Revisiting Combat as Sport vs Combat as War

[Quertus]

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

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. (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 seemingly¹ 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)

¹ unless there's a lot of posts somewhere that I haven't read / don't remember where someone is actually taking such a stance.