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

Majoru Oakheart said:

I guess I just keep reading on ENWorld about games where the PCs are not "railroaded" at all. That they often decide on their own goals without any input from the DM at all and then the DM is forced to write an adventure to go along with that desire. Like the PCs decide "We're going to clean up this city and defeat the Thieves Guild." and then the DM now needs to write up a bunch of encounters with Thieves.

I've never ran a game like that. Every campaign starts with: Plot hook, the PCs take it and then follow every clue I leave them without ever coming up with their own ideas.

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Pure sandbox is something I've never seen either.

It's hard for me to imagine a campaign where at least part of isn't "plot hook then do the adventure the DM prepared for". Some of what I run on email is pretty "open ended", but, except the downtime periods, there is a goal of some sort, and I write lots of monster stats, etc. planning for when the PC's go after the dangled target.

Majoru Oakheart said:

They don't really take their characters seriously as people...no. I've been complaining about it for years. Hoping some people will come up with real personalities. Problem is, that we're used to games ending so quickly or PCs dying so quickly that coming up with background for your character and a real personality is almost always wasted when you die during the second session. Or the DM decides to stop running his game.

Plus, a number of them LOVE character building. They want to see what kind of broken power combos they can come up with. So, after one session of playing their character they are almost always ASKING to have their character leave so they can try a different concept.

We had a TPK a couple of weeks ago and every last member of the group said they didn't want to be brought back to life because they'd rather just make new characters. Thereby ruining all of the plot I had put into the game up until that point.

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Huh. I don't have any char op players. I have the opposite problem -- some of them just like to play and get bored by the "paperwork" of leveling up, rather than looking forward to it -- it's like pulling teeth to get people to do it in my email campaign!

For my live campaign, most of the folks in my live campaign just borrow my PHB's rather than buying their own books. We do the updates at the gaming table.

The vibe is similar for the 4e campaign I'm a player in -- we use the character software on the DM's PC when we're there to play, and none of us own it.

Perhaps that's the difference in where they came from. Mine are old school gamers (AD&Ders who had dropped out of gaming) or new converts who never did MtG or anything like that. Most have LOTR as their main inspiration, not thinking of it as a game first, story second.

It's really interesting to me how different your groups and mine are. I think this explains why it's so hard to make everyone happy in D&D edition changes.

Majoru Oakheart said:

We just...played a LOT. For about 2 years, we played about 4-5 times a week. One of which was 14 hours long.

I think the amount I played was one of the main reasons I hate CaW style play. There's only so many times you can see the same "creative" plan play out before it doesn't seem creative anymore. And if it got used even once in one of our games, it got used in all of them.

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Wow, yes, I can see your point. I'm coming from a very different universe of gaming.

BTW, I played 4e last night, and enjoyed it really for the first time. It was a crazily hard CaS scenario, which to me made it sort of CaW. We were traveling back from the Keep on the Shadowfell, when a famous dragon who had killed the Warlord's family swooped down to attack us. There was no talking out of the fight, nowhere to run to (open plain), and nowhere to hide (open plain).

The DM told us afterwards, it was an encounter balanced for 5 10th level characters -- we fought as 6 4th level characters. We were lucky -- my dice were on fire -- and we survived a LONG time. In the end, everyone had used every Daily and Encounter Power and single-use magic item we had, except one potion on the archer and one defensive encounter power the Wizard had. The result was three deaths -- including my paladin -- but most of us had fallen more than once (our Cleric is really good). The Cleric killed it even though he has a feat with a side effect of stunning him if he attacks a bloodied opponent -- he survived attacking, hitting, being stunned, and then did it again for the win.

Why I enjoyed it was that we tested out everything we had, and the Warlock and my Paladin got to be heroic. I was down, healed, got up, charged, hit, and then went down again. Then the next round, I took a breath weapon critical hit while already at negatives! I couldn't ask for a better way for a paladin to go.

So was it a CaS scenario -- because the tactics and rules were all -- or a CaW scenario, because we were fighting to the death in an unfair fight, roleplaying to the end?

Either way, it was fun!

S'mon said:

The worst thing is that when I try to prompt them "What are your PC goals?" they always ask me for a path to a tailored magic item/artifact: putting the burden back on Me to give Them stuff.

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So, I have seen this, and it often winds up being a (sometimes ironic) issue of expectations around authorial control.

Characters live in their fictional world 24/7/365. Players live in that fictional world a couple of hours a week. The character should know tons of things about the world to form goals around. The player usually knows *way* less than the GM thinks they do. The GM thinks there is *tons* of cool bits to take as goals, and the player is largely ignorant of the possibilities.

A new player does not have an established idea of where the lines of authorial control lie - and so they may feel more okay just making things up to fill in for what they don't know. The more veteran player does have an established view of what the roles are - and it probably doesn't match *you* as a GM. (For any value of "you" - each GM is different).

This is sometimes ironic, when it happens in games where the GM *hates* mechanics that give the player authorial control, but they expect the player to take that control for goals and the like, and are surprised when the player doesn't take the lead.

Umbran said:

A new player does not have an established idea of where the lines of authorial control lie - and so they may feel more okay just making things up to fill in for what they don't know. The more veteran player does have an established view of what the roles are - and it probably doesn't match *you* as a GM. (For any value of "you" - each GM is different).

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I think this is a good point. Often it seems the new & younger or young at heart players who are best at being proactive within the fantasy world. Other more experienced players have often had their expectations shaped by years of play.

My son (11) is always coming up with plans and schemes for his PCs. It probably helps that I started him off on Mentzer Classic D&D rather than on (eg) Pathfinder Adventure Paths. I definitely think the system makes a difference; eg 4e D&D I can never make work for proactive sandboxing, but it is great for a kind of superhero team play. I like how 5e is quite flexible and accommodates a range of play styles, but it can lead to culture shock when players & DMs encounter those from a different style.

Holy thread necromancy batman!

Cadfan said:

I used to have what you'd call a "combat as war" style.

The problem was that eventually I started to recognize the man behind the curtain. I knew that I wasn't actually coming up with brilliant plans to defeat the monster, I was, at most, coming up with brilliant plans to defeat the DM. But that's like a four year old wrestling with his father- you only win if (when) he lets you win.

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This, and some of us saw the guy behind the curtain early on.

However I think there are tropes that need rescued.

One is with explicit Macguffin pieces .. ie you need to have the silvered weapon to have a chance defeat this type of shapechanger, next game it may require a certain flower juice to be fed to the boss shifter and various other things.

The McGuffins once achieved turn your story from a heavily foreshadowed waffle stomp via story implemented strategy into the more interesting combat. You sort of get both at least the flavor of both.

I have heard many DMs who were far more comfortable actually killing player characters when they could reliably see how the mechanics lined up in tactical combat.

Because they KNEW in they were the one... behind the curtain.

Josiah Bradbury said:

Holy thread necromancy batman!

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A 7 year necro of a classic thread, gotta love it!

Garthanos said:

This, and some of us saw the guy behind the curtain early on.

However I think there are tropes that need rescued.

One is with explicit Macguffin pieces .. ie you need to have the silvered weapon to have a chance defeat this type of shapechanger, next game it may require a certain flower juice to be fed to the boss shifter and various other things.

The McGuffins once achieved turn your story from a heavily foreshadowed waffle stomp via story implemented strategy into the more interesting combat. You sort of get both at least the flavor of both.

I have heard many DMs who were far more comfortable actually killing player characters when they could reliably see how the mechanics lined up in tactical combat.

Because they KNEW in they were the one... behind the curtain.

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Well, my answer, maybe different from 7 years ago, is that the acquisition and desire to use the special silver sword LEAD to the existence of the shapechangers being framed into the action (though it is perfectly possible that they were foreshadowed before the sword came up too, but then some other reason would exist to believe that the players were interested in fighting such creatures).

AbdulAlhazred said:

Well, my answer, maybe different from 7 years ago, is that the acquisition and desire to use the special silver sword LEAD to the existence of the shapechangers being framed into the action (though it is perfectly possible that they were foreshadowed before the sword came up too, but then some other reason would exist to believe that the players were interested in fighting such creatures).

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This puts forth pretty nicely the response I was formulating to [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION]'s post above about 4E being ill-suited to "proactive sandboxing," presuming that what he means by this is a kind of Story Now play! Adherents to such play such as yourself, pemerton, Manbearcat, I, etc. have been beating the drum that 4E is the edition of D&D that most facilitates such play, though perhaps S'mon has not played with a group that grokked the possibilities of the system. (But even if that is so, one of the near-universally praised elements of 4E, even by detractors, was the ease of GMing wrt putting together a balanced encounter (especially on the fly), which would seem to lend itself to "sandboxing" regardless of play philosophy!)

darkbard said:

This puts forth pretty nicely the response I was formulating to [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION]'s post above about 4E being ill-suited to "proactive sandboxing," presuming that what he means by this is a kind of Story Now play!

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Er... definitely not! What I think of as Sandboxing is definitely 'story later'; not 'story now' or 'story pre-written'.

The sandboxing PCs explore a GM-defined pre-defined and procedurally-defined environment with a lot of freedom. Any story only emerges subsequently as a result of play, and story creation is not the aim of play.

S'mon said:

Er... definitely not! What I think of as Sandboxing is definitely 'story later'; not 'story now' or 'story pre-written'.

The sandboxing PCs explore a GM-defined pre-defined and procedurally-defined environment with a lot of freedom. Any story only emerges subsequently as a result of play, and story creation is not the aim of play.

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Fair 'nuff! Certainly, I don't think the terms sandbox and Story Now are equivalent, though sometimes people use them this way (I used to myself before being educated to see the difference). I suppose the confusion can come about through the tilting in both towards Player-Driven play, although I think such play is largely Illusionism in sandboxing (pemerton would call this Choose-your-own-adventure choice, i.e., not much choice at all). This is not meant to denigrate sandboxing but to point out that this stark distinction between (a) choosing betweeen GM-defined pre-defined and procedurally-defined environment(s) and (b) allowing the focus of play to emerge from player cues and actions.

What about 4E did you find pushing back against a sandbox game? Two of the most highly-praised published adventures for the edition, Madness at Gardmore Abbey and Reavers of Harkenwold, lend themselves to such a style, or at least as much as any published adventure can (which, I concede, is limited success).