Revisiting Combat as Sport vs Combat as War

[awa]

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.

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.