Interesting Decisions vs Wish Fulfillment (from Pulsipher)

[Neonchameleon]

One can imagine Combat-as-Sport about ambushing the other team and hiring fans to take potshots. This is what refluffing powers and/or using pg 42 in 4e is like. You can describe your move however you like, but it's still Combat-as-Sport because you know what the consequences are going to be. There's no "going with your gut" involved.

Then in my experience one of two things is true
1: Combat as Sport does not exist
2: Combat as War is predicated on people who do not understand the world they live in.

Coming up with crazy schemes (eg @Daztur's example from the original thread with the bees) is definitely fun when it works, but not so much when your plan tumbles like a house of cards because of something you didn't expect. Whether or not you like this depends on whether the fun outweighs the frustration.

And I love 4e because it is far better for me as DM to enable such schemes.

Look, here's the primary difference between Combat as War vs Combat as Sport, at least as Daztur suggested (I make no claim about how edition warriors may have abused it). Do you find lots of short, one-sided curbstomp battles appealing? If so, you like Combat as War. Do you find a succession of one-sided curbstomp battles boring, and prefer battles with a little more granularity, a little give and take? If so, you like Combat as Sport. I mean, it's right there in the post that linked to earlier in the thread. There's nothing there about combat as war being a statistically accurate representation of battles in war. It all comes down to do you want your combat to be like the fencing matching Princess Bride, or like Indy shooting the swordsman in Raiders?

Personally I find one sided curbstomping battles to be two things
1: Roleplaying a systematic bully
2: An utter and pointless waste of resources that could better be put to use elsewhere

I would far, far rather avoid any such battles. Either by intimidating the enemy out of the fight, diplomancing them to work for us, or tricking them into attacking my enemies. Is this combat as sport or combat as war?

Combat as War is a knight riding against an opposing army. He doesn't want a fair fight, he wants to win. He'd rather ride against the peasant militia if he has to, because they can't hurt him up there on his horse. If he's forced to fight an opposing knight, he uses whatever tactics he thinks he can win with.

And this is just amusing. The Knight wants a "fair fight". Quite explicitly so. With a fair fight including trying to ban the crossbow and knowing that they will be ransomed. Medaeval warfare was, for the knights, a bloody and dangerous sport - but a sport nonetheless. For the peasants ... it wasn't.

 

[Iosue]

Personally I find one sided curbstomping battles to be two things
1: Roleplaying a systematic bully
2: An utter and pointless waste of resources that could better be put to use elsewhere

I would far, far rather avoid any such battles. Either by intimidating the enemy out of the fight, diplomancing them to work for us, or tricking them into attacking my enemies. Is this combat as sport or combat as war?

It's not combat anything. It's intimidation, diplomacy, and trickery. Everything that happens outside of combat. I'm asking about actual combat. (In the game of course.)

 

[Tony Vargas]

would you mention this to Hussar for me?

Hey, Hussar: from 2000-2008 I played in not one, but two 3.x campaigns that went from 1st-14th level, and, through an extraordinary combination of skilled DMing and player restraint, avoided most of the commonly-noticed problems with 3e until the last few levels.

Mind you, we also went on to play 4e and found it a serious improvement over 3.5, as well - in fact (and here, I'll have the same problem as you in that people won't believe me), we were pleased with how much /faster/ combats were in 4e. And, I've played and DM'd 4e for its entire run with great success to levels as high as 26th, without the cracks showing like they did in 3e.

Oh, God, I would never claim that my game SHOULD have anything to do with ANY game's fate for better or worse.

4E deserved to get the axe because it didn't cater to the market.

You just contradicted yourself. You said out of one side of your mouth that you were just speaking for yourself, and then out the other you imply that no, objections like yours rightly killed 4e, because you somehow represent 'the market.'

Sure, 4e was an ambitious, in retrospect ill-advised, gamble that tried to take D&D mainstream and make money on the scale of CCGs and MMOs and it failed /at that/. At 'catering to' a much larger market that D&D has consistently failed to penetrate since the end of the fad years. By that standard, every edition of D&D has failed.

 

[BryonD]

You just contradicted yourself. You said out of one side of your mouth that you were just speaking for yourself, and then out the other you imply that no, objections like yours rightly killed 4e, because you somehow represent 'the market.'

No, the actions of the market represent the market. I still make noi claim that the vast number of other people who also happened to share my distaste for 4E shared that distaste for the same reasons.

Sure, 4e was an ambitious, in retrospect ill-advised, gamble that tried to take D&D mainstream and make money on the scale of CCGs and MMOs and it failed /at that/. At 'catering to' a much larger market that D&D has consistently failed to penetrate since the end of the fad years. By that standard, every edition of D&D has failed.

Oh, I wildly agree with you that compared to almost everything else in the universe D&D is a micro-marketplace.
I am amused about arguing over how to best be an elf as much as I enjoy it.

But, there is a TTRPG marketplace. And within that marketplace there are games that appeal to a wide range of players and games that do not.

 

[Hussar]

would you mention this to Hussar for me?

I ignored it BryonD because I never said it. I never said your game didn't happen. What I said was that I think you are mistaken about the reasons that it happened. It didn't happen by chance. It didn't happen because you beat the odds consistently.

It happened because, as you say, you and your "lucky freaks of gaming" deliberately set out to make this happen. Which is the antithesis of "Combat as War" where random elements are supposed to be the rule, not the exception. You, as DM, have set out scenarios deliberately designed for your group. Your players have deliberately chosen a style of play which suits the kinds of adventures that your present.

IOW, it's all combat as sport. It's pure, 100%, artifice. The players succeed because the scenarios are designed in such a way that the players will most likely succeed, not because they managed to manipulate the odds. The fact that the odds could be manipulated in the first place is artifice. The knight gathering the peasant levy (to borrow an example from above) succeeds because the DM allows the knight player to gather a peasant levy. Shock and surprise, there will be enough peasants to levy, if and only if, the DM decides that this is a viable tactic.

So, no, I am in no way saying you didn't have the experience you had. That would be ridiculous. What I am saying is the reason you had that experience is, as you say, because you and your players deliberately worked to gain that particular experience. Not random chance.

 

[Tony Vargas]

If the emphasis is on "open-endedness", then I don't see how any RPG doesn't permit that.

There are some clear ways that RPGs constrain open-ended play. The big one is the rules. If there are things the rules won't let you do, that's less open-ended. The other thing that constrains you in an RPG are all those other considerations besides what's optimal for victory: what's in-character, what's expected in the genre, what's expected in the context of the group. They're 'soft' constraints, but they're there.

If the emphasis is on the unit of play (which eg [MENTION=6688858]Libramarian[/MENTION] has mentioned upthread) then I don't really think that war/sport is a very helpful terminology (for the reasons that [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] and [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION] have given).

Rapid-deployment long-range teleport is problematic for scene-focused play, because of the authority it gives players to unilaterally reframe the scene. But I don't really see what summoning or polymorph have to do with any contrast in this neighbourhood.

They're both examples of problematic or broken rules in some editions that were fixed in 4e. Summoning, in 4e, didn't break the action economy too badly, while in other editions it did. Polymorph was crazy-broken in early 3.x and still pretty problematic post-errata, while having drawbacks in AD&D (when Poly-Self only gave you movement abilities, and Poly-Other carried a non-trivial risk of character loss), and prettymuch a non-issue in 4e (largely cosmetic except as modeled by specific powers).

That's why it's important to remember that CaW/CaS was a product of the edition war.

 

[Hussar]

The odds of me running a 10-second 100m sprint are zero. The odds of a world champion running that speed might be close to 100%. But that doesn't mean that it isn't hard for the champion sprinter to run that time: I'm pretty sure that sprinter is working and training hard all the time in order to maintain that level of performance.

In other words, the odds of success aren't per se a measure of difficulty, because it may be that hard work is a major contributor to those odds which, but for that work, would be much worse for the players/PCs.
/snip

But, odds of success are a measure of difficulty IN A GAME. It's somewhat disingenuous to keep pointing to real world examples where success is not determined by a random die roll. The example of child birth, your example of running a sprint, both are very controllable events in the real world because you have access to virtually 100% of the information that you need, every time.

In a game, that is virtually never true. The players rarely have access to that level of information. Nowhere near usually. In order for your idea to work, the players would have to have access to the same levels of information that the sprinter or the doctor has, every single encounter.

Since they don't, then random chance rules. In a combat as war scenario, random elements should be much stronger, since the PC's are not protected by the "combat as sport" idea of rules. If the dice say you die, then you die. If the DM monkey piles your cleric, because that would be a good tactic, then your cleric dies. If the bear doesn't stop mauling your fighter after he stops moving (continue attacking after the character reaches negative HP), then so be it. That's what combat as war should mean.

But, AFAIC, it doesn't exist in D&D. We don't DM that way. DMing that way is generally considered bad DMing. And, the fact that parties succeed about 95% of the time belies the idea of combat as war.

 

[Hussar]

Hey, Hussar: from 2000-2008 I played in not one, but two 3.x campaigns that went from 1st-14th level, and, through an extraordinary combination of skilled DMing and player restraint, avoided most of the commonly-noticed problems with 3e until the last few levels.

Mind you, we also went on to play 4e and found it a serious improvement over 3.5, as well. And, I've played and DM'd 4e for its entire run with great success to levels as high as 26th, without the cracks showing like they did in 3e.
/snip

I'd just like to point out that my experience is largely the same. I ran one campaign from 1st to 18th (The World's Largest Dungeon), and the Savage Tide AP (up to 10th level) just to name two campaigns in 3e/3.5. And, yup, same experiences - player restraint avoided most of the commonly noticed problems. Heck, we never had a caster issue because no one played a tier 1 character for years. Everyone hated Vancian casting.

BryonD is under the mistaken impression that because I find that 4e fixed many of 3e's issues, that I somehow hate 3e. The single biggest reason I play 4e is because it's a thousand times easier for me to prepare adventures in 4e than it was in 3e. Again, for me. The mountain of work it was for me to run a 3e campaign meant that long before 4e was even a gleam in anyone's eye, I had given up prepping adventures for 3e and had gone purely to running modules.

If Pathfinder had fixed that issue with 3e, then I'd probably be playing Pathfinder. But, it didn't. Pathfinder is just as much work to DM as 3e is and I'm far, far too busy to put that much work into prepping sessions. I just don't have that kind of time anymore. So, 4e gets the nod, despite its failings. I'd consider going back to AD&D because of the ease of prep, but, the lack of tactical depth that I got with 3e and then 4e means that I would not enjoy it that much. So, again, I stick to 4e.

5e looks like it's hit a nice balance. Good tactical level choices mixed with strategic level options and the return of logistical level choices as well. Seems like a good balance to me. 3e focuses so much on strategic level choices that I get swamped (as the DM) trying to prepare. 4e abandoned a lot of the strategic level in favor of the tactical level which makes it much easier to prep (no spell lists as one example) but, loses a lot of strategic level fun (which is where I believe the Combat as War fans reside).

For example, in the knight levying peasants example, that would be problematic in 4e since adding that many combatants to a fight would make the fight take FOREVER to resolve. Dragging a fight out to two hours at the table is not my idea of fun. So the strategic level tends to get ignored in favor of tactics.

And, let's be honest, neither 3e nor 4e is interested in logistics. Both systems heal far too quickly, and make resources far too easy to replace. And I enjoy the logistical level of play as well.

I think the model of CaW vs CaS tends to be too simplistic. There should be three elements there and they are all important. Ignoring one and emphasizing another just causes problems. As I said, I think 5e is striking a nice balance here.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Sure, 4e was an ambitious, in retrospect ill-advised, gamble that tried to take D&D mainstream and make money on the scale of CCGs and MMOs and it failed /at that/. At 'catering to' a much larger market that D&D has consistently failed to penetrate since the end of the fad years. By that standard, every edition of D&D has failed.

Oh, I wildly agree with you that compared to almost everything else in the universe D&D is a micro-marketplace.

But, there is a TTRPG marketplace. And within that marketplace there are games that appeal to a wide range of players and games that do not.

Really, it's a very niche marketplace. D&D dominated because so many folks in the hobby started with it - there's always curiosity about the new edition, and it's always easier to find a group of gamers who have all played D&D than it is with any other game. 4e didn't have any less appeal than any other edition of D&D in that sense. It probably had more/broader appeal than most other editions, including being more successful at retaining new players. It's just that even if it appealed to the /whole/ TTRPG market, it wouldn't have been able to meet the goals set for it.

And, of course, that those to whom it didn't appeal were willing to wage the edition war against it.

 

[BryonD]

even if it appealed to the /whole/ TTRPG market

Thats one huge "if" right there.

And, of course, that those to whom it didn't appeal were willing to wage the edition war against it.

Yeah, it did have that effect on a very large number of people, didn't it?