Search results

How many organizations are just sitting around with spare resources looking for hypothetical future threats rather than being currently busy using those resources to oppose current threats or pursue the organization's primary goals? Even if the PCs happened to be causing problems for all of...

The factions aren't sitting back waiting to be poked. They're constantly going out and proactively dealing with the threats they perceive. The PCs' job is to make sure they don't end up on the threat list in the first place (or at least not high enough on the list to be worth spending resources...

I disagree strongly with part of this. I think there can indeed be "actual strategy" from the players' side. Even though the fictional situation the PCs are engaging with will not have the same level of detail as the real world, the plans the PCs come up with to deal with the situation are still...

If the DM creates a world with a plausible distribution of threats, and then the PCs, via deliberate and successful strategy, manage to only earn the enmity of the threats that they are able to outmaneuver and neutralize, that's not DM fiat--that's a party "winning" a Combat-as-War campaign...

I think you're introducing an additional level of analysis that isn't present in the common understanding of CaW and CaS. In my experience the labels focus on table expectations for the players, letting them know whether the expectation is that they try to trivialize encounters in advance, or...

I think you might be placing more emphasis on the "war" part of the analogy than the dichotomy requires to be a useful description of different styles of play. Ultimately, Combat-as-War vs Combat-as-Sport describes a difference in how encounters are approached on a metagame level, and how those...

But, I was making the exact opposite point.... :( I really am in poor form today given the rate at which my posts are being read as saying something entirely different than I intended. I'll try again tomorrow when hopefully I can write more clearly.

I don't follow. Could you clarify?

That isn't substantially different from how human vision works for well-lit objects: the brain is inferring where one object begins and another ends by noticing the edges as a contrast to a background. (That's why camouflage works even in bright light.) And in bright light the inference can also...

Just go outside and look at that distant, lit farmhouse you mentioned. Anything between you and that house that you can see as dark contrast against that lit background is a silhouette.

Ok, so we're coming at this from entirely opposite directions. In technical terms, you're reading "something" as invoking an existential quantifier, whereas I'm reading it as invoking a universal quantifier. So for you, an area can be Heavily Obscured so long as there are sufficient places for a...

Use small "d" "darkness" (I'm talking about natural darkness in general) and you're pretty close. And magic can explain a physical impossibility, but just using "magic" as an explanation doesn't tell us what an observer sees. Somehow the DM has to describe to the player what the scene looks...

How about we agree to disagree as to the viewpoints of other posters expressed in past posts? The alternative is wading through 40 pages to find quotes, then arguing about the context of those quotes, and we'll likely just end up conceding that the other one's interpretation of the thread is...

Not being able to be seen clearly is the standard for hiding. For Heavy Obscurement an observer effectively suffers from the Blinded condition, which means the observer "can't see". It doesn't sound like you are effectively suffering from the Blinded condition with respect to seeing things in...

Would it help if I used your most recent dog/bunny/cat example? Or are you ok on the mechanics of it now? Interesting. In my mind "can't see" is basically the entire point of the Blinded condition, because it fundamentally changes how the character interacts with the game world (plus it's in...

It doesn't! :) I'm explicitly not making that claim. Claim A: "the Darkness spell needs to be an opaque ink-blot because otherwise creatures can see through walls." What I was trying to say: "I'm not saying (Claim A)." Hopefully that makes it clear? I do not think either of the...

But we know that foliage dense enough provide Heavy Obscurement gives effectively gives observers the Blinded condition when trying to see anything in the area. The only way that can be true is if every possible sight line is obstructed by foliage. So yes, in three dimensions the foliage isn't...

Ahh! Thanks! The intended structure of the sentence was: "I'm not saying that (the Darkness spell needs to be an opaque ink-blot because otherwise creatures can see through walls)." So my intent was to say something entirely orthogonal to what you read it as. The fault is mine for using...

I keep trying to explain and re-explain the transparent-walls issue (most recently in the post you quoted!), and every time I do you seem to come back with some variation on "I agree, but I don't have any idea what you were saying about the transparent walls." :) I'm happy to try again, but...

It doesn't and I'm not saying that. How are you parsing what you quoted to think I'm saying that? (Legitimate question here--I've been having hard time in this thread expressing myself without being misunderstood, so any clarity on why you're reading it that way would be helpful!)