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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steady Vane" data-source="post: 9886637" data-attributes="member: 7051331">Agree on earlier editions focusing on Combat as War. They had multiple rules to avoid or handle combat. Reaction rolls meant every meeting was not a combat if you could help it, hard-coded fleeing rules meant you could escape if combat went poorly, and the morale rules helped as well. All meant to give multiple ways the multiple combats you were expected to overcome could go.Combat as sport said forget that, every individual combat should be balanced upon. Why compare combats to each other when you can instead compare the combats to the player's build choices? Combat as sport has room for every PC's combat build to shine. Combat as War instead cared about making combat varied through other factors. 4e, the nadir of Combat as Sport, faced allegations of roteness and samyness in long stretches of combat encounters. The PC builds were rube goldberg machines meant to fire once, then level up and change.Combat as Theater instead says that the story of combat is what matters. Focus can shift onto whom makes sense for the meta reason outside the combat. The combat is about being cool or highlighting a specific character or feeling aimed for. The combat is curated specifically, instead of being random as in War, or with clear even rules as with Sport. In theater, you shift to follow whomever is important for the scene. Daggerheart is probably the most Combat as Theater forward game currently out, while 5e kind of is since it says the DM should juggle combat to make it satisfying instead of letting the chips fall where they may. 5e lacks more formal support other than telling the DM to wing it however.I will say there is enough randomness in how CR works with the monsters in the manual that 5e also can kind of approximate Combat as War's randomness. In a certain sense, but once again without the structural support. The style benefited from fleeing/morale/reaction roles in the early editions, as well as detailed leadership and group structure rules support.5e does all the styles partly while lacking the support for each of them mostly. Famously called everyone's second favorite D&D edition for a reason. It gets halfway there in each style, so no matter which you want it gets halfway there</blockquote>

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