[Very Long] Combat as Sport vs. Combat as War: a Key Difference in D&D Play Styles...

ExploderWizard · Feb 5, 2012

Tony Vargas said:
I'm still waiting for someone to explain why they think a game should be less like an actual sport, and more like an actual war.

We /are/ talking about a game.

Actually, as long as we're exploring reasons for prefering one ed over another, there's one I think this thread illustrates rather well.

The better balanced a game is, the more style-neutral it is. That is, the more a player can play the character he wants, the way he wants, and the DM can run the campaign he wants, the way he wants and tell the story he wants, without the player character having to suck for the sake of concept or the DM having to re-write swaths of rules.

D&D has never been among the better-balanced games. It rewards some styles of play or character concept over others. In 3e Monte Cook said the intent was to 'reward system mastery.' A bizzarely elitist idea for a game that was still often an entry point to the hobby.

I think most of us have played D&D a long time, and we've gotten used to the demands that each edition has made on us, and modified our respective styles to get the most out of them. 4e threw a monkeywrench into that by not strongly favoring a style. You might 'master' the 4e system, but you didn't get 'rewarded' for it, at least not with anything more than a fun gaming experience.

I can see how we can get used to imbalance and start to think of the imbalances within a game as 'support' for the particular style that those imbalances favor. But, I think it's a mistake to get sucked into that line of thinking - especially if 5e is to have any shot at being as all-inclusive as the marketing rhetoric surrounding it suggests.

This distinction the OP draws between 'sport' and 'war' seems like nothing more than a way of trying to make imbalance sound kinda butch and cool. Rather than what it is: merely limitting.

Sure, in 3.x, the game was badly broken, and there were all kinds of ways to leverage the broken bits (mostly spells and items) to trivialize a supposedly tough encounter, or, conversely, to get your asses kicked by a supposedly modest encounter. That's just a symptom of poor balance. Yes, it meant aproaching the game as a 'war' was the viable option, which is fine if that's the only style you think it should support. But, a balanced game would still let the DM and players aproach individual combats with the 'war' mentality. It would just require the DM to design combats with that in mind. A balanced system doesn't keep you from creating an overwhelming encounter, nor keep players from finding a way of making it less overwhelming. It just makes pegging an encounter at 'overwhelming' a good deal easier and more consistent.

Balance can mean so many things and can be applied to a game so many ways that just throwing the term around as if it only had one meaning doesn't get one anywhere.

What kind of balance are we talking about. Balance as it applies to the overall campaign or balance based purely on one aspect of the game such as round by round combat balance?

The idea of any kind of perfectly numerically balanced rpg with character types that actually feel different in capability and identity is a fantasy.Every new element that gets added to the game will throw the balance off which will require more tweaking and revision which leads to a cyclical never ending revision process, a base system that is never stable, and books that are out of date before leaving the printers.

Actual meaningful game balance always has and always will need to be supplied by the persons who are participating. Different groups have vastly variable types of balance requirements and no prepackaged book can supply one version that will satisfy all.

The underlying balance problem is that no one wants to be the bad guy. No one wants to take charge of the game and hammer it into the perfect vehicle for them. Thats what hobbyists do. Roleplaying games are very personal and are limited only by what the people playing can come up with. Any published ruleset is going to hit the balance mark for some, require some tinkering by others, and just plain not work as a baseline for some.

Rpgs have been like this forever. Find the closest thing to what you want and kick it till it becomes perfect for you. Every once in a while one may stumble upon pure perfection right out of the box. Thats awesome when it happens but it shouldn't be an expectation in this hobby. Expecting that is equal to expecting people to not be different. How boring would that be?

thuryl · Feb 5, 2012

Since people have been talking a bit about the possibility of reconciling what players with a strong combat-as-war preference like and what players with a strong combat-as-sport preference like but not coming to too many conclusions, here's a thought. Maybe all of the out-of-combat, resource-tracking, strategic-planning stuff that combat-as-war players like, instead of setting the difficulty of the combat you get into, sets the stakes? If you plan and manage resources well, maybe you successfully raise a rebel army against the evil emperor, bust into his throne room and end up in a balanced fight against him and a handful of his elite guards while your allies hold off the rest of his forces outside. If you plan and manage resources badly, the rebellion collapses and the balanced fights you end up getting into are instead against the evil emperor's patrols as they try to hunt you down and capture you: your main goal at that point is just to get out of the emperor's lands alive, and you're going to have to really shine in those combats to ever get a shot at taking the emperor down.

My main problem with the combat-as-war paradigm is the fact that it can trivialise combat encounters that I'd have enjoyed being challenged by, so I think I'd be happy with a game that did something like this, but I'd like to hear what players with a combat-as-war preference think.

Thulcondar · Feb 5, 2012

The Human Target said:
I think one of my problems with CaW is that its so biased towards spell casters in the older editions.

I disagree.

On the one hand, the combat-as-war approach does allow spell-casters, especially at lower levels, to actively participate in combat situations beyond what they might otherwise be expected to. For instance, a first level magic-user might cast grease to impede the movement of the goblins down a corridor and let the DM sort it out. He's not dealing out loads of damage, but it allows him to use those "useless" spells by applying a little imagination. Rules that encourage the combat-as-sport approach tend to gravitate to spells that just dole out damage.

But more broadly, combat-as-war allows the player characters to employ strategies that the rules do not anticipate, and thus requires the full referee skills of the DM. This is something that earlier editions somewhat paradoxically encouraged by not having rules for every circumstance, forcing the DM to make on-the-fly decisions. Once there's a rule for dropping a cloth tarp on top of a load of bullywugs to confuse them and obscure their vision, it edges more towards the combat-as-sport view that then needs to give the bullywugs something to balance against that possibility. It's all about coming up with crazy ideas that the DM buys, that can give some sort of advantage. Rolling burning logs down a hill, torching the forest to smoke out the bees, digging pits and camouflaging them, etc.

Heck, if anything, I'd say that the combat-as-war approach is biased towards fire, not spell-casters. ;-)

Joe
Greyhawk Grognard

Thulcondar · Feb 5, 2012

thuryl said:
As a GM, I want to be able to play to win without just making my players lose by default because I'm the GM. That means that I want limits on my power. I want there to be a hard-and-fast rule, not just a guideline, that says "this is as much adversity as you're allowed to throw at the players in a balanced encounter". That way, I can genuinely compete against the players: I can play as hard as I'm allowed to, and know that the players will still have a chance to win if they're better at the game than I am.

The hard-and-fast rule is, if you're not being fair as the DM, you're players leave your game.

I don't need a rule to tell me "if your players have X levels, you should only throw Y monster hit dice at them, and when you do, make sure you have Z magic items". Sometimes my players face things that are out of their league, and the smart play is to run away. Sometimes, they face things that are out of their league, and they use their wits to bring the baddies down a notch into their league.

As long as I am being fair within the internal logic of the campaign setting and the rules, it's not unfair to set a challenge beyond the "by the book" capabilities of the player characters. They have the opportunity to bolster their own odds by going beyond the book. My duty as DM is to adjudicate fairly the impact of those wild and crazy schemes.

And I can tell you they find that more satisfying than knowing that their victory was not due to their own smart thinking, but to some pre-calculated formula that dictated the odds that they would survive any given encounter.

Joe
Greyhawk Grognard

jasonzavoda · Feb 5, 2012

This has probably been said before somewhere in the 8 pages of replies.

After reading the article it seems to me that this is really about roleplaying combat versus wargaming combat.

Roleplaying is the art of the game. It is the hardest thing to accomplish and the downfall of RPGs versus things like video games and online games. This would be the combat as war.

Wargaming is easy to set-up but as complex as the ability of the players to think tactically within the confines of the rule system. It is much more of a skill than an art and roleplaying can be minimized. This would be the combat as sport.

It seems like the author is saying that 1e and 2e are open to more roleplaying, while 4e is more like a wargame.

My feeling is that regardless of the rulesystem it is the DMs and players who adjust the game to their comfort level of roleplaying versus wargaming during combat.

thuryl · Feb 5, 2012

Thulcondar said:
I don't need a rule to tell me "if your players have X levels, you should only throw Y monster hit dice at them, and when you do, make sure you have Z magic items". Sometimes my players face things that are out of their league, and the smart play is to run away. Sometimes, they face things that are out of their league, and they use their wits to bring the baddies down a notch into their league.

As long as I am being fair within the internal logic of the campaign setting and the rules, it's not unfair to set a challenge beyond the "by the book" capabilities of the player characters. They have the opportunity to bolster their own odds by going beyond the book. My duty as DM is to adjudicate fairly the impact of those wild and crazy schemes.

This is fine, and it's kind of what I was getting at in my previous post. I think the difference is that I want the characters' strategic decisions to exist outside of the combat system and give context to the combat, rather than interact with the combat rules directly.

If I'm playing a game with a combat system that I enjoy, I like being able to actually use the combat mechanics to play out challenging combats. Rules-based tactical combat is something that I can enjoy for its own sake, in much the same way I might enjoy a game of chess. When my party kills off most of a group of enemies by setting off a rockslide or something instead of fighting them, I don't feel satisfied that we've won an easy victory through our wits: I feel disappointed that I've missed out on the chance for a fun fight.

And I can tell you they find that more satisfying than knowing that their victory was not due to their own smart thinking, but to some pre-calculated formula that dictated the odds that they would survive any given encounter.

I think characterising it as "smart thinking" vs. "pre-calculated formulas" is a bit unfair, just as it would be unfair for me to describe good combat-as-sport play as "smart thinking" and good combat-as-war play as "sweet-talking the GM into making your plan work". Ideally, both combat-as-sport and combat-as-war require smart thinking: the difference is the scope of the things you're thinking about.

Tony Vargas · Feb 5, 2012

ExploderWizard said:
Balance can mean so many things and can be applied to a game so many ways that just throwing the term around as if it only had one meaning doesn't get one anywhere.

Certainly, if you're trying to rationalize to yourself or justify to others a preference for a game that's lacking in the balance department, denying the very concept of balance would be a good first step.

The idea of any kind of perfectly numerically balanced rpg with character types that actually feel different in capability and identity is a fantasy.

Perfect balance is, indeed, impossible. That's no reason not to try to make a game as balanced as possible, though. And there's /nothing/ inherently contradictory in balance and different character types. Indeed, the better balanced a game is, the more different character concepts can work within it.

Take 3.5, it has 3 top-tier classes, you play a tier 1 game, you have three character concepts to choose from. There are tons more classes, but they aren't competative. Play a tier 2 game, and though you eliminate classes from play, you have more viable choices for class.

Actual meaningful game balance always has and always will need to be supplied by the persons who are participating.

I can see how you feel that way if you've mostly played D&D. Balance has been poor through most eds of D&D, and old-school D&D was certainly subject to massive variants in endless variety. Which, I admit, was kinda fun at the time. But the game's slowly improved. 3.x, for instance, was modestly well balanced at lower levels. The 3.x ruleset was also a lot more consistent from table to table than AD&D or BECMI or 0D&D had been, far fewer variants ('house rules,' now) and a certain amount of hostility towards the very idea of tweaking the rules.

4e has similar table-to-table consistency, but is decently balanced. You don't need to re-work it extensively to play it, which I suppose, might make it harder to 'sell' players on voluminous variants (I haven't really tried with 4e, since, well, it works as writen, and I have less free time than when I was 15).

The underlying balance problem is that no one wants to be the bad guy. No one wants to take charge of the game and hammer it into the perfect vehicle for them.

Funny, seems like lots of people have been willing to do that when they needed to. Maybe there's just less need?

Rpgs have been like this forever.

They were for quite a while, yeah. Maybe some of 'em have moved on a bit, though.

Daztur · Feb 5, 2012

Tony Vargas said:
I'm still waiting for someone to explain why they think a game should be less like an actual sport, and more like an actual war.

We /are/ talking about a game.

Actually, as long as we're exploring reasons for prefering one ed over another, there's one I think this thread illustrates rather well.

The better balanced a game is, the more style-neutral it is. That is, the more a player can play the character he wants, the way he wants, and the DM can run the campaign he wants, the way he wants and tell the story he wants, without the player character having to suck for the sake of concept or the DM having to re-write swaths of rules.

D&D has never been among the better-balanced games. It rewards some styles of play or character concept over others. In 3e Monte Cook said the intent was to 'reward system mastery.' A bizzarely elitist idea for a game that was still often an entry point to the hobby.

I think most of us have played D&D a long time, and we've gotten used to the demands that each edition has made on us, and modified our respective styles to get the most out of them. 4e threw a monkeywrench into that by not strongly favoring a style. You might 'master' the 4e system, but you didn't get 'rewarded' for it, at least not with anything more than a fun gaming experience.

I can see how we can get used to imbalance and start to think of the imbalances within a game as 'support' for the particular style that those imbalances favor. But, I think it's a mistake to get sucked into that line of thinking - especially if 5e is to have any shot at being as all-inclusive as the marketing rhetoric surrounding it suggests.

This distinction the OP draws between 'sport' and 'war' seems like nothing more than a way of trying to make imbalance sound kinda butch and cool. Rather than what it is: merely limitting.

Sure, in 3.x, the game was badly broken, and there were all kinds of ways to leverage the broken bits (mostly spells and items) to trivialize a supposedly tough encounter, or, conversely, to get your asses kicked by a supposedly modest encounter. That's just a symptom of poor balance. Yes, it meant aproaching the game as a 'war' was the viable option, which is fine if that's the only style you think it should support. But, a balanced game would still let the DM and players aproach individual combats with the 'war' mentality. It would just require the DM to design combats with that in mind. A balanced system doesn't keep you from creating an overwhelming encounter, nor keep players from finding a way of making it less overwhelming. It just makes pegging an encounter at 'overwhelming' a good deal easier and more consistent.

OK, let's try to hit these points:

1. Why to play Combat as War instead of Combat as Sport. OK have you ever played the Total War games? Master of Orion? Master of Magic (words cannot express my love for that game)? In those games you can play on campaign mode and move around your armies TBS-style (like Civilization) and then when the armies meet you play out the battle. Because the two sides of the battle are determined by the events of the campaign mode, they are often wildly unbalanced. In Total War games you can nix the campaign mode and just play out the battles and make sure that each one is precisely balanced, but many people (including me) much prefer to play the campaign mode, unbalanced battles and all. What I'm talking about is the exact same thing, just applied to D&D (and it's a lot more fun in D&D, for all of the reasons that D&D of any edition is more fun than computer games).

2. On game balance. How exactly do you define "balance" in D&D? In Pathfinder (based on 3.5ed) Create Water is a 0-level cleric spell. In Adventurer Conqueror King (based on B/X) Create Water is a 4-level cleric spell. Which one is unbalanced? Why? "Balance" doesn't mean anything unless it's balanced against something, it's like saying that my 3-year old is balanced when he sits on a see-saw, it doesn't mean anything unless you say what's on the other side, give me some context man

3. On System Mastery: the "Ivory Tower Game Design" one you're mentioning is the second dumbest article I've ever read written by a WotC dev. I agree that encouraging System Mastery like that is silly, but I find it incredible that you say that 4ed doesn't reward system mastery at all. Really? Am I reading you correctly? Are you saying that having all 4ed content memorized doesn't give you any advantage at all over a newbie? As far as rewarding other sorts of behavior, I think that any game system inevitably rewards some sorts of behavior over others, no matter how neutral it tries to be. This can be good or bad depending on if the rewarded behavior is any fun or not.

Rogue Agent · Feb 5, 2012

Savage Wombat said:
You know, CaW requires a shitload more work from the DM in terms of game prep.

Common misconception. It comes as a result of trying to prep non-railroaded scenarios as if they were railroads.

In reality, it's a lot easier to prep a situation than it is to prep a plot.

Daztur said:
Combat as Sport: valuing the separate roles of the quarterback, linebacker and wide receiver and what plays you can use to win a competitive game.

Combat as War: being too busy laying your end zone with caltrops, dousing the midfield with lamp oil, blackmailing the ref, spiking the other team’s water and bribing key members of the other team to throw the game to worry about all of those damn squiggles on the blackboard.

Something else to think about:

In the course of this thread, there's a conflation going on between "combat as war vs. combat as sport" and "strategic-based play vs. encounter-based play".

This seems to be because people are mapping the pre-4E vs. 4E edition warring onto these categories. But there's no reason why you can't have an encounter-based system which is open to "combat as war" exploitation; and there's no reason why you can't have strategic play which is nevertheless designed to be "combat as sport". (I can't think of a good example of the former at the moment, but Descent arguably qualifies as the latter.)

The "war vs. sport" thing also seems to be getting conflated with challenge: Daztur talks about the "combat as war" group wanting to turn fair fights into turkey shoots. And that's true. But it's also true that the "combat as war" style of play also makes it possible for a group to turn an impossible fight into a fight that they can win with a struggle.

Yes, it's Indy pulling out his gun and shooting the swordsman (without having someone say "ohmigod, gunfighters are totally too powerful"). But it's also the Man in Black figuring out how they can storm the castle and rescue Princess Buttercup (without the DM carefully pre-balancing the encounter so that they can just fight their way through 40 guards).

Mokona · Feb 5, 2012

Daztur said:
the "Ivory Tower Game Design" one you're mentioning is the second dumbest article I've ever read written by a WotC dev.

Where is that link in this thread? Thanks.

[Very Long] Combat as Sport vs. Combat as War: a Key Difference in D&D Play Styles...

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