D&D 5E Combat as war, sport, or ??

[UngainlyTitan]

Spoiler: protagonist

pro·tag·o·nist
/prōˈtaɡənəst,prəˈtaɡənəst/
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noun
the leadingcharacter or one of the major characters in a drama, movie, novel, or other fictional text.
the main figure or one of the most prominent figures in a real situation

What the heck is "protagonist play." in a game with multiple players other than a string of conflicting buzzwords? More Importantly, what are the rules doing to carry that playstyle for the gm who needs to run the game for all of their players without treating any one of them as The Protagonist of the game?

Regardless of the answer BIFTS even provide us with examples of design choices made to disempower the gm with regard to any sort of protagonism. In a 5 generations of d&d"* panel a few years back Mearls described an example of a proto5e rule that got cut using a "greedy rogue" flaw to force a player's hand in reacting to a presented situation. If that shift is somehow creating whatever "protagonist play` it's hard to excuse the conflicting empowerment of toxic main character syndrome that results when the gm is exposed to run the game with more than a single player.

We could claim that the party as a whole is the protagonist, but the 5e rules do absolutely nothing to encourage that & editors pre-5e had much stronger reasons to encourage that mindset in mechanics 5e stripped away or oblivisted like risk of lethality required magic item churn & tactical grid combat elements.

*I'm on my phone but want to say that the timestamp for it was like 1:21 for some reason

It is a term I have advocated in this thread to look at play (in this post) where the party are the main characters in a story enabled by as little as having enough hit point to reduce risk of sudden death due to random chance. It enables any kind of story play that a group wants to drift D&D towards (starting with Trad story play - see the Hickman revolution) as a contrast to the gritty resource management type game of earlier D&D (like Gygaxian "skilled play")

 

[Fanaelialae]

A character losing some or all of what it's gained is always a risk.

In the most basic of ways, it's like hitting a snake in Snakes and Ladders: you get knocked back, but you can keep plugging away and try to catch up. Or perhaps like a bad beat in poker where you didn't go all-in - sometimes the luck just doesn't go your way but you can keep at it and see if you can recover.

Without these sort of Bad Things as risks in the game - level loss, item loss, etc. - death is the only severe threat left; and as others point out, that gets pretty one-dimensional after a while.

I strongly disagree.

RPGs are not like Snakes and Ladders or Poker. There's a sense of continuity to RPGs that these other games lack. There's no real character or story to lose at. There is winning and losing, but it's fundamentally mechanical. It's not like poker player 1 is role playing his favorite persona, and if he loses the game he can't ever play that persona again.

I guess you haven't been reading the same responses I have, because I've seen others point out that death is not the only consequence. There are tons of potential consequences aside from death or level drain (et al).

You can have a significant setback in the goals you are pursuing. Perhaps the BBEG completes the evil rite, sacrificing the villagers and is one step closer to his apotheosis into something Very Bad. You can outright fail in your goals. The BBEG succeeds in conquering the free kingdoms of the world and now the campaign pivots into the party trying to overthrow him.

The only case in which I would say this doesn't work is if your party is a bunch of murderhobos with no goals beyond leveling up and getting rich. Which is fine, and I can even see level drain (et al) being necessary to play that way because if leveling up and finding treasure are your only goals, then losing levels and treasure are basically the only significant setbacks you can face.

However, understand that not everyone plays that way. In fact, I suspect that nowadays that's a fairly small minority of the game space overall.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

They're not actively malicious, though. They're simply playing to win, as one does in any game or sport, and taking what advantages are given them.

Dont' want them to exploit the advantages? Then don't give them the advantages to exploit. Easy.

Sure they are. They're actively doing something hostile to the game premise, knowing it will upset the DM. You've had absolutely no problem calling that out when it comes to things like wanting to play a race that isn't present in a particular game world. How is this any different?

Tell me how any other stakes matter if you lose the survival stake.

Tell me why a man would lay down his life for his friend.

History, the Geneva Convention, and boatloads of war-crimes trials would all beg to differ.

Since when are those referees of wars?

That's victors punishing bad behavior from one or more combatants. I'm not seeing a referee here; there's no third party who calls the shots.

MMA is more like combat as war - yes there's some rules but people still get seriously hurt doing it and know that risk going in; and (in theory) are trying to beat the opponent.

And yet it is, explicitly, officially, a sport. Every resource available to me agrees it is a sport--a "combat sport," to be clear, but a sport nonetheless. What does that say, then, that you consider it to be "Combat as War" despite literally being a sport?

WWE is more like combat as sport - it's predetermined who will win and the whole thing is mostly for show (though they still take a beating doing it).

And yet WWE isn't even a sport to begin with! Again, what does that say about this alleged model, when a thing that explicitly is a sport is "combat as war," and something you're claiming is a sport isn't even a sport at all?

Also, I categorically reject your claim that "everything is predetermined." Others have already given you examples of the kinds of stakes one can have other than always defaulting to character death all the time. It is, in fact, exactly this dismissive and hostile "oh everything is predetermined the way you do things" that I am so frustrated by. Everything is NOT pre-determined. In fact, in many cases, things are less pre-determined than they would be if death were always hiding in the wings.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

4e combat is of course set up so that the PC side usually wins. It is 'sport' in the sense that what happens before initiative is rolled rarely matters much.

5e I think is set up so that you can run it in a manner more similar to 0e-2e (exploit the world CAW), 3e (exploit the PC build pre-combat CAW), or 4e (exploit the PC build in-combat CAS) combat style. Because it's designed to do all three, it doesn't quite feel like any of them. It's probably closest to low level 3e I'd say.

My experience is VERY different... it is MUCH more DM dependent (at least for 3e+) then system.

I have 1 DM who left the group (and the state) just a bit before covid who would ALWAYS throw high level threats at low level parties (and if you didn't know it was how he DMed you would HATE his game for the number of TPKs) he did it in 2e 3e 4e and 5e (and Torg and furry pirates and rifts if that matters).

In 4e he would throw level 20+ solos at level 5 players and be like "Well you should have run" or throw a choice between 2 threats with little intel unless you REALLY research them, but 1 will be level appropriate and one will be level+7 or 8 appropriate but 'if you play smart'

Ironically in 5e he HATED DMing us because we would always pick the tougher fights to get the better XP (we would CAW stuff to max our chances, but the system is forgiving enough that even if we didn't we stood a chance)

Spoiler: 4e game he ran at store

This guy ran a game for 2 experienced players (one co owned store) and 1 a little experienced player and 2 newbies this was there first D&D... and drove both newbies off. He started game 1 level 1 with an orc invasion of the town they were in (you know really being orginal) but used his 'didn't hold back' mentality that had the big bads of the tribe very close to were the PCs started... and when the PCs found them doing (not safe for enworld discussion things) to locals the newbies and the little experienced player jumped in head first to be the heroes, and the 2 more experienced players had to jump in to try to help (even though they knew it was biteing off more then they could chew) and it TPKed game 1.
that night when the store owner took out the garbage he found 1 of those players had thrown out there PHB... we still have it in a group pool at the store.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

As a big fan of 4e...yeah, I don't see it. 5e is a retooled 3e with an eye toward appearing "traditional" and getting early-edition players on board, regardless of what must be done to make that happen. To say that 4e was merely neglected would be a serious understatement.

the only thing I see from 4e brough over is short rest as a concept (although made harder) including healing (I actually like HD better then HS TBH) and the concept of the highly moble rogue.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

If you're saying that 5e combat in practice owes less to 4e than the other editions, yes I'd tend to agree. It does have some significant 4e derived elements such as Healing Word, battle cantrips (aka At Wills) and the general idea that all PCs should be able to attack every round.

opps... yea at will cantrips too... healing word is not really anything like the 4e one except in name...

and irconicly by keeping the at will cantrips but taking any at will fighter exploits it HURT the martial characters and helped the casters that were already going back to be more powerful

 

[Fanaelialae]

Again, experience here differs.

I've had situations where - at full pop both times - they meet six wandering orcs and sail through without losing a single hit point, then meet six more the next day and almost TPK.

In fact a version of this became a long-running joke/meme in a previous campaign of mine: whenever the party stopped off in town for some downtime, their first combat of any kind back in the field - no matter how easy it looked on paper - would be a complete crap-show! Six nobody bandits once nearly TPKed a 4th-5th level party of 7 characters who collectively shouldn't have taken a scratch; but the first-combat-out jinx struck again and they had to stagger back to town to recover.

Not me, other than to the vaguest sense of level-appropriateness that any module has. The adventure is what it is; and if they decide to take a party of composition A in there as opposed to another of composition B (or size A or B - party size can vary quite a lot as well) it's not going to make me change anything.

If an adventure demands they have a mage in the party, for example, and they didn't bring one (or the one they did bring is dead) then when they get to the point where the mage is essential they're gonna grind to a halt. In cases like this, if they think to do any info-gathering ahead of time I'll try to work in a hint somewhere that having a mage and keeping it upright would be useful; but if they don't ask, so be it.

If the Big McGuffin found in the adventure can only be used by a Good Cleric and the only Cleric in the team is Neutral, then so be it: they don't get any use out of ol' Big McG.

So, when this happens, do you note what the difference was?

Perhaps in the former case you couldn't roll above a 5? Perhaps in the latter case you rolled half a dozen crits in the same encounter?

Maybe I'm confusing you with a different poster, but weren't you the one who just claimed to have 38 years of experience? No offense, but this post reads like weaponized incompetence on your part. Like in those 38 years you couldn't figure out how to estimate the difficulty of an encounter. Frankly, I find that a little hard to believe.

Yes, RNG is always a factor. I prefer it that way. I would think, given your stated preferences, that you would prefer it that way too. However, as DMs with some experience, it's not that difficult to get a feel for how challenging an encounter will be on average.

If the elder dragon rolls nothing but 1s and the players roll nothing but 20s then they may steamroll it. And if the players roll nothing but 1s and the lone kobold rolls nothing but 20s it may steamroll them. (Obviously abilities that are save for half change this a bit, but let's leave those aside for the sake of simplicity.) However, we can pretty safely assume that for a 4th level party the elder dragon will most likely result in a TPK if engaged directly, whereas the kobold will probably pose a trivial encounter.

After we've played a session or three, we can probably start to get a feel as to how the party is performing relative to the encounter building guidelines. If they're over performing we can increase the challenge a bit (this doesn't even have to be additional creatures; it might simply be something like terrain that favors the monsters). If they're under performing, we can reduce the challenge.

Maybe I'm off base and the guys I game with and I are gaming geniuses who managed to crack a code that no one else has managed. I strongly doubt it though. I'm pretty sure that any DM with a modicum of experience under their belt can manage the same. For those DMs who aren't experienced enough, setting the guidelines on the easier end of the scale is a good idea, because they can gradually learn to get a feel for the system without accidentally slaughtering their parties.

 

[overgeeked]

I strongly disagree.

I disagree with you. Lanefan is right.

RPGs are not like Snakes and Ladders or Poker. There's a sense of continuity to RPGs that these other games lack. There's no real character or story to lose at. There is winning and losing, but it's fundamentally mechanical. It's not like poker player 1 is role playing his favorite persona, and if he loses the game he can't ever play that persona again.

That’s also not true of a dead D&D character. Players haul around the same character to game after game dead or no. Dying in one game has no impact on the character in other games. Even in the same game where the character died there’s the possibility of resurrection. To say nothing of the old standby of adding “Jr” or “the III” to a character’s name and bringing them into play.

I guess you haven't been reading the same responses I have, because I've seen others point out that death is not the only consequence. There are tons of potential consequences aside from death or level drain (et al).

The poster you’re quoting points out many of the same things.

You can have a significant setback in the goals you are pursuing. Perhaps the BBEG completes the evil rite, sacrificing the villagers and is one step closer to his apotheosis into something Very Bad. You can outright fail in your goals. The BBEG succeeds in conquering the free kingdoms of the world and now the campaign pivots into the party trying to overthrow him.

Yep. And those only work if the players and PCs care. If they don’t care, all you have left is attacking the character sheet, meaning hp, levels, gear, etc on up to character death. I’ve had dozens of 5E players simply not care. They refused to risk anything regardless of the collateral damage. All they cared about was their character. Not even the rest of the party. Just their own character.

The only case in which I would say this doesn't work is if your party is a bunch of murderhobos with no goals beyond leveling up and getting rich. Which is fine, and I can even see level drain (et al) being necessary to play that way because if leveling up and finding treasure are your only goals, then losing levels and treasure are basically the only significant setbacks you can face.

Exactly.

However, understand that not everyone plays that way. In fact, I suspect that nowadays that's a fairly small minority of the game space overall.

My experience shows the opposite. Of the few hundred 5E players I’ve run the game for in the last near-decade only a tiny handful cared about anything outside their own character.

 

[Fanaelialae]

I disagree with you. Lanefan is right.

That’s also not true of a dead D&D character. Players haul around the same character to game after game dead or no. Dying in one game has no impact on the character in other games. Even in the same game where the character died there’s the possibility of resurrection. To say nothing of the old standby of adding “Jr” or “the III” to a character’s name and bringing them into play.

The poster you’re quoting points out many of the same things.

Yep. And those only work if the players and PCs care. If they don’t care, all you have left is attacking the character sheet, meaning hp, levels, gear, etc on up to character death. I’ve had dozens of 5E players simply not care. They refused to risk anything regardless of the collateral damage. All they cared about was their character. Not even the rest of the party. Just their own character.

Exactly.

My experience shows the opposite. Of the few hundred 5E players I’ve run the game for in the last near-decade only a tiny handful cared about anything outside their own character.

So you're saying that the same exact character, same sheet, same everything, is dead at one table but they take him to another table and he's alive? Or do you mean that they make a similar character with the same name and personality, and play them at different tables?

The former sounds like cheating to me. And the latter isn't the same character. You might be playing Bormir at both John and Tim's tables, but the Bormir at John's table didn't defeat the Dragon King of Rancor (that happened at Tim's table). If, at John's table, Bormir starts boasting how he slew the Dragon King, people are going to look at him like he's crazy. Because there never has been a Dragon King in John's setting.

That's your experience, but it hasn't been mine. I already said that for a group like that you arguably need level drain (et al) because if all the group cares about is levels and treasure, then that's the only setbacks they can face. That's seems pretty easy to solve with a conversation where you let them know that for this new campaign there will be nasty challenges in store for them, such as level drain.

If they protest against that, then maybe they aren't a good fit for you. You could seek out a different group that's better aligned with your interests, or have one of the players run a campaign (sitting in the DMs chair has a way of giving players a sense of perspective, IME).

 

[Micah Sweet]

I strongly disagree.

RPGs are not like Snakes and Ladders or Poker. There's a sense of continuity to RPGs that these other games lack. There's no real character or story to lose at. There is winning and losing, but it's fundamentally mechanical. It's not like poker player 1 is role playing his favorite persona, and if he loses the game he can't ever play that persona again.

I guess you haven't been reading the same responses I have, because I've seen others point out that death is not the only consequence. There are tons of potential consequences aside from death or level drain (et al).

You can have a significant setback in the goals you are pursuing. Perhaps the BBEG completes the evil rite, sacrificing the villagers and is one step closer to his apotheosis into something Very Bad. You can outright fail in your goals. The BBEG succeeds in conquering the free kingdoms of the world and now the campaign pivots into the party trying to overthrow him.

The only case in which I would say this doesn't work is if your party is a bunch of murderhobos with no goals beyond leveling up and getting rich. Which is fine, and I can even see level drain (et al) being necessary to play that way because if leveling up and finding treasure are your only goals, then losing levels and treasure are basically the only significant setbacks you can face.

However, understand that not everyone plays that way. In fact, I suspect that nowadays that's a fairly small minority of the game space overall.

See, this opinion is predicated on the idea that your PC is so special that losing their abilities makes the entire experience retroactively pointless. I don't agree. To me, you do the best you can with your PC, and if bad things happen to them, you deal with it or you retire the PC and move on with a new one. In my old group, players would sometimes just get tired of their PCs and retire them or let them die so they could try something new. Making it to the end of a campaign with the same PC was a gift from the dice gods and/or a reward for skilled play, not an assumption, and losing your super-powers in no way invalidates the emergent story from before. If you don't want to try and come back from it, just make a new PC.

I know other people feel differently, but we all have our preferences.