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

[JonWake]

Right, and CaW works in big sandbox play for the same reasons. It assumes that the PCs will be proactive with their characters rather than reactive to the DM's storyline. If you have a mixed group of CaS and CaW partisans, well, you've got your work cut out for you.

 

[billd91]

Aha!

Now I understand why many old-school grognards hate "story-telling" adventures.

It's because the CaW strategies work best on a static or reactionary force. Such as a dungeon, or an approaching army. A situation where the PCs are the ones determining when an engagement occurs.

In a story-focused adventure, where you have actions occuring on a villain's timetable, the encounters tend more towards the "fight me now or lose the game" type (not to mention the famous "the module assumes you do this" type) and don't allow for strategies such as regrouping, or coming back with better weapons and more exp.

CaW players benefit from dungeons, not event sequences. (I was going to say time pressure, and then thought that they probably think of time pressure as a challenge, not a frustration.) CaS players are OK with DM-driven plots, and even railroads, because they don't risk a single encounter overwhelming them.

I favor the CaW end of things and this makes no sense to me.

 

[Savage Wombat]

I favor the CaW end of things and this makes no sense to me.

Meaning you don't understand my point, or you disagree with it?

 

[haakon1]

Did you consciously prevent it? Or did your CaW seize-every-advantage elite strike team of players just miss an obvious way of conserving the Cleric's spells and starting every combat at full hps?

It never occurred to me to have magic Wal-Marts, where you can buy an item you wanted. I did the magic item inventory for the store I created by using random magic item rolls, a certain number from each table.

I think you're misunderstand that CaW means Min-Maxing and Build Optimization. We've never been interested in that.

We're CaW, but we're storyteller/role player types. In other words, we want swingey combat that's dangerous and requires luck and brains to survive -- because that's super interesting and exciting combat.

But we're not going to sacrifice the design of the character to do it, and there's a lot more than combat going on in our stories. For example, the cleric just leveled up. The player was debating whether to put more skill points into Craft: Carpentry and Craft: Masonry because he's helping some refugees build shelters, or put it into Knowledge: Religion and Diplomacy since he's been using that too. He's not thinking about CharOp.

Did you also ban the 5th level Craft Wands feat??

No one's ever taken that feat. Item creation feats I've seen are Scribe Scroll, Brew Potion, Craft Magic Arms & Armor, and Craft Wondrous Item -- the first two being highly useful, and second two being "fun" for the player's involved.

5-8 is 'high' level? I used to get told off for calling it 'mid' ("This game has twenty levels, Tony, 'mid' is 11th..."). But, yeah, if you run 3e more or less exclusively at single-digit levels, there aren't so many cracks aparent in the system.

I've played it I think to 14, but it got boring at the level. I've DM'd it to a max of 9th, maybe 10th, so far.

'To you,' OK. So, I list factual differences that set exploits and spells apart, and your counter is an unsupported personal opinion? Fine. You've made up your mind on that point, and are not open to alternatives.

Works like a spell = works like a spell.

 

[billd91]

Meaning you don't understand my point, or you disagree with it?

Both, pretty much. I don't see how you are reaching your conclusion, nor do I agree with it. Ultimately, neither the CaW nor CaS approach to the game says much about sandbox, DM-driven plots, or other event driven campaigns. I think preferences to those styles are largely tangential. Sandboxing may be at least a little unfriendly to CaS, but I think the other two I listed are neutral.

If CaS is more about balanced "fair" fights using planned encounters geared for equal participation by all and sundry, I don't see much of a difference how the encounter is, uh, encountered (if you can forgive too much use of the term 'encounter' and its derivatives). It doesn't matter if it's DM pushed or reactive. The important elements approach to design details and resolution.

I don't see any real difference in preference for DM pushed or reactive encounters with CaW. The difference I see is that there is a wider, more open, even more gonzo attitude toward how the encounter is designed and resolved no matter what the encounter's source is. Combat isn't a games to play. It's a war to win. IF we have the prep time, sure, we'll take it to give ourselves whatever advantage we can. But if we're forced to react, we'll still do whatever it takes to come out on top including doing what we can to swing the balance in our favor, no matter if it is outside the conception of the encounter as built.

People who view D&D as a game first, simulation later probably favor CaS. They favor balance, rules equally applied to DMs as well as players, rules shaping what the PC can do. People who view D&D as simulation first, game second are more likely to favor CaW. And by simulation, I mean mainly a simulation of a fantasy world/story in which the rules serve to provide help when adjudicating the results of whatever the PC wants to do but are secondary to the needs of the simulation, emphasis on rulings not rules because the rules (or DM's encounter plans) may not cover what lengths the PC will go to. And none of that strIke's me as being anything but agnostic with respect to plot/DM driven encounters or reactive ones.

 

[haakon1]

An important asside about 'simulation.' Simulation, realism, and verisimilitude get thrown around a lot. 3.5 wasn't, I think, exactly any of those things, but it had qualities of them. What it really seemed like to me was a game in a simulationist mode that wasn't trying to simulate anything, it just had the internal consistency of a simulationist system, but rather than trying to simulate a world, it implied a world. There was never a world/system diconnect, because the world /was/ the system. For instance, in 3.5, craft let you make an item at 1/3rd cost, and you could sell items for half cost - so it was 'realistically' possible to live as a crafter. The existance of the expert class and the craft skill - not the need of a world to have people who make stuff as a backdrop for the heroes' story - fills the world with crafters. It's a subtle but profound characteristic of some games.
. . .
3e vaguely described a world, and let the mechanics of the system imply the rich detail of that world as a consequence of how they worked.

I think that's very true.

 

[haakon1]

Now I understand why many old-school grognards hate "story-telling" adventures.

Maybe we're talking about a different definition of CaW or grognard, but I haven't noticed a particular hate of story telling -- in fact, we love story telling (adventures that have a point, where something interesting is going on that you can unravel). I think what you mean is "event chart driven", but even there, I haven't heard people complain about those kinds of adventures.

"Standing Stones" is one of my favorite 3e adventures, as a player and as a DM, and it's event driven, but also has some minor dungeon crawling. What it has in spades is ATMOSPHERE, interesting NPC's, and a mystery -- which are stuff I really like.

In a story-focused adventure, where you have actions occuring on a villain's timetable, the encounters tend more towards the "fight me now or lose the game" type (not to mention the famous "the module assumes you do this" type) and don't allow for strategies such as regrouping, or coming back with better weapons and more exp.

Hmmm, I think you can do CaW in any situation -- sometimes, you end up in a crappy situation and need to fight your way out. Sometimes you're the one who gets ambushed, that's part of CaW.

I get the feeling we're somehow talking about different things, though.

 

[Rogue Agent]

Little more than the covers changed, BECMI was effectively one ed that went through 1992.

Okay. You've clearly never actually seen these rulebooks. I get that. Not much else that can really be said at this point: You've got your facts wrong. Again.

You could arguably toss 3.0 onto that pot, too, since it was completely replaced by 3.5 and its supplements taken out of print due to a lack of compatibility.

And, if we're counting half-eds, 4e went barely 2 years, thanks to Essentials.

Wow. I was unaware that all the non-Essential 4E books were taken out of print back in 2009. Someone should probably let WotC know. (/sarcasm)

The flexibility of character creation is a matter of viable choices.

You're talking about the number of viable builds for a game focused on encounter-based CaS combat. 4E probably does have the edge on that.

I, on the other hand, was talking about the actual flexibility of the character creation system and the ability for players to make meaningful choices (as opposed to calculating the best way to achieve a relatively non-flexible goal) within that system.

 

[Lanefan]

In a story-focused adventure, where you have actions occuring on a villain's timetable, the encounters tend more towards the "fight me now or lose the game" type (not to mention the famous "the module assumes you do this" type) and don't allow for strategies such as regrouping, or coming back with better weapons and more exp.

We-ell, my game is pretty much CaW; and going back to town to regroup (and recruit, to replace their losses) and train etc. and then try the adventure again is very much in play.

Then again, now I think about it, for much of my current campaign the parties have either been on a defined mission (usually by quest) or in full react mode as they try to deal with what the rest of the world is doing.

Lanefan

 

[Savage Wombat]

As a quick point of clarification, I will state that I have, many times, read people claiming that the problem with the switch from 1e to 2e was the removal of focus on "the dungeon" and the shift to focus on "story-telling". Usually with implied retching noises.