Revisiting Combat as Sport vs Combat as War

[Quertus]

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 original¹, 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.

¹ 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?