RPG Combat: Sport or War?

Sunseeker · Oct 18, 2017

Saelorn said:
It's not easy to approach an enemy who wants to kill you - which includes the vast majority of monsters in a dungeon - and offer them a fair fight. Even if you speak their language, they have every reason to betray you, and cheat in any manner that they can get away with, and they expect you to do the same. Fair fights are for chumps who don't care about winning, and winners don't fight fair if they can ever avoid it!

This is irrelevant and not the point I was making, nor was it the point @Derren was making. Considering that all the pro-"combat as war" posts have utilized perfect knowledge in their analysis of why combat as war is superior, we're going to roll with that.

If you have perfect knowledge of your enemy, you can choose not to outmatch them, but instead to simply match them. I'm not using "approach" as in "walk up to and speak to nicely" I'm using approach as in "engage". I thought what I was saying was rather clear. With perfect knowledge you can choose to match your enemy, just as much as you can choose to outmatch them.

If we assume that half of fights don't result in death for the loser, which is a significant exaggeration compared to what actually happens (how often do your PCs take prisoners?), then it's still unlikely that anyone has ever made it to level nine. Even with a 75% survival rate, you're just not going to survive eighty fair fights. That's still at least a billion-to-one against you.

And death is only temporary if you have a level 9 cleric around to reverse that, which you won't, because no cleric would ever reach level nine if each encounter only had a 75% survival rate.

Well apparently characters are making it past level 9 by some zany means so either the system has an absolutely absurd survival rate for the players to such a degree that fights are completely meaningless anyway, or players are, on the whole really lucky.

Also, I'm fairly sure you're using your statistics wrong here. Each encounter is it's own chance. It's not a percentage of a percentage.

aramis erak · Oct 18, 2017

lewpuls said:
There are two different extremes in arranging fights. One is like war and the other is like a sporting event. Sporting events are supposed to be fair contests between roughly equal forces. On the other hand, war is the epitome of unfair competition.

[/I]

Spoken like someone who has never ever entered a fencing tourney.

Seriously, Lew, the analogy is TOTALLY F'd up.

Especially for fencing. Given that fencing, like curling, is generally pay to enter, but the crowd gets in free...

... blowout matches are exceedingly common in fencing - both olympic/modern and recrudescence/HEMA styles of fencing.

In fact, it's often the case that the first round is intentionally the favorites vs the known to be inept, simply to get the inept out, while the semi-skilled get weeded out in round two.

I've seen similar arrangements made in Kendo, karate, and wrestling.

In the SCA West Kingdom, for heavy tourney, the unbelted often pick their belted opponent for first round...

Many sporting events don't even try for fair competition... otherwise, UAA would have been kicked out of their division as inept, and the Broncos would have been dropped from the NHL, the Cubs from their league, etc. And the USA eagles would be banned from international competition. (The Aussies, as a team, once cheered the eagles making a try... high fiving them for actually scoring! That game went on to be something like 46-6...)

The only thing balanced about sport is the size of the sides.

The Crimson Binome · Oct 18, 2017

shidaku said:
This is irrelevant and not the point I was making, nor was it the point @Derren was making. Considering that all the pro-"combat as war" posts have utilized perfect knowledge in their analysis of why combat as war is superior, we're going to roll with that.

If you have perfect knowledge of your enemy, you can choose not to outmatch them, but instead to simply match them. I'm not using "approach" as in "walk up to and speak to nicely" I'm using approach as in "engage". I thought what I was saying was rather clear. With perfect knowledge you can choose to match your enemy, just as much as you can choose to outmatch them.

I'm not sure why you're assuming perfect knowledge here. In the real world, or in any believable game world, you rarely have perfect knowledge of your opponent. That's one of the main reasons why you need to take every advantage you can get - because you never know whether it will be the difference between life and death! If you could guarantee that you would win a direct engagement with negligible losses, then there would be no need to use tricky plots or clever traps; you'd just smash the enemy, and get on with your life.

To contrast, if you're using the Combat-as-Sport model, then you do know with significant certainty that the encounter is balanced in such a way that you'll probably win, or else the DM wouldn't have put it there with the expectation that you would face it. It's meta-game knowledge, but most advocates for that model seem okay with it.

shidaku said:
Well apparently characters are making it past level 9 by some zany means so either the system has an absolutely absurd survival rate for the players to such a degree that fights are completely meaningless anyway, or players are, on the whole really lucky.

As mentioned before, PCs very rarely engage in fair fights, where their chance of success is anything close to fifty percent. They either resist engaging unless they have a clear advantage, or the DM contrives to only place encounters that the PCs are likely to win. That is why characters frequently survive until level nine or higher. The de facto survival rate is significantly greater than ninety percent.

If survival in each fight came down to a coin flip, then the likelihood of surviving eighty fights would be the same as winning eighty coin flips. That's basic statistics. But it isn't, so it's not.

billd91 · Oct 18, 2017

aramis erak said:
Spoken like someone who has never ever entered a fencing tourney.

Seriously, Lew, the analogy is TOTALLY F'd up.

Especially for fencing. Given that fencing, like curling, is generally pay to enter, but the crowd gets in free...

... blowout matches are exceedingly common in fencing - both olympic/modern and recrudescence/HEMA styles of fencing.

In fact, it's often the case that the first round is intentionally the favorites vs the known to be inept, simply to get the inept out, while the semi-skilled get weeded out in round two.

I've seen similar arrangements made in Kendo, karate, and wrestling.

In the SCA West Kingdom, for heavy tourney, the unbelted often pick their belted opponent for first round...

Many sporting events don't even try for fair competition... otherwise, UAA would have been kicked out of their division as inept, and the Broncos would have been dropped from the NHL, the Cubs from their league, etc. And the USA eagles would be banned from international competition. (The Aussies, as a team, once cheered the eagles making a try... high fiving them for actually scoring! That game went on to be something like 46-6...)

The only thing balanced about sport is the size of the sides.

It's true that many tournaments are designed to maximize the chances that the top seeds make it through to the later stages (which is why the NCAA basketball tourney matches seeds 1 vs 16 in each region in the first games), but it's not true that sporting leagues generally don't try for reasonably fair competition. The NFL and NBA have salary caps that strongly encourage championship teams to break up as their players all increase in marketability and become too expensive to be kept together. Leagues that hold a draft allocate better pick opportunities to the worst teams. They share certain kinds of revenue to boost the ability of smaller market teams to recruit better players. At the college level, schools have limits on their rosters, their scholarships, and face fairly strict recruitment regulations. At the high school level, teams (at least in Wisconsin) are grouped into playoff divisions based on their size, as are conferences when possible.

None of those measures lead to perfectly even competition, of course. But they do tend to keep things dynamic and with more balance than just size of the teams.

Derren · Oct 18, 2017

Saelorn said:
I'm not sure why you're assuming perfect knowledge here. In the real world, or in any believable game world, you rarely have perfect knowledge of your opponent. That's one of the main reasons why you need to take every advantage you can get - because you never know whether it will be the difference between life and death! If you could guarantee that you would win a direct engagement with negligible losses, then there would be no need to use tricky plots or clever traps; you'd just smash the enemy, and get on with your life.

To contrast, if you're using the Combat-as-Sport model, then you do know with significant certainty that the encounter is balanced in such a way that you'll probably win, or else the DM wouldn't have put it there with the expectation that you would face it. It's meta-game knowledge, but most advocates for that model seem okay with it.
As mentioned before, PCs very rarely engage in fair fights, where their chance of success is anything close to fifty percent. They either resist engaging unless they have a clear advantage, or the DM contrives to only place encounters that the PCs are likely to win. That is why characters frequently survive until level nine or higher. The de facto survival rate is significantly greater than ninety percent.

If survival in each fight came down to a coin flip, then the likelihood of surviving eighty fights would be the same as winning eighty coin flips. That's basic statistics. But it isn't, so it's not.

You are confusing something. No matter if you use combat as sport or war, the fights are always rigged in the PCs favor. The difference is that, to use the fencing example above, that in combat as sport both sides start the combat with the same weapon and clothing (sport) or if one contestant brings a longer weapon and a shield.

How could combat as sport happen in a system that allows for combat as war? Roleplay, like the noble who things ranged weapons are dishonorable and meets the enemy at the bottom of a narrow gorge instead of trying to cause an avalanche and then shoot all survivors from above, a failure to realize a possibility to gain an advantage beforehand or because the players think that the fight is manageable without spending resources like deciding to save buffing spells for later instead of pre buffing and teleporting into the middle of the enemy.

pemerton · Oct 18, 2017

Saelorn said:
You could also fall out of an airplane at 30,000 feet and survive. Just because something can kill you easily, that doesn't mean it will. Either one of those things has a substantially better chance of killing you than someone swinging a sword at you while you're wearing armor, even if they know what they're doing.

The damage formula for falling objects in 3E (which I only cite because it's at hand) is 1d6 per 200lbs for the first 10 feet, plus 1d6 per 10 feet beyond that. It's still just damage, though, and you could always roll significantly below average. The whole point of this tangent is just that it does damage based on its intrinsic properties, rather than any sense of fairness.

Upthread you were berating 4e for prioritising mechanics over "narrative", but now your argument that a rock is more dangerous than a sword is based not on any actual facts about how rocks hurt people compared to swords, but the 3E mechanics for rocks.

The idea that a normal person has a good chance of surviving being ambushed by a shortsword-wielding attacker (d6 damage) but has almost no chance of surviving a 10,000 lb rock dropped 10' (50d6) is purely an artefact of the mechanics. If that rock lands on my head, I'm dead. If it lends on my foot or even my legs, I'm probably not dead. If it is rolling along and hits me, it might completely crush me, or it might crush my legs (depending how I fall and how it moves). There's a reason that bows/guns rather than rocks have tended to be weapons of choice for ambushers over the years.

pemerton · Oct 18, 2017

The reason that PCs in classic D&D have a chance of surviving combat is because (i) they tend to have better ACs (eg fighters will have AC 3 in AD&D, or AC 2 in Basic, whereas orcs, goblins etc tend to be around 6 or 7), (ii) they tend to do better damage (eg fighters may easily do 1d8+1, compared to 1d6 from goblins), and (iii) they have better support in the form of magic-users (Sleep spell and Charm Person are the two main ones at 1st level).

Where these things are not true (eg 1st level PCs vs ghouls, which have more attacks and so do better damage, and have some magical immunities in addition) then the PCs will tend to be hosed. Hence the high death rates at low level in those systems, and the tendency to look for solutions to problems that engage the fiction directly rather than the mechanics.

billd91 · Oct 18, 2017

pemerton said:
Upthread you were berating 4e for prioritising mechanics over "narrative", but now your argument that a rock is more dangerous than a sword is based not on any actual facts about how rocks hurt people compared to swords, but the 3E mechanics for rocks.

The idea that a normal person has a good chance of surviving being ambushed by a shortsword-wielding attacker (d6 damage) but has almost no chance of surviving a 10,000 lb rock dropped 10' (50d6) is purely an artefact of the mechanics. If that rock lands on my head, I'm dead. If it lends on my foot or even my legs, I'm probably not dead. If it is rolling along and hits me, it might completely crush me, or it might crush my legs (depending how I fall and how it moves). There's a reason that bows/guns rather than rocks have tended to be weapons of choice for ambushers over the years.

There is a reason, yes, and it has pretty much nothing to do with the possibility that rocks might only crush your legs instead of outright kill you (since, after all, arrows and swords can also miss the vitals). Bows and guns and swords are a

load more mobile. You can use them virtually anywhere. But that misses part of the point again about the difference between combat as sport and combat as war, particularly as realized in games and fantasy literature. Combat as war tends to be about using what's on hand to the PCs' advantage. Low lying caverns + nearby river = ents divert the river to flood the caverns. Huns invading under a snowy mountain + rockets = Mulan buries the Huns under an avalanche. Horde of Tuigan horsemen invade on plains + dwarves with shovels = tons of small pits dug to break up horde charge. Balrog coming your way + narrow rock bridge + wizard = broken bridge. Icicle covered cavern roof + warhammer = killing Icingdeath by throwing the hammer to dislodge icicles. Rocky cliff wall + cave + wizard's apprentice = Galen uses magic amulet to cause rockfall to imprison Vermithrax.

The Crimson Binome · Oct 18, 2017

pemerton said:
Upthread you were berating 4e for prioritising mechanics over "narrative", but now your argument that a rock is more dangerous than a sword is based not on any actual facts about how rocks hurt people compared to swords, but the 3E mechanics for rocks.

At least the 3E rules tried to describe how the world works. If a heavy rock lands on you, it has a good chance of killing you, but may also just cause severe trauma. If someone just stabs you, then there's a limit to how much trauma they can cause (especially since you're wearing armor), and that limit is significantly less than what the boulder can inflict. As a model, it is perfectly reasonable. It makes sense. That's what a good rule looks like.

pemerton said:
The idea that a normal person has a good chance of surviving being ambushed by a shortsword-wielding attacker (d6 damage) but has almost no chance of surviving a 10,000 lb rock dropped 10' (50d6) is purely an artefact of the mechanics. If that rock lands on my head, I'm dead. If it lends on my foot or even my legs, I'm probably not dead. If it is rolling along and hits me, it might completely crush me, or it might crush my legs (depending how I fall and how it moves). There's a reason that bows/guns rather than rocks have tended to be weapons of choice for ambushers over the years.

A normal person is probably dead either way, if they take a direct hit. A dagger can kill a normal person. Normal people are chumps. The difference in lethality between a shortsword and a boulder is not meaningful unless you're talking about someone or something that could reasonably survive one or the other. The reason why weapons are favored over rocks in the real world is because weapons are more accurate and real people are all chumps.

Accuracy stops being the deciding factor when you're dealing with targets that can withstand a dozen arrows or more.

Sunseeker · Oct 18, 2017

I'm sorry, but my point has been so horribly misrepresented I have to tear this apart line by line.

Saelorn said:
I'm not sure why you're assuming perfect knowledge here.

I already answered this: because previous posts discussing combat as war have assumed as such. They may not have said so explicitly, but the way they talk about "gathering your forces until you either force surrender or cause a massacre" implies as much. This is entirely unreaslistic to how war works. Yeah, ideally you gather strength until you overwhelm your enemy. But realistically you strike when presented with an opportunity, even if you are not at a place to create a total surrender or complete massacre.

Again: I answered this in the post your quoted.

In the real world, or in any believable game world, you rarely have perfect knowledge of your opponent.

Well we're talking about D&D aren't we? I don't want to hear anything about how 3E represents boulders if you're going to start saying "in reality" now. We're talking about a game and a game does not work like reality.

That's one of the main reasons why you need to take every advantage you can get - because you never know whether it will be the difference between life and death!

There is only one portion of this that matters: "every advantage you can get" ie: every advantage possible. In war, there are an infinity of possible advantages, but only some of them are possible It's known as "opportunity cost". For every opportunity you wish you to gain there is a cost in other lost opportunities. If one could guarantee that the Enemy was a fixed target and you could simply avoid it until you had gained sufficient strength to overcome it with ease, everyone would do it! But that's not how reality or the game works.

Besides, in a game like D&D, from whence does that "extra strength" come? You don't really get much XP for defeating challenges that you've completely out-matched and are no longer a threat.

If you could guarantee that you would win a direct engagement with negligible losses, then there would be no need to use tricky plots or clever traps; you'd just smash the enemy, and get on with your life.

This is as absurd as it is implausible. You want to talk to me about "in reality" and then tell me how we can guarantee victory in a direct engagement? There's a reason that even some of the most qualified tacticians in the world are the folks who say things like "No plan survives contact with the enemy." or "There are known known, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns." These are people who know their stuff plainly saying that we can never guarantee anything. We can develop reasonably sound approaches to problems

To contrast, if you're using the Combat-as-Sport model, then you do know with significant certainty that the encounter is balanced in such a way that you'll probably win, or else the DM wouldn't have put it there with the expectation that you would face it. It's meta-game knowledge, but most advocates for that model seem okay with it.

I have never provided my players with any certainty that they will win a fight. Probably because a use a "spwart" model of gameplay. It's up to the players to assess the variables and develop a plan of action for any given fight.

Saelorn said:
At least the 3E rules tried to describe how the world works. If a heavy rock lands on you, it has a good chance of killing you, but may also just cause severe trauma. If someone just stabs you, then there's a limit to how much trauma they can cause (especially since you're wearing armor), and that limit is significantly less than what the boulder can inflict. As a model, it is perfectly reasonable. It makes sense. That's what a good rule looks like.

Not really. There's a reason we started killing each other with swords and daggers instead of rocks.

Weapons cause specific trauma. You can easily puncture a lung, slice the heart, skewer a kidney, disembowel someone with a bladed weapon.

The physics issue you're missing is that 10000lb rock does not transfer the entirety of it's force to the puny human. It's one of the reasons humans can survive car accidents (and falling from 30000 ft). The human body bends, twists and ultimately gives way after a very (comparatively) light application of force. Even if you steeled your body, arms out to attempt to stop the rock, you're more than likely to just end up with a LOT of broken bones, as the force and mass of the rock is so great it will hit you, transfer a small portion of it's kinetic energy into your body and then keep going.

Now it's safe to say that D&D does a terrible job representing health and combat anyway. Realistically noone would likely have more than 20HP, damage would affect us differently depending on the body part that received the damage and players would drop like flies to mere infections from a glancing blow.

3E rules do worse than trying to emulate physics. They fail at it. They do worse than representing human health, they fail at it. They represent it so badly that WotC rightly discovered that no representation is superior to bad representation.

Attempting to argue and impart real world physics into a game like D&D is absolutely pointless.