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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Xetheral" data-source="post: 8837571" data-attributes="member: 6802765">Differing levels of emphasis on strategy and tactics are definitely an important part of the relevant distinction. As they are general terms with their own history of debate over where one ends and the other begins, however, I'm not confident that they make effective labels for a gaming-specific distinction between (in the D&D context) an expectation that one accept the premise of potential combats as presented by the DM, versus an expectation than one will try to redefine the premise of those combats. Further complicating matters, there are other aspects of RPG playstyles to which the terms "strategy" and "tactics" can be applied. An "armchair-general" style campaign, for example, could focus heavily on large-scale strategic troop movements while still having an expectation that the premise of personal-level combats be accepted as presented by the DM.That's not to say the gaming-specific terms "combat-as-sport" and "combat-as-war" are necessarily better labels. Your experience of the terms being used with intent to denigrate and/or dismiss "combat-as-sport" playstyles is important, and I agree that such usage is highly problematic. In my own experience, I've seen the terms used mostly as neutral descriptors, and the exceptions of people using either term to intentionally denigrate a playstyle having gone both ways. You are more active on this forum than I am, however, so I take your contrary observations very seriously.Solution-wise, I'm not confident that the best strategy for combating intentional denigrations of others' playstyles is to try to change the vocabulary itself. My reasons are twofold. First, the terminology is already in common use in the wild. While enworld undoubtedly played a role in popularizing the terms as they apply to RPGs starting with <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/very-long-combat-as-sport-vs-combat-as-war-a-key-difference-in-d-d-play-styles.317715/" target="_blank">this thread</a>, I'm skeptical that a deliberate effort ten years later to revise the terminology could have much success--naming something novel is always easier than trying to rename it when it is no longer novel. Second, there's an awful lot of denigrating other people's playstyles in online RPG forum discussions, using a wide variety of terminology. Maybe I'm being too cynical, but I'm skeptical that people who intentionally use "combat-as-sport" (or "combat-as-war") to denigrate the other style would fail to communicate their derision even if we convinced them to use different terminology.Instead, I personally think it would be more effective to rebut the derision directly rather than the specific terminology employed. That approach has the added advantage of focusing effort on convincing those engaging in the problematic behavior to stop, rather than spreading that effort across everyone using the terminology (which would also risk provoking resistance by a larger group than just those engaging in the derisive behavior). There are times in other contexts when a label becomes so problematic that changing the terminology is an important end in its own right, but I dearly hope technical terminology identifying a specific aspect of gaming playstyles can't rise to that level.Ultimately, you've identified a problem I agree should be fixed. I disagree with you on what the most effective strategy to fix the problem would be, but I could easily be wrong.</blockquote>

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