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

[Crazy Jerome]

Agreed. It's easier to correct for bad rolls/bad scouting when you start out with what, 3x the hit points of earlier editions? The grind is intended to lower PC casualties, I would guess.

I'm not sure if it's possible to write a single edition with both "grind combat" (plenty of time to correct for bad luck/misinterpretation of the odds) and "save or die" or "old style Boot Hill combat" -- 1d6 damage, 6 is just dead -- so you'd better try your darnedest not to get shot!

Both are too extreme for most people, I think, but some folks want the extremes -- and perhaps the folks in the middle like a mix of "grinds" and "save or dies"?

Yes. I like the mix, too. But like FireLance's suggestion, when I'm the DM, I want some control over the mix--and a way to convey the distinctions to the players, in game.

One possible way to cater a bit to both crowds with one set of rules is to set hit points so that characters can always last at least two or three round in anything but the very worst circumstances (which they probably should have been clued in to avoid in the first place), and then make the escape options less about hit points and more about something else.

It has been awhile since I played AD&D, but I seem to recall that movement rates often were as much to blame as lack of hit points or healing. You often kept fighting if you got in over your head because running wasn't an option.

So maybe the "Fate" points, special magical items, 1/day special abilities, etc. should be geared less towards helping you fight the normal fight, and more about escaping the killer fights. That was kind of the point of the AD&D hold portal spell, I think, only that it never seemed to work out effectively because of movement rates.

Then if those are at least somewhat acquired independent of level, you can shift the game towards either extreme by how much you expect planning to compensate for such resources. The basic encounter math is built around CaW. The fighter with his sword and basic abilities, the wizard with some renewable magic, etc. can get into fights designed as equal challenge, and get something akin to a "fair" fight.

If that is mostly what you want, then you see to it that those other resources are provided in sufficient quantities to mitigate bad surprises, and not much more. That is, the DM would provide those resources to keep the action moving, without the too tough encounters being glossed over. They don't take long, because the party runs. OTOH, if you want something more like Fantasy Vietnam, you use the same rules for your fights, but it is entirely up to the players to replenish those resources as their cleverness permit and/or conserve them via careful planning and strategy. Those become the critical resources to track.

Of course, depending on play style in AD&D, you got some of this at low level with flasks of oil and food. If the DM let you drop food to get monsters to not chase you, and food was critical, it was exactly the kind of resource I'm talking about (operationally speaking). It's merely that in the discussion of these mundane resources, and the watering down of the model via renewable resources that do affect fights directly (i.e. charges in a fireball wand), the idea of magical, important, death-escaping magic can get lost in the shuffle.

Not sure I'm being entirely clear here, but picture an AD&D-ish game where the casters get some relatively low-powered 4E-style at wills and encounter magic for fights, but all of their "big guns" are for escape, out of combat healing, exploration, etc. and not easily renewable. Then you perhaps give the non-casters more options helping escape, avoid enemies, etc (i.e. make fighters a bit more skilled out of combat). And of course any magic items are either relatively low-powered or limited-use escape and so forth.

Would that model support both styles?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

One of the key features of a system that supports CaW play is the ability to get in over your head unexpectedly. I'm not going to shout about 'lethality', as that I think that's a straw man. There aren't too many games that are designed to be instantly lethal if a character gets in over their head. But let me define my terms.

Getting in over your head, or over committing, happens when a player's expectations of an encounter turns out to be untrue. This is typically, but not limited to, engaging with an enemy you're certain you've got the advantage and finding the tables turned either through bad luck or poor reconnaissance. What was certain in one round is now uncertain, the kobold you just cornered stabs you in the thigh and spews poison in your face.

It is the potential for this sudden turn of events that gives the players in CaW their jollies. Knowing that at any moment things can go pear-shaped, that their best laid plans might collapse with enemy contact is what keeps the players invested in stacking the deck. Because they know that even a stacked deck has a few jokers.

(I apologize for the metaphor.)

Balance, at least on an encounter to encounter basis, severely undermines this style of play. Balance is predicated on statistical predictability. It's based on equalizing the enemies against the protagonists so that a certain pattern of play emerges. Having a steady pattern allows players to make the most use of their tactical and system mastery, it keeps the flow of play moving along certain predictable vectors.

It's this very attribute of a balanced system that harms the CaW playstyle. When the players can see the gears under the hood, they can reliably predict their success level with any given encounter. A group of 1st level 4e characters will know that an ogre will be a lethal threat, a pair of kobolds a likely non-issue. In a true CaW game, the players must know that even a one-armed midget with palsy gets a lucky shot in now and again, and Goliath can be dropped with a sling stone on a good day.

This uncertainty, this 'swingyness', if you want to call it that, is essential to CaW play.

It's also completely unfair.

Intentionally so. There's no 'fairness' in a CaW game, there's only a line of consequence. As long as the thread of consequences follow logically from each other, the game is preserved.

NOTE: This lack of balance and fairness is not a bad thing. The value of this is entirely dependent on what you're looking for in a game.

It is an interesting point. Not sure I agree, but its interesting.

In say 4e where there is mechanical predictability there is no guarantee of STORY predictability. IMHO it is more robust to rely on the ability of the system to deliver what the DM expects in general. If the DM wants to play a turnabout on the players, well, he can decide that one kobold just isn't such a pushover after all, or there are reinforcements that show up after everyone burned their best stuff, etc.

Beyond that though I think it is pretty certain that no system with dice ever delivers any absolute guarantees. I've seen encounters turn hard against groups in 4e. It is less likely you'll all of a sudden be needing a resurrection, but you can certainly find yourself in deep trouble pretty darn fast even in a fairly 'routine' encounter.

IMHO what you pretty much need in order to do 'CaW' is an open-ended enough system that you can find ways to generate advantage. Uncertainty can be useful as it tends to feed the desire to plan more and if that's the MO you're wanting to see in play then it probably is useful, but a reasonably balanced game can deliver the basic 'not a fair fight' as well as any other, and certainly a game like 4e is quite open ended. 1e is going to deliver more of the CaW kind of behavior from players, but either one can work when you need it to in that mode.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

In say 4e where there is mechanical predictability there is no guarantee of STORY predictability. IMHO it is more robust to rely on the ability of the system to deliver what the DM expects in general. If the DM wants to play a turnabout on the players, well, he can decide that one kobold just isn't such a pushover after all, or there are reinforcements that show up after everyone burned their best stuff, etc.

I pretty much run 4E the way I ran Arcana Evolved, 3E, and Fantasy Hero--the style we like, which is a mix of sandbox, lots of mystery/intrigue, and action adventure. So as you say, story predictability is put heavy on the players' shoulders--i.e. they can get wiped out if they aren't careful, and I won't save them.

One of the most difficult things that we had to adjust to with 4E was the extreme focus on the action economy. It is mitigated somewhat by usually having a larger group than normal, but my experience with 4E is that the risk of unexpected character death is lower, but the risk of a TPK is far higher as a percentage of all deaths. We had a 3 year 3E campaign that had several deaths in it, but was never in the slightest danger of a TPK. The Fantasy Hero game had deaths avoided only by special resources, but no TPK. We had one close TPK when only 4 players showed and I did not adjust the adventure.

But in 4E, we've had everyone down into single digits or dying many times--and I don't merely mean in that well-known 4E manner of "seemed almost dead and then broke out the dailies to reverse the trend." In fact, it reminds me of the TPKs I had in Basic and 1E, except that there are enough hit points and other resources that it isn't so swingy, and thus the TPKs have been avoided. But you probably know the ones I mean, where the cleric went down, and within 2 rounds, everyone else was either dead or about to be.

 

[cibet]

I look at it more like this (and a little in jest):

Combat as 3E: the PCs approach the bees and engage them in combat using the terrain to their advantage because the rules describe the advantages and disadvantages the terrain gives. The fighter chooses the right position to be able to cleave since he knows cleave only works with adjacent foes while staying outside the accurately defined radius of the wizard’s area effect spell, the cleric keeps the wizard from going down to bee venom and the rogue uses his sneak as opposed with the bees perception to surprise and kill the bee queen. With the tactics agreed upon to minimize the chance of failure hopefully the gods are smiling on the party as the players roll the dice...

Combat as pre-3E: the PCs approach the bees but there’s BEES EVERYWHERE! GIANT BEES! With nasty poison saves! The PCs run for their lives since they don’t stand a chance against the bees in a fair fight. But the DM decides the bees are too fast! So the players argue since the wizard and monk are not wearing armor they should be able to out run the bees, but the DM says not these bees they are too fast! The party Wizard uses magic to try to set part of the forest on fire in order to provide enough smoke (bees hate smoke, right?) to cover their escape. Unfortunately the DM declares the forest is too wet to burn, but the party feels this is magic fire so moisture shouldn't hinder it. The DM agrees and the forest goes up in flames but it has little effect on the bees because the DM says these bees are not only super fast but they actually don't mind the smoke at all! Then the PCs regroup and swear bloody vengeance against the damn bees and DM. They think about just burning everything as usual and ending the campaign because this DM is constantly changing rules or making up rules since none exist, but decide that that might destroy the value of the honey and they won't be able to find another group to play with. So they decide to suck it up and make a plan that will hopefully be successful despite the ever shifting rules-scape, DM whims, and nebulous interpretations. Hopefully the DM and players won't spend too much time arguing about how to determine if the bees see them hiding or if the owl bear nearby can catch the monk as he runs away because they would really like to have some fun tonight and not spend hours making up or arguing over rules. They declare that anything could happen so it's almost impossible to succeed tactically unless the DM decides they are allowed to. The DM grins ghoulishly as he peers into his seemingly endless series of spiral notebooks that detail every aspect of his never ending sandbox campaign.

 

[Libramarian]

It seems obvious to me that you could and should try to design your system so that a GM who always follows the guidelines for creating balanced encounters will end up with a CaS game and then provide lots of additional advice and options that support CaW play. The most basic of which would be "You don't have to follow the guidelines for creating balanced encounters."

Balance is not bad. Slavish, fetishistic worship of balance at the expense of creativity and spontaneity is.

There's a serious conflict between CAW play and PC - encounter balance.

Because CAW is all about giving the players the freedom to be less predictable, and PC-encounter balance is all about making encounter difficulty (and pacing and rhythm) more predictable. Which requires that the PCs be predictable.

At least with regard to their capacity to defeat game-world challenges. If you design a balanced system where the fluff is easily divorced from the mechanical interactions, then you can give the players plenty of freedom to narrate their fluff. But this isn't the same thing as giving them the power to seriously influence or entirely override the standard mechanical interactions with situational CAW play.

I thought of an analogy the other day for the role of "fluff" in CAW and fluff-agnostic CAS play, riffing off the term "reskinning".

In fluff-agnostic CAS fluff is to crunch as clothing is to your body (or skin, but that's kind of ghastly).

In fluff-matters CAW fluff is to crunch as muscle is to bone.

 

[JonWake]

I've always had a deep level of discomfort with the whole fluff/crunch divide. It's symptomatic of a big cognitive gulf that I doubt DnD 5e will be able to breech.

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

At their extremes, a system can't support both methods. You can't play Combat as War with Chess.

This is because, when balancing PC's with Encounters, eventually you have to start removing unaccounted for methods of using tools.

But, we don't need extremes. So, you can design a game where encounters are reasonably predictable if the PC's simply engage in them with a Combat as Sport mentality, but still leave a lot of room for creativity.

In fact, we've had a system that held this compromise: Third Edition D&D. I'm not saying it was perfect. What I'm saying is that, because an attempt at balance was made without sacrificing flexibility, you could play using either method reasonably well. You could even switch between the two from time to time.

3E accomplished it by happenstance, though. I believe that, with a lot of effort and the hindsight of the past decade, a system can be built that more intentionally supports the two playstyles.

And I think the best tool to make that work would be a section in the DMG describing the very topic of Combat as War versus Combat as Sport, and how to run both styles.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

(Lanefan passes note to DM)

While everyone else is distracted arguing over the corpse, I sneak in and take its stuff

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And in other news...

It's this very attribute of a balanced system that harms the CaW playstyle. When the players can see the gears under the hood, they can reliably predict their success level with any given encounter. A group of 1st level 4e characters will know that an ogre will be a lethal threat, a pair of kobolds a likely non-issue. In a true CaW game, the players must know that even a one-armed midget with palsy gets a lucky shot in now and again, and Goliath can be dropped with a sling stone on a good day.

This uncertainty, this 'swingyness', if you want to call it that, is essential to CaW play.

My favourite example of this is Merry and Eowyn bringing down the leader of the Nazgul in "Return of the King". If the game can't let that happen, I'll find a different game that will.

And, credit where it's due, from what Monte Cook et al have been saying thus far it sounds like 5e is going to go in this direction; low-level parties/monsters will at least be able to pose a vague threat to their higher leve counterparts.

Lan-"now, let's see what 4e had in its pocketses"-efan

 

[Tony Vargas]

I've only gotten to 4th level, I think. Seems like we have 1 daily utility and 1 daily attack, everything else is encounter powers (reloading each combat) or at-will.

At 4th, you should have 2 encounter powers, 1 daily attack, and one utility. At 5th you'll pick up another daily.

It may have been a "common practice", but I never actually saw this behavior in 3e/3.5e. I've run 4 campaigns (three of them years long) and played with two other DM's, and I never saw the Wand of CLW thing.

How did I prevent that?

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?

My players have only dealt with two magic-item dealers in all my campaigns, and those stores had specific inventories that don't turn over much, working like a small used book store before the Internet, rather than running "any item for gold" places that work like Amazon.

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

In my high level (5th-8th level) email campaign,

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.

To me, Encounter and Daily Powers work pretty much like spells.

'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.

 

[Daztur]

That's certainly part of heroism. In a story, the author has complete narrative control, so he can throw his protagonist into one near-certain-death situation after another and have him succeed. In an RPG seeking to model such things, 'realism,' gets you a hero one time in 10 (or a thousand) and a dead would-be hero most of the time - or, once the players figure that out, pragmatic opportunists succeeding somewhat more often. Until an RPG models that narrative control the author enjoys - either building it into the system, granting it to the GM, or granting it to the players (or all the above) - it won't model stories of heroism (at least, not very darn often). D&D, at least, with it's exp system, is clearly meant to be played many times with the same character. After Raise Dead becomes available, that character is expected to die now and then, clearly, but if the game's meant to be heroic at all levels, it needs more than that to keep the would-be heroes from just decorating the dungeon with their remains.

I think that FATE does a pretty good job of modeling novel-style heroism (the hero defies the odds but generally wins anyway due to the players having partial narrative control). Basically a FATE character has a number of Aspects that describe part of your character, for example “Always Helps Those in Need” and (loosely) whenever that gets your character in trouble (for example, when it makes him rush into a burning building) you get a FATE point, you can then spend FATE points to exercise little bits of author-style narrative control (in ways that connect to your aspects) or to get a bonus to your rolls (in ways that connect to your aspects).

For example, my character got a FATE point from my GM for not backing down when faced with a powerful NPC because of my “My Father Told Me to Duel Often” and then I spent that FATE point to help win the fight. Basically what it does is make acting in-character (including doing heroics) be the most pragmatic option and works pretty well once you wrap your head around the logic of the FATE point economy.

For D&D I don’t really want any mechanics that promote heroism (this is just my personal tastes), I want adventurers not heroes. That means that the rare instances in which the PCs really stick their neck out stand out all the more since the player is really sticking his neck out and not just being heroic because the system is set up to make being heroic the pragmatic choice (as in FATE). But if you want mechanics that give you that kind of narrative control and incentives for characters to care about things more than gold and XP then a module with FATE-style mechanics could work well.

Fair vs 'anything goes?' meh. Mostly it just sounds like calling people who don't like the same game pansies.

I think that you’re reading things into my posts that aren’t really there. Difficulty has nothing to do with either style. A lot of people (not me) call 4ed dumbed down and easy since a lot of the specific sorts of difficulty that they’re used to have been removed, but 4ed puts in other sources of difficulty to compensate.

When you say 'old' RPG, you don't really have context, it could be from 2 years ago, but there's a newer one out. When you say 'early,' you get the idea that you're back where RPGs began... and RPGs have progressed quite a bit since their beginning.

Yup, there’s a lot of indie games I love (especially FATE) that are built on concepts that didn’t exist until relatively recently, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t old games that blow just about every new game out of the water at the particular things that they focus on. Just like I’d take the Saga of Egil Skallagrimson over many many many modern novels, no matter how much literary theory has developed since then.

For me, one of the very best things about roleplaying games is that I can throw that expectation nonsense right out the ing window.

Yup, in RPGs the adventure can always end abruptly and gruesomely. What I’m talking about is that, for example, when I played a 3ed campaign in which CLW wands were readily available any fight that didn’t have a chance of killing us all was boring since we could just heal up right afterwards. In D&D I don’t want every fight to be dancing on the line of a TPK in order to be fun and the last few games of 3ed that I played were exactly that. I’ve got a lot of love for 3ed, but damn does it require some house ruling to be fun.

CaS:

CaW: