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Quertus
2020-10-27, 04:15 PM
Combat as War and Combat as Sport - defined by the presence or absence (respectively) of the strategic layer. Is that definition enough?

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When creating a dichotomy, one should strive to create definitions which encompass, at the least, the *majority* of the space described, as well as covering the most common / popular / visible / well-known portions of that space.

The original descriptions of Combat as Sport vs Combat as War left a lot to be desired. Eventually, fed up with people's inability to recognize this fact, I spoofed the article to drive my point home, and wrote what at the time I believed to be much clearer, cleaner definitions for the terms.

Except… what I wrote, while better, was still pretty vague. And, recently, it has been demonstrated that my "not definitions" may not necessarily hold up to edge cases in a meaningful way.

So, for reference

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.

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?

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?

[list] 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)

My original contention is that the only axis that matters in evaluating CaW vs CaS is the ability of the players/PCs to use the strategic layer to manipulate the specifics (including and especially the difficulty) of the encounter.

At the player level, in CaS, the onus is on the GM to create balanced encounters that are "sporting"; the onus is on the players to not break the encounters / not engage the strategic layer. This is pretty much "beer and pretzels", "kick down the door" fun.

CaW, OTOH, demands that the GM "play it honest", letting the players manipulate the strategic layer to modify the challenge. The onus is on the GM to let the players actions have logical consequences; the onus is on the players to make the encounter… survivable? Fun? "5D chess" is an extreme example of CaW.

One rather misleading thing about the terms is their focus on Combat. I hold that this is true for any encounter (including the ability to *reframe* an encounter as combat / social / stealth / puzzle / whatever).

There is also the question of whether encounters are mandatory or optional under each paradigm.

Doubtless, there are other edge cases where my minimalist definitions might begin to show some strain.

So, what do y'all think? How *should* CaW & CaS be defined?

Yora
2020-10-27, 05:10 PM
Presence or absence of tactics is completely irrelevant to the distinction.

It's really all about the mindset with which you go into a fight, and the expectations of how battle is conducted.

Games with the d20 systems are usually considered the most prominent examples of Combat as Sport: Both sides meet on a level playing field, both with a limited set of approved and "legal" moves, with the expectation that they have a contest to determine which side makes the better thought out use with the moves that are available to them.
Players go into a combat encounter anticipating to be challenged by the GM, and looking forward to test and show how well they understand the abilities on their character sheet and the rules of combat in the rulebook. Combat as Sport is a logic puzzle that can be solved analytically. Using methods that are considered to be "cheesy" is frowned upon as it goes against the spirit of the game.

Combat as War is a very different approach. In Combat as War, there is no expectation that a combat is fair. The odds are stacked against the characters and the GM is expected to pull all kinds of nasty tricks. The challenge for the players is not to find an optimal solution to how the basic combat moves and the special abilities of their characters can lead to victory in an even fight, where the enemy is fighting the same way.
Fairnes and using the rules as they are intended is not the expectation in a figt that is Combat as War. The only goal is to win, by whatever means necessary. Using cheesy exploits in the rules is not considered bad sportsmanship, it's regarded as the right way to play. The way that the game is supposed to be.

In Combat as Sport, the players and GM have a gentlemen's agreement and mutual understanding that the enemies the characters face will not be too difficult to defeat, and that the players play the game according to the spirit of the rules.
In Combat as War, both the players and GM try to constantly outsmart each other by coming up with unusual and unexpected setups and outlandish improvisation.

Combat as War can be very tactical, but generally we find this approach to combat in games with very general and vague rules. Improvisation and thinking outside the box are the name of the game. You never really know what to expect and players are supposed to think on their feet when they are thrown into situations they've never had to deal with before.
Combat as Sport is more common in games with very elaborate and specific rules that aim to cover as many probably cases as possible. In these games, players have extensive to full knowledge of all the factors that can come up in a fight.

Sport has rules, and when people don't stick to them there is little point to even play.
In war, everything is permitted if it helps you win.

In my experience, Combat as Sport requires much more attention to the details of an encounter and careful deliberation of every move. Combat as war tends to be more of a fun romp where you go wild. Because when the rules are flexible, players don't have certainty of what a die roll will mean exactly. Things rely much more on the GMs judgement if an action sounds clever and sensible and whether it should work out because it was a great idea, or make little difference because it was pretty dumb.

Tvtyrant
2020-10-27, 05:17 PM
Those examples seem pretty biased to me. Combat As War implies to me that both sides are doing their utmost to win within the rules. Scry and Die is met with Glyphs, Symbols and other traps. Everything escalates as the DM and party try to one up each other.

Combat as Sport implies to me that the party and the DM agree combat is largely distinct from the setting, so they act within the settings' expectations of behavior. Maybe the Druid turns into a bird to scout, but the party doesn't Planar Bind the most detection free creature they can find to scout and then assassinate the enemies. The enemies hide in evil lairs instead of demiplanes, and don't use bomb strapped civilians as hostages wherever they go. It's an agreement that both sides will abide by setting expectations, basically. Swordfights using swords instead of ice assassins, or plague infected mice swarms, or whatever the particular metaweapon is.

Edit: Not that the former is metagaming per say. Just that there is always discrepancies between mechanics and setting, and finding the most mechanically efficient system will always veer somewhat from the setting. Harry Potter is a notorious example where the characters often look like idiots because they are supposed to look and act like anachonistic wizards, but their mechanics leads to semi-deific nested subspaces ala Doctor Who or Myst.

Duff
2020-10-27, 06:57 PM
Fairnes and using the rules as they are intended is not the expectation in a figt that is Combat as War. The only goal is to win, by whatever means necessary. Using cheesy exploits in the rules is not considered bad sportsmanship, it's regarded as the right way to play. The way that the game is supposed to be.

I disagree on this point. The "combat as war" mindset can be done as a character choice and still be played within the spirit of the rules. You might say the players are doing "combat as sport", just from a slightly more zoomed out perspective where the rest of the world and underhand tactics are part of the game. So your players in the bee fight won't use rule exploits (and might even not use particularly optimised builds) but will use owlbears and mud and fire to win the fight.
I refer to the characters which don't try to do this a simple thinkers - They see a problem and they work out how to solve it with the tools they have. They fight a monster using their best skills, weapons and tactics, but aren't looking to change the world so they don't have problems (or the problems are easer to solve).

If you're exploiting the rules ruthlessly, your players are also approaching it as "conflict as war".
Heavily optimised characters walking into a fair fight might even be characters approaching combat as (high stakes) sport with players playing CAW

RedWarlock
2020-10-27, 10:59 PM
The one thing I'll add is that it's a spectrum, not a binary.

Duff's example is just closer to the center.

There's also the factor of broken rules to consider. CaS functions because that Gentleman's Agreement keeps the DM and the players from digging those outside edges where the game-mechanic physical laws break down. CaW, on the other hand, may either exploit those boundary spaces, or the DM and players might try to patch them pre-game as best they can. (Even in CaW, the players may expect a good challenge and not rocks-fall-everyone-dies level DM BS.)

zarionofarabel
2020-10-27, 11:25 PM
*Assume DnD for ease of reference.

Combat as Sport - All encounters are built using the proper challenge rating, PCs NEVER face opponents outside the accepted challenge rating.

Combat as War - No encounter is built using challenge ratings, it simply up to DM whim what the PCs face.

awa
2020-10-27, 11:57 PM
I see two aspects to this division and I think neither is about difficulty.

1) how much planning went into a specific fight on the dms end. In combat as war (CAW) the pcs have a lot more control over how they engage a target this might mean the fight is harder or easier it certainly makes it harder for the dm to make plans ahead of time. Combat as sport (CAS) the dm has more control the pcs are going to arrive in a fight with a fairly predictable power.

The advantage here with CAW is the pcs have more freedom; the advantage here with CAS is the dm can design interesting encounters.

2) a second aspect while not directly part of the equation is the fight fun? In CAW the general answer is no a fight is what happens when you failed to plan properly. In CAS the answer is yes otherwise you wouldn’t be playing the game at all because fighting is fun.

Ask yourself this which is more appealing to you having an epic battle with the dark lord in a volcano lair as the lava slowly seeps closer to you forcing you to continue to climb to new heights to avoid burning or death. Or would you prefer to trick the dark lord into a mine shaft and then collapse it on him while he wails in impotent rage. That is the difference between CAS and CAW and which one appeals more is a matter of opinion.

I think people get so hung up on which one they like they can’t help but make it a pejorative. The fact that this particular forum tends to have an extremely hostile opinion of anything that even hints of the dm directing play, pushes some to bash CAS which requires it to a degree.
CAS can have hard fights; a fight the pcs are designed to lose so they can get captured is still CAS. It can have easy fights either to introduce the pcs to a mechanic that will be important in a latter harder fight, to give a neglected pc an opportunity to shine or just because.

I would also argue that most games are not wholly CAS or CAW but a little bit of both. Getting silver for the werewolf fight and picking off some sentries before the main battle but then fighting the werewolf in pre-scripted burning warehouse would be a bit of both.

Quertus
2020-10-28, 12:32 AM
Anyone else noticing that the server seems to be having issues?

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CaS certainly requires the Goldilocks-approved "just right" difficulty. "Too hard" is certainly one implementation of CaW; however, what about "too easy" - where does that fit in?

My contention is that CaS accepts exclusively {"just right"}, whereas CaW accepts {"too hard", "just right", "too easy"}. Those who care about the Challenge aesthetic will doubtless tend towards "too hard" when playing CaW, but I don't think that CaW inherently cares about the default difficulty setting of the encounter.

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Strategy is not a synonym for tactics.

When I discuss "engaging the strategic layer", I am talking about actions designed to change the difficulty of the encounter. "Contracting ursine lycanthropy", "hiring/consulting a beekeeper", "animating / becoming undead" - these are examples of strategic decisions designed to reduce the difficulty of the encounter with giant bees.

Ever see threads or hear GMs complain, "man, the party did X, now how can I make Y challenging?"? That's the kind of actions I'm taking about. (And those GMs that make those comments have clearly adopted the challenge aesthetic, and rejected CaW (at least, according to my understanding of CaW)).

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I think that the earliest example of a CaW mindset is the earliest gamers, who believed that if the dice came out, you had already lost. If possible, everything should be resolved at a level where there is no chance of failure - in the bees example, that includes things like smoke to make them docile, or DR beyond their ability to deal damage.

These are not "drown healing" exploits - they are how the world legitimately *should* operate.

However, just because you aren't cheating from the PoV of pulling infinite loops or breaking game physics doesn't mean that CaS won't cry foul.

If the GM had created a series of CR-appropriate bee fights, and then the players came in invisible, used smoke to make the bees docile, or even just brought extra combatants to change the difficulty of the fights, I can certainly see them being accused of "cheating" (or, at least, "unsportsmanlike conduct") from a CaS perspective.

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The next most classic example of CaW is, IMO, the Schrödinger's Wizard: perform sufficient Divinations to always prepare the perfect loadout of spells for every encounter. When you always have the right tool for the job, and access to near-infinite tools, or tends to greatly affect the Challenge of, well, challenges.

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3e is not inherently CaS.

The DMG encounter guidelines expect GMs to routinely / randomly provide challenges of up to ±4 EL from the party's ECL, and the XP table expects characters to face individual creatures of up to ±7(8?) CR from their ECL (with no limit to *how many* of those creatures one can earn XP from in a single encounter).

This is pretty far into CaW territory. (Although it is interesting evidence of the notion of a spectrum, I, personally, have difficulty conceptualizing a spectrum of valid answers to the binary yes/no questions of, "are the PCs allowed to engage the strategic layer to change the Challenge of encounters?", and "is the GM responsible for ensuring that all encounters are 'fair fights' that the party can survive?".)

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EDIT: awa, I agree with a lot of what you said; however, I contend that CaW is capable of *more interesting* encounters than CaS because it is not constrained to make them "balanced". Just look at how much more interesting the 2e Wild Mage is than the 3e counterpart, or all of 4e for examples of how constraining things to be balanced makes them less interesting. Or just use the trivial logic of "CaS encounters are a subset of CaW encounters; all CaS encounters could be used in a CaW game. However, the reverse is not true. So, if the imbalanced encounter is more interesting, it can be played in CaW, but not in CaS.".

Granted, it *may* be more likely that PCs in CaW will engage the more interesting encounters in uninteresting ways… jury is still out on that one.

Tvtyrant
2020-10-28, 12:43 AM
Seems to me you are seeing DM choices as reactive, but the world can also be proactive. If you make a big enough name for yourself too quickly you die because more powerful individuals get involved. That would also be Combat as War, it just doesn't assume that only the characters use their brains. If you foil the Dark Lord's minions you might not get a slow escalation but a hit squad of Wraiths, or an army that uses dogs and Dancing Lights to find you.

Tucker's Kobolds is also CaW, it just runs the opposite direction. Or Goblins that use Lycanthropy to give them an edge, etc.

Quertus
2020-10-28, 12:50 AM
Seems to me you are seeing DM choices as reactive, but the world can also be proactive. If you make a big enough name for yourself too quickly you die because more powerful individuals get involved. That would also be Combat as War, it just doesn't assume that only the characters use their brains. If you foil the Dark Lord's minions you might not get a slow escalation but a hit squad of Wraiths, or an army that uses dogs and Dancing Lights to find you.

Tucker's Kobolds is also CaW, it just runs the opposite direction. Or Goblins that use Lycanthropy to give them an edge, etc.

Not at all! To simplify matters (because it's easier to discuss), I am actually looking at a world that is neither *reactive* nor *proactive*, but entirely static and prescripted ("there are bees here - what do you do?").

So, afaict, such variables are completely irrelevant to the conversation at hand.

GeoffWatson
2020-10-28, 01:55 AM
I'm not a fan of the distinction, as it is usually used by CaW fans to insult CaS players. CaW is for smart, strategic play, while CaS is for dummies who charge at at every monster.

Having played war games that cover both strategy/operational and tactical scales, I find that using both is boring - if you do well at strategy, the tactical battle is too easy.

I prefer CaS, as you usually have interesting tactical battles, while CaW is mostly about having the right spell for the job, or fast-talking the DM into letting you win without a dice roll (eg. setting the goblin caves on fire so they all immedately die from smoke as the adventure doesn't specifically mention ventilation).

Zombimode
2020-10-28, 03:36 AM
I prefer CaS, as you usually have interesting tactical battles, while CaW is mostly about having the right spell for the job, or fast-talking the DM into letting you win without a dice roll (eg. setting the goblin caves on fire so they all immedately die from smoke as the adventure doesn't specifically mention ventilation).

While it could play out like this, it is not mandatory.

For me, CaW at it's best is all about leveling the playing field. You have to act on the strategic layer to even have a chance for winnig. That's why CaW does not preclude tactical insteresting encounters.

Red Hand of Doom is very much a CaW campaign done right: many of the major sites have strong enough opposition that, when combined, will crush the PCs or at least make it a very costly fight.

As such the players are encouraged to act on the strategic layer (taking out isolated enemies before the fight, sneaking/moving into favorable positions, aquiring allies, trying to fight the enemies piecemeal, using the environment, scouting and perparing etc.) in addition to perform well in the actual combat.

To me that makes the whole experience more meaningful in contrast to when it would be clear to me that I, as a player, can't do anything to shift the scales and that I also don't have a need to because the encounters are already tailored.

Yora
2020-10-28, 04:15 AM
For me, CaW at it's best is all about leveling the playing field. You have to act on the strategic layer to even have a chance for winnig. That's why CaW does not preclude tactical insteresting encounters.
I think we might actually have the same idea, but I would not call it levelling the playing field. I'd call it stacking the odds in your favor.


I'm not a fan of the distinction, as it is usually used by CaW fans to insult CaS players. CaW is for smart, strategic play, while CaS is for dummies who charge at at every monster.

Combat as War is roleplaying,
Combat as Sport is roll playing.
:smalltongue:

MoiMagnus
2020-10-28, 04:22 AM
The different parts I see are

(1) Does the concept of "encounters" is significant? How much link does exist between a single encounter and the overhaul campaign.

A CaS proponent will usually express its distaste for out-of-the-encounters effects having significant impact on the encounter (like extensive preparation), or in-the-encounter effects having a significant impact outside of it (like permanent injuries). All of those effects are disturbances that ruin the fun of the fight. In its more radical case, a CaS proponent will push for taking a long rest between each fight, as the concept of attrition war is not something he/she enjoys participating to.
A CaS DM will try to balance encounters so that every fight is interesting by itself, even if that mean cancelling the bonus/penalties from previous fight. (Have a rough day? Let's nerf the enemies. You rolled over the previous encounter? Let's buff the enemies.)
CaS does not mean that every fight is evenly matched. But it means that when building a non-level-appropriate fight as per CR, there is a backed-in solution which is level appropriate (like running away), and explicitly presented to the players so that they don't blindly go into the fight.

For a CaW proponent, the fights are a mean, not a goal. Cancelling the bonus from victories by making later fight harder would feel like robbing them from the entire point of winning a fight, and disregarding the effects of preparation as removing their agency to outsmart the enemies.
A CaW DM will expect the players to try to manipulate the encounters they take part in, and will punish lack of anticipation skills from the players but reward unorthodox approaches at solving problems.

CaS players with a CaW DM will result in frequents TPK, or at least frequent moments when the players complain about the DM being unfair or adversarial. CaW players with a CaS DM will result in a feeling of lack of agency / railroading, or the DM growing more and more frustrated than his fight doesn't go as planned and enjoying less and less being a DM (depending on how much the DM tries to force CaS onto the players).

(2) How many conventions the table has, aka how much "good sportsmanship" is expected. E.g do monsters finish of dying PCs?

This question is quite different from CaS vs CaW, but often gets lumped into it. It is totally possible to play CaS with very few conventions other than respecting the limits of the combat encounters. And it is totally possible to play CaW where the DM applies a very strict "you can only die from your own mistakes" or "player equipment is sacred and cannot be lost/stolen".

(3) A question of expected gameplay.

It's not unusual for players to come with expectation like "I have this cool power I want to use". Assuming quick level up (often the case with milestone level up) or rare gaming sessions (so the player rediscover their character each time), the players have an expected gameplay for their character, and will feel frustrated if the challenges in front cannot be solved with their expected gameplay.

At the contrary, if that's the 10th fight of the (real life) week you're doing with the same character and not significant changes of powers available to your character, you will appreciate having a fight that cannot be summed up by "I use the standard tactics".

PS:
I am firmly CaS. I don't like to anticipate. I usually follow the path (or the rails) to discover what is happening and react to it, and find it very tiring to have to actually take initiatives. I have a very weird relationship with loots, as while I do enjoy loot, there are a lot of kind of loots that I actually find more tiring than enjoying. (In particular, I don't like at all the fact that wizards loot their spells).

Vahnavoi
2020-10-28, 07:49 AM
Distinquishing between games focused on tactics versus strategy is useful, but calling this distinction "combat as war versus combat as sport" is not. For one, it is misleading because sports do not universally or even generally lack strategic layers; if you engaged in any sport to compete even at a low amateur level, you'll know this.

For two, if people know and understand what words "tactics" and "strategy" mean, you can just use those words. Seriously. The need to define idiosyncratic colloquialisms like "combat as war" strictly is a self-created problem. It's a simple analogy most people with two brain cells could get from the original description. In any situation where the original description is not enough, the correct solution is to ditch the analogy and find better words to describe your point. In this case, the exact terms already exist and eliminate need for the analogy.

awa
2020-10-28, 07:50 AM
EDIT: awa, I agree with a lot of what you said; however, I contend that CaW is capable of *more interesting* encounters than CaS because it is not constrained to make them "balanced". Just look at how much more interesting the 2e Wild Mage is than the 3e counterpart, or all of 4e for examples of how constraining things to be balanced makes them less interesting. Or just use the trivial logic of "CaS encounters are a subset of CaW encounters; all CaS encounters could be used in a CaW game. However, the reverse is not true. So, if the imbalanced encounter is more interesting, it can be played in CaW, but not in CaS.".

Granted, it *may* be more likely that PCs in CaW will engage the more interesting encounters in uninteresting waysÂ… jury is still out on that one.

A good CAS dm can ensure interesting encounters simply by designing them to work that way, they know what the pcs will be fighting and when and thus can design interesting combos, interesting terrain and work out their interactions ahead of time. While a CAW dm could attempt the same the inability to know where or when the pcs are going to do something wildly increases the difficulty of doing so and thus they rely a lot more on luck for an interesting encounter to occur.

If I design a CAS fight in a burning building I can decide ahead of time how the fire reacts how fast it spreads, what the difficulty to open a blocked door is, if and when a floor/ ceiling will collapse and design a very cinematic fight. In a CAW scenario i have much less control to make certain the pcs end up in that burning building and thus I either run into a situation where my planning time might be wasted if they avoid the burning building or find a away to negate the or I have less time to plan and polish the fight worst case I might be having to do it all on the fly.

on an unrelated note
I would also argue that CAS works better at lower levels, assuming you dont allow wacky shenanigan to work their are simply less effective levers the pcs can apply and going in and stabbing some dudes may very well be the only effective choice. Where at higher levels particularly with casters they have so many options you either need much greater buy in or a much more significant amount of railroading to get them to engage with the planed encounters in the expected way.

As a short mini example lets say you plan an encounter where a giant troll bursts out from under a bridge causing the bridge to collapse into a partially dry river bed, you draw out the terrain on your map, mark down what the varying levels of water, mud and incline have on the fight. Work out the difficulties of leaping clear of the collapsing bridge ect. A low level party is almost certainly going to cross a bridge they have no reason not to, a high level party well no telling what will happen, did they decide to memorize a flight spell for the whole party? Teleport? Will the barbarian just pick up the party and jump across the river? They have so many options that it becomes much harder to predict what they can and will do.

That said I suspect most games are on a spectrum of CAW and CAS with more games being pure CAW then pure CAS.

To Vahnavoi) I am also not particularly enamored with the terms, combined with a tendency for proponents of CAW denigrating CAS, the terms at least in my mind seem to be implying that CAS is inferior to CAW. As some one who enjoys the tactical game from both sides of the screen I dislike that.

Lvl 2 Expert
2020-10-28, 09:50 AM
I think one of the best examples of what the distinction is is still that in combat as sport you can fight multiple groups of enemies (from the same faction) in the same smallish dungeon. Yes, in combat as war you might be able to catch the goblins by surprise and split up into different groups, but there's no way that group 1 is fighting you in the first room while group 2 is patiently waiting for you to finish in the next. Group 1 will call for help, or execute a tactical retreat, or group 2 will just plain hear the fighting, or... And most of the time a dungeon has a pretty observable entrance, so they'll have a sentry report your approach and they all man an ambush for you, not wherever the fight would be the coolest, but wherever it would be most advantageous for them.

So on one hand combat as war places a burden on the GM to think things through a lot further than combat as sport, on the other hand it that very thinking it through also blocks a lot of options.

King of Nowhere
2020-10-28, 09:51 AM
i really, really don't like those definitions. they are arbitrary, and they try to set up dichotomies where they need not be.
for example, at my table using ganks and strategy and everything you can do get the drop on the enemies and stack the fight in your favor is absolutely fair game, and that's something you define as CaW. on the other hand, we'd not want to exploit rule loopholes, which you'd define as CaS. Nor could you place us half-way, because halfway would entail a bit of anything, not being strongly stacked on one side of the definition for one aspect, and strongly on the other side for the other aspect.

furthermore, your bias against casual players is evident in the way you describe the CaS scenario as a bunch of bumbling morons.

it would be a much better definition to have "combat as problem solving", where you try to use strategy outside of combat to improve the chances, and "combat as charOP", where you try to optimize your character to be stronger, and "combat as tactics", where you stumble into the fight and then try to use your resources at best to win. and possibly even more axes that i'm not thinking about right now.
then your example of bumbling morons would score very low in all those axes. or they'd just be bad at it.

and you'd also need an entirely new axis for "RAI vs RAW", describing how much you would use the letter of the rules to abuse loopholes. Or a "roleplaying vs RAW" to describe how much your interactions are defined by the result of a diplomacy check and how much by using established elements of the story. Also a "RAW vs homebrew" for the charOP axis: if your wizard is incompetent and does nothing but casting fireballs even when she's level 15, do you show her an incantatrix build and let her retrain, or do you drop a staff increasing her fireball damage in the loot? both have the same purpose and results, but they use very different means.

ultimately, you can't just divide all the various styles of gaming along a line. And you should be especially wary of your own prejudices to avoid grouping the extremes of that line as "the cool guys" and "the dumb guys"

kyoryu
2020-10-28, 10:25 AM
In CaS, the goal is that the encounter itself is interesting. As pointed out, the GM can ensure an interesting and balanced encounter. Often/generally, the players won't choose what encounters they go into. The assumption is that the encounters will be balanced, and players can approach them with what they have and what is in the encounter.

This doesn't mean that tactics are irrelevant. It does mean that, generally, each encounter is a "closed set" and is designed to be "beatable" given what's on hand.

In CaW, the combat itself is not the interesting bit. Pursuing goals is. Combat is just a means to an end, not the end in and of itself. As such, having an "interesting" encounter isn't valuable. What is valuable is having an objective that can be attained in multiple ways, and a complex situation that gives players options both in terms of what encounters to engage in, what encounters to bypass, and how to engage in encounters.

That's one of the areas that the CaS/CaW examples usually fail in, is that they both presume that the encounter is happening. Encounter selection is a huge part of CaW, and so ignoring that misses a ton.

I'd also say that CaS lends itself more to more linear games, while CaW lends itself more to more open games.

And that's probably a big part of the problem is that people talking about these terms are probably more used to one style of game than another, and so interpret them from a framework that is primarily based on one or the other, and so exaggerate the one that they're really doing (since they think what they do is "normal" and therefore the term being used must express something "more"), while shoving the other one's square peg into the round hole of their expectations.

I do think the terms are valuable, as they, in many ways, capture the essence. In war, you want things as unfair as possible. The goal is not to show off how good you are at fighting, the goal is to either completely avoid fights, or to make them so one-sided that one side has to retreat immediately. The best fight in a war is boring. The goal is to arrange the situation so that you have as lopsided of a situation as possible. That doesn't mean that having people good at fighting, or good at tactics on the micro-level isn't helpful or important.... but it's the secondary factor.

In sports, however, we want to see teams that are fairly evenly matched (though in RPGs we generally want things to be tilted in the players' favor). We want a thrilling game between well matched teams where the result is up in the air. That doesn't mean that people in sports "play dumb". They play as smart as they can, but they ideally start on a roughly even playing field. They can get an advantage by "good play", but they can't get an advantage by putting twice as many people on the field. Sometimes you'll get some advantage outside of the strict boundaries of the sport (home field advantage, advantage from being used to different types of weather, etc.), but the primary emphasis is on a "fair" fight between two reasonably even sides.

Quertus
2020-10-28, 12:21 PM
Distinquishing between games focused on tactics versus strategy is useful, but calling this distinction "combat as war versus combat as sport" is not.

if people know and understand what words "tactics" and "strategy" mean, you can just use those words. Seriously. The need to define idiosyncratic colloquialisms like "combat as war" strictly is a self-created problem.

Yes and no? I mean, my initial "definition" was the trivial, "is the strategic layer accessible?".

The issue is, the terms CaW and CaS have baggage - and that's the point. There are numerous behaviors that grow from the decision whether or not to allow Strategy to affect the Challenge.

Many people foolishly attempt "no wealth 3e", to disastrous effect. If anyone gets all of the surrounding rules changed, and makes a good CaS game out of it, then I expect them to give it a more descriptive name, to distinguish it from the general fail case of "doing it wrong". Same thing here. CaW and CaS are both valid playstyles; but they need names to explain that they are thought-through playstyles, not just kneejerk, "can we use strategy, yes or no".


The different parts I see are

(1) Does the concept of "encounters" is significant? How much link does exist between a single encounter and the overhaul campaign.

A CaS proponent will usually express its distaste for out-of-the-encounters effects having significant impact on the encounter (like extensive preparation), or in-the-encounter effects having a significant impact outside of it (like permanent injuries). All of those effects are disturbances that ruin the fun of the fight. In its more radical case, a CaS proponent will push for taking a long rest between each fight, as the concept of attrition war is not something he/she enjoys participating to.
A CaS DM will try to balance encounters so that every fight is interesting by itself, even if that mean cancelling the bonus/penalties from previous fight. (Have a rough day? Let's nerf the enemies. You rolled over the previous encounter? Let's buff the enemies.)
CaS does not mean that every fight is evenly matched. But it means that when building a non-level-appropriate fight as per CR, there is a backed-in solution which is level appropriate (like running away), and explicitly presented to the players so that they don't blindly go into the fight.

For a CaW proponent, the fights are a mean, not a goal. Cancelling the bonus from victories by making later fight harder would feel like robbing them from the entire point of winning a fight, and disregarding the effects of preparation as removing their agency to outsmart the enemies.
A CaW DM will expect the players to try to manipulate the encounters they take part in, and will punish lack of anticipation skills from the players but reward unorthodox approaches at solving problems.

CaS players with a CaW DM will result in frequents TPK, or at least frequent moments when the players complain about the DM being unfair or adversarial. CaW players with a CaS DM will result in a feeling of lack of agency / railroading, or the DM growing more and more frustrated than his fight doesn't go as planned and enjoying less and less being a DM (depending on how much the DM tries to force CaS onto the players).

Sounds good.


(2) How many conventions the table has, aka how much "good sportsmanship" is expected. E.g do monsters finish of dying PCs?

This question is quite different from CaS vs CaW, but often gets lumped into it. It is totally possible to play CaS with very few conventions other than respecting the limits of the combat encounters. And it is totally possible to play CaW where the DM applies a very strict "you can only die from your own mistakes" or "player equipment is sacred and cannot be lost/stolen".

Eh, I would *not* include this in CaW vs CaS - it seems to muddy the waters, as both could do either.


(3) A question of expected gameplay.

It's not unusual for players to come with expectation like "I have this cool power I want to use". Assuming quick level up (often the case with milestone level up) or rare gaming sessions (so the player rediscover their character each time), the players have an expected gameplay for their character, and will feel frustrated if the challenges in front cannot be solved with their expected gameplay.

At the contrary, if that's the 10th fight of the (real life) week you're doing with the same character and not significant changes of powers available to your character, you will appreciate having a fight that cannot be summed up by "I use the standard tactics".

... I'm not following how this has anything to do with CaW vs CaS. Care to explain what I missed / how this ties in?


PS:
I am firmly CaS. I don't like to anticipate. I usually follow the path (or the rails) to discover what is happening and react to it, and find it very tiring to have to actually take initiatives. I have a very weird relationship with loots, as while I do enjoy loot, there are a lot of kind of loots that I actually find more tiring than enjoying. (In particular, I don't like at all the fact that wizards loot their spells).

Heresy! :smallwink: Looting spells is, like, what drew me to D&D in the first place. (no, seriously, why would anyone *hate* on that? :smallconfused:)


A good CAS dm can ensure interesting encounters simply by designing them to work that way, they know what the pcs will be fighting and when and thus can design interesting combos, interesting terrain and work out their interactions ahead of time. While a CAW dm could attempt the same the inability to know where or when the pcs are going to do something wildly increases the difficulty of doing so and thus they rely a lot more on luck for an interesting encounter to occur.

If I design a CAS fight in a burning building I can decide ahead of time how the fire reacts how fast it spreads, what the difficulty to open a blocked door is, if and when a floor/ ceiling will collapse and design a very cinematic fight. In a CAW scenario i have much less control to make certain the pcs end up in that burning building and thus I either run into a situation where my planning time might be wasted if they avoid the burning building or find a away to negate the or I have less time to plan and polish the fight worst case I might be having to do it all on the fly.

That... is *mostly* true, but... even engaging the tactical layer could result in you needing to railroad to maintain your intended cinematic feel.


on an unrelated note
I would also argue that CAS works better at lower levels, assuming you dont allow wacky shenanigan to work their are simply less effective levers the pcs can apply and going in and stabbing some dudes may very well be the only effective choice. Where at higher levels particularly with casters they have so many options you either need much greater buy in or a much more significant amount of railroading to get them to engage with the planed encounters in the expected way.

As a short mini example lets say you plan an encounter where a giant troll bursts out from under a bridge causing the bridge to collapse into a partially dry river bed, you draw out the terrain on your map, mark down what the varying levels of water, mud and incline have on the fight. Work out the difficulties of leaping clear of the collapsing bridge ect. A low level party is almost certainly going to cross a bridge they have no reason not to, a high level party well no telling what will happen, did they decide to memorize a flight spell for the whole party? Teleport? Will the barbarian just pick up the party and jump across the river? They have so many options that it becomes much harder to predict what they can and will do.

This seems very D&D-specific for a system-agnostic discussion.

But, to generalize, yes, players with more tools are better equipped to go off the rails. Yes, Railroading is harder when the players have more Agency. :smalltongue: (Yes, it is harder to set the scene when the players are allowed to and have the tools to engage the content differently.)


That said I suspect most games are on a spectrum of CAW and CAS with more games being pure CAW then pure CAS.

One of the big questions that my definition had to scratch its head about (figuratively speaking) was whether "skipping the Troll encounter entirely because the party is flying" is / should be valid in CaS.


I think one of the best examples of what the distinction is is still that in combat as sport you can fight multiple groups of enemies (from the same faction) in the same smallish dungeon. Yes, in combat as war you might be able to catch the goblins by surprise and split up into different groups, but there's no way that group 1 is fighting you in the first room while group 2 is patiently waiting for you to finish in the next. Group 1 will call for help, or execute a tactical retreat, or group 2 will just plain hear the fighting, or... And most of the time a dungeon has a pretty observable entrance, so they'll have a sentry report your approach and they all man an ambush for you, not wherever the fight would be the coolest, but wherever it would be most advantageous for them.

So on one hand combat as war places a burden on the GM to think things through a lot further than combat as sport, on the other hand it that very thinking it through also blocks a lot of options.

Kind of?

So, this gets into "what should the definitions be" territory. Awesome!

IMO, you can have a CaS game where the goblins "act intelligently" and "sound the alarm". Problem is, you have then totally borked the "level-appropriate challenge" aspect. Unless "show good enough tactics to not let them sound the alarm" was the Challenge that the party failed.

And you could certainly have a CaW game where the goblins never think to clump up - there just are groups of 10-600 throughout the caves.

Anyway, I am not completely convinced that the line belongs exactly where you have placed it.


i really, really don't like those definitions. they are arbitrary, and they try to set up dichotomies where they need not be.
for example, at my table using ganks and strategy and everything you can do get the drop on the enemies and stack the fight in your favor is absolutely fair game, and that's something you define as CaW.

Yup, you're CaW.


on the other hand, we'd not want to exploit rule loopholes, which you'd define as CaS.

No, this has nothing to do with CaW vs CaS. Either technically could allow or disallow rules loopholes (granted, only at the tactical layer for CaS).


it would be a much better definition to have "combat as problem solving", where you try to use strategy outside of combat to improve the chances, and "combat as charOP", where you try to optimize your character to be stronger, and "combat as tactics", where you stumble into the fight and then try to use your resources at best to win. and possibly even more axes that i'm not thinking about right now.
then your example of bumbling morons would score very low in all those axes. or they'd just be bad at it.

Oh, interesting. I'll need to stew on this - poke me if I don't get back to this in a few days.


and you'd also need an entirely new axis for "RAI vs RAW", describing how much you would use the letter of the rules to abuse loopholes.

Agreed, this is entirely outside CaS vs CaW, just like "choice of system" is.


Or a "roleplaying vs RAW" to describe how much your interactions are defined by the result of a diplomacy check and how much by using established elements of the story. Also a "RAW vs homebrew" for the charOP axis: if your wizard is incompetent and does nothing but casting fireballs even when she's level 15, do you show her an incantatrix build and let her retrain, or do you drop a staff increasing her fireball damage in the loot? both have the same purpose and results, but they use very different means.

I'm pretty sure that these are irrelevant to the CaW vs CaS distinction, too, yes (although someone could disagree with me here).


ultimately, you can't just divide all the various styles of gaming along a line. And you should be especially wary of your own prejudices to avoid grouping the extremes of that line as "the cool guys" and "the dumb guys"

Agreed. That's no small part of why I've made this thread, because the originator of the terms failed at this spectacularly. And I've only spoofed them, not given it serious scholarship.


In CaS, the goal is that the encounter itself is interesting. As pointed out, the GM can ensure an interesting and balanced encounter. Often/generally, the players won't choose what encounters they go into. The assumption is that the encounters will be balanced, and players can approach them with what they have and what is in the encounter.

This doesn't mean that tactics are irrelevant. It does mean that, generally, each encounter is a "closed set" and is designed to be "beatable" given what's on hand.

In CaW, the combat itself is not the interesting bit. Pursuing goals is. Combat is just a means to an end, not the end in and of itself. As such, having an "interesting" encounter isn't valuable. What is valuable is having an objective that can be attained in multiple ways, and a complex situation that gives players options both in terms of what encounters to engage in, what encounters to bypass, and how to engage in encounters.

That's one of the areas that the CaS/CaW examples usually fail in, is that they both presume that the encounter is happening. Encounter selection is a huge part of CaW, and so ignoring that misses a ton.

I'd also say that CaS lends itself more to more linear games, while CaW lends itself more to more open games.

And that's probably a big part of the problem is that people talking about these terms are probably more used to one style of game than another, and so interpret them from a framework that is primarily based on one or the other, and so exaggerate the one that they're really doing (since they think what they do is "normal" and therefore the term being used must express something "more"), while shoving the other one's square peg into the round hole of their expectations.

I do think the terms are valuable, as they, in many ways, capture the essence. In war, you want things as unfair as possible. The goal is not to show off how good you are at fighting, the goal is to either completely avoid fights, or to make them so one-sided that one side has to retreat immediately. The best fight in a war is boring. The goal is to arrange the situation so that you have as lopsided of a situation as possible. That doesn't mean that having people good at fighting, or good at tactics on the micro-level isn't helpful or important.... but it's the secondary factor.

In sports, however, we want to see teams that are fairly evenly matched (though in RPGs we generally want things to be tilted in the players' favor). We want a thrilling game between well matched teams where the result is up in the air. That doesn't mean that people in sports "play dumb". They play as smart as they can, but they ideally start on a roughly even playing field. They can get an advantage by "good play", but they can't get an advantage by putting twice as many people on the field. Sometimes you'll get some advantage outside of the strict boundaries of the sport (home field advantage, advantage from being used to different types of weather, etc.), but the primary emphasis is on a "fair" fight between two reasonably even sides.

This seems like an awesome explanation of the two. Kudos!

EDIT: so, you are clearly on the side of "skipping encounters entirely - including by choosing which encounters to engage (and which missions to take?) - is CaW territory"?


I'm not a fan of the distinction, as it is usually used by CaW fans to insult CaS players. CaW is for smart, strategic play, while CaS is for dummies who charge at at every monster.


To Vahnavoi) I am also not particularly enamored with the terms, combined with a tendency for proponents of CAW denigrating CAS, the terms at least in my mind seem to be implying that CAS is inferior to CAW. As some one who enjoys the tactical game from both sides of the screen I dislike that.


furthermore, your bias against casual players is evident in the way you describe the CaS scenario as a bunch of bumbling morons.

I am amazed how many people a) were unable to comprehend that the initial article was biased, even when I said so repeatedly; b) are seeminglyą unable to comprehend that my spoof of the article is intended to make that bias plain by putting it on the other side. I suppose I am glad that people can see bias mono-directionally at least, rather than being bias-blind? Maybe? Still, I am surprised that bidirectionally bias enabled sight is so rare.

Yes, I happen to prefer CaW. But I could have still written my spoof even if I had preferred CaS, because the spoof is about showing bias.

The point of this thread is to try to work past the bias, and create and evaluate a definition of the terms that actually explains them in a neutral light.

(EDIT: historically, due to the horrifically biased source, it was actually primarily to exclusively CaS proponents denigrating CaW)

ą unless there's a lot of posts somewhere that I haven't read / don't remember where someone is actually taking such a stance.

zarionofarabel
2020-10-28, 12:35 PM
I think there is a false dichotomy in regards to the use of strategy/tactics and CaS vs CaW. Strategy/tactics can an should be applied in both situations.

However I do see the usefulness of using the CaS vs CaW distinction in regards to how combat is handled within the game.

If players assume CaS and the DM is running CaW, the dreaded TPK is much more likely to occur. Players who expect a "fair" encounter won't be inclined to retreat or use extra caution when engaging in combat.

On the other hand players who assume CaW, when it's CaS, may find they are disappointed with the "fairness" present in encounters.

IMHO, it really comes down to the kind of combat one wishes to experience. Personally I cannot stand CaS combat. If I wanted a "fair" fight I would play a minis combat game or some such. All of the fun of CaW combat comes from the fact that any encounter is a crapshoot and it keeps the tension high. If I know that every fight will be a "fair" fight it sucks all of the tension right out of the experience.

Quertus
2020-10-28, 12:50 PM
I think there is a false dichotomy in regards to the use of strategy/tactics and CaS vs CaW. Strategy/tactics can an should be applied in both situations.

However I do see the usefulness of using the CaS vs CaW distinction in regards to how combat is handled within the game.

If players assume CaS and the DM is running CaW, the dreaded TPK is much more likely to occur. Players who expect a "fair" encounter won't be inclined to retreat or use extra caution when engaging in combat.

On the other hand players who assume CaW, when it's CaS, may find they are disappointed with the "fairness" present in encounters.

IMHO, it really comes down to the kind of combat one wishes to experience. Personally I cannot stand CaS combat. If I wanted a "fair" fight I would play a minis combat game or some such. All of the fun of CaW combat comes from the fact that any encounter is a crapshoot and it keeps the tension high. If I know that every fight will be a "fair" fight it sucks all of the tension right out of the experience.

As I come from a wargaming background, I cannot help but be in agreement with your sentiment about fair fights. If the only component to the game is a series of "fair fights", I would rather use a better system for fair fights, of which there are numerous.

Then again, RPGs *do* have more things than tactical combat - like role-playing. However, I find having to metagame and curtail my role-playing so as not to break CaS irritating.

If, in addition to appreciating Challenge, you also have the Abnegation and Narrative features (which I don't), you could appreciate the story you're being told, interspersed with a series of "sporting fights". But, if you appreciate Exploration/Discovery - and, in particular, utilizing those tools in creative ways (as I do), you'll still struggle with breaking CaS.

So, I think that there are ways to engage CaS that aren't strictly inferior to war gaming - they just require different tastes than I possess.

I am, however, curious how you view strategy as a valid element in CaS. How can strategy not break the game under a CaS paradigm? (EDIT: *tactics* are available in both)

PhoenixPhyre
2020-10-28, 01:10 PM
I am, however, curious how you view strategy as a valid element in CaS. How can strategy not break the game under a CaS paradigm? (EDIT: *tactics* are available in both)

CaS =/= railroad. Strategy allows you to pick different fights (and under different conditions). It doesn't (in CaS) generally allow you to win those fights without fighting. Unless you talk your way out of them, of course.

Most of the time IMX, CaW devolves into finding loopholes and playing the DM, not actually playing the game. It's completely independent of the characters and only depends on the players...like chess. Which is not how I like to roleplay.

Basically, the strategy involved in CaS[1] is about getting the DM to create encounters that are favorable to the play-style you have/want, rather than avoiding fights entirely. Because there's a wide range of "CR appropriate" fights. And CR is such a rough measure that you can bend quite a ways. And no one holds strictly to the "all fights are exactly balanced" extreme.

For example, take one of the 5e published modules (Princes of the Apocalypse). These are all as CaS as things get. But in one section, you could fight your way up a certain tower room by room (facing a bunch of penny-packet fights). Or you could do what we did, which was parley our way up to the top, then fight everything all at once. That "strategy" produced a very different set of fights than the other option. Heck, we went and did the same sort of thing (rush into the middle and blow them all up at once) in another part of the module, where you could have lured out and defeated them in detail.

[1] I hate these terms, because as used they're basically pejoratives. CaS == you guys don't want to think. CaW == we're so smart and "realistic". When in reality, the DM only doesn't win because he chooses not to. Neither is "fair" or "earned"--the DM is always building things that can be defeated. Because otherwise you get rolled at level 1 and TPKd, because the DM holds all the cards.

RifleAvenger
2020-10-28, 01:32 PM
Sure was great to start this thread out with two sets of biased examples, rather than just retaining the positive framing for both extremes. Only to be further improved when the OP called their slant "better," implying it's the more correct view on something so subjective!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Anyways...

There's benefits to both. Just like with playing stronger PCs, having increased ways to resolve or avoid encounters can only increase the complexity of challenges PCs face in the broad scale. E.g. I don't think Combat as Sport would be good for a game looking to address issues of socio-economics, especially not in a game without some form of "social-combat" mechanic (and even in those, being unable to maneuver outside of 'encounters' would be detrimental).

However, there is also merit to scaling things down to an individual encounter, asking how the players would solve it, and reiterating that question with increasingly more restrictions placed on the players. It's why hard modes and variant runs of video games are interesting. Could you win this combat with these sets of starting parameters? What about while with restricted builds? Can you make a party of "takes-all-comers" who can solve a series of set encounters with minimal ability to change the parameters of those encounters before engaging in them?

Combat as War games offer more ability to resolve big-picture problems and allow more freeform expression of character. Combat as Sport games are puzzles that disallow "cutting the knot" to bypass them entirely, and allow expression of character through how they respond to the limitations set.

Most games will use both. Even in a system where crunch is divorced from fluff, in the interest of promoting engaging, tightly tuned, tactical combat (D&D 4e; Lancer), the strategic maneuvering of the party outside of those tactical portions should have import on the narrative and therefore what they face in combats. A completely pure tactical game would be context-less encounters or a wargame. A pure strategic game would probably be abstracted form the individual encounters.

I agree a lot with the poster who said their ideal is a game where the players need to use strategy to ensure their viability on the tactical layer for major encounters/scenes (and this goes for everything, not only combat). I'll also agree that "Combat-As-Sport" is a thinly veiled pejorative, and its use should probably be discontinued.

KineticDiplomat
2020-10-28, 03:43 PM
After sitting through preferences, the distinction is really one which social contract is used/preferred. The idea that one or the other is somehow more mentally challenging is a bit laughable - RPG rule sets are written in good faith, often by disparate authors, with varying production values, and subject to a staggering range of GM and player interpretation without any real authority to recourse to. Being able to break them in one manner or another really isn’t an intellectual distinction for either CaW or CaS. It may be an illusion of personal competence to pretend one or the other is somehow more OOC challenging.

As to CaS/CaW as a social contract, that is where the difference lies.

A CaS social contract implies that the GM will give the players a “fair” range of encounters (be they fights or fast taking your fantasy meth dealer). The players can expect that so long as they behave in a semi-reasonable fashion, they will not suddenly get hammered with a “GOTCHA!” about not explicitly packing their healing potion, or being wiped away with a hellfire from an unanswerable drone 30k feet in orbit with no chance to do anything about it. In turn, the GM expects the players to keep the plot moving without infinite paranoia and preparation, and that they try to solve the issues they encounter in good faith. That doesn’t mean the answer to every guard is a stabbing - bribing, sneaking, seducing, mind controlling etc. are all fine so long as players are not deliberately trying to break the encounter. And this can honestly be a very low-stress way to play a game about doing cool things in cool places. The players know that if they are genre savvy their fun isn’t going to be an illusion, and the GM knows that he may have to plan a world, but at least it won’t be one that players are trying to break. It can also be seen as stifling by some, who feel that they are being inadvertently railroaded, or that social conventions at the table are guiding their actions more than they would like.

CaW is a different form of social contract. The players have no expectation that anything about it will be fair. “ROCKS FALL” is a possible outcome from seeming to follow the narrative arc. The GM plays the opposition to the limits of their resources...and maybe a little more. The players in turn are expected to find every trick they can, IC and meta, to win. Even if this means going knowingly against the theme of an encounter or generic table conventions.
This can, on one hand, be highly liberating. You are free to legitimately tricks those players into an ambush that they as real world people didn’t see coming, and then machine gun their helpless characters! You are free to solve the GMs elaborate Kobold Dungeon by flooding it with poison gas and sealing the cave mouth! It can also be obnoxious for some people - it can slow down a table as people try to cover every possibility, it can frustrate players when they thought an obvious social cue like “talk to the elaborately described NPC in the corner” should not immediately lead to “shot in the head”, and frustrate GMs when for real or imagined possible IC reasons a plot grinds to a halt or is entirely discarded.

To use a non-combat example, let’s look at a quest/mission/shadow run/whatever.

In a CaS contract, there is an understanding that “taking the quest” is going to be the generally done thing. You’re in front of the duke, he wants you to solve the goblin problem, and you know that the GM probably has tonight’s events planned around solving the goblin problem. Oh, you may be betrayed, ambushed, lied to, reneged on, drakes, run out of town and so forth as a result of all this, but these are narrative components that come with a bit of plot insurance from the GM. Since it’s part of the contract that you’ll take the quest, his side of it is that the act of accepting the job isn’t going to be fundamentally game ending.

In a CaW contract, you’re still in front of the duke who wants you to solve his goblin problem. You have every right to tell him to pound sand; you don’t like the feel of it, you think he’s treacherous, he won’t pay enough, the goblins sound extra tough, whatever. The GM has to deal with that. However, if you take the quest and the Duke betrays you, you’re getting shot twice in the back of the head as you come out of the goblin cave. Roll a new character and do better client research next time. Caveat emptor. The player has to deal with that.

Done right, either contract can bring a whole lot of fun to a table. Done wrong, and well the potential weaknesses of each are pretty glaring.

JoeJ
2020-10-28, 03:53 PM
I wouldn't call it interacting with the strategic level per se; to me what's important is the way in which the PCs interact with the game world. For example, if the party is trying to clear out a cave full of kobolds and one of the players suggests diverting a nearby river so that if flows into the cave and everything drowns, will the other players be on board or will they feel cheated because they didn't get to fight the kobolds? Does the game system reward them, punish them, or neither reward nor punish them for choosing to deal with the problem this way instead of entering the cave and fighting it out?

Satinavian
2020-10-28, 04:06 PM
I would say :

CaS : The combat is supposed to be the fun and exciting thing. And the important thing. The in-game reasons why people fight are of little importance and further consequences of the fight don'T really matter either. It is all just a setup to have the fight and to bring an interesting bunch of combatants to the arena and have fun there.

CaW : People have a reason to fight and the consequences of the fight are really important. How the fight actually happens does not matter much, only the outcome matters. If it is interesting and fun that is good. But if it is short and forseeable and the right side wins, that is even better. That does not mean that cheating or cheese is welcome, but stacking the deck in your favor and seeking unfair advantages through not broken rules is welcome.


Usually CaW is also more immersive.

Quertus
2020-10-28, 04:10 PM
Sure was great to start this thread out with two sets of biased examples, rather than just retaining the positive framing for both extremes. Only to be further improved when the OP called their slant "better," implying it's the more correct view on something so subjective!

Hooray! You just made my day! At last, someone has finally explicitly stated that the original origin of the terms is biased! You have no idea how boggling it was getting responses of "no it isn't" from all the fanboys who held that article on a pedestal. Sigh. (Syndrome's voice) And then you had to go and ruin the ride.

No, I never claimed that my spoof was better than the originalą, horrifically biased example. I claimed that "the distinction between CaW and CaS is whether one can engage the strategic layer to affect the Challenge of the encounter" is better than that pile of trash.

I included both as a history lesson. And so that people didn't have to ask, "what's CaS/CaW", Google it, only see one biased explanation, and become as intractably biased as many of my former conversational dance partners. And as an admission that I have never previously engaged the topic with any serious scholarship, only with maximum snark in a war against oblivious incomprehension of the bias of the origin.

ą aside, you know, from being a spoof, and therefore clearly "better" for it to have that level of bias


There's benefits to both.

Agreed.


Just like with playing stronger PCs, having increased ways to resolve or avoid encounters can only increase the complexity of challenges PCs face in the broad scale. E.g. I don't think Combat as Sport would be good for a game looking to address issues of socio-economics, especially not in a game without some form of "social-combat" mechanic (and even in those, being unable to maneuver outside of 'encounters' would be detrimental).

Eh, I don't think we need to limit CaS to games with a weak tactical layer - I think it's perfectly fine to play CaS in highly complex environments. I would argue that MtG could be a very successful example of such play (playing the metagame notwithstanding).

I think, for your example, you may need to ask, "what is an encounter?", and build the game from there to make CaS viable. But don't take my word on it, I'm more CaW.


However, there is also merit to scaling things down to an individual encounter, asking how the players would solve it, and reiterating that question with increasingly more restrictions placed on the players. It's why hard modes and variant runs of video games are interesting. Could you win this combat with these sets of starting parameters? What about while with restricted builds? Can you make a party of "takes-all-comers" who can solve a series of set encounters with minimal ability to change the parameters of those encounters before engaging in them?

Emphasis added.

Before that last bit, I thought that that was a better description of CaW than CaS. That confusion on my part is likely what I made this thread to discuss.


Combat as War games offer more ability to resolve big-picture problems and allow more freeform expression of character. Combat as Sport games are puzzles that disallow "cutting the knot" to bypass them entirely, and allow expression of character through how they respond to the limitations set.

Mostly agree? It's really interesting looking at it from an Expression PoV. But I think that, because of the bias of GMs, CaS is actually more likely to result in resolving "big picture" problems.


Most games will use both. Even in a system where crunch is divorced from fluff, in the interest of promoting engaging, tightly tuned, tactical combat (D&D 4e; Lancer), the strategic maneuvering of the party outside of those tactical portions should have import on the narrative and therefore what they face in combats.

I haven't seen it. That might contribute to why I dislike 4e so much.

That said, what you describe is, IMO, CaW.

Which means (at least under my definition) one could arguably run even war games as CaW (multiple rounds of fighting and rest/repair/reman; who you choose to injure / replace / level up / spend money on / whatever is a strategic level choice, and nothing past the first engagement is guaranteed to be "sporting", for example).


A completely pure tactical game would be context-less encounters or a wargame. A pure strategic game would probably be abstracted form the individual encounters.

Abstracted from? Abstracted form of?

I agree with your assessment of what a "pure tactical" game would look like.

Question: suppose every component, every build choice, every option was actually *perfectly* balanced. I would still want to build my MtG deck, build my Battletech mech, build my D&D character. Does that violate a "pure tactical" game?


I agree a lot with the poster who said their ideal is a game where the players need to use strategy to ensure their viability on the tactical layer for major encounters/scenes (and this goes for everything, not only combat). I'll also agree that "Combat-As-Sport" is a thinly veiled pejorative, and its use should probably be discontinued.

A vote for "not just combat". Cool. Do you think that the words "combat as…" are needlessly confusing in that regard, or are they fine?

CaS as a pejorative is rather… odd… given that the originator of the terms was so clearly in the CaS camp. Given the value of the term, "a sporting challenge", it's tough to replace - do you have an alternative nomenclature for consideration?

PhoenixPhyre
2020-10-28, 04:14 PM
CaS as a pejorative is rather… odd… given that the originator of the terms was so clearly in the CaS camp. Given the value of the term, "a sporting challenge", it's tough to replace - do you have an alternative nomenclature for consideration?

I'd vote for "don't". It's not a meaningful distinction except as a pejorative. Say what you mean directly, without using a shortened phrase that carries hidden assumptions and meanings.

I feel that way about a lot of "forum terms". RAW. RAI. Etc.

Vahnavoi
2020-10-28, 05:49 PM
@Quertus:

The number of tactical decisions in a game starts from zero and can go arbitrarily high.

The number of strategic decisions in a game also starts from zero and can go arbitrarily high.

In case of a typical game, neither number is zero. Games focused on tactics still involve some degree of strategy and vice verse. That's why trying to sort games into just two camps is ridiculous. You are outlining stereotypes, not doing useful analysis. The "baggage" you adore consists of conflating other issues with analyzing levels of tactics and strategy in a game - issues such as player preferences over game difficulty, player respect of game rules, player preferences for immersion and players' motives for playing. It's not clear at all that any of these correlate with preferences about tactics and strategy to the degree implied by your posts and many others.

zarionofarabel
2020-10-28, 06:14 PM
I am, however, curious how you view strategy as a valid element in CaS. How can strategy not break the game under a CaS paradigm? (EDIT: *tactics* are available in both)
Because it is front loaded into the PCs abilities. CaS doesn't lack a strategic element, it lacks the element of in play strategic decisions. Hence the reason I prefer CaW, it has the added bonus of multiple strategic layers that CaS lacks.

Duff
2020-10-28, 08:48 PM
CaS certainly requires the Goldilocks-approved "just right" difficulty. "Too hard" is certainly one implementation of CaW; however, what about "too easy" - where does that fit in?
It's part of the CAW game process, but also a narrative element. Say in our hypothetical hive of giant bees our intrepid party are camped in a meadow with some nice flowers...

In a less combat focused game, the bees are there for the flowers. It's an easy fight and the party knows bees visit flowery meadows. They may or may not do anything with this info and that's fine.
In more CAW games it's the start of a scene which might have multiple encounters as the scout goes for help, or maybe it's just showing the party where bees feed so they can consider that in their plans
In a CAS game there'll be enough bees to make it a good fight


Also, as a community, maybe we need to work on accepting there's no wrong way to play except when someone is abusive of others at the table
Having terms for this scale can then be a helpful tool for players and GMs to work together better to make a game fun for everyone

GeoffWatson
2020-10-29, 03:07 AM
CaS doesn't require "fair" fights. The main goal is interesting fights.

With CaW you aim for boringly easy fights because you did something "strategic" that made them easy.

Morty
2020-10-29, 04:24 AM
I'm not a fan of the distinction, as it is usually used by CaW fans to insult CaS players. CaW is for smart, strategic play, while CaS is for dummies who charge at at every monster.


This is more or less where I'm sitting. The distinction seems like it has little purpose but to foster division. I've yet to see it actually help with anything else. The terms are useless and trying to "refine" them is a waste of time.

awa
2020-10-29, 07:18 AM
Part of the problem is I suspect pure Cas where the players have no ability to influence an encounter until initiative is rolled is pretty rare, I'm not certain I have every played with a system that considered it the default. Its more a though experiment than an actual campaign /system wide trait.

Thus when one side of the equation is largely theoretical I agree with other voices saying the distinction is not useful and possibly a slight detriment as it implies a division far greater than actually exists.

LordCdrMilitant
2020-10-29, 08:16 AM
I would say:

In both situations, the party is expected to prevail but might lose if things go pear shaped. If the party is dead or the challenge is unfair beyond the established and reasonable consequence of prior action, you don't have a game and might as well just have said rocks fall y'all die lets do something else. In both situations, the players should use tactics and strategy and their mastery of system mechanics to win. Whats different is the relationship between the player and the GM, and how it feels afterwords to the player.

In combat as sport, the GM works with the players to create an fun and exciting challenge.

In combat as war, the GM works against the players and vice versa to create an engaging and thoughtful challenge.

In combat as sport, after the battle, the players should be on an adrenaline high and feel excited about the action that just happened.

In combat as war, after the battle, the player should be self-satisfied and feel clever about the action that just happened.

zlefin
2020-10-29, 08:52 AM
This is more or less where I'm sitting. The distinction seems like it has little purpose but to foster division. I've yet to see it actually help with anything else. The terms are useless and trying to "refine" them is a waste of time.

I disagree; I find the terms moderately useful, mostly in terms of setting expectations in a session 0. They don't explain everything instantly and completely, but they provide a good starting off point, and a useful shorthand, especially for PbP descriptions.

Yora
2020-10-29, 10:56 AM
I think it's usually the same distinction as roleplaying and rollplaying, except that it does put the two things at an equal level and not judging one to be right and the other to be wrong.

Combat as Sport acknowledges that it's different from Combat as War, but they are two equal options. The emphasis is put on the two being different approaches for what is expected out of combat encounters. And it suggests that people being unhappy with combat encounters can be a result of mismatching expectations between players, GMs, and game mechanics.
The whole purpose of the terminology is to reduce conflict by showing the difference between square pegs and round holes. (And round pegs and square holes.)

Of course, it doesn't change what anyone enjoys. It doesn't make conflicting expectations and wishes magically disappear. It only shows where the conflict comes from.

Quertus
2020-10-29, 11:30 AM
I would say :

CaS : The combat is supposed to be the fun and exciting thing. And the important thing. The in-game reasons why people fight are of little importance and further consequences of the fight don'T really matter either. It is all just a setup to have the fight and to bring an interesting bunch of combatants to the arena and have fun there.

CaW : People have a reason to fight and the consequences of the fight are really important. How the fight actually happens does not matter much, only the outcome matters. If it is interesting and fun that is good. But if it is short and forseeable and the right side wins, that is even better. That does not mean that cheating or cheese is welcome, but stacking the deck in your favor and seeking unfair advantages through not broken rules is welcome.


Usually CaW is also more immersive.

I agree with the parts I bolded; I'm not so sure about the rest.


@Quertus:

The number of tactical decisions in a game starts from zero and can go arbitrarily high.

The number of strategic decisions in a game also starts from zero and can go arbitrarily high.

In case of a typical game, neither number is zero. Games focused on tactics still involve some degree of strategy and vice verse. That's why trying to sort games into just two camps is ridiculous. You are outlining stereotypes, not doing useful analysis. The "baggage" you adore consists of conflating other issues with analyzing levels of tactics and strategy in a game - issues such as player preferences over game difficulty, player respect of game rules, player preferences for immersion and players' motives for playing. It's not clear at all that any of these correlate with preferences about tactics and strategy to the degree implied by your posts and many others.

I think you are thoroughly confused about what I meant by "baggage".

I agree that none of those have any bearing on CaW vs CaS. In fact, that was the entire point of my spoofą.

No, the "baggage" that I am referring to is things like "CaS requires a sporting difficulty, whereas CaW accepts encounters of any difficulty (with a heavy skew towards 'too hard' when the party learns of it, and 'too easy' by the time that they resolve it)" or "under CaS, a TPK is the GM's fault; under CaW, it is the players' fault (which one could word positively as 'making sure that a fight is survivable is the responsibility of…’)" or "the ’fun part' of the game in CaS is the combat; in CaW, the combat *might* be fun, but the 'fun part' is the strategic layer" or "those who derive fun from Challenge will likely be more drawn to CaS / may feel like oldschool level of 'well-played' CaW is cheating / robbing them of their fun".

Both games can have tactics. But using strategy to change the Challenge of the encounter is unsportsmanlike in CaS.

ą well that, and the fact that the originator had failed to grasp this fact, and the fanboys had failed to grasp that they had failed to grasp this fact.


CaS doesn't require "fair" fights. The main goal is interesting fights.

With CaW you aim for boringly easy fights because you did something "strategic" that made them easy.

Agree (mostly) with the second bit - that is certainly *one* implementation of CaW (and the original way to play RPGs).

I'm not so sure about the first part: are you saying that a CaS GM could design a TPK or a tactical snoozer for a CaS group, and it would be fine so long as the encounter was interesting? Because that's… not really been my understanding of the PoV of the CaS camp.


This is more or less where I'm sitting. The distinction seems like it has little purpose but to foster division. I've yet to see it actually help with anything else. The terms are useless and trying to "refine" them is a waste of time.

No, the division *absolutely* existed long before I had ever heard the terms.


It's part of the CAW game process, but also a narrative element. Say in our hypothetical hive of giant bees our intrepid party are camped in a meadow with some nice flowers...

In a less combat focused game, the bees are there for the flowers. It's an easy fight and the party knows bees visit flowery meadows. They may or may not do anything with this info and that's fine.
In more CAW games it's the start of a scene which might have multiple encounters as the scout goes for help, or maybe it's just showing the party where bees feed so they can consider that in their plans
In a CAS game there'll be enough bees to make it a good fight


Also, as a community, maybe we need to work on accepting there's no wrong way to play except when someone is abusive of others at the table
Having terms for this scale can then be a helpful tool for players and GMs to work together better to make a game fun for everyone

Strongly agree with the last paragraph (for a very loose definition of "abusive"). But you've lost me on almost all the rest.

"In a less combat focused game…" … I would expect that "the bees are there for the flowers" would make this trivially a non-fight. Also, can CaS accept "an easy fight"? That sounds like a waste of valuable game time.

Why is the scout going for help with an easy fight in the CaW game? :smallconfused:

kyoryu
2020-10-29, 11:54 AM
EDIT: so, you are clearly on the side of "skipping encounters entirely - including by choosing which encounters to engage (and which missions to take?) - is CaW territory"?


I think it would be more accurate to state that in CaW there are no "encounters". "Skipping encounters" implies that there's an expectation of what encounters should be engaged in. That seems very CaS to me.

In CaW, combat isn't the point. It's a means to an end, not the end itself. It's not "skipping" an encounter. It's not engaging in something that doesn't further your goals.


CaS =/= railroad.

Not inherently, but the level of balance that CaS calls for is a lot easier if you know what the players will be encountering, and so can spend more time on the combats.

OTOH, I would argue that railroading just about requires CaS.


Strategy allows you to pick different fights (and under different conditions). It doesn't (in CaS) generally allow you to win those fights without fighting. Unless you talk your way out of them, of course.

The problem is that if you are good enough at that strategic layer, you can trivialize fights, which defeats the purpose of CaS.


[1] I hate these terms, because as used they're basically pejoratives. CaS == you guys don't want to think. CaW == we're so smart and "realistic". When in reality, the DM only doesn't win because he chooses not to. Neither is "fair" or "earned"--the DM is always building things that can be defeated. Because otherwise you get rolled at level 1 and TPKd, because the DM holds all the cards.

You seem to be the one with a very pejorative view of "CaW". Now it might be that some people do use these terms, but it's not universal, and let's not hold the worst of people up as the default. It's not helpful.

CaS relies on thinking. It's not unthinking "hit the attack button durrr". If done right, it requires lots and lots of thinking, as if you've got even resources, the only thing you can do to get a success is to outthink your opponents. You just think about different things than you do with CaW.

Also I'd say in CaW, the GM shouldn't be "letting" anyone win or not. If we go super old school, "here's the megadungeon. There's stuff in it. Where you go and what you do is up to you." They can play it safe and likely make it back, or get riskier and push their luck. That's all up to the players.


I would say :

CaS : The combat is supposed to be the fun and exciting thing. And the important thing. The in-game reasons why people fight are of little importance and further consequences of the fight don'T really matter either. It is all just a setup to have the fight and to bring an interesting bunch of combatants to the arena and have fun there.

CaW : People have a reason to fight and the consequences of the fight are really important. How the fight actually happens does not matter much, only the outcome matters. If it is interesting and fun that is good. But if it is short and forseeable and the right side wins, that is even better. That does not mean that cheating or cheese is welcome, but stacking the deck in your favor and seeking unfair advantages through not broken rules is welcome.

This is a pretty good and neutral description I think.

EGplay
2020-10-29, 12:08 PM
Both games can have tactics. But using strategy to change the Challenge of the encounter is unsportsmanlike in CaS

Unless that is the layer at which the Sport takes place, and as such these strats are accounted for (and indeed expected).

Not that it's my business, but I can definitely see the possibility of a CaS-approach on pretty much any strategic level (as well as CaW without one, even a tactical).

PhoenixPhyre
2020-10-29, 12:57 PM
Not inherently, but the level of balance that CaS calls for is a lot easier if you know what the players will be encountering, and so can spend more time on the combats.

OTOH, I would argue that railroading just about requires CaS.


Again, there's a huge difference between "not 100% sandbox" and "railroad".




The problem is that if you are good enough at that strategic layer, you can trivialize fights, which defeats the purpose of CaS.


Only if what you're really good at is playing the DM and ignoring the idea that "abilities do what they say they do" and abusing the lossy nature of descriptions (ie assuming that there's no ventilation because none was mentioned). That's how I see all the CaW games I've ever heard described--abuse of system and logic as well as browbeating/manipulating the DM. Has nothing to do with actually playing the game, it's just social manipulation. You don't even have a game at that level beyond free-form.



You seem to be the one with a very pejorative view of "CaW". Now it might be that some people do use these terms, but it's not universal, and let's not hold the worst of people up as the default. It's not helpful.

CaS relies on thinking. It's not unthinking "hit the attack button durrr". If done right, it requires lots and lots of thinking, as if you've got even resources, the only thing you can do to get a success is to outthink your opponents. You just think about different things than you do with CaW.


My only exposure to those terms is on this forum. Where CaS is used synonymously with being lazy and having your hand held, and CaW is the "one true way". Like how sandbox and railroad are treated as binaries, when it's a spectrum.



Also I'd say in CaW, the GM shouldn't be "letting" anyone win or not. If we go super old school, "here's the megadungeon. There's stuff in it. Where you go and what you do is up to you." They can play it safe and likely make it back, or get riskier and push their luck. That's all up to the players.


The DM is always letting people win in D&D at least. Because he has unlimited tools and the players have none that don't rely on him, so if he really wanted to win, he could. Trivially. There is no such thing as "fair" between an omnipotent (within the game) force and one that can only act by relying on the DM to play nice and limit himself. Remember, the rules aren't binding on the DM--he has full authority (and is in fact commanded) to alter them as he sees fit. A fully antagonistic game (where the DM actually wants to win) would look much more like the Tomb of Horrors, except worse.

Not only that, but everything in the world exists because the DM put it there. That megadungeon? Made (or approved) by the DM. All those options that you take? Only exist if the DM says they do. The DM is the sole interface between the world and the players. To get around that, you'd have to have a third party just hand the DM a dungeon and have him run it blind. No prep, not reading ahead. Just running it entirely blind and entirely by-the-book except for roleplaying the creatures. Every possible interaction outside of that would have to be pre-scripted. Which sounds even more railroady than anything else I can think of. And horrible for everyone.

So the idea that CaW is somehow less hand-holding than CaS is, to me, a mirage. In fact, since so much of CaW is extra-game (relying on convincing the DM that the plan will work without actually involving things like rules or mechanics, mostly by arguing that <real world idea, often badly understood and horribly flawed> will solve the problem for sure, no need to roll), the entirety of CaW is up to the DM being a pushover. Nothing about CaW tests the characters. Or even cares about who they are. It only tests how tricky the players can get. The characters are just chess pieces without meaningful identity.

Morty
2020-10-29, 01:30 PM
I think it's usually the same distinction as roleplaying and rollplaying, except that it does put the two things at an equal level and not judging one to be right and the other to be wrong.

Combat as Sport acknowledges that it's different from Combat as War, but they are two equal options. The emphasis is put on the two being different approaches for what is expected out of combat encounters. And it suggests that people being unhappy with combat encounters can be a result of mismatching expectations between players, GMs, and game mechanics.
The whole purpose of the terminology is to reduce conflict by showing the difference between square pegs and round holes. (And round pegs and square holes.)

Of course, it doesn't change what anyone enjoys. It doesn't make conflicting expectations and wishes magically disappear. It only shows where the conflict comes from.

Terminology is only useful if it tells us anything. This CaW/CaS split doesn't. The distinction doesn't actually exist, as combat is just one part of role-playing (but let's be real, this is a very D&D-specific argument despite claims of system-agnosticism) and there are many different approaches to it, which differ considerably based on circumstances and the ruleset. Trying to draw a line in the sand and forcibly put games, groups and players on either side helps no one.

kyoryu
2020-10-29, 02:03 PM
Again, there's a huge difference between "not 100% sandbox" and "railroad".

To the extent that there's a bunch of styles of play besides the two extremes, I agree, though I do think there's a fairly firm boundary for "linear play" (which I use rather than railroad) that can be fairly easily tested objectively.

And linear play isn't bad either. It's just... a way to play. Like any other, it has advantages and disadvantages, and will suit some people and not others.


Only if what you're really good at is playing the DM and ignoring the idea that "abilities do what they say they do" and abusing the lossy nature of descriptions (ie assuming that there's no ventilation because none was mentioned). That's how I see all the CaW games I've ever heard described--abuse of system and logic as well as browbeating/manipulating the DM. Has nothing to do with actually playing the game, it's just social manipulation. You don't even have a game at that level beyond free-form.

A) Any player that pulls the "you didn't describe it, it's not there" would get the boot.

B) Some people prefer games where more of the adjudication is placed on the system. Some people prefer games where the GM has more of the adjudication ability. We can recognize the strengths and weaknesses of both, acknowledge our preferences, and accept that other people have different preferences because they value different things.


My only exposure to those terms is on this forum. Where CaS is used synonymously with being lazy and having your hand held, and CaW is the "one true way".

You'll notice I haven't done that. You'll notice that "different play styles, with strengths and weaknesses, appealing to different people" is a recurrent theme.

Also, you're nudging up against OneTrueWayism yourself here a bit. I can understand that as a reaction, but since I haven't done the thing you're reacting to, I'd appreciate a touch more of a discussion. We can agree that hte CaW people that are OneTrueWaying and asserting it's superior and that CaS people are dumb and weak and play an inferior game are Poopy Butt Heads. That doesn't mean that CaW is something only enjoyed by PBHs.


The DM is always letting people win in D&D at least. Because he has unlimited tools and the players have none that don't rely on him, so if he really wanted to win, he could. Trivially. There is no such thing as "fair" between an omnipotent (within the game) force and one that can only act by relying on the DM to play nice and limit himself. Remember, the rules aren't binding on the DM--he has full authority (and is in fact commanded) to alter them as he sees fit. A fully antagonistic game (where the DM actually wants to win) would look much more like the Tomb of Horrors, except worse.

Meh, ToH is just built on a different set of assumptions than most people are used to. At Gary's table people routinely busted through it with no issue, and he wrote it because people playing his game complained that it was too easy.

Now, dropping ToH on a table not used to (or worse yet - expecting) that style of gaming is a jerk move and any GM doing that should lose his entire table immediately.


Not only that, but everything in the world exists because the DM put it there. That megadungeon? Made (or approved) by the DM. All those options that you take? Only exist if the DM says they do. The DM is the sole interface between the world and the players. To get around that, you'd have to have a third party just hand the DM a dungeon and have him run it blind. No prep, not reading ahead. Just running it entirely blind and entirely by-the-book except for roleplaying the creatures. Every possible interaction outside of that would have to be pre-scripted. Which sounds even more railroady than anything else I can think of. And horrible for everyone.

I mean, yeah, there's jerk GMs? If you set up a dungeon, and do it in a fairly consistent way, it becomes objective. If the GM decides "I'm gonna screw with the players" then they're a bad GM and, again, should lose their table.


So the idea that CaW is somehow less hand-holding than CaS is, to me, a mirage.

Good thing I've never made that claim, because I don't believe it.


In fact, since so much of CaW is extra-game (relying on convincing the DM that the plan will work without actually involving things like rules or mechanics, mostly by arguing that <real world idea, often badly understood and horribly flawed> will solve the problem for sure, no need to roll), the entirety of CaW is up to the DM being a pushover.

.... and now you're making BadWrongFun arguments. People do like games with more GM adjudication rather than everything being prescribed. You may not, for whatever reason. That's not a moral failing nor triumph on your part any more than it is a moral failing or triumph for people that don't like that.

Clearly, CaW isn't for you. That's cool. It does work for other people. Also cool. It doesn't make anybody better than anybody else.


Nothing about CaW tests the characters. Or even cares about who they are. It only tests how tricky the players can get. The characters are just chess pieces without meaningful identity.

I mean, that depends on how you define the characters? Is it their personality or their abilities? And a good GM should be leaning on the mechanical abilities to the extent that they're defined anyway.

But, again, you just prefer gaming styles where the rules are more objective and the GM has a more limited input. Cool. But that doesn't mean that people who don't like that aren't roleplaying.

I mean, seriously. I've made none of these accusations. Why are you making them at me? I'm trying to approach you with good faith here. Let's have that discussion, and leave the PBHs out of it.

PhoenixPhyre
2020-10-29, 02:28 PM
Kyoryu: I'm reacting less to you than to the general topic here. While you've been reasonable, the vast majority of uses of the term have been much less so. Including the OP. And I'm working from a long history of getting irritated by this topic every time it comes up, with the same patterns repeating themselves over and over again. So if it seems like I'm accusing you, I'm not. At least not intentionally. More just venting.



A) Any player that pulls the "you didn't describe it, it's not there" would get the boot.

B) Some people prefer games where more of the adjudication is placed on the system. Some people prefer games where the GM has more of the adjudication ability. We can recognize the strengths and weaknesses of both, acknowledge our preferences, and accept that other people have different preferences because they value different things.


But separating those as "CaW" vs "CaS" isn't meaningful at all. Because the boundaries here are completely different and unrelated. I don't particularly have a problem with either playstyle...as long as it's a real thing, not the strawmen and exaggerations they're normally presented as.

I find the distinction between CaW and CaS illusionary and most commonly made pejoratively. And I'm not the only one who feels that way (as evidenced in this thread).



You'll notice I haven't done that. You'll notice that "different play styles, with strengths and weaknesses, appealing to different people" is a recurrent theme.

Also, you're nudging up against OneTrueWayism yourself here a bit. I can understand that as a reaction, but since I haven't done the thing you're reacting to, I'd appreciate a touch more of a discussion. We can agree that hte CaW people that are OneTrueWaying and asserting it's superior and that CaS people are dumb and weak and play an inferior game are Poopy Butt Heads. That doesn't mean that CaW is something only enjoyed by PBHs.


I disagree that there is anything meaningful about the terms CaW and CaS as defined on these forums except pejoratives. They're basically "things I like" and "things I dislike" (which one is which depends on the speaker). Although you don't hear people who fit the stereotype of CaS proclaiming their allegiance to that--the use of the term dominantly comes from self-proclaimed CaW people, and them claiming superiority (or the inferiority of the other side). I claim that the terms themselves are vacuous.



Meh, ToH is just built on a different set of assumptions than most people are used to. At Gary's table people routinely busted through it with no issue, and he wrote it because people playing his game complained that it was too easy.

Now, dropping ToH on a table not used to (or worse yet - expecting) that style of gaming is a jerk move and any GM doing that should lose his entire table immediately.


But ToH isn't even a DM trying seriously to win. Because there's no way for the DM not to win if he does so without artificially tying his own hands. And that's something ignored by the side pushing this distinction.



I mean, yeah, there's jerk GMs? If you set up a dungeon, and do it in a fairly consistent way, it becomes objective. If the GM decides "I'm gonna screw with the players" then they're a bad GM and, again, should lose their table.


Agreed on the second, but I disagree that there can ever be an "objective" dungeon. Because people are doing it, and people are subjective creatures.



Good thing I've never made that claim, because I don't believe it.


You're not the only one in the conversation. And I've heard it directly, in sneering tones multiple times.



.... and now you're making BadWrongFun arguments. People do like games with more GM adjudication rather than everything being prescribed. You may not, for whatever reason. That's not a moral failing nor triumph on your part any more than it is a moral failing or triumph for people that don't like that.

Clearly, CaW isn't for you. That's cool. It does work for other people. Also cool. It doesn't make anybody better than anybody else.
...
But, again, you just prefer gaming styles where the rules are more objective and the GM has a more limited input. Cool. But that doesn't mean that people who don't like that aren't roleplaying.


Funny thing--I don't like (and don't run) fully prescribed games. There's heavy DM adjudication at my tables. But I also don't let players talk their way out of everything or use real-life arguments. And I generally run balanced encounters, but tactical triumphs aren't a focus of my games. Basically, neither CaS (as defined here) or CaW fit. And it's not even a spectrum--the terms themselves are just inapposite. And that's what I'm complaining about. The terms, as defined, are meaningless and unhelpful except to attempt to say that one is better or more realistic than the other.

If you want to talk about having multiple paths to complete an objective, say that. If you want to talk about levels of GM adjudication, say that. If you want to distinguish strategy from tactics, do that. Don't muddle them into highly partisan terms that obfuscate, not clarify.



I mean, that depends on how you define the characters? Is it their personality or their abilities? And a good GM should be leaning on the mechanical abilities to the extent that they're defined anyway.


All I know is that every self-proclaimed "success" of CaW that I've heard has relied on the players bypassing anything about their characters (including personality, except to always make paranoid super-thinkers, because that's what real war is all about) and engaging in mind/word-games with the DM. Their abilities, their personalities, the entire game layer has always been discarded in favor of arguments from real textbooks, use of knowledge that the characters can't have (or that is flat out invalid in the fictional world--cf any use of modern physics or chemistry in D&D) and/or relies on weasel-wording of abilities to bypass all the limits written into them and inflate their abilities beyond measure.

And a common thread between those who proclaim their allegiance to CaW has seemed to be a strong distrust of DMs and an antagonistic relationship towards them. And that's something I find disgusting. The most common thing is for people to be gloating about how they "broke the DM" (or his plans), in terms that made it clear that the DM wasn't having fun. And that their fun came from the DM not having fun/not getting to actually use anything he'd built. And that attitude, taking pleasure in someone else's displeasure is, to me, highly unpleasant. And the correlation between people talking up "CaW" and that attitude has been so high as to be hard to ignore.

NorthernPhoenix
2020-10-29, 02:30 PM
I've always had trouble understanding the meaning of this. If i choose not to design balanced encounters, I'm instead choosing a different difficulty (easy, hard, impossible, etc) even if i pretend that's not the case. If i want to "win at DND" as the DM, there's no way i can lose.

This fundamental generally colors how i view encounter design, and generally leads to me preferring "balanced" encounters.

PhoenixPhyre
2020-10-29, 02:37 PM
I'll note my own style:

I plan combats with reference to the party's capabilities. If the established in-universe facts suggest that there should be something trivial or something undefeatable, I don't plan it as a combat encounter[1].

I do plan combats and expect there to be combat, because my players enjoy combat. They don't enjoy pushovers or running from unwinnable fights. And they don't enjoy spending 99% of the time planning so that the implementation can be just a "ok, your plan works perfectly, you win". They enjoy reacting to curveballs, charging in blindly and figuring things out on the fly, etc.

On the other hand, I don't force encounters and the party has significant freedom at the strategic level, even if it invalidates my planning. And tactically-challenging combat isn't my gig--I'm more of the cinematic style. Narrative and exploration are my big things. Seeing what they do to the world and how.

I assume the players will win and succeed--the interesting questions are how do they win and with what side-effects and what will they succeed at.

I'm not CaW or CaS--neither term fits, and I'm not on a line between the two. Because the terms themselves don't describe real things or real games very well at all. They bundle together disparate elements that don't always (or usually) play nice together. It's like saying that either you like (vanilla ice cream and cherry pie) or you like (chocolate ice cream and apple pie). The idea that you may like all of them, none of them, some other mixture, or something else entirely is completely excluded from consideration.

[1] but instead something else, like a social encounter or a setpiece with the unbeatable thing serving as the background. But if they really want to fight, they can.

Vahnavoi
2020-10-29, 03:16 PM
I think you are thoroughly confused about what I meant by "baggage".

I agree that none of those have any bearing on CaW vs CaS. In fact, that was the entire point of my spoofą.

No. What you continue to describe as the baggage you want continues to be the conflatory mess I said it was.


"CaS requires a sporting difficulty, whereas CaW accepts encounters of any difficulty (with a heavy skew towards 'too hard' when the party learns of it, and 'too easy' by the time that they resolve it)"

What is or isn't "sporting" difficulty is largely a subjective player assesment and dependent on player skill. It has nothing to do with presence or absence of a strategic layer: you can have two players play through the exact same purely tactical scenario, and have one of them thing it's fair and the other curse the scenario designer for their unfairness.


"under CaS, a TPK is the GM's fault; under CaW, it is the players' fault (which one could word positively as 'making sure that a fight is survivable is the responsibility of…’)"

This is stereotypical nonsense; in most tactical games, players are happy to accept that their loss is their own fault if it can be demonstrated to stem from their own tactical error. And most players of strategic games are happy to blame the GM if they have a reason to suspect the GM is feeding them deliberately unwinnable scenarios. TPKs have nothing to do with it; preference for or against TPKs is mostly about preference for character permanence.


or "the ’fun part' of the game in CaS is the combat; in CaW, the combat *might* be fun, but the 'fun part' is the strategic layer"

I'm gonna claim that most players of strategic games would like for the tactical part to be interesting... sorry, "fun" as well. And most players of tactical games find some strategic choices to be fun as well. As I explained, it's not a binary choice where you can only choose one, it's entirely possible to pick both to varying degrees, so sorting playstyles to just two camps is building up stereotypes.


"those who derive fun from Challenge will likely be more drawn to CaS / may feel like oldschool level of 'well-played' CaW is cheating / robbing them of their fun".

As someone who primarily runs OSR games, I'll note that a lot of "old school" tips and tricks for "cheating" encounters are tactical, not strategic, and preference for "old school" gaming is about being able to pitch those tactics directly to a GM without having to hunt through rulebooks for feats, spells or skills. On the flipside, a lot of people who feel "cheated" or "robbed" by such pitches, feel so because to them it looks like you're bypassing normal rules of the game by fast-talking a GM (PhoenixPhyre, above, is a case in point).

This has nothing to do with "challenge" - that's, once again, about player preferences for difficulty.

Morty
2020-10-29, 04:06 PM
If you want to talk about having multiple paths to complete an objective, say that. If you want to talk about levels of GM adjudication, say that. If you want to distinguish strategy from tactics, do that. Don't muddle them into highly partisan terms that obfuscate, not clarify.

I think that's the crux of my objection as well. The attempted CaW/CaS categorization takes several considerations and preferences for games and lumps them all together under two arbitrary and artificially opposed labels.

Quertus
2020-10-29, 10:45 PM
Part of the problem is I suspect pure Cas where the players have no ability to influence an encounter until initiative is rolled is pretty rare, I'm not certain I have every played with a system that considered it the default. Its more a though experiment than an actual campaign /system wide trait.

Thus when one side of the equation is largely theoretical I agree with other voices saying the distinction is not useful and possibly a slight detriment as it implies a division far greater than actually exists.

Just look at modules which change the number of opponents based on the number of PCs, or which have things like, "doesn't matter what the PCs abilities are, they cannot X" for *published* examples of how rare it isn't.


In combat as sport, the GM works with the players to create an fun and exciting challenge.

In combat as war, the GM works against the players and vice versa to create an engaging and thoughtful challenge.

Mostly disagree on this one.

I think that the GM should be a *fan* of the PCs in either case. I think that the GM should roleplay the adversaries against the players in either case.

The difference is, in CaS, the GM has to metagame just as much as the players to not wreck the carefully-calibrated Challenge of the encounters.


In combat as sport, after the battle, the players should be on an adrenaline high and feel excited about the action that just happened.

In combat as war, after the battle, the player should be self-satisfied and feel clever about the action that just happened.

Maybe? I mean, I feel awfully clever about my tactical choices in war games & CaS games - I don't think that that sentiment is exclusive to CaW / the strategic layer.


I disagree; I find the terms moderately useful, mostly in terms of setting expectations in a session 0. They don't explain everything instantly and completely, but they provide a good starting off point, and a useful shorthand, especially for PbP descriptions.

Agreed. Glad to hear some support for terms people have been using and advocating for years.


I think it's usually the same distinction as roleplaying and rollplaying, except that it does put the two things at an equal level and not judging one to be right and the other to be wrong.

Combat as Sport acknowledges that it's different from Combat as War, but they are two equal options. The emphasis is put on the two being different approaches for what is expected out of combat encounters. And it suggests that people being unhappy with combat encounters can be a result of mismatching expectations between players, GMs, and game mechanics.
The whole purpose of the terminology is to reduce conflict by showing the difference between square pegs and round holes. (And round pegs and square holes.)

Of course, it doesn't change what anyone enjoys. It doesn't make conflicting expectations and wishes magically disappear. It only shows where the conflict comes from.

Well, it's certainly intended… well, no. The originator clearly favored CaS. I think that it certainly *should* be intended to put them on equal footing.

I'm not so sure that it corresponds to "roleplaying and rollplaying" beyond the metagaming (and occasional idiot ball holding / bad role-playing) required to not break the sporting nature of CaS.


Only if what you're really good at is playing the DM and ignoring the idea that "abilities do what they say they do" and abusing the lossy nature of descriptions (ie assuming that there's no ventilation because none was mentioned). That's how I see all the CaW games I've ever heard described--abuse of system and logic as well as browbeating/manipulating the DM. Has nothing to do with actually playing the game, it's just social manipulation. You don't even have a game at that level beyond free-form.


All I know is that every self-proclaimed "success" of CaW that I've heard has relied on the players bypassing anything about their characters (including personality, except to always make paranoid super-thinkers, because that's what real war is all about) and engaging in mind/word-games with the DM.

C'mon, even my *spoof* was better than that!

The characters used their statistics to animate the dead, and their improved carrying capacity (from created undead, and from updating their character sheet with ursine lycanthropy) allowed them to "win extra", carrying out more honey than the GM expected.

So, you're demonstrably wrong just from the example of CaW in my spoof.

Assuming you, you know, actually read the spoof. :smallconfused: :smallamused:


Terminology is only useful if it tells us anything. This CaW/CaS split doesn't. The distinction doesn't actually exist, as combat is just one part of role-playing (but let's be real, this is a very D&D-specific argument despite claims of system-agnosticism) and there are many different approaches to it, which differ considerably based on circumstances and the ruleset. Trying to draw a line in the sand and forcibly put games, groups and players on either side helps no one.

Helps no one? No, that's demonstrably wrong, per the various posters (including myself) who have used the terms to facilitate communication about gaming style.

If I break the entire world down into "male" and "female", that doesn't tell us very much about what job the individuals involved hold. That doesn't mean that it isn't a useful distinction to make.

The CaW / CaS distinction has purpose. Granted, the originator's purpose appears to have been to denigrate styles other than their own, but I have found - and hope to continue to find - the terms useful for *initiating* discussions about gaming styles.

If someone says, "I prefer a CaS game that is heavy on sensory pleasure and Abnegation", I'll know it's probably not worth asking more questions to see if they're a good fit or not.

And, having used the terms successfully to describe systems that aren't D&D, I am left quite confused as to why you believe that the terms are only applicable to D&D. Given my contradictory experiences, care to explain your reasoning?


I've always had trouble understanding the meaning of this. If i choose not to design balanced encounters, I'm instead choosing a different difficulty (easy, hard, impossible, etc) even if i pretend that's not the case. If i want to "win at DND" as the DM, there's no way i can lose.

This fundamental generally colors how i view encounter design, and generally leads to me preferring "balanced" encounters.

Imagine a sandbox. I've placed an ancient Dragon there. You're in a level 1 party. Fighting that Dragon is *not* a balanced, sporting challenge. You are, of course, free to do so - and free to attempt to gain sufficient advantage that it is actually a winnable fight.

Make more sense?


I think that's the crux of my objection as well. The attempted CaW/CaS categorization takes several considerations and preferences for games and lumps them all together under two arbitrary and artificially opposed labels.

Where were you when I was first trying to make this point about the originator, before I wrote my spoof? :smallamused:

OTOH, if *I* have made an error in the definition, it is the *exact opposite* - I am attempting to define the distinction *solely* on the ability of the strategic layer to affect the Challenge of the encounter.

awa
2020-10-29, 11:50 PM
"Just look at modules which change the number of opponents based on the number of PCs, or which have things like, "doesn't matter what the PCs abilities are, they cannot X" for *published* examples of how rare it isn't."

Yeah that's not an example of pure Cas, at best that is an example of an encounter that is pure Cas but even that is really stretching it. Now find me a module that says every encounter cannot be influenced outside of combat and you would be proving somewhere; but modifying number of foes based on number of pcs? Come on if were calling that Pure Cas then the term is so broad as to have no meaning.

Running the same game for 2 players as you would for 6 without any adjustments just shows your not a very good dm.

Besides I said campaign or system, a module is neither of those being much smaller in scope so even if you did find one that was a single continuous rail road that allowed not a single deviation from script it would not refute my point.

Kelb_Panthera
2020-10-30, 05:31 AM
To my mind, if this is a distinction worth making at all it's pretty much purely a matter of the attitude with which the group approaches combat.

A combat as sport group sees the combat as, well, a sport; as in they expect it to be sporting. That doesn't necessarily mean they expect the PCs to -win- every encounter but they do expect that a TPK is a thing to be avoided to the point of it being nigh-guaranteed that they will or even for the GM to cancel out what would otherwise be a TPK by imposing some lesser, if still severe penalty for losing the combat.


A combat as war group sees the combat as both sides of any given combat as doing their level best to annihilate the other. The only thing standing between the PCs and a TPK is their ability to avoid it. The GM may or may not deliberately leave the PCs any outs in a particular encounter but he won't go out of his way to point them out and will kill them all anyway if they don't opt to try for it, either because they missed it or misjudged needing it. If a TPK does happen, everyone just shrugs and rolls up new characters without much fuss.


Beyond this difference in attitude, I don't know that there is a meaningful distinction to be made here.


With that in mind, I doubt seriously that many groups are purely one or the other. I know my group certainly isn't.

In combat as sport territory, we -should- have TPKed session before last. I made a few bad judgement calls after the Bard went down and things quickly spiraled. When the combat was ended, the bard was down but stable, the druid was stumbling around in the dark, blind as a bat and unable to meaningfully defend himself or target his spells and me and the wizard were dead. There's absolutely -no- reason beyond GM mercy that the bard and druid survived. They were stripped of their belongings and sent on their way.

In combat as war territory, only one member of our group would've actually been particularly upset if the TPK had stood. We "kicked in the door" of a not-so-abandoned fortress full of orcs. We -should- have retreated sooner than we attempted to do so. I fully accept that I got my martial adept killed. Wizard does too with how his character died. The druid wasn't exactly pleased with how it went down, since it was a combination of both his -and- our decisions rather than just his own that left him in the lurch, but would've rolled with it anyway. The GM's mercy was predicated on two things: he didn't want to have to reintroduce one of the plot-hooks he layed down and the bard, his wife, would've whined to no end about how her death, fairly wrought, was unfair and he was pickin' on her again. I assure you, he feels -no- guilt for wiping us out.

Personally, I kinda wish he had just rolled with the TPK. Getting us back on the plot-hook wouldn't have been as difficult as he thought.

Spiderswims
2020-11-02, 05:18 PM
Well, lots to unpack here.

An RPG is way to complex for just two descriptions like sport or war, but they are useful only in the most vague way to give you a vague sense of the game play.

Combat as Sport is by default more casual. Some friends getting together eating snacks, having fun and rolling dice. And you get:

1.The Genteelness Agreement. In any form.

2.Characters as Stars of their own stories. This goes beyond the rules and the agreement to where the PCs are special main characters of the story.

3.The Rules. Much like in a sport, the rules are the rules and are final. Everyone must follow the rules, and everyone is ready to call out if they see someone bend or ignore or break a rule.

Combat as War by default is deadly serious. Some friends getting together to play out a very complex simulated reality.

1.Anything goes. There is no agreement of any sorts.

2.The PCs are not special stars at all.

3.The Rules. Some rules are final, but for the most part: anything goes.

But the above really only gets you a vague sense of the game. What you really need to do is go point by point, on a ten scale(0: Cartoon, 1-5:Combat is Sport 6-10:Combat is War)

Seriousness
Consequences
Awareness
Assumptions
Protections
Resource Management
Loss
Lasting Effects
Surprises

And so on.

An Archer is a great example here. At zero it's a pure cartoon, an archer can shoot 100 arrows and they zip around like bees; the archer can shoot any time, anywhere with no ill effects. At about three you get the idea that the archer has as many mundane arrows as they wish "if reasonable"; they can shoot mundane arrows in every encounter and are assumed to make/find/buy/or something arrows as the game day rolls on. By five the archer has slightly less then infinite arrows and must take at least a vague action, and a roll, to say they are crafting or looking for arrows. Getting to six is where the archer has a very specific and set number of arrows: period. And they have set rules about how to make or find arrows. Going past seven is thing like the archer must keep the bow dry, make checks often to see if it gets broken when dropped or hit, gets into dozens of different bow and arrow types, plus all types of at will maneuvers that are not in the rulebooks.

You can easily see examples:

Sport: Almost no foe ever targets the archers bow or arrows. The archer can fall off a cliff into a raging river, tumble in to a pool of lava or be zapped into another dimension and they will never loose their bow an arrows. The archer is just assumed to take care of the bow and arrows ''off game" and the archer just buys and makes arrows all the time, again "off game"

War: The archers bow and arrows are big huge target: any foe with an intelligence of three or more understands the power, range and danger of a bow and will target it if needed or possible. The archer is always in a big danger of loosing their bow and arrows. To say fall in a river from a higher is just about sure to loose the bow and many arrows, and the character will have to take actions to get them back...if possible. A pit of lava will destroy the mundane bows and arrows quickly. The archer must take game time and actions to care for the bow. The archer must carefully count each arrow, and they can and will run out...and then not be much of an archer.

But none of the above are exclusive to one type. Two games might both be Resource Management eight, so each archer in each game has to count their arrows carefully. But game A might have Loss 2, so the PCs just about never accidentally loose anything and game B might have Loss 9, where the Pcs stuff might be lost on a whim at any time.

Duff
2020-11-02, 05:38 PM
I disagree; I find the terms moderately useful, mostly in terms of setting expectations in a session 0. They don't explain everything instantly and completely, but they provide a good starting off point, and a useful shorthand, especially for PbP descriptions.

As a concept, this conversation may help make me a better player. I like to do CAW, but if the game is being run more CAS, I should consider that might be because the gm or other players prefer that.
So, it shouldn't have to be a destructive conversation.

In an Australian discussion group I'm in we say "There's no such thing as badwrongfun". That doesn't mean we can't learn from each other, just that different doesn't mean wrong

kyoryu
2020-11-03, 12:33 PM
Actually, I disagree about CaS/CaW being more/less serious. I think it's more about what types of decisions people want to make.

And while CaS/CaW bundle up a number of variables, I still think it's useful, because at some point those variables combine to create a fundamentally different style of gaming. And understanding that these styles of gaming exist, and are different is useful.

Quertus
2020-11-03, 02:16 PM
Actually, I disagree about CaS/CaW being more/less serious. I think it's more about what types of decisions people want to make.

And while CaS/CaW bundle up a number of variables, I still think it's useful, because at some point those variables combine to create a fundamentally different style of gaming. And understanding that these styles of gaming exist, and are different is useful.

More or less serious? Did I miss that, or is that people's takeaway from my "beer and pretzels" comment? If the latter, I clearly need to amend my comment slightly.

For the "bundling a number of variables"... I mean, I think "male vs female" (biologically) is defined by a single variable involving chromosomes, but results in numerous measurable variables between the two (for any given species). I *think* CaW/CaS is similarly a single variable "under the hood" ("can we change the difficulty of the encounter through the strategic layer / before the encounter starts"), with numerous observable differences in the types of games that result from that decision. Does your stance fundamentally differ from mine in any appreciable way; if so, would you care to explain those perceived differences?

kyoryu
2020-11-03, 02:19 PM
More or less serious? Did I miss that, or is that people's takeaway from my "beer and pretzels" comment? If the latter, I clearly need to amend my comment slightly.

For the "bundling a number of variables"... I mean, I think "male vs female" (biologically) is defined by a single variable involving chromosomes, but results in numerous measurable variables between the two (for any given species). I *think* CaW/CaS is similarly a single variable "under the hood" ("can we change the difficulty of the encounter through the strategic layer / before the encounter starts"), with numerous observable differences in the types of games that result from that decision. Does your stance fundamentally differ from mine in any appreciable way; if so, would you care to explain those perceived differences?

As I've said before, i think it's more than that. It's about the role of "encounters" within the game, the expected activities of the game, etc.

And you didn't say that about "more/less serious". Spiderswims did.

Duff
2020-11-03, 07:29 PM
More or less serious? Did I miss that, or is that people's takeaway from my "beer and pretzels" comment? If the latter, I clearly need to amend my comment slightly.

For the "bundling a number of variables"... I mean, I think "male vs female" (biologically) is defined by a single variable involving chromosomes, but results in numerous measurable variables between the two (for any given species). I *think* CaW/CaS is similarly a single variable "under the hood" ("can we change the difficulty of the encounter through the strategic layer / before the encounter starts"), with numerous observable differences in the types of games that result from that decision. Does your stance fundamentally differ from mine in any appreciable way; if so, would you care to explain those perceived differences?

There's some implied differences that go with the split to a variable degree:
CAW works better than CAS with sandbox games.
1st level party decide to take on the great old dragon? CAW says "Sure, you'll need a brilliant plan or you're toast"
CAS struggles with that so; either the sensible players understand that the deep end of the sandbox isn't for them yet, the GM puts 10 levels worth of encounters between them and the dragon so it's a sporting fight when they get there, the dragon has moved out when they get there etc. It can be done, but it doesn't suit the game style as well. CAS is easier when the party is following the plot from one level appropriate adventure to the next.

On a related note, CAW requires more of the world to be generated. The party can't use other resources to beat a fight if they can't find out what resources are there. Some games will have players ask for/tell the GM what's around, others will rely on the GM to tell the players about the world

CAS works better at a faster pace. The level appropriate party probably makes a few stealth rolls and maybe a tracking roll to get them to the dragon's lair. Fight ensues and maybe another couple of encounters before home time.
CAW works better at a slower pace. A session spent plotting the dragon's downfall is a session well spent, plan to be enacted next session...

CAW often needs to give the characters more down time to gather info and resources. Hire scouts and a week later you get their reports. Travel around the kingdom recruiting another party to hit the front door while you go in the back
Again, CAS is faster, rest, heal, repeat with just the odd trip into town to sell loot and buy supplies. They can often use the down time for crafting etc, but it's not essential that they have it regularly

The GM and players in CAS should have a reasonable idea of how hard a fight or an adventure will be so the risk of accidental TPK is less. Though the GM may make a genuine 50/50 fight, that's not an accident if it goes south
Because the GM is creating situations without knowing how much the players will manage to change it, there's a higher risk of accidental TPK. So the party need to be OK with that

The strategic mindset of CAW works better with players who think and talk about the game between sessions.
CAS rewards that sort of thing less. It's still good to talk about your build plans and rule interpretations out of game time, but there's simply less planning that needs doing.

Telok
2020-11-04, 06:30 PM
Has the DM done statistics to figure out how many people of what power levels are left after you nuked their city from orbit, to determine how many people are going to be trying to scry&teleport-kill you? Was it more than 30 people? Combat as war.

When the party sneaks into the villian's hideout at night are all the henchmen at their posts in full arms & armor despite having been our raiding that afternoon? Did you find an appropriate amount of gold coins as loot but the wagons of stuff they hauled off from the town is "worthless" even though they cleaned out a silversmith, a brewery, and an alchemist? Combat as sport.

Those are extreme experiences, but it's my experiences. I will not claim it's common or a good definition. Just experiences.

GrayDeath
2020-11-05, 05:55 PM
JNow, prefacing that I didnt start to play D&D outside of Eye of the Beholder unti 3rd was well and right on its way, I heard of both things described in my 2 groups at that time, but obviously (there was no Internet and we are not English^^) under different terms.

Back then, we called it "DSA Combat" and "Shadowrun Combat".

DSA Combat meant that either the fight had no real meaning, as the actual Star of the adventure, the NPC we were following (Sarcasm level 3^^) would start doing something if it went bad, or even if it did go bad, we would at most be prisoner for a day and then get everything but lost arrows/some money back.
So our go on it was "go in, dont think too much, enjoy roleplaying it!". very often the Adventure even demanded certain battles be lost.


Shadowrun Coimbat was the term for "Spend 7 hours planning the combat, and less than 20 Minutes doing it.
It meant we tried our utmost to make the run as smooth, slick and eprfectly executed as we could. And while we did still roleplay a lot, it was roleplaying semi "pros" who would wait until the paycheck to do something that could endanger said paycheck.
Losing here in the best case meant wasting lots of ingame ressources and loads of time, in the worst case we ere dead or gunea pigs for Renraku.



So while I am by no means an expert on the terms, for us it was more a "the Combat and what happens before/during/after count" and "Only the Result counts".

AdAstra
2020-11-05, 06:29 PM
I gotta agree with some of the other posters in this thread, CaW and CaS seem to primarily exist as ways for people to say that they're playing better than other people. It's like Realism. The term could have meaning, but it's largely just used as a way to praise or decry a way of doing things, and often has nothing to do with how well something meshes with reality.

The closest thing I can see to a definition of CaW and CaS comes down to flags. Certain flags are associated with CaS, others with CaW.

-Enemies surrendering, retreating, and otherwise being clearly concerned with their own lives is usually more associated with Combat as War. Really this is more of a matter of how the DM chooses to roleplay the enemies.

-Enemies not behaving "optimally" by the judge's estimation is usually associated with Combat as Sport. This is despite the fact that people in real wars very much do not behave optimally all the time, and people's definitions of optimal tend to vary. And of course, behaving optimally and behaving as if your life has meaning as noted above can conflict with each other.

-Cheap shots and tricks, from either the players or the DM, is usually seen as a CaW thing. Of course, any DM can pull the ultimate cheap shot of fiat, and cheap tricks can often be seen as more of a beer-and-pretzels thing ("hey look at how many attacks my character can do with this build"), rather than an attempt to wring every possible advantage out of the rules.

-Enemies having clear goals independent of the players is usually seen as CaW, but it's honestly pretty rare to see foes that solely exist to antagonize the heroes. Most of the time even the cheesiest 2-dimensional villains have plots and goals that are the reason why the heroes take action in the first place.

Duff
2020-11-05, 06:46 PM
I think also, if your GM is trying for a realistic world, it will look more like CAW. The bandits that shake you down could be well over your level, or well under it. There's no reason you can assume your random encounters are your level in a realistic world, nor in CAW.
This isn't a hard and fast rule, CAW worlds don't have to be built to be realistic and a good CAS GM can simply say "The bandits aren't dangerous enough to be worth fighting" or ensure the party know they are fighting their way *out* of the ambush, not trying to save the rest of the caravan.

But the quote "Not everything in going on in the world is at your level" fits better with CAW

Mechalich
2020-11-05, 10:03 PM
-Enemies surrendering, retreating, and otherwise being clearly concerned with their own lives is usually more associated with Combat as War. Really this is more of a matter of how the DM chooses to roleplay the enemies.

There's a big mechanical element to this as well. In order for retreat, surrender, and similar mechanics to work the game has to prevent them as mechanically viable options - attempting to run away or surrender has to not only be more likely to work than simply fighting to the bitter end, it also has to preserve more resources for the party. This gets complicated in a system that allows for the dead to come back, as you end up with math that winning with all but one party member dead may still be superior to surrendering.

This also runs into the problem of certain types of enemies. D&D in particular has a very large range of implacable, merciless, tireless monsters that you can't surrender to or viably runaway from. If you really want to make encounters commonly end with something other than everyone on one side in a bloody pile, you have to restrict what can constitute a side.

Tessman the 2nd
2020-11-06, 02:18 AM
I think the difference between these two is the setting

In combat as war creatures simply exist in their habitat in the most realistic manner for those creatures and are not certain combatants. Most of combat as war is done outside of combat: determining how to get the most benefit for the least Risk, with combat as war combat itself should be a decision with weight.

AdAstra
2020-11-07, 10:09 PM
There's a big mechanical element to this as well. In order for retreat, surrender, and similar mechanics to work the game has to prevent them as mechanically viable options - attempting to run away or surrender has to not only be more likely to work than simply fighting to the bitter end, it also has to preserve more resources for the party. This gets complicated in a system that allows for the dead to come back, as you end up with math that winning with all but one party member dead may still be superior to surrendering.

This also runs into the problem of certain types of enemies. D&D in particular has a very large range of implacable, merciless, tireless monsters that you can't surrender to or viably runaway from. If you really want to make encounters commonly end with something other than everyone on one side in a bloody pile, you have to restrict what can constitute a side.

I was speaking in terms of how the enemy acts, and not how the players act. Enemies surrendering/retreating doesn't necessarily have to be common for people to label a game as CaW, and I personally disagree that it's valid reasoning.

These are purely things that I've seen other people use to characterize CaW/CaS games, not things I think separate the two. Because again, I think the labels are mostly buzzwords.

Duff
2020-11-08, 06:54 PM
With the retreat/surrender side, I kinda agree it comes under CAW.

As in, if every monster is going to fight to the death*, you're probably doing CAS.

* assuming not every monster you fight is a non-retreating kind. Fighting against the Golem King, you might expect no retreat.

Also, this is definitely not an either/or. A GM can set up fights which, once the party has been as clever as they can to stack odds, will still be an interesting fight. They can have the fights along the way to curb-stomping the BBEG be interesting. So quite significant elements of both can go in a single story. Also, the balance between the two can vary if that's what the GM and players want. One stroy where the players have lots of options to CAW, then the next one, the structure of the adventure limits the player's options to allow CAS
OTOH, in more story oriented games, maybe neither apply so much. Maybe what's more important is how the party behave in the fight - who helps who and style over substance.

Morty
2020-11-09, 06:57 AM
-Enemies surrendering, retreating, and otherwise being clearly concerned with their own lives is usually more associated with Combat as War. Really this is more of a matter of how the DM chooses to roleplay the enemies.


Yes, I had enemies run away, retreat and surrender to the players in Dungeon World - and neither the system nor my take on it have much to do with what's usually bandied about as "Combat as War".

Pleh
2020-11-09, 08:17 AM
With the retreat/surrender side, I kinda agree it comes under CAW.

As in, if every monster is going to fight to the death*, you're probably doing CAS.

* assuming not every monster you fight is a non-retreating kind. Fighting against the Golem King, you might expect no retreat.

Also, this is definitely not an either/or. A GM can set up fights which, once the party has been as clever as they can to stack odds, will still be an interesting fight. They can have the fights along the way to curb-stomping the BBEG be interesting. So quite significant elements of both can go in a single story. Also, the balance between the two can vary if that's what the GM and players want. One stroy where the players have lots of options to CAW, then the next one, the structure of the adventure limits the player's options to allow CAS
OTOH, in more story oriented games, maybe neither apply so much. Maybe what's more important is how the party behave in the fight - who helps who and style over substance.

I'm going to give a possible counterpoint to this.

For the start of one campaign, I had my players begin by being chased by a chemically mutated Rancor. They were low level (hadn't even earned Heroic Levels yet, so they weren't even level 1 yet). I told them up front there was no hope for fighting this thing and they needed to run.

They were on board and it was a fun little romp through a building while the beast tore the place apart trying to kill them.

I feel like this scenario definitely still falls under CaS, because the challenge was curated to be specifically a FAIR challenge, when players follow the rules (don't fight, just run).

My point being, Sport implies there should be a fair contest, assuming all parties involved are following the expected rules.

CaW, on the other hand, implies there are no rules and fairness isn't even really a part of the equation. You encounter X, and you are expected to take whatever actions optimize your own outcome.

I tend to see myself as a CaS style GM. I see this as placing a high priority on players consistently receiving the games expected difficulty, as long as the players are following an anticipated course of action. Because at the end of the day, we are playing a game, even if our characters are not. Games should be run fairly.

The reason, in my mind, to NOT be a CaW style GM is that I have an unfair advantage over my players in this fight, if we treat it as a war. I can kill their characters by fiat and win immediately at no risk to myself. That seems the optimal solution, so that is what treating it as war would advise me to do.

So I begin to see that in this thread, I am outlining that an optimal TTRPG will probably want to Simulate CaW within the context of the PCs and NPCs, but at the meta level for the players, it should remain CaS. We want Sportsmanship from each other as players, but we want their characters to behave as if dealing with a life or death, CaW scenario.

That is where people seem to get confused. As real world players, we must strive to be fair to one another. Our characters, on the other hand, have absolutely no such constraint (quite the contrary, they have every incentive to avoid any kind of fairness in combat).

This is where, in my own GMing, I've devised the concept of consciously dividing the GM roles: The Referee and the Antagonist (there are more roles, but this is the part that most pertains to CaS/CaW). The role of Referee requires that I be absolutely impartial and ensure the meta game is run as fairly as possible. The role of the Antagonist compels me to use any advantage available to me to win and defeat the party. The best players I've had at my tables operated this level of separation of mental states as well, never getting angry when they lose, because they recognize the fairness of the game, but also being able to adapt and devise clever solutions to scenarios because they are able to think in the CaW mindset.

The issue I've seen from people talking about it online are people who get these roles confused at some point. CaS gets called out for inhibiting a player's ability to outwit the problems standing in front of them (or makes the game too easy by having enemies ignore obviously advantageous tactics). CaW gets called out when the players stumble into an encounter that is far beyond their capabilities and rips the players out of their immersion to wonder exactly what the GM was thinking by putting such deadly enemies within reach of the party (or again, making the game too easy by getting the party stranded in miles of goblin territory in every direction, so every encounter is the same, trivial goblin stomp every time).

Ultimately, I've settled on the best Balance point for Fairness is Communication of Information.

Yes, the Meta Game should be set up to be balanced around a certain degree of fairness that makes the game most fun for the whole table as much as possible. But part of what makes the game exciting is having some degree of uncertainty, too. If we already know every fight will be scaled to be exactly the right challenge rating, some of the excitement of the discovery is lost. On the other hand, players don't like getting TPK'd for making the "wrong choice" when there wasn't any indication that a wrong choice could be made, much less that so much was at stake for it.

For both CaS to work on the Meta Game AND CaW to work within the game's inner narrative, what players need is a solid flow of information about the game. They need to know ahead of time if the encounter should be expected to be harder or easier than the Expected Difficulty, on the CaS Meta level, as correctly discerning this from clues is part of the reward of winning, and further this informs how much extracurricular work they might want to prepare for the CaW aspect. If you anticipate the fight to be easier, you can tactically choose to save your spells for harder fights later. If you anticipate you will struggle to win, you can devise retreat plans ahead of time and cast buffing spells before initiating the encounter. This is Information allowing players to interact with both the Sport of the Meta and for their characters to demonstrate proficiency in the War of the Game.

Quertus
2020-11-09, 10:20 AM
Yes, I had enemies run away, retreat and surrender to the players in Dungeon World - and neither the system nor my take on it have much to do with what's usually bandied about as "Combat as War".

In what way is your game not CaW?


Games should be run fairly.

Agreed. Strongly agreed.


The reason, in my mind, to NOT be a CaW style GM is that I have an unfair advantage over my players in this fight, if we treat it as a war. I can kill their characters by fiat and win immediately at no risk to myself. That seems the optimal solution, so that is what treating it as war would advise me to do.

It is not you vs the players in CaW.


So I begin to see that in this thread, I am outlining that an optimal TTRPG will probably want to Simulate CaW within the context of the PCs and NPCs, but at the meta level for the players, it should remain CaS. We want Sportsmanship from each other as players, but we want their characters to behave as if dealing with a life or death, CaW scenario.

Yes, the players should not read the module, or assassinate the GM or kidnap the GM's sister to "win" the game. The game is CaW, not the metagame.


That is where people seem to get confused. As real world players, we must strive to be fair to one another. Our characters, on the other hand, have absolutely no such constraint (quite the contrary, they have every incentive to avoid any kind of fairness in combat).

People get confused here? :smallconfused:


This is where, in my own GMing, I've devised the concept of consciously dividing the GM roles: The Referee and the Antagonist (there are more roles, but this is the part that most pertains to CaS/CaW). The role of Referee requires that I be absolutely impartial and ensure the meta game is run as fairly as possible. The role of the Antagonist compels me to use any advantage available to me to win and defeat the party. The best players I've had at my tables operated this level of separation of mental states as well, never getting angry when they lose, because they recognize the fairness of the game, but also being able to adapt and devise clever solutions to scenarios because they are able to think in the CaW mindset.

Again, yeah, if you don't want your players cheating, or blackmailing the GM, or whatever, then this is obviously correct.


The issue I've seen from people talking about it online are people who get these roles confused at some point. CaS gets called out for inhibiting a player's ability to outwit the problems standing in front of them (or makes the game too easy by having enemies ignore obviously advantageous tactics). CaW gets called out when the players stumble into an encounter that is far beyond their capabilities and rips the players out of their immersion to wonder exactly what the GM was thinking by putting such deadly enemies within reach of the party (or again, making the game too easy by getting the party stranded in miles of goblin territory in every direction, so every encounter is the same, trivial goblin stomp every time).

OK, maybe I myself need some help getting back on the obvious path, but... If the GM broadcasts (implies) a "sporting challenge", I've been known to counter with "what were you thinking?!".

In fact, even in a CaW environment, I will ask, "what were you thinking" when I can see no way for the party to successfully engage / survive / enjoy a particular bit of content.

Even in CaW, the content should be designed with the intent that it should be fun, because this is a game.

Or, at least, that's my stance on things.


Ultimately, I've settled on the best Balance point for Fairness is Communication of Information.

Yes, the Meta Game should be set up to be balanced around a certain degree of fairness that makes the game most fun for the whole table as much as possible. But part of what makes the game exciting is having some degree of uncertainty, too. If we already know every fight will be scaled to be exactly the right challenge rating, some of the excitement of the discovery is lost. On the other hand, players don't like getting TPK'd for making the "wrong choice" when there wasn't any indication that a wrong choice could be made, much less that so much was at stake for it.

For both CaS to work on the Meta Game AND CaW to work within the game's inner narrative, what players need is a solid flow of information about the game. They need to know ahead of time if the encounter should be expected to be harder or easier than the Expected Difficulty, on the CaS Meta level, as correctly discerning this from clues is part of the reward of winning, and further this informs how much extracurricular work they might want to prepare for the CaW aspect. If you anticipate the fight to be easier, you can tactically choose to save your spells for harder fights later. If you anticipate you will struggle to win, you can devise retreat plans ahead of time and cast buffing spells before initiating the encounter. This is Information allowing players to interact with both the Sport of the Meta and for their characters to demonstrate proficiency in the War of the Game.

Hmmm... I can't really think of a good way to phrase my full response, so I'll just give the snarky, "but what if 'the GM just tells us stuff' is a 'Win Button', taking away the 'figure out the difficulty' minigame that I was looking forward to?".

So, while in general I agree about information and informed choices, I have to counter with, "why not just hand the players the module at the start of the game before they even make / select their characters?".

I think that where this line gets drawn, how the players receive what information, is not so trivial a question that "give all info always" is the correct answer.

Morty
2020-11-09, 11:08 AM
In what way is your game not CaW?

Answering this question would dignify the categorization far more than it deserves. Furthermore, I suspect this is a "you run challenging combat encounters, so obviously you're doing CaW" situation.

Spiderswims
2020-11-09, 01:34 PM
People get confused here? :smallconfused:


People seem to get confused everywhere.

Still War and Sport don't really cover all the styles of games. So War and Sport are more vague short-hands.

Sport: A light more fluffy, much less serious game where things are tipped way in the players favor and the GM and the players each agree to not do dozens of things to muddy up the game. For example the GM agrees to not have foes or monsters attack the PCs when they are not ready or at a huge disadvantage; and the players also agree not to do that to foes and monsters.

War: a more dark and gritty, a much more serious game where anything can happen to the players, and there is no hint of any agreement. For example the PC rest for the night and the GM has some assassins come over and kill the helpless sleeping PCs. TPK. No chance of the players doing anything except watching their characters die. The end. And the players can do any such thing to defeat or kill a foe or monster.

How the GM runs encounters really shows War vs Sport to me. It's not binary, so there are some shades in between, but not so much you can't tell them apart. Like on the ten scale:

1:The players need never even think about worrying about anything ever. So when the players have their PCs camp for the night they just say so: the GM has sworn to never ever attack the PCs at night or when they are not ready.

5:The players only give a vague worry about things as it is assumed the PCs know what they are doing and select a defensible campsite, post guards, have guard shifts, don't make a big easy to see fire, and so on. Here the GM only has a night or not ready attack once in a while. And still the GM will most often give the players a hint that it is coming. And the GM agrees to not take "too much" advantage. And, often, gives the PCs some free time, even if surprised, to get ready.

10:Anything goes. It's 100% up to the players as to what their characters do. The player gets no 'help' from the character or even the rules. The players, using their real life skills, must make a defensible camp site. Any simple blunder by a PC here can lead to disaster or TPK. Here the GM has night attacks or attacks when the PCs are not ready often...about as often as they are used in real life....and that is All The Time. And here there is no agreement about anything.

And this provides another example of how the scale does slide. A LOT of GMs will say they run their games in the style that makes sense. So things that happen in the game have no judgement, it is all based on what would/should happen naturally. But then look at night attacks: by that definition most foes should use night attacks. But here the GM will alter things a bit and say either no or few night attacks. The GM is making the choice here to not have foes and monsters attack when the PCs are wounded, out of armor and out of spells, charges, and daily uses.


In a War type game the players have to take time to prepare for things that might happen. Wizards have an extra spell book or tattoo themselves with spells, clerics have a extra holy symbol, warriors have armor and weapons that teleport on to them, they rest in extra dimensional spaces, and they provide protection for animal allies. Just to name a few. In short the PCs must expend resources to prepare to survive.

In the Sport type game, the GM agrees not to target the PCs in the above ways. The wizard never has to worry about their spellbook, and everyone will always be fully equipped for every encounter. And the PCs don't need to overly worry about mounts and animals. In short the players are free to make any build they wish without "wasting" abilities, money, items and spells to prepare for things that might happen.

Both games are fun, but they are radically different.

Pleh
2020-11-09, 02:17 PM
Hmmm... I can't really think of a good way to phrase my full response, so I'll just give the snarky, "but what if 'the GM just tells us stuff' is a 'Win Button', taking away the 'figure out the difficulty' minigame that I was looking forward to?".

So, while in general I agree about information and informed choices, I have to counter with, "why not just hand the players the module at the start of the game before they even make / select their characters?".

I think that where this line gets drawn, how the players receive what information, is not so trivial a question that "give all info always" is the correct answer.

Thankfully, that wasn't what I was advocating anyway.

Rather, you can't "figure out the difficulty" if the GM gives you nothing to work with. "Giving the players info" isn't meant to suggest dispensing answers or conclusions, but data and clues relevant to their decisions.

"You find a set of footprints. Your level of skill can determine that they are Small sized humanoids (not referring to mechanical Humanoids), but you can't determine the race beyond that. It may be a harmless group of Gnommish Nomads, or a hunting pack of Goblins, or even a savage group of Halfling Barbarian Bandits. But you know there are approximately a half a dozen of them traveling together that passed through here no more than six hours ago, meaning they could be six hours travel ahead of you, unless they stopped to rest or turn off the road before then."

Probably, the desired response from the players is, "look for more clues before we encounter them," but now they have a reasonable expectation that the worst they might encounter is a pack of Goblins or an angry tribe of barbarians. Expectation of difficulty has been discovered by winning the Challenge Deduction Minigame, even if there are still pieces missing that leave some element of surprise.

Duff
2020-11-09, 07:28 PM
I'm going to give a possible counterpoint to this.

For the start of one campaign, I had my players begin by being chased by a chemically mutated Rancor. They were low level (hadn't even earned Heroic Levels yet, so they weren't even level 1 yet). I told them up front there was no hope for fighting this thing and they needed to run.

They were on board and it was a fun little romp through a building while the beast tore the place apart trying to kill them.

I feel like this scenario definitely still falls under CaS, because the challenge was curated to be specifically a FAIR challenge, when players follow the rules (don't fight, just run).

My point being, Sport implies there should be a fair contest, assuming all parties involved are following the expected rules.

CaW, on the other hand, implies there are no rules and fairness isn't even really a part of the equation. You encounter X, and you are expected to take whatever actions optimize your own outcome.

I tend to see myself as a CaS style GM. I see this as placing a high priority on players consistently receiving the games expected difficulty, as long as the players are following an anticipated course of action. Because at the end of the day, we are playing a game, even if our characters are not. Games should be run fairly.

The reason, in my mind, to NOT be a CaW style GM is that I have an unfair advantage over my players in this fight, if we treat it as a war. I can kill their characters by fiat and win immediately at no risk to myself. That seems the optimal solution, so that is what treating it as war would advise me to do.

So I begin to see that in this thread, I am outlining that an optimal TTRPG will probably want to Simulate CaW within the context of the PCs and NPCs, but at the meta level for the players, it should remain CaS. We want Sportsmanship from each other as players, but we want their characters to behave as if dealing with a life or death, CaW scenario.

That is where people seem to get confused. As real world players, we must strive to be fair to one another. Our characters, on the other hand, have absolutely no such constraint (quite the contrary, they have every incentive to avoid any kind of fairness in combat).

This is where, in my own GMing, I've devised the concept of consciously dividing the GM roles: The Referee and the Antagonist (there are more roles, but this is the part that most pertains to CaS/CaW). The role of Referee requires that I be absolutely impartial and ensure the meta game is run as fairly as possible. The role of the Antagonist compels me to use any advantage available to me to win and defeat the party. The best players I've had at my tables operated this level of separation of mental states as well, never getting angry when they lose, because they recognize the fairness of the game, but also being able to adapt and devise clever solutions to scenarios because they are able to think in the CaW mindset.

The issue I've seen from people talking about it online are people who get these roles confused at some point. CaS gets called out for inhibiting a player's ability to outwit the problems standing in front of them (or makes the game too easy by having enemies ignore obviously advantageous tactics). CaW gets called out when the players stumble into an encounter that is far beyond their capabilities and rips the players out of their immersion to wonder exactly what the GM was thinking by putting such deadly enemies within reach of the party (or again, making the game too easy by getting the party stranded in miles of goblin territory in every direction, so every encounter is the same, trivial goblin stomp every time).

Ultimately, I've settled on the best Balance point for Fairness is Communication of Information.

Yes, the Meta Game should be set up to be balanced around a certain degree of fairness that makes the game most fun for the whole table as much as possible. But part of what makes the game exciting is having some degree of uncertainty, too. If we already know every fight will be scaled to be exactly the right challenge rating, some of the excitement of the discovery is lost. On the other hand, players don't like getting TPK'd for making the "wrong choice" when there wasn't any indication that a wrong choice could be made, much less that so much was at stake for it.

For both CaS to work on the Meta Game AND CaW to work within the game's inner narrative, what players need is a solid flow of information about the game. They need to know ahead of time if the encounter should be expected to be harder or easier than the Expected Difficulty, on the CaS Meta level, as correctly discerning this from clues is part of the reward of winning, and further this informs how much extracurricular work they might want to prepare for the CaW aspect. If you anticipate the fight to be easier, you can tactically choose to save your spells for harder fights later. If you anticipate you will struggle to win, you can devise retreat plans ahead of time and cast buffing spells before initiating the encounter. This is Information allowing players to interact with both the Sport of the Meta and for their characters to demonstrate proficiency in the War of the Game.

First off, the Rancor chase sounds like an amazing start to a campaign. Well done!
I think that encounter sits outside the CAS/CAW dichotomy. It could fit equally well in a campaign which sits anywhere on that sliding scale (though if you're running more at the CAS end, you're right to tell the players what the encounter is about, whereas CAW you'd expect the players to work that out themselves.

2nd, You're absolutely right about there being an important difference between player CAW and character CAW. I would say if you want to do player CAW, stick with boardgames, but different people will enjoy different games and that's fine.

3rd, I can't imagine a GM actually playing CAW. I consider myself to have been a fairly CAW GM*. I threw my players problems that I didn't know how to solve. I ran evil overlords who had read the evil overlord book, who responded rationally but who had limited resources to use. So the BBEG would send what they thought was enough force to deal with the threat the PCs had shown at the time with little regard for the power of the party.
I can see a short campaign maybe where a GM says "I'm going to use only level appropriate threats and I'm going to try for a TPK" as the most CAW GMing that could work. And I might well play that game. Since the GM only has to win once, it will be a short game and I'd only enjoy it as an interlude. It wcould be very much like the boardgame descent.

And I think your last paragraph gets into why it isn't as much a sliding scale as it can seem - elements from different points on the line can be combined, even within the one encounter.

* In retrospect, I should often have been less so since some of my players were not up for that sort of challenge and some probably needed a heads up that that was how I was going