I like combat as adventure, but I think combat as extermination doesn't quite capture the same tone as combat as war, or strategic combat.
The difference I am trying to get across, is the way a combat as war campaign plays differently from a combat as adventure campaign. Its not just all about the combat. In a war campaign, the battle and strategy loom over the entire campaign. The players have to constantly be mindful what the opposition is planning, and the DM plays the opposition as if literally putting armies into motion.
This doesn't mean that combat as war is a meatgrinder that the players are sure to lose in the long run, as some other posters have suggested. Any campaign can be a meatgrinder or a walk in the park, depending on how difficult the DM chooses to make it.
In a combat as war campaign the DM tries to play the opposition to the best of their capabilities, and with ruthless efficiency. The DM is making an effort to let the bad guys win. But the capabilities of the opposition are still limited by their relative strength when compared to the party, the amount of resources they have at their disposal, and time. And so, balancing a combat as war is not all that different from a combat as adventure campaign. The DM is still trying to create fair winnable scenarios. But 'winning' in this case, may not always be a simple case of walking up to the monster and hitting it on the head till it stops moving. It requires more thought and strategy.
I just don't agree with this, because I don't agree that genuine strategy is possible, in an 'all out total war' sense in an RPG. The world is not detailed enough. The GM is free to invent new reasons why this or that fails or succeeds at any moment, and can always justify it with some logistical, environmental, tactical, etc. factor he's just invented. I'm not even saying this is done in a spirit of 'screwing up' anyone's plans or whatnot, just that GAME considerations always end up overriding everything else.
In an actual wargame, like say
Afrika Corps (published in the 1960's by Avalon Hill, I don't think any of that series of games is in print now) the game is simply like Chess, all possible rules and situations are covered, everything is determined by them, and any considerations outside of what the designer thought of are simply impossible to model in that game. This is totally different from D&D, which cannot be classified in any form as a wargame or even having the elements of a wargame. It is an exercise in creating a shared imagined space and a fiction associated with it. Anything can and does happen, and there are no quantified rules for how or why it does. It isn't simulating anything, even if there are some trappings of such.
AT LEAST you would need a truly disengaged neutral 3rd party referee who would agree to provide the adjudication of each factor that 2 opposing sides wished to try to factor in before it would become anything like a simulation. Without that 'simulation character' the idea of actual STRATEGY is meaningless. You do not, and can not, know the relevant factors on which to plan. It is impossible.
An example:
In my campaign I had a tower on a peninsula. The tower had a powerful lens on top of it, that could be an important war asset, as it could set ships aflame that were in range. The big bad attempted to take this tower for himself with an all out assault. They invaded the tower through subterfuge and through a simultaneous underwater invasion into the subterranean harbor of the tower.
The players first had to fight against the forces that were already there, while trying to prevent reinforcements from overwhelming them. The fight was skewed against them on purpose. There was a real risk of defeat, which would mean either death or a forced retreat. The players might have had to sacrifice the harbor, or they might have had to abandon the tower entirely, after which it would fall into enemy hands.
In the end they secured the tower, but blew up the harbor. This meant the powerful lens weapon would be available to them during the next naval battle (and any battle to come), but the harbor was forever lost.
Seems more like a narratively driven kind of 'put up some stakes, pick your battle, and lets see how much trouble you get into' kind of thing to me, though I'm sure that in play it was much more involved with details of terrain and whatnot.
So, my thinking is that it is MUCH MUCH MUCH easier to have 'Combat as Battle' than 'Combat as War'. That is, a strictly tactical scenario where all the elements which will come into play have been defined, and the scope is minutes to hours, is a lot less likely to fall prey to "there are other factors, like X!" which is likely to happen in any more complex and drawn-out situation, like a whole war/military campaign. Intelligence can mostly be brought down to the level of 'Fog of War' which RPGs exploration mechanics can generally handle, etc. A GM, or players, can still potentially drag in new understandings of the fictional setting, etc., but there is less scope.
Another example:
The party received intel that the big bad was attempting to establish a base somewhere off the coast. This base would then create a portal to another dimension, allowing the big bad to more easily send its fleet to the surface. Meanwhile, there were also reports of an attack on an allied town.
The party had to make a choice. Would they come to the aid of the town and risk the enemy fortifying their base, with the added risk that the fight might be over by the time they arrived? Or would they commit to an early strike against the base while its defenses were low, but leave the town to fend for itself?
Losing the town would be a great loss of life, plus it would mean one less safe port for the players to rely on. They would also no longer get intel from the town on enemy movement if it was destroyed.
But allowing the enemy to build its base, would allow their enemy to make it strong enough to repel any attacks that they could currently launch against it. This would fortify the enemy's position in the region and greatly strengthen its fleet.
Again, though, this fiction, at the level described could easily fit within any classic 4e campaign's paradigm. It involves a lot of 'rock and a hard place' sorts of challenge, but that is not really IMHO necessarily the same thing as a completely 'CAW' situation in the way I think it is normally understood.
I think there is obviously a continuum in tone between extremes, and also the possibility that you can, for example, have a very harsh 'all out war' kind of feel to the campaign, but then run encounters in a much more setpiece style of "well, you did all the things to make your effort a success, and THIS is what you meet!" 4e even has mechanics for it, the SC. Its perfectly canonical to say "Oh, you won that SC, your reward is you avoid the fight" or something like that. But if you did fight, it will be, at least to a degree, level-appropriate. If it is now trivial, 4e would rather you didn't play it out, maybe it becomes another low-complexity SC, something like that.
