D&D General Combat as War vs. Sport and a Missing Third Mode

[EzekielRaiden]

* Combat as War: asymmetric, player-driven, where preparation, avoidance, and clever tactics matter more than balance.
* Combat as Sport: balanced encounters, challenge ratings, tactical puzzle-solving, and fair challenges designed for engagement within a defined ruleset.

This comparison was frequently used by the OSR community to demonstrate a difference between OSR and WotC D&D approaches to combat.

This whole presentation perfectly encapsulates why I dislike the CaW/CaS concept. I just want that noted at the outset. I just about outright reject this alleged "distinction" because 99.9999% of the time it is absolutely riddled with disparagement for "Combat-as-Sport" while doing nearly everything it can to amp up how much more awesome and betterer and cooler and more dangerous and (etc. etc. etc.) "Combat-as-War" must be.

The fact that I've only ever met ONE person who self-professed to like Combat-as-Sport as described, is...pretty good evidence that of course this (alleged) distinction is missing things. It wasn't created to be a fair appraisal of options. It was created to disparage one way and venerate another.

Now, with that out of the way...the actually interesting idea here.

Combat as Theater.

By “Combat as Theater,” I mean treating combat primarily as a performance or scene rather than an asymmetric test of survival or a challenging tactical puzzle. The focus shifts toward narrative/character expression, pacing, and dramatic impact.

So, the way Dungeon World does it?

It sounds to me like you're stumbling upon the core concept of PbtA/FitD/etc. type games, "Story Now" rather than Before (what Dragonlance put forward, and what most current-day D&D DMs think every game must be by its nature) or After (what OD&D, 1e, and Basic/etc. put forward, and what most self-avowed classic-D&D fans think every game should be). Combat as something which evolves through a natural pacing, not so much "driven by" the rules as "driving" the rules, so to speak.

I can say there are imperfections with the DW approach, trying to marry the immense crunch of even so-called "light" versions of D&D with the pure fiction-first approach of PbtA, but it's satisfying enough to have kept my Tuesday game running for 8 years now.

In Combat as Theater:

• Combat becomes a vehicle for expression: showing who a character is under pressure, how relationships evolve, or how themes emerge in action.
• Outcomes are often appreciated not just for success/failure, but for how they feel in the unfolding narrative.
• Players and GMs emphasize vivid descriptions, cinematic moments, and dramatic choices.
• Turns and actions are framed to highlight character identity, tone, and story beats.

Yes, the first point is extremely close to what I expect of DW play. The "themes" would not usually be constructed ahead of time, it's worth noting; they should just be what naturally arises out of the situation as the participants play through it.

The second point is...complicated. It implies that we should rewrite the fiction if it would make us, as players, have more happy feelings. I don't think that's the case for this playstyle. Instead, it is that we should follow our narrative intuitions over other considerations. E.g., one of the failings of even a genuinely well-run ultra-classic OSR-type game (what you would likely call "Combat-as-War") is the problem of too-effective SOPs, which is why Gygax did the crappy not-good type of design to fix it, by throwing in Ear Seekers and cursed treasure that looks identical to valuable treasure etc., creating the GM/player arms race. Narrative intuitions, however, are not particularly weak to SOP issues, because pacing, tone, and context are the inputs for both how the GM frames new scenes, and how the players respond to scenes. Similarly, one of the great failings of a 3.5e-style hyper-simulatonistic game (among the things you would likely label as "Combat-as-Sport") is the dead-end-roll problem: nobody has good Perception and someone HAS to find the secret door before the adventure can continue, or nobody can pick locks and the adventure requires a picked lock to proceed etc. This, again, is something narrative intuitions easily overcome: if the story is about investigating an old house full of secret doors and such, then that needs to happen, you just involve the rules to determine how it is revealed and, most importantly, what costs (or benefits) arise from that reveal.

To repeat myself from above, I'm not saying this approach is free of issues. It isn't. It has its own flaws. But the above two are extremely well-known and widely-lamented flaws which PbtA and its cousins were literally built to avoid, and a reliance on narrative intuitions for linking the scenes and actions together is one of those intentional choices meant to obviate the above problems.

Where War asks, “How do we win (and survive) this through preparation, tactics, and asymmetry?” and Sport asks, “How do we win this fair encounter efficiently using our abilities?”, Theater asks, “How do we make this scene compelling while expressing character and drama?" (These questions may vary but are meant to be more illustrative of general ideas.)

Well, if I may, I find all of these questions flawed. As noted at the start, I guess. If I had to try to rehabilitate this distinction, even though I personally kinda hate it, I would present it as follows:

Combat as War asks, "How do we survive, maybe win, through guerrilla actions, logistics, and unorthodox thinking?"
Combat as Sport asks, "How do we succeed, maybe triumph, through teamwork, tactics, and leveraging mechanics?"
Combat as Theater asks, "How do we change, maybe grow, through facing danger, handling failure, and reacting to each other?"

Here I identify "winning" and "triumphing" as similar but distinct things. Pyrrhic victories are still "wins", but they are not triumphal. Symbolic victories may in fact be triumphal, but I find most "CaW" fans would consider them losses, given the rather...mercenary and amoral (or, far to often, immoral) attitude "CaW" actively fosters and passively sustains, and the rather...jaundiced perspective it has on the concept of real teamwork (as in, being a committed part of the team, not "I'm in it only as long as it's very useful to me").

Combat as Theater doesn't actually care about whether you achieve the goal you set out to achieve--that's something the other two care about. But it also wouldn't care about enforcing a beautiful theme or the like, because that wouldn't be natural, and it's...really important that things flow naturally in this approach. Make it enforced, make it artificial, and it dies. Instead, success just means THAT part was not hard--but something else inevitably will be hard, assuming the GM is actually framing scenes of conflict and challenge, rather than...some other thing.

Also, notice how I removed "tactics" from CaW and transferred it to CaS. I, personally, think CaW is almost totally tactics-agnostic. "War" is very minimally about tactics; combat is about tactics. War is about strategy, long-term planning kind of thing, the stuff that links between battles much more than the conduct of the actual battles themselves. That's pretty much literally why English has the phrase, "you've only won the battle, not the war". That's half of why I emphasize "logistics". The other half is that keeping yourself fed is a concern, sure, but much more important than that is that characters in CaW will often be--despite its proponents' insistence otherwise--looking at their sheet, they just aren't looking at it for "abilities" to exploit. They're looking at it for equipment to exploit, because that's so radically different you see. What CaW actually encourages is, more or less, "You have been given a puzzle box. Figure out how to break it open your way." Hence why I put "unorthodox thinking" at the end. It's really really not about "tactics", but instead about, as much as possible, winning a fight hours before it ever starts, not so much through "planning" per se (that's logistics, not combat), but through being so much of a chaos gremlin squad that even an experienced GM has to sit back and say, "Well, you made it work!"

 

[EzekielRaiden]

CaW - DM is completely neutral and impartial as to whether the players win or lose

This is not possible.

The GM creates the antagonists. Hence, by definition, she cannot be "completely neutral and impartial".

Further, the GM runs the game--as I'm 99.9% certain I've heard you personally say before--in order for the group to have a good time. For OSR-type players, that usually means facing dangers that are "real", for a very idiosyncratic and abstract definition of "real", meaning, they actually could come to bear...on your fictional character. But even then, even in that restricted case, the GM is constantly putting their thumb on the scale. Gygax inserting Ear Seekers and indistinguishable (except via identify) cursed treasure? Ain't no way in hell that's "completely neutral and impartial". That's the GM actively effing over their players in order to cultivate a particular player experience--in this case, shock, frustration, and (in the long run) disruption, so that their ossified standard operating procedures fail and they must resort to speculation, improvisation, and adaptation.

It's a great line, the whole "completely neutral and impartial" arbiter thing. It's never been true, but it sounds so true!

Good except the end bit needs clarification. In CaT survival is typically of very little concern because it is assumed the PCs will survive, much like in a movie; as opposed to being of very little concern because nobody cares if the PCs live or die.

Another possible and very brief summary might be:

CaW - not heroic
CaS - heroic
CaT - uber-heroic.

Not at all. CaT has no specific place on the scale there.

Because Blades in the Dark? Yeah, that's not even slightly a "uber-heroic" game, you're literally thieves planning heists. But combat in that context, as with most games related to BitD, is very much in the direction of "CaT".

Your problem is that you are considering the only possible experiences-of-combat to be either pure "can we even survive", or pure "can we roflstomp these newbs". There are...a LOT more experiences-of-combat than that. Thieves doing a heist are likely ready to kill to secure their loot, but also likely to avoid actually DOING any killing if they can, because that's nasty business with the risk of extreme long-term consequences. Totally different story, one that is actively anti-heroic or even villain-protagonist!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The defining advice for War is to play at the world, for Combat it's the Challenge Rating, for Theatrical it's to shoot the monk

So, real talk.

I have no freaking clue what "play at the world" means. At all. People use the phrase plenty. Nobody ever explains what the everloving flip it means. The only thing I've ever gotten out of it is that it's a title of a book analyzing games.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Hm. On the one hand I like your ideas. On the other hand I wonder - is it actually a third missing mode or is it a complete different category? The former two modes are concerned with mechanics, mainly balance. Combat as war means unbalanced combat, players need to use every dirty track. Combat as sport means balanced, players can rely on every combat being winnable if they just press the right buttons on the character sheet.

Combat as theatre, as you phrased it, is not concerned with mechanics at all, I think it actually describes a different quality, the amount of roleplay in combat for example. So its a different problem dimension. There might be a 4 axis system to describe different combat modes: The axis of mechanics (sport vs war), the axis of roleplay (theatre/spectacle vs ??? - pure gameplay driven?)

As a self-avowed hater of "CaW"/"CaS" stuff, I have to point out that your characterization of "CaS" is woefully wrong. Like I...don't know how you got that out of it, because it's so extreme I don't even know where to begin.

No game I've ever seen labelled "CaS" does the thing you describe here that I bolded. Zero. None. Zip. Nada.

To use one such game I know well: You absolutely are not guaranteed to win a "balanced" combat in 4e D&D. A "balanced" combat can be anything from level-5ish (-5 is right at the borderline of crossing into "not interesting") to level+8 (for a really REALLY hard combat). Indeed, the fact that you are NOT guaranteed to win is precisely what the "4thcore" movement focused on. It was absolute no-holds-barred; survival was not guaranteed; the GM would leverage every nasty trick they could, and the players were completely expected to do the same.

But, of course, the (IIRC former) existence of 4thcore is inconvenient for the "CaW"/"CaS" dichotomy, so it gets completely ignored.

 

[Pedantic]

As a self-avowed hater of "CaW"/"CaS" stuff, I have to point out that your characterization of "CaS" is woefully wrong. Like I...don't know how you got that out of it, because it's so extreme I don't even know where to begin.

No game I've ever seen labelled "CaS" does the thing you describe here that I bolded. Zero. None. Zip. Nada.

To use one such game I know well: You absolutely are not guaranteed to win a "balanced" combat in 4e D&D. A "balanced" combat can be anything from level-5ish (-5 is right at the borderline of crossing into "not interesting") to level+8 (for a really REALLY hard combat). Indeed, the fact that you are NOT guaranteed to win is precisely what the "4thcore" movement focused on. It was absolute no-holds-barred; survival was not guaranteed; the GM would leverage every nasty trick they could, and the players were completely expected to do the same.

But, of course, the (IIRC former) existence of 4thcore is inconvenient for the "CaW"/"CaS" dichotomy, so it gets completely ignored.

I'll be honest, I've never found the games that get put into the CaS category satisfying on a strict mechanical interaction level, precisely because they tend to be relatively solvable or completely unsolvable: do you have enough time/context to understand what the enemies do and how to make good choices to counter it? If not, then you generally fall back on whatever is the most effective SoP your set of character abilities can muster. My experience usually is "I wish this was a single player tactics game, having four brains doing this is more complicated than helpful."

Once you get over the communication problem, the gameplay is often not that interactive; you're more likely to be trying to execute whatever set of build choices the party has collectively made than focusing on interaction with the board. If there is a strong mechanical element to the board (usually terrain, but maybe if you have enough information to know what moves the enemy can bring to bear) there's a tendency for them to be relatively simple minigames that you either give up on your build execution to do completely, or you might ignore entirely if the benefit is notably lesser.

The whole tactics/strategy question feels off to me. Ultimately, you're just talking about the timeframe in which player decision making matters to combat outcomes. Either you're isolating 5-25 decisions a player makes in a combat, or you're setting a larger scope tied to all the choices a player makes between "rests" or whatever the unit of recovery is. A sufficiently procedural dungeon crawl and a tactical engagement are more different because of their length than any real difference in the decision making texture.

I think there is maybe something to do with the scope of effectiveness per action? CaW might be more defined by setting the potential impact of an action or an executed plan compromising several actions than CaS does. CaS is much more about repeated demonstration of the same skill in a given timeframe (say one dungeon), while CaW has more sweeping board changes over the same period? Something like that feels closer to what's going on. Lots of smaller impact decisions vs. fewer higher impact decisions.

 

[Steady Vane]

Hm. On the one hand I like your ideas. On the other hand I wonder - is it actually a third missing mode or is it a complete different category? The former two modes are concerned with mechanics, mainly balance. Combat as war means unbalanced combat, players need to use every dirty track. Combat as sport means balanced, players can rely on every combat being winnable if they just press the right buttons on the character sheet.

Combat as theatre, as you phrased it, is not concerned with mechanics at all, I think it actually describes a different quality, the amount of roleplay in combat for example. So its a different problem dimension. There might be a 4 axis system to describe different combat modes: The axis of mechanics (sport vs war), the axis of roleplay (theatre/spectacle vs ??? - pure gameplay driven?)

Daggerheart literally has a system for sharing the spotlight, or focusing on one character as they get their power moment. 5e tells GMs to fudge rolls to make the story interesting. The style is indeed about mechanics, and deserves to be among the other two

 

[Steady Vane]

I have no freaking clue what "play at the world" means.

Playing the world means the level of gameplay decisions that affect combat are at the macro level, not player build vs monster manual level.

Combat as sport puts the onus of handling combat on player build and party build. Combat as war puts the onus on decision making. Negotiate, fight, frighten, flee, ally, trap, whatever, it is all macro decisions to solve the problem of combat and move on to interacting with the rest of the world.

There's a post further up in this thread that points out that what a game rules for drags what it focuses on around in a sort of gravity way. Combat as sport expects the answers to combat to be on your character sheet. Combat as war expects the answers to combat to be in game systems outside your individual character. Combat as Theater says that if combat is assumed to be balanced as in combat as sport, why not make it interesting by having the story actually matter, through fudging and metacurrencies to help with pacing and tension.

In combat as sport, you win because your character is built correctly and you make the right tactical decisions using what is on your character sheet. Combat is the goal. In combat as war, you win because you make game system level decisions to pick the right encounters to get to your real goal, which is something else. In combat as theater, you use metacurrencies and table fiat to have a combat that is as balanced and narratively satisfying both. Story is the goal, and combat can facilitate that while being heroic.

Hope that helps.

 

[Steady Vane]

Arguably 5e brought around the Theater school of thought by using Inspiration as a baked-in metacurrency to focus play on more than just monster bashing. The new school games that came after 5e, like Draw Steel and Daggerheart, embraced using metacurrencies to push the game in a direction they want.

Draw Steel rewards combat by making your character stronger the more they get through before resting and cashing in your victories for xp. Daggerheart has fear and hope to push around and make the story more dramatic.

Of course, thinking about it, this is more a return to form for D&D, as we ignore the original metacurrency to drive player behavior: XP. D&D started as a hybrid of all combat as war and combat as theater by pointing what it wanted the game to be about: collecting gold from dungeons full of monsters. The shift from what grants XP in each system is arguably what defines each combat style. XP from gold, XP from monsters, XP from story milestones. Lines up with what each editions had as goals for combat: combat as obstacles to gold, combat as the main point, combat as a story piece.

 

[Lanefan]

This is not possible.

The GM creates the antagonists. Hence, by definition, she cannot be "completely neutral and impartial".

Further, the GM runs the game--as I'm 99.9% certain I've heard you personally say before--in order for the group to have a good time. For OSR-type players, that usually means facing dangers that are "real", for a very idiosyncratic and abstract definition of "real", meaning, they actually could come to bear...on your fictional character. But even then, even in that restricted case, the GM is constantly putting their thumb on the scale. Gygax inserting Ear Seekers and indistinguishable (except via identify) cursed treasure? Ain't no way in hell that's "completely neutral and impartial". That's the GM actively effing over their players in order to cultivate a particular player experience--in this case, shock, frustration, and (in the long run) disruption, so that their ossified standard operating procedures fail and they must resort to speculation, improvisation, and adaptation.

The neutral and impartial piece is around how you run what's already been prepped (or written, if using a canned module).

If the module says there's 2 Beholders in the room and the PCs get way in over their heads in trying to deal with them, a CaW DM isn't going to help those PCs out. They're on their own as to whether they cut and run (maybe leaving some fallen comrades behind) or stand in till the bitter end, or try to negotiate, or whatever other approach they decide upon.

A CaS DM would adjust that encounter on the fly upon realizing the PCs were otherwise pooched.

When I write my own adventures I'm often running on several different (and sometimes conflicting) trains of thought at the same time:

--- what makes in-setting sense for this scenario?
--- what can I put in to make this adventure even a bit unique, that maybe hasn't been done loads of times before?
--- what can they handle, keeping in mind that when put to the test PC parties are astonishingly resilient things?
--- does, or can, any of this fit in with bigger and-or previously established elements of the fiction?

The first and fourth points above are agnostic to the players and their PCs. The second point is more for player interest, while the third is more character-centric (assuming I've any idea which particular PCs they'll bring on that adventure).

Not at all. CaT has no specific place on the scale there.

Because Blades in the Dark? Yeah, that's not even slightly a "uber-heroic" game, you're literally thieves planning heists.

In the sense that the PCs are the centre of attention, they're still the heroes and are still expected to win...and could maybe even be actual heroes, if the thieves are played with a Robin Hood-like mentality.

But combat in that context, as with most games related to BitD, is very much in the direction of "CaT".

Your problem is that you are considering the only possible experiences-of-combat to be either pure "can we even survive", or pure "can we roflstomp these newbs". There are...a LOT more experiences-of-combat than that. Thieves doing a heist are likely ready to kill to secure their loot, but also likely to avoid actually DOING any killing if they can, because that's nasty business with the risk of extreme long-term consequences. Totally different story, one that is actively anti-heroic or even villain-protagonist!

The bolded is a very CaW outlook, where combat is seen as the last resort and to be avoided if possible; as opposed to CaS where combat is expected and to be leaned into.