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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9887439" data-attributes="member: 6790260">This whole presentation perfectly encapsulates why I dislike the CaW/CaS concept. I just want that noted at the outset. I just about outright reject this alleged "distinction" because 99.9999% of the time it is absolutely riddled with disparagement for "Combat-as-Sport" while doing nearly everything it can to amp up how much more awesome and betterer and cooler and more dangerous and (etc. etc. etc.) "Combat-as-War" must be.The fact that I've only ever met ONE person who self-professed to like Combat-as-Sport as described, is...pretty good evidence that of course this (alleged) distinction is missing things. It wasn't created to be a fair appraisal of options. It was created to disparage one way and venerate another.Now, with that out of the way...the actually interesting idea here.So, the way Dungeon World does it?It sounds to me like you're stumbling upon the core concept of PbtA/FitD/etc. type games, "Story Now" rather than Before (what Dragonlance put forward, and what most current-day D&D DMs think every game must be by its nature) or After (what OD&D, 1e, and Basic/etc. put forward, and what most self-avowed classic-D&D fans think every game should be). Combat as something which evolves through a natural pacing, not so much "driven by" the rules as "driving" the rules, so to speak.I can say there are imperfections with the DW approach, trying to marry the immense crunch of even so-called "light" versions of D&D with the pure fiction-first approach of PbtA, but it's satisfying enough to have kept my Tuesday game running for 8 years now.Yes, the first point is extremely close to what I expect of DW play. The "themes" would not usually be constructed ahead of time, it's worth noting; they should just be what naturally arises out of the situation as the participants play through it.The second point is...complicated. It implies that we should rewrite the fiction if it would make us, as players, have more happy feelings. I don't think that's the case for this playstyle. Instead, it is that we should follow our narrative intuitions over other considerations. E.g., one of the failings of even a genuinely well-run ultra-classic OSR-type game (what you would likely call "Combat-as-War") is the problem of too-effective SOPs, which is why Gygax did the crappy not-good type of design to fix it, by throwing in Ear Seekers and cursed treasure that looks identical to valuable treasure etc., creating the GM/player arms race. Narrative intuitions, however, are not particularly weak to SOP issues, because pacing, tone, and context are the inputs for both how the GM frames new scenes, and how the players respond to scenes. Similarly, one of the great failings of a 3.5e-style hyper-simulatonistic game (among the things you would likely label as "Combat-as-Sport") is the dead-end-roll problem: nobody has good Perception and someone HAS to find the secret door before the adventure can continue, or nobody can pick locks and the adventure requires a picked lock to proceed etc. This, again, is something narrative intuitions easily overcome: if the story is about investigating an old house full of secret doors and such, then that needs to happen, you just involve the rules to determine how it is revealed and, most importantly, what costs (or benefits) arise from that reveal.To repeat myself from above, I'm not saying this approach is free of issues. It isn't. It has its own flaws. But the above two are extremely well-known and widely-lamented flaws which PbtA and its cousins were literally built to avoid, and a reliance on narrative intuitions for linking the scenes and actions together is one of those intentional choices meant to obviate the above problems.Well, if I may, I find all of these questions flawed. As noted at the start, I guess. If I had to try to rehabilitate this distinction, even though I personally kinda hate it, I would present it as follows:Combat as War asks, "How do we survive, maybe win, through guerrilla actions, logistics, and unorthodox thinking?"Combat as Sport asks, "How do we succeed, maybe triumph, through teamwork, tactics, and leveraging mechanics?"Combat as Theater asks, "How do we change, maybe grow, through facing danger, handling failure, and reacting to each other?"Here I identify "winning" and "triumphing" as similar but distinct things. Pyrrhic victories are still "wins", but they are not triumphal. Symbolic victories may in fact be triumphal, but I find most "CaW" fans would consider them losses, given the rather...mercenary and amoral (or, far to often, immoral) attitude "CaW" actively fosters and passively sustains, and the rather...jaundiced perspective it has on the concept of real teamwork (as in, being a committed part of the team, not "I'm in it only as long as it's very useful to me").Combat as Theater doesn't actually care about whether you achieve the goal you set out to achieve--that's something the other two care about. But it also wouldn't care about enforcing a beautiful theme or the like, because that wouldn't be natural, and it's...really important that things flow naturally in this approach. Make it enforced, make it artificial, and it dies. Instead, success just means THAT part was not hard--but something else inevitably will be hard, assuming the GM is actually framing scenes of conflict and challenge, rather than...some other thing.Also, notice how I removed "tactics" from CaW and transferred it to CaS. I, personally, think CaW is almost totally tactics-agnostic. "War" is very minimally about tactics; combat is about tactics. War is about strategy, long-term planning kind of thing, the stuff that links between battles much more than the conduct of the actual battles themselves. That's pretty much literally why English has the phrase, "you've only won the battle, not the war". That's half of why I emphasize "logistics". The other half is that keeping yourself fed is a concern, sure, but much more important than that is that characters in CaW will often be--despite its proponents' insistence otherwise--looking at their sheet, they just aren't looking at it for "abilities" to exploit. They're looking at it for equipment to exploit, because that's so radically different you see. What CaW actually encourages is, more or less, "You have been given a puzzle box. Figure out how to break it open your way." Hence why I put "unorthodox thinking" at the end. It's really really not about "tactics", but instead about, as much as possible, winning a fight hours before it ever starts, not so much through "planning" per se (that's logistics, not combat), but through being so much of a chaos gremlin squad that even an experienced GM has to sit back and say, "Well, you made it work!"</blockquote>

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