees hate smoke, right?) to cover their escape. Then the PCs regroup and swear bloody vengeance against the damn bees. They think about just burning everything as usual, but decide that that might destroy the value of the honey. So they make a plan: the bulk of the party will hide out in trees at the edge of the bee’s territory and set up piles of oil soaked brush to light if the bees some after them and some buckets of mud. Meanwhile, the party monk will put on a couple layers of clothing, go to the owl bear den and throw rocks at it until it chases him. He’ll then run, owl bear chasing him, back to where the party is waiting where they’ll dump fresh mud on him (thick mud on thick clothes keeps bees off, right?) and the cleric will cast an anti-poison spell on him. As soon as the owl bear engages the bees (bears love honey right?) the monk will run like hell out of the area. Hopefully the owl bear and the bees will kill each other or the owl bear will flee and lead the bees away from their nest, leaving the PCs able to easily mop up any remaining bees, take the honey and get the hell out of there. They declare that nothing could possibly go wrong as the DM grins ghoulishly.

Does that sound familiar to anyone?

And here's my spoof:

Combat as War: The PCs make knowledge checks, and prepare for the encounter, using their abilities intelligently, and having good teamwork. Realizing that bears raid honey trees in nature, one character contracts ursine lycanthropy, while another prepares Summons spells to summon bears. They also consider how to utilize the smoke that beekeepers use to collect honey, and, while discussing holding their breath and establishing escape routes even in smoke, realize that Undead have DR, and neither breathe nor can be poisoned. With cooperation, and every advantage, they roflstomp the encounter, without taking damage, and reconsider their plan to kill the Queen Bee. Instead, they leave her alive, and vow to return to get even more free money later. The GM congratulates them for a game well played, and for exceeding both his expectations on how much they'd net (given the lycanthropy strength boost, and that the undead added their carrying capacity to the party), and his expectation of this being a one-shot cash cow.

Combat as Sport: the party blunders straight into the encounter as always, declaring that nothing could possibly go wrong as the DM grins ghoulishly, but there’s BEES EVERYWHERE! GIANT BEES! With nasty poison saves! The PCs don't even consider running for their lives, or that they don’t stand a chance against the bees, because they know that the GM will make everything a fair fight. But then the Fighter stowed his magical sword in favor of his hammer, because nobody uses swords against bees IRL, and hammers smush bees, right? The barbarian decides now, while he's distracted and won't be expecting it, is the perfect time to take revenge on the Wizard, and power attack leap attack shock troopers him into a thin red paste. On a series of unlucky rolls, aided by their poor tactics, the Fighter and Barbarian succumb to the poison. The Rogue, who was hiding the whole time, attempts to flee, using a zigzag pattern (because bees have problems with zigzag, right?), and dies to the maximum number of AoOs. The GM face palms as the party suffers yet another TPK on an encounter his 7-year-old brother was able to solo.

Sound familiar?

Point is, at its heart, CaS vs CaW is, afaict, whether or not there exists a strategic layer, whereby the party can attempt to obtain advantage, or whether by social contract such a layer is off-limits, to allow the GM to provide a "sporting challenge".

But the author of that article shoved a great many unrelated things under each side.

Inchhighguy
2019-07-25, 09:28 PM
Point is, at its heart, CaS vs CaW is, afaict, whether or not there exists a strategic layer, whereby the party can attempt to obtain advantage, or whether by social contract such a layer is off-limits, to allow the GM to provide a "sporting challenge".

But the author of that article shoved a great many unrelated things under each side.

I must say the ''articles'' definitions of Combat as Sport and Combat as War make no sense. So CaS is a fun game...and CaW is..er..what a nightmare?

THOUGH...when it gives the examples of:

CaS:Princess Bride Sword Fight

CaW:Indiana Jones - Swordman Vs. Indiana

CaS:Princess Bride Sword Fight is a light hearted romp of a non fight. Nobody dies.

CaW:Indiana Jones - Swordman Vs. Indiana is a fight...to the Death.

So the examples make a bit more sense, but all the other paragraphs are just a bunch of crazy mixed up words.

Tanarii
2019-07-25, 11:21 PM
Point is, at its heart, CaS vs CaW is, afaict, whether or not there exists a strategic layer, whereby the party can attempt to obtain advantage, or whether by social contract such a layer is off-limits, to allow the GM to provide a "sporting challenge".
That's what it probably should be. But since the article was really about a certain view of old school D&D vs new expectations, it was really about "making up rules because a strategic layer doesn't exist and even the tactical layer is a mishmash of poorly interlocking subsystems" vs "the tactical layer is now well written and the focus of the game, and the strategic layer still doesn't really exist, so most people just play within the tactical layer."

Personally I align them more closely with "sandbox / pick the difficulty of what you're going to face and flee if it's too much" vs "single party / adventure designed to your level". But that's not really accurate. To use a video game analogy, World of Warcraft is a sandbox, and you pick a raid instance based on if you think you can take it. But you still are limited by the game's programming and you still have faith that the devs designed it with an expectation that a certain level could beat it, and it's generally designed to be taken on as a series of encounters without pulling the entire instance. I doubt anyone would call a WoW instance combat as war.

Quertus
2019-07-26, 06:52 AM
That's what it probably should be. But since the article was really about a certain view of old school D&D vs new expectations, it was really about "making up rules because a strategic layer doesn't exist and even the tactical layer is a mishmash of poorly interlocking subsystems" vs "the tactical layer is now well written and the focus of the game, and the strategic layer still doesn't really exist, so most people just play within the tactical layer."

Personally I align them more closely with "sandbox / pick the difficulty of what you're going to face and flee if it's too much" vs "single party / adventure designed to your level". But that's not really accurate. To use a video game analogy, World of Warcraft is a sandbox, and you pick a raid instance based on if you think you can take it. But you still are limited by the game's programming and you still have faith that the devs designed it with an expectation that a certain level could beat it, and it's generally designed to be taken on as a series of encounters without pulling the entire instance. I doubt anyone would call a WoW instance combat as war.

I mean, there's choosing what to encounter, and choosing how to encounter it. But, with the former, if the whole world is constantly scaling with you as you level, I doubt it'd be an easy sell to call it CaW.

And thanks for reminding me - I had wanted the Thief/Rogue to flee from the bees in a zigzag pattern (because bees have problems with zigzag, right?), to demonstrate attempting to create new rules in CaS / at the tactical layer, as a clear counterpoint to the CaW party following the rules at the strategic layer (DR, time one can hold their breath, etc).

Quertus
2019-07-27, 10:18 AM
So, how many good, identifiable axes/meters/stats get grouped together in that article about CaW vs CaS? whether / the extent to which the GM builds balanced encounters
Strategical impact
Tactical impact
Player competence
Following rules vs going outside them
GM malice
Player confidence issues (over, under)







And there's doubtless others.

Is the article a fair depiction of oldschool vs newfangled gaming? Not in my experience. Is this a fair depiction of those who want a series of sporting challenges vs those who want the challenge of making fights winnable? Not even remotely. I think that the only things that can actually be tied to one group vs the other is whether the GM carefully crafts (and tests) balanced encounters, and whether the strategic layer is allowed to impact the challenge level of the encounter - in short, whether encounters are "guaranteed" to be sporting, or not.

Now, IME, the one that feels most likely to be tied to one group vs another is that, typically, those players who were not clever enough to impact the strategic layer were also not clever enough to impact the tactical layer. But, having seen plenty such players at both CaW and CaS tables, even that level of player (in)competence isn't strictly tied to either playing style.

-----

As the Giant put it (IIRC, not intentionally misquoting him, but I cannot actually find the quote), "my limited game time is too precious to waste on encounters that aren't fun". I think it's one of the best arguments for sporting encounters I've heard (as it's the only one I can remember - darn senility). IMO, the distinction between CaW & CaS is one of responsibility - is the GM just responsible for picking good ingredients, or is he responsible for cooking the meal, too? Also, one of fun - do the players enjoy the strategic layer, "cooking the meal to taste", or would they rather… not?

What does all this have to do with the topic at hand? Heck, I don't even remember. Darn senility. But, if I had to guess, I'd say it's a question of cooking a meal for players will enjoy, rather than one that they'll force down or reject.

It's about understanding more than just a few buzzwords, but actually understanding what works for your players, and why. It's about dissecting complex issues, and discussing the components openly, meaningfully, and intelligently.

Inchhighguy
2019-07-27, 07:44 PM
What does all this have to do with the topic at hand? Heck, I don't even remember. Darn senility. But, if I had to guess, I'd say it's a question of cooking a meal for players will enjoy, rather than one that they'll force down or reject.


The topic sound very ''flashback" to me. Like your in the future, telling a story about some heros that did a great thing...and of course the heros did the thing that is why you are telling the story in the first place.

But for that to happen in the ''present" of the game requires the DM have a simple and easy game to simulate the game world staccked in the PCs favor and the ''luck" of the PCs.

I shall officaly call this new term: Adventure As Sport.

KineticDiplomat
2019-07-29, 02:07 PM
Re: CaW and Warcrimes. This actually rather reveals the difference between the two, CaS and CaW. Using D&D as the most commonly played example, players are routinely granted spells that give them access to chemical weapons (toxic cloud, stinking cloud for CS gas, etc), poison for ingesting, coating weapons, with, and so forth, napalm and thermobaric equivalents, non-target discriminating area denial weapons, and many more on just the physical world. The basic level 5 party has the ability to violate every single human prohibition there is on weapon use in the real world - and that's before we start having instantaneous mental torture, raising the dead, forcible brainwashing, and literally ripping souls apart. Obviously using them is not a moral issue in most RPGs. I've never heard of a party coming back to town only to be told "wait...wait...you used fireball AND toxic cloud? You'll be standing trial now. We have standards of civilized behavior to uphold."

The difference is that in CaS you duke it out with your flashy arsenal, sending fiery, poisonous, aggravated injury causing death at your enemies in an environment where you stand up, they stand up, and its a man to man fight with somewhat different weapons. No one pays attention to "criminal" abilities because they are little more than a different type of sword/crossbow being used in face to face battles like D&D is designed. No one cares what tools you are using because the game consists of for the most part morally unambiguous combat between warriors.

CaW is what happens when you actually apply logical thought to the point that you have been handed nerve agents, flamethrowers, waves of expendable and renewable troops that just need summoning, and other tools for murdering people with maximum efficiency and minimum risk. And that the setting does not really care that you use them. And you can fling them from your hands in a setting where glass windows are still a big deal in some places. Sure, the GM can keep making up reasons why your idea doesn't work, but that eventually means he just wants you to play CaS.