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

[S'mon]

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.

As more of a CaWers normally, I've been drifting a bit towards this a bit in my 4e Wilderlands sandbox, I think. Letting good PC pre-battle strategy make an encounter easy often doesn't work well in 4e, whereas keeping encounter difficulty in the -1 to +4 EL range and letting PC pre-combat strategy determine the stakes, keeps it firmly in the 4e sweet spot. The only big downside is that it requires a lot of planning & encounter building session to session and does not allow a 'status quo sandbox' approach.

 

[S'mon]

There's nothing wrong with the system being balanced, but it shouldn't be balanced solely towards combat. For example, my understanding is that 4E doesn't allow a PC to have a long-duration flight spell, because having one PC flying through the whole combat is unbalancing. But it's a vital component of some CaW strategies.

So a 4E system supporting CaW would need to provide PCs with the means for flight outside of combat, if not inside of combat.

Just one example.

A CaW game does not need to include any particular "I win button" magic spells, no. It can perhaps accommodate them better than a CaS game can, but it certainly does not need them.

 

[S'mon]

Aparently, if done often enough, stridently enough, viciously enough, and combined with a veritable boycott, it can kill a 3-year-old edition of D&D for the first time in the history of the game.

This kind of comment makes me ashamed to like 4e.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Hmmmmmm.

I think people underestimate the extent to which strategic planning can be advantageous in 4e. I think people also got REAL firmly used to leaning on casting as a planning crutch in earlier editions (probably more in 3.x than in AD&D, but I have limited experience with 3.x). AD&D worked reasonably well in at least some respects at low level. Casters had mostly 'tactical' and now and then 'plot' type spells (and there were some other classes like the paladin with plot relevant class features too). It really did start to break down though, and IMHO at least the sweet spot was pretty narrow.

I know as a player who made a point of exploiting my magic user's casting ability to the hilt that 7th level was about the limit. Once you had even one 4th level spell slot and the willingness to be ruthless and systematic about 'warring' on the opposition it was pretty much nuclear war. An enemy without similar resources was just SOL, even if it took some time and energy to deal with them. OTOH if the DM played the same game back with you then the whole thing rapidly broke down.

I'm also not really that confident that there were ever unbiased DMs. I KNOW better than to claim I ever was, and I think what really happened was a series of social contracts evolved where the DM would avoid exploiting the bad guys strengths overly and the players would play along with his willingness to not go too hard on them or rule too hard against them if they didn't push things to the ultimate limit.

I think 4e was simply designed to avoid this as much as possible. I don't think it was designed to be "Combat as Sport" explicitly, and I'm not sure I've ever heard a DM (or player) really explain their preferences in that sort of way. 4e was more intended to be flexible in allowing for all sorts of character archetypes to be useful. That virtually necessitated making 'strategic' magic more accessible, more costly, and less arbitrarily flexible.

I think the INTENT at least was that the players would use their abilities in creative ways, whether in or out of combat, but that those abilities would be more numerous but less open-ended. That SHOULD bring OOTB thinking to the front, you don't get a win button on your character sheet, you have to come up with it yourself. Page 42 certainly provided one set of ways to get there, but I don't see that the intent was ever to exclude others.

It is interesting to note that the presentation of 4e seems to have just killed the concept. Clearly people stopped thinking in terms of cleverness outside of combat as a possibility, yet 1e's books say not one word more about such cleverness than the 4e books do. I think 4e resource management also was intended to make thinking ahead MORE important, not less. Again, the reaction here is to things like 3e healsticks.

I think the real problem is there's a big danger of rejecting some very good concepts that 4e introduced in people's haste to have both a better presentation and familiar older mechanics. A LOT of things that exist in 4e will work not only perfectly well in a more classically presented format, but will actually work better than their AD&D equivalents IMHO. I think a lot of them will seem perfectly acceptable in the right context too.

Ideally 5e will provide that context and retain most of the mechanical improvements. Making them 'options' is fine, but in a sense that makes me uneasy as it tempts the designers to not really look at them deeply, and clearly there's been a lot of shallow analysis that has gone on in the last few years (well, always, lol).

Anyway, it is a good thread. Please do carry on.

 

[GSHamster]

I don't like Combat as War.

I think it leads to overly-cautious, non-heroic play. If the entire point is to stack the deck in your favor, then conversely you avoid all situations where the deck is not stacked in your favor.

Croaker and the Black Company are not heros. They're barely better than rapist scum. And they're not really people I would like my game to emulate. In Combat as War, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one. I find that attitude to be anathema to the heroic play I like.

Combat as Sport is much better support for playing heroes in a traditional style.

I'd rather have King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table than Croaker and the Black Company.

 

[valis]

I don't like Combat as War.

I think it leads to overly-cautious, non-heroic play. If the entire point is to stack the deck in your favor, then conversely you avoid all situations where the deck is not stacked in your favor.

Croaker and the Black Company are not heros. They're barely better than rapist scum. And they're not really people I would like my game to emulate. In Combat as War, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one. I find that attitude to be anathema to the heroic play I like.

Combat as Sport is much better support for playing heroes in a traditional style.

I'd rather have King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table than Croaker and the Black Company.

Frankly, I think the thought of engaging in a 'balanced' encounter where I'm expected to win is about the most unheroic thing conceivable.

Now, having a swingy combat swinging against you, and taking a stand against overwhelming odds - that seems a little more heroic then scooting a target over so your ally gets a +2.

 

[SlyDoubt]

Personally I think the preference for different styles and different systems is also related to the overall form the game takes.

What I mean by form is more sandbox and location based or more story and time based. I think most people try to find a balance here but I feel the different systems handle each of these better or worse.

I find from my experience that 3.X/PF handles sandbox better than 4E. 4E handles more story focused games better. I think this is because of resource management, healing surges and the line drawn between combat and non-combat in 4E.

There's no reason that 4E cannot play like 3.X/PF when it comes to 'combat as war' though. 4E can do that with combat just as well and 3.X/PF can handle 'combat as sport' pretty well too though I think that 4E does a better job.

The difference is that sandbox games are essentially 'combat as war' by their very nature. Prior to 4E I feel like D&D was much more about the sandbox style game. With random encounters, treasure, exploring a hex map or something similiar and the like. I could be wrong but that is how I grew up knowing 3E.

So there is a lineage of this more sandbox style play that I think doesn't fit as well into the 4E framework. I think that's where this divide has developed from.

 

[nightwyrm]

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

1. I love those games. It's a lot of fun becoming ruler of the mediteranean/world/galaxy. But I found that I had the most fun in the early to mid part of those games where I have to struggle and every decision is critical. Once I've managed to conquer about half of the map, the game gets boring. I've accured so much advantage that the rest of the game becomes tedious and it's just about mopping up the rest of the map, but that mopping up can still take hours to play through. It's not totally analogous to a TTRPG, but I found I encounter a similar problem in 3.x where the combat is already decided in pre-combat or during the first round or two of combat and then we spend a huge amount of time just cleaning up.

Also, how would you characterize RTS games such as Starcraft (PvP mode of course)? If you take those games at a macro level, it's amazingly CaS. Every players starts off with one base and has the same level of resources. You don't have the dude with the higher rating starting off with extra stuff. But once you start looking at the battles during the game, it gets CaW. You target your opponent's workers, find out what he's building and you build counters, or you just build a huge economy and crush him with endless Zergs etc.

2. I think that in order to define balance, you need to first figure out what your game is about and then you figure out how certain (classes of) special abilities affect your game premise. For a game that requires players to track resources and where resource management is the main concern, spells that gives large amounts of free resouces (create water/food etc.) are powerful while those same spells are much less powerful in games which has CaS combat as their main feature and handwaves extensive resource tracking.

Conversely, the ability to kill enemies (death spells, guns etc.) are much less powerful in a game which focuses on investigation and puzzle solving instead of combat.

This is why after reading your thread, I've become less optimistic about 5e uniting the base. For CaW players, long term resource management is "the game" (the focus of the majority of decision making), combat (the mop up) should be quick and almost an afterthought. For CaW players, the combat is "the game", macro level (food/water, ammo) resource management should be easy and almost an afterthought.

 

[MacMathan]

Great discussion, it has made me think about the scope of dnd development.

Personally I feel CAW was killed by 3E. Interestingly enough I believe that was the first edition with major marketing research to see how the majority of players wanted to play.

Question: Do sandboxers and long time CAW players even need to buy rpg materials anymore given the wealth of free material available and their own very experienced imaginations?

I feel that it was the OGL not grognards that broke 4E financially.

It seems to me the CAW/CAS relates to the challenge the player or character divide. The OP example had very little to do with character knowledge and was all player skill. Hard to picture all first level characters with CAW level tactical acumen. Especially with avg or low even int or wis.

I honestly do not think wotc could service the CAW better than the OSR community has at free or at least lower prices.

 

[Gentlegamer]

I want to duel the Cardinal's Guards in a convent courtyard.

And I want to push a bastion wall over on a sortie of Huguenots.

I want to thwart the evil priest's plan by producing a document in his own hand authorizing whatever I do. And then have the evil priest promote me into the king's guards.