Interesting Decisions vs Wish Fulfillment (from Pulsipher)

[BryonD]

But, how does that work?

To repeat my question: Is your statement intended to be "to you", or are you claiming to describe an unavoidable truth for all games everywhere?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

You didn't say much, so I can't take much context. But you seem to be back to implying the inevitability of circumstances based on looking at mechanics in a vacuum. I not only reject that presumption but I'm saying that my decades on gaming experience disprove the null hypothesis claiming my game can't happen. That isn't to say that other peoples' game with negative results don't happen. But I'm not going to get hung up on worrying about if someone else has a game that is defined by failures and dramatic events that did not materialize.

You seem to be working very hard to avoid talking about what can, potentially, on the outside, happen, whilst avoiding acknowledging what the mechanics might make likely. I'm not following closely but, just because something can, technically, happen, just because you've seen it happen, doesn't mean it's very likely in the mechanics.

You say "I'm not going to get hung up on...", and that's nice for you, but if that's a common result of using a system RAW or the like, that's certainly an issue that should be acknowledged, and airily dismissing it, as you really appear to be doing, doesn't really contribute anything.

Maybe I have the wrong end of the stick, though.

 

[Hussar]

I look at it this way.

If a group is consistently beating the odds, on a consistent basis, then the odds are not what they think they are. They cannot be.

The example of poker is pretty apt I think. Sure, you can play the odds in poker. You can do all sorts of things to help you win. But, what you cannot ever do, is consistently win. You can't. There's simply too much random element in poker to ever win consistently. The longer you play, the more you will lose, and that's an unavoidable fact.

So, if your group is consistently succeeding in combat, then how can it be CaW? It's not random. It can't be. Not if you are consistently succeeding. The odds are simply too great for that to be true. Even if you have an 80% success rate, you are still failing 1 encounter in 5. And I'll guarantee that no one in this thread has a failure rate even approaching that. Probably closer to about 1%

That's why I call it illusionism. It has to be. The DM is setting encounters with the idea that the encounters are not only defeat able (unless he wants the party to run away) but the presumption of everyone at the table is that the vast majority of encounters ARE winnable. You can pretend that your encounters are as difficult as you want, but, at the end of the day, most of them really aren't. They can't be. If they really were, then you'd be killing PC's more often than you do.

That's why I asked Emerikol way back how often he whacked PC's in combat. A question that got completely dodged by claiming that difficulty isn't just combat. Thing is, in D&D, failure in combat is generally a dead PC. It's pretty rare that you fail and no one dies. I'll stand by the idea that if you're playing a D&D campaign from level 1 to 20 and the PC's succeed more than 80%, then you're pretty much tailoring every encounter to the group. There's no other way it works because the odds are just too great.

The odds in most groups is likely somewhere around 95% for every single encounter. I doubt any of you see your groups fail more than 1 in 20 encounters, either combat or non-combat. 1 in 10 at the absolute outside. Whether that's due to the DM designing encounters that way at the outset, or shifting the odds during encounters by making deliberate choices (yeah, I could coup de grace the downed fighter, but, hey, we'll swing fire over to the cleric because that would be more fun...) the odds are almost never as high as people pretend they are.

 

[Savage Wombat]

If a group is consistently beating the odds, on a consistent basis, then the odds are not what they think they are. They cannot be.

The example of poker is pretty apt I think. Sure, you can play the odds in poker. You can do all sorts of things to help you win. But, what you cannot ever do, is consistently win. You can't. There's simply too much random element in poker to ever win consistently. The longer you play, the more you will lose, and that's an unavoidable fact.

I have no problem with these statements.

So, if your group is consistently succeeding in combat, then how can it be CaW? It's not random. It can't be. Not if you are consistently succeeding. The odds are simply too great for that to be true. Even if you have an 80% success rate, you are still failing 1 encounter in 5. And I'll guarantee that no one in this thread has a failure rate even approaching that. Probably closer to about 1%.

And this is where you fall down - because #2 has nothing to do with #1. Combat as War is not defined by odds or risk. (Although I agree it seems odd for someone who likes this style of play to win all the time.)

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.

Combat as Sport is a knight riding in a joust. He still wants to win, but in this case the circumstances are limited by mutual agreement - one knight at a time, waiting until the other guy is ready, letting the other guy pick up his weapon when he falls down. (The fact that they're also not trying to kill each other doesn't apply to D&D.) Both knights could still be hurt or killed. One knight could be much better than the other, such that he has no chance of losing. But the circumstances surrounding the fight limit the options of the fighters.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

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.

Combat as Sport is a knight riding in a joust. He still wants to win, but in this case the circumstances are limited by mutual agreement - one knight at a time, waiting until the other guy is ready, letting the other guy pick up his weapon when he falls down. (The fact that they're also not trying to kill each other doesn't apply to D&D.) Both knights could still be hurt or killed. One knight could be much better than the other, such that he has no chance of losing. But the circumstances surrounding the fight limit the options of the fighters.

By this definition, though, no edition of D&D has focused on either extreme, they've all been in a continuum in-between those.

 

[Savage Wombat]

By this definition, though, no edition of D&D has focused on either extreme, they've all been in a continuum in-between those.

I don't see this as a problem with the model.

The reason the CaW/CaS dichotomy comes up is because certain D&D rulesets support one playstyle better or worse - and that people who prefer to play at the CaW end of the continuum found the, shall we say, "encounter-level" focus of some magical abilities to be too weak for their intentions. While people preferring the CaS end found long duration and open-ended powers to be "game-breaking".

Ergo - when discussing a new edition, it became a point of contention as to how far to one side of the continuum the rules should fall. Remember, most people in any argument tend to think their viewpoint represents something close to the "center".

I think that these points about different goals of playstyles is useful for understanding the game, and I get very frustrated when other writers dismiss whole arguments because they feel that the original poster was attacking their preferences.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I don't see this as a problem with the model.

The reason the CaW/CaS dichotomy comes up is because certain D&D rulesets support one playstyle better or worse - and that people who prefer to play at the CaW end of the continuum found the, shall we say, "encounter-level" focus of some magical abilities to be too weak for their intentions. While people preferring the CaS end found long duration and open-ended powers to be "game-breaking".

Ergo - when discussing a new edition, it became a point of contention as to how far to one side of the continuum the rules should fall. Remember, most people in any argument tend to think their viewpoint represents something close to the "center".

I think that these points about different goals of playstyles is useful for understanding the game, and I get very frustrated when other writers dismiss whole arguments because they feel that the original poster was attacking their preferences.

Well, what you're showing is that there is no dichotomy. Only a continuum, and talking about the issue as if there was a dichotomy is very clearly, as you have illustrated, actively unhelpful.

 

[Savage Wombat]

Well, what you're showing is that there is no dichotomy. Only a continuum, and talking about the issue as if there was a dichotomy is very clearly, as you have illustrated, actively unhelpful.

Okay, then, looking up Dichotomy to see if I'm using it incorrectly.

...

Maybe. I think CaW and CaS are two very different styles of play, though no one would say completely opposite. But for the purposes of this analogy, call them "black" and "white".

Just because I have defined "black" and "white" as concepts does not mean that (a) there is no continuum of shades between them, nor that (b) almost everything falls in the "shades of gray" part of the continuum. It does mean that a lot of grays consist of more black than white, or more white than black.

If you are trying to figure out why a particular person dislikes the shade of gray you like - maybe it's because he likes more black in his gray than you do.

And I don't think it's actively unhelpful - I think it's trying to define terms, which is more productive in discussion than arguing from emotion. If everyone agrees on the same terminology and definitions, then you can more easily discuss why the thing with the agreed-upon-definition is good or bad.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I don't have time to go into everything wrong with the false dichotomy presented by CaW/CaS and its slanted, condescending delivery.

I will pause to point out, though, that D&D is a cooperative TT game, and that both 'styles' that CaW/CaS presents as the only styles are potentially problematic when applied to such a game.

As to the justification that certain games 'support' one style or another, I'm not convinced. Classic D&D lacked encounter guidelines, and those provided by 3.x weren't that dependable, while 4e came up with some fairly decent ones and 5e is at least trying to hold onto some of that. That doesn't mean that any of those edition 'supported' one quasi-competitive mode of play better than another, just that later games better-supported both, in the limited sense that they decreased the degree of system mastery the DM needed to prepare encounters as intended - be they of the asymmetrical CaW type or the balanced CaS type.

 

[Savage Wombat]

I don't have time to go into everything wrong with the false dichotomy presented by CaW/CaS and its slanted, condescending delivery.

This is what I mean when I point out that it's not necessarily the original writer that's the one causing the hostile tone here.

As to the justification that certain games 'support' one style or another, I'm not convinced. Classic D&D lacked encounter guidelines, and those provided by 3.x weren't that dependable, while 4e came up with some fairly decent ones and 5e is at least trying to hold onto some of that. That doesn't mean that any of those edition 'supported' one quasi-competitive mode of play better than another, just that later games better-supported both, in the limited sense that they decreased the degree of system mastery the DM needed to prepare encounters as intended - be they of the asymmetrical CaW type or the balanced CaS type.

And there's no reason you can't hold such an opinion, and defend it, while maintaining civility. Discussions such as this one help me better understand the play experience from multiple points of view, and I don't want them to descend into anger.