RPG Combat: Sport or War?

The Crimson Binome · Oct 18, 2017

shidaku said:
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.

I certainly never used that language. Perfect knowledge is implausible in any believable world. In an RPG, we're constrained to what our characters know, which is rarely the whole picture. It's all about making best guesses, based on knowns and known unknowns and unknown unknowns.

shidaku said:
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.

A game works like a reality. If the game is worth playing, then every single rule in the book is meant to reflect some truth about the reality of the game world. Otherwise, there would be no point in playing.

shidaku said:
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.

At least we seem to be in agreement on that much. Combat-as-War means making a lot of tough decisions, and taking a lot of risks outside of combat. It's one of the reasons why it's important to have a trustworthy DM - because it's trivially easy for a DM to render your decisions meaningless by altering the unknowns.

shidaku said:
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

That was the hypothetical "if you could", which forms the basis of Combat-as-Sport. The proponents of Combat-as-Sport can know with reasonable certainty that they are likely to win a fight with negligible losses. That was the entire premise of 4E. Combat existed so that you could optimize your round-by-round power usage to defeat enemies who were specifically set up so that they could present a believable threat before you inevitably defeated them. Yes, it is entirely absurd. That is one of the many reasons why the game failed.

shidaku said:
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.

That's a matter of opinion. Personally, I think they did well enough for most practical purposes. The rules, for the most part, made sense (although there were still some obvious concessions toward making the game playable). As with most things, it does require you to play in good faith, and try to understand why the rules are what they are.

The Crimson Binome · Oct 18, 2017

pemerton said:
Upthread, when I mentioned that D&D characters are larger-than-life types, you objected that they're not, that they're made of "flesh and bone". But now you're saying that they're not like real people at all - ie people who are made of "flesh and bone".

I may have been less clear on that point than I could have been. What I said is that the characters we care about are not different from any random peasant except in ways which the game actually represents. What I meant is that they don't have plot armor or narrative protection, and they don't have any special benefits as protagonists. They can withstand a greater amount of trauma without dying, as their HP statistics reflect.

pemerton said:
Being stabbed with a sword or spear can inflict a fair bit of trauma. And many D&D characters are not wearing armour - eg wizards, sorcerers, monks. Many are not wearing metal armour - eg thieves, assassins, druids, some bards.

Every character in D&D that we care to model is very likely wearing armor and/or is some kind of wizard. One of the least ridiculous things that Gary ever said is that the exceptional HP capacity of high-level characters is derived largely from their armor (in the case of fighter types) or from background enchantments that aren't worth modeling directly (in the case of caster types).

For example, while it is incredible that a fighter might have 100hp, that fighter is probably also wearing +3 plate armor, so we can attribute much of the fighter's ability to survive a giant's axe swing to the incredible enchantment on that armor which reduces the obviously-lethal impact into something more reasonable. Even though the mechanics don't actually say that the enchantment works that way, it's a reasonable enough assumption under the vast majority of circumstances, so it's a valid concession toward keeping the game playable.

pemerton said:
You are arguing that 4e gets things wrong because it assigns the wrong value/effectiveness to the use of rocks in combat.
[...]
A good rule will be one which results in entities being killed by boulders at about the right frequency we would expect for some appropriate set of reality + genre informed expectations.

It's not as simple as a number or formula giving an unrealistic outcome. Those sorts of things happen all the time, and they aren't a huge deal. The issue is with the logic by which the formula was generated.

The game said that making a single-use terrain-based attack (like dropping a ceiling on someone) should deal damage comparable to an encounter power (or something like that, it's been a while since anyone has quoted page 42), because that way they're strong enough that you would want to use them but they wouldn't completely upstage your actual powers or trivialize an entire combat. And that's not valid logic, because it requires meta-gaming in order to adjudicate. The mechanical effect of a physical process can't depend on what the DM wants it to be; it can only depend on actual in-game intrinsic characteristics, if it's supposed to hold any sort of objective meaning at all. That sort of meta-gaming would only be a reasonable concession to playability if your highest priority was making sure that combat was balanced.

Whether a falling rock does 3 damage or 300 damage, or damage equal to the square root of its mass times the cube of the distance fallen, it's not a big deal. If it does as much damage as the DM thinks it should, based on circumstances, then that's vague but also fine. If it does not enough damage to kill anyone except mooks, because otherwise it would be boring, then that is entirely unacceptable.

Jhaelen · Oct 18, 2017

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.

Interestingly, my highest pc ever (pre-4e) reached level 8. I've played dozen of characters but I never managed to reach a higher level. Apparently, I either suck at playing or I'm incredibly unlucky, right?

I've always wondered about tales from other groups who apparently regularly reached epic levels and were traveling the multiverse killing gods as an exercise before their breakfast.
The answer is simple: They weren't playing the same game as our group: They used house-rules, their DMs were pulling blows, their opponents were acting stupid, they started at higher levels, they were decked out in magical treasures and artifacts, etc, etc.

By the time you're about to reach class levels territory, all monsters have save-or-die powers, often affecting the entire party at once (mind-flayers, beholders, etc.). There simply isn't any way to survive such encounters on a level battlefield repeatedly. This is mostly true in 1st and 2nd edition.
In 3rd edition some changes were introduced to increase the odds for the pcs:
- a somewhat accurate challenge rating system and rules for encounter design.
- easier access to resurrection powers
- a simple system for crafting magic items
- a revised action system favoring the pcs with plenty of swift and free action spells and powers
Despite of all this, in my 3e campaign, advancement started to falter at a certain point. In the end the highest pc had about level 13. In the last two or three adventures one or more PCs died in almost every combat.

4e by comparison was a cakewalk. We still had a couple of character deaths, but managed to reach level 15 without much trouble. And if the campaign hadn't fizzled, I don't think that would have changed.
The reason is of course that combat encounters are meant to be cinematic: the way monsters work creates a dramatic arc. They're mostly front-loaded and have few means to recover or heal. So the PCs get hit hard in the beginning and often one or more of them drop, but they have a lot more staying power, so they slowly turn the tide and are almost guaranteed to win. If a character actually dies, it's usually only by accident, because of a string of bad luck. This results in combats that are always exciting without being actually threatening, and it's firmly in the realm of 'combat as a sport'.

shidaku said:
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.

It depends on what you're trying to calculate:
The chance to survive a sequence of 80 encounters, each with a survivability percentage of 75%? You _definitely_ have to multiply the percentages: you have to survive the first encounter in order to even make it to the second!

pemerton · Oct 18, 2017

Saelorn said:
One of the least ridiculous things that Gary ever said is that the exceptional HP capacity of high-level characters is derived largely from their armor (in the case of fighter types) or from background enchantments that aren't worth modeling directly (in the case of caster types).

Where did Gygax say that? Not in his PHB or DMG, both of which attribute high hit points to skill, luck, divine intervention, etc.

Saelorn said:
The game said that making a single-use terrain-based attack (like dropping a ceiling on someone) should deal damage comparable to an encounter power (or something like that, it's been a while since anyone has quoted page 42)

The game also suggests that the terrain that comes into play will be commensurate to level/tier of play (see eg p 44 of the 4e DMG). The game doesn't anticipate that within a given campaign, dropping the ceiling on someone does different damage depending on the level of the dropper (or the victim of the drop). Once dropping is established as doing X damage, it does X damage.

But the game does anticipate that dropping won't recur across levels and especially across tiers of play, because the game is expressly designed around an escalation of the narrative stakes as the PCs grow in level and move up the tiers. So if your Heroic characters are dropping ceilings on their enemies, then the expectation is that Paragon characters will be dropping whole buildings on their enemies, and Epic characters will be dropping mountain tops on their enemies.

Saelorn said:
Whether a falling rock does 3 damage or 300 damage, or damage equal to the square root of its mass times the cube of the distance fallen, it's not a big deal. If it does as much damage as the DM thinks it should, based on circumstances, then that's vague but also fine. If it does not enough damage to kill anyone except mooks, because otherwise it would be boring, then that is entirely unacceptable.

So why does a fighter in AD&D, or 3E, or 5e, who ambushes and stabs someone, do only enough damage to kill a mook? (Whereas a thief or assassin might do more?)

Is it because the game designer thought killing by ambush is boring compared to killing in face-to-face combat? I think the answer is obviously yes. And personally, when it comes to game design I think having regard to what is or isn't boring makes sense. Likewise when it comes to authorship. So doubly so in a game that includes authorship as part of its play.

jasper · Oct 18, 2017

The op whole argument is missing a big assumption. The combat as sport or war assumes the pc team is fighting an npc team with similar abilities and rules of engagement. You could swap out members of npc for some monsters.
Ex. Now playing for the New York Nicks Line backer Oscar Otyugh he will be taking the first base position and gets a free throw from the 20 yard line.
But this still assumes the NPC and monsters have watch last Sunday’s highlight reels of the group, bought a scouting report, and down loaded the drone footage of the encounters in room three, six, seven Hike!
I think it is .Combat as either a friendly fist fight versus all up fire fight. Fist fight no friendlies are going get seriously hurt. The other the dm must try put pcs in the ground.

Sunseeker · Oct 18, 2017

Shasarak said:
So in the fiction of Indiana Jones, how does Indy react to a rock rolling down the corridor towards him? Is it the same as how he reacts to a Swordsman threatening him with a sword?

This is a great example of what I said just a post above. Aside from a few skill checks to run out of the dungeon, the "DM" of Indiana Jones said "Boulder=death", so Indi took a few checks and obviously passed, as he ran away from the boulder. At another time, when facing a guy with a sword, the DM called for combat, so Indi drew a gun and shot him.

Now, it's all obviously rigged because we know Indi didn't make any actual checks, he won because the author said he's going to win. But the premise is functionally there. You don't roll damage for giant boulders if you want death to be the certain outcome. You DO roll damage for combat.

Sunseeker · Oct 18, 2017

Saelorn said:
I certainly never used that language.

And I didn't say you did, I said other posts already had.

A game works like a reality.

That's silly. Some game rules are just game rules, and some of them are just bad.

That was the hypothetical "if you could", which forms the basis of Combat-as-Sport. The proponents of Combat-as-Sport can know with reasonable certainty that they are likely to win a fight with negligible losses. That was the entire premise of 4E. Combat existed so that you could optimize your round-by-round power usage to defeat enemies who were specifically set up so that they could present a believable threat before you inevitably defeated them. Yes, it is entirely absurd. That is one of the many reasons why the game failed.

Woah there partner. As I'm sure you're aware you've got arguably two of the biggest fans of 4E right here in this thread, myself and @Morrus; and while I'm sure we can both give a litany of reasons for why 4E was less popular I don't think you're going to get any positive progressing out of arguing 4E failed.

That's a matter of opinion. Personally, I think they did well enough for most practical purposes. The rules, for the most part, made sense (although there were still some obvious concessions toward making the game playable). As with most things, it does require you to play in good faith, and try to understand why the rules are what they are.

Personally, I think they did poorly for practical purposes. You can easily bash in a skull with a fist-sized rock, but by the rules you need something about the size of a car to get anyone's attention.

Tony Vargas · Oct 18, 2017

pemerton said:
None of what you describe captures any interesting contrast between 4e and AD&D or 3E. But [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] was pointing to such a contrast, and it was [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION]'s post that I was responding to.

As I've already mentioned, the edition of D&D most likely to replicate Gandalf standing on a bridge and breaking it to make the Balrog fall is 4e. Diverting rivers is likewise very easily resolved; or the use of icicles on a roof; etc.

C'mon, you don't see how Gandalf being a 5th level magic user peforming a Retributive Strike with his mostly-charged Staff of the Magi to kill a Type VI demon, making the 50% chance to plane-shift instead of vaporize, and leveling up, isn't 'Gandalf breaking the bridge to defeat the Balrog, and coming back later as Gandalf the White.' No? Seemed obvious to me when I was 14.

pemerton said:
Classic D&D has evasion mechanics, and (by dint of them) emphasizes fleeing more than does 3E. 4e does not have specific evasion mechanics, but has skill challenges to handle that sort of thing.

I dusted off the 1e DMG 'Pursuit & Evasion of Pursuit' rules, such as they were, a few years ago. There's not much to them. The slowest member of the party being chased by faster monsters was caught up to, and combat resumed.

Second, on your account of CaS, 4e is not an example of the "combat-as-sport" model.

D&D, if the DM designs encounters to 'challenge' his party, is prettymuch running in 'CaS' mode. All three WotC versions of D&D facilitate that by providing encounter-design guidelines. Such guidelines can also be used to make push-over or overwhelming encounters.

The 4e DMG (pp 56-57, 104) says the following:

That's advice about pacing and managing player expectations. Even if followed, it doesn't generate significant certainty that you'll probably win, except in the anodyne sense that I mentioned above, namely, that the GM is not just going to declare that a red dragon breathes on you or that an orc horde turns up and massacres the party. And nothing about the game makes it remotely difficult to ignore the advice, and include a larger proportion of what the DMG calls "hard" encounters - I know that, because I've done it throughout my 4e campaign.

I think part of what makes CaW/CaS problematic is that it's used as if it were a quality of a game, when it was actually articulated as a style of play - and then went on to make claims about what games worked with what style. It's much like the problems GNS runs into, being a description of aspects of how people play games, and taken as a set of boxes to sort games & gamers into, denying any overlap.

An actual game is going to present players with a selection of meaningful, viable choices, and it's going to resolve conflict based on those choices and the mechanics. The examples we see of CaW tend not to be of games, but of bypassing the game, finding a series of choices that lead the DM ('cause it's always D&D get'n the CaW treatment) to make a ruling in favor of the PCs, without regard to the rules. Obviously, you can do that in any game, all you need is a GM willing to go for it. It's a style, maybe, at the outside, a game-the-DM strategy.
Examples of CaS, OTOH, tend to be examples of a game, and specifically of taking a guideline as a rule. If CR guidelines recommend 4 Ogres as a challenge, or a DC 25 lock as an obstacle at a certain level, they'll be misrepresented as rules. The lock's DC is 'set by the party level,' you 'can't encounter' a 7th ogre, etc - therefor, since you can't violate the guidelines-masquerading-as-rules, the game can 'only be run CaS.' Obviously, you can treat guidelines as such, it's just that, the more dependable the guidelines are, the more the DM can count on the challenge being too much if the party just take it on head-on.

The series of choices that might work for CaW with one GM might not with another - they might get you killed or get you a standard challenge.

CaW/CaS also gets represented as a difference in fiction rather than a difference in playstyle. For instance, carefully planning and prepping for a battle, acquiring specific gear, gaining specific aid, sneaking up on and overwhelming the enemy, might be presented as 'CaW narrative.' But, it could have been resolved as a series of checks, resource uses, & risks that were fairly-'balanced' and challenging and gave the players a CaS-appropriate chance of success.

shidaku said:
Woah there partner. As I'm sure you're aware you've got arguably two of the biggest fans of 4E right here in this thread, myself and @Morrus; and while I'm sure we can both give a litany of reasons for why 4E was less popular I don't think you're going to get any positive progressing out of arguing 4E failed.

It failed to hit a revenue goal set for it.

pemerton · Oct 18, 2017

shidaku said:
Personally, I think they did poorly for practical purposes. You can easily bash in a skull with a fist-sized rock, but by the rules you need something about the size of a car to get anyone's attention.

I don't know the rules other than from [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION]'s account of them in this thread, but at least as they've been presented I absolutely agree with this.

pemerton · Oct 18, 2017

Tony Vargas said:
C'mon, you don't see how Gandalf being a 5th level magic user peforming a Retributive Strike with his mostly-charged Staff of the Magi to kill a Type VI demon, making the 50% chance to plane-shift instead of vaporize, and leveling up, isn't 'Gandalf breaking the bridge to defeat the Balrog, and coming back later as Gandalf the White.' No? Seemed obvious to me when I was 14.

I guess that's one way to look at it - nothing quite says "LotR" like Keep on the Borderlands and the DMG city encounter table!

Tony Vargas said:
I dusted off the 1e DMG 'Pursuit & Evasion of Pursuit' rules, such as they were, a few years ago. There's not much to them. The slowest member of the party being chased by faster monsters was caught up to, and combat resumed.

The wilderness evasion rules have slightly richer mechanics for resolving the chase. But the key to the dungeon purusit rules is (i) a different take on movement rates and how movement and combat interact from that which applies during rounds of combat, and (ii) a system of specified determinations (either random or pre-written), rather than spur-of-the-moment GM fiat, for determining whether pursuit occurs and continues.

RPG Combat: Sport or War?

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