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I don't care about the lore of published settings precisely because of the lack of continuity between editions. If I could count on there being continuity, I might have considered using a published setting for my campaigns. But I don't see any advantage to running games in a persistent setting...

An unlosable battle can still be very exciting if it's possible to fail at one's goals despite winning the fight. An unlosable battle can also be exciting when it's unknown whether the cost of victory will be affordable.

It doesn't have to be "purely gamist reasons". Sure, the DM isn't going to have that level of detail and will need to make something up, but that doesn't mean the DM can't try to make a reasonable extrapolation from established facts in the game world. Sure, there will be inevitably be some...

You appear to be approaching your examples as a DM choosing which mechanical representation of an Ogre will be the most fun for a party of a particular level. That works great in a CaS playstyle, where the DM is planning the encounters with an eye towards fun and balance. But in a CaW...

An AL DM is allowed to introduce new encounters if (and only if) they "maintain the spirit of the adventure". If, after reading the published adventure being run, the DM can honestly say that they think it's within the spirit of the published adventure to add a random encounter every 59 minutes...

Adventurer's League Dungeon Master's Guide v9.1, page 2. The DM can change the content of the adventure, but the DM can't implement new rules.

Quick note: under AL rules the DM can't change the resting mechanics.

Interesting approach! I've considered going with 5 minute short rests and 8 hour long rests, but the Warlock class always gives me pause. Do you make additional changes to the Warlock class to account for 5 minute short rests? For clarity, the problem I see with 5 minute short rests is that a...

Two responses: First, I interpreted @AbdulAlhazred's post as expanding the scope of the conversation beyond 4e, and into a broader discussion of the role of the game world. So my response, although borrowing a term (minion) from 4e, was not intended to be 4e-specific, but instead apply to any...

For me, world-building is one the biggest draws of TTRPGs. As a DM, developing an evocative, self-consistent world is what makes the prep time fun. And that time investment pays off again with additional fun at the table when I see the players engrossing themselves in my world to the point that...

I'll play either way if I like the DM and it sounds like a fun campaign. There are, however, several classes/subclasses I would avoid in a game with no feats or multiclassing just because I don't personally find them sufficiently appealing (thematically and/or mechanically) to want to be stuck...

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...