Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tigris" data-source="post: 9883168" data-attributes="member: 7043270"><h2>Sport vs War or  Rules vs King</h2>This framing definitly sounds as coming from the OSR because it does sond biased. For me the big difference between "combat as a sport" and "combat as war" is if the combat and its outcome are defined by its rules only, or by a King (Judge/GM).If it is tactical or not depends in the end on the rules and the GM. You can have a combat as a sport which is absolutely not tactical, because just doing basic attacks each turn is enough to win.And you can have a combat as war being absolutely not tactical, because the GM only decides if you win by how nicely you sweet talk them (and or by the looks of the one bringing an idea), and it does not matter if an idea is clever or completly stupid. (Kind of making a "pary game" out of it similar to cards against humanity (rules wise), just that the judge (of what works vs what is most funny) is always the same person).Especially the word "assymetrical" for me does not fit "combat as war", because its highly likely in such a game that enemies are created by the same creation rules as player characters, where in "combat as sport" games you most often have completely different rules for player character creation and enemy creation. <h2>Theater vs Sport or Combat Narrates vs Narrating Combat</h2>For me the combat as theater for sure is something different, but I would also frame it differently. Similar to how "combat defined by rules" vs "combat defined by GM" is an axis (you can have a game where GM has no say at all, or one where there are no rules for combat and just GM decides what works, as well as anything in the middle) is an axis this is another axis.The axis of "the combat narrates the story" vs "you narrate the combat".In Risk (or other board games), there you have clear rules, and strict decisions you can do. No interpretation. What happens in the game are facts and by these facts often a story is created. "Oh your brother that lucky dude did again hold his position forever, winning against all odds making it impossible for me to conquer Australia and win." Meanwhile in an extreme narrative system, there could be no fact behind the combat. Lets take as example "War for Rayuba". There the only fact is that "you 2 fight against each other" and then the 2 people narrate the fight (as a comic). And then depending on this narration its decided who wins. So the combat is purely narrated. Here a video about this: [MEDIA=youtube]8Jm8URxXFF0[/MEDIA]Again its an axis with things between, but even in an RPG it can be quite extreme, as in a single roll deciding a combat and you then narrate how the combat went, with the only fact being your roll (if its a success, fail or mixed success), but everything else is just narration.</blockquote>

Verification