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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8264964" data-attributes="member: 6790260">This is fair. I originally had "combat as death," but that felt a little TOO strident. Trying to capture that "make the battlefield as unfair as possible" perspective in a single word is hard!Quite cromulent, but isn't "combat-as-X" always going to be inadequate for that? You want to capture stuff beyond combat in your term.This I agree with, but it's been made very clear to me, both from actual players and from looking over the rules, that losing characters is basically guaranteed. For even one player to go, say, six months without losing a single character--that is, playing a single character from level 1 to whatever their collected XP permits--would be pretty unusual. Not "never ever happens," but highly unusual and noteworthy.See, I don't actually think THIS is strictly accurate either. I've known 4e DMs who do exactly this--because they trust the 4e system to deliver a fun fight even when they do it. (It's part of how the best 4e game I've ever been in had 2 deaths before 4th level, and a near-miss before 5th.)I would absolutely do this to my own players--whether in 4e or DW or if, in some fit of pique, I ran 1e or something like that, in that too. An example of my own:The party has learned that the Shadow Druids have been shipping around dangerous stuff--wicked spirits and fungus zombies/spores to infect others with the zombie fungus--from two different places. The stuff is coming out of an area in the northeastern wastes, routing through the main city and up to one of the tributaries of the main trade river, then coming back to the main city for "deployment." They had to choose: check out the root source, potentially cutting off their supplies, or check out the far destination, and potentially catch some leadership? They chose the latter, and got some bad rolls on the journey to get there--so by the time they arrived, someone else had already attacked, scattering the enemy and ruining their chances of learning much or capturing anyone. When they eventually got around to checking out the other location, the Shadow Druids there were long gone--and had clearly extracted more blood-obsidian than they could ever use, so they'll be able to set up shop somewhere else.Yet I would absolutely say I run a "combat as adventure" game, not "combat as war." I just make the victories and defeats, the rewards and losses, something that primarily happens on the "what stuff matters to the NPCs? What stuff do they love or hate?" level, rather than the "your ticket for getting onto the ride (aka their PCs themselves)" level.You can have that....and yet also have threat assessment that is relative. See below for a real-world example.Whereas I would rather spend my money on a good execution, and then simply not buy things that don't cater to my interests. And the real problem is more that what 3e did is debatably good--and the execution was very, very bad. When the execution is so bad you have to disassemble the entire edifice before you can build something effective in its place, it's quite easy to argue that no amount of "good idea" is enough to justify it. I mean, consider the Spheres of Power/Spheres of Might stuff for Pathfinder--even its ardent supporters admit that it doesn't actually FIX caster-vs-martial problems, it just papers over them well enough that they usually won't adversely affect a group prepared for them. (Or, y'know, just PF2e, where the PF designers openly admitted the only way to move forward was to redesign the system.)Except that that's the problem: those absolute numbers now enslave the whole system to making sure they stay absolute....or else the system just turns belly-up and is worthless. Or, I guess, the 5e solution of "here's some numbers...and if they don't work, you figure it out," which I am extremely not a fan of. You have to constrain what low-level players can do, so that "CR6" actually means "CR6," and not "CR6 unless you have a Wizard built to one-shot it," where "CR8" means "CR8" and not "CR8 unless the Fighter gets 4 crits in a row because of Action Surge." More on this below.By making relative threat assessments rather than absolute ones, you liberate yourself from having to so tightly constrain things. A level 5 fight is designed to be challenging for typical 5th level characters, but maybe you punch above your weight tonight, or maybe you punch below your weight and have to retreat. (Yes, I have specifically had to do this at least twice in 4e.)What if the stats don't tell you "this is an absolute, ideal ogre, in every detail necessary," but rather tell you "this is what an ogre means to you"? Absolute mechanics are perfect truths present everywhere--an ogre is like an electron, it has one (rest) mass, one charge, one dipole moment, etc. Relative mechanics are mechanics true for a situation. E.g. instead of having an absolute "this lock is DC 25," and then needing to rigidly control what numbers the player is permitted to attain so that that number is impossible at 1st level and trivial at 20th, you instead say "this lock is designed to be hard for a 5th level character," so that the numbers naturally represent the world?Under that notion, "an ogre is designed to be hard for a 6th level character" is a perfectly natural way to speak about it: you're talking about a world where "6th level character" MEANS "person who would find it hard, but not impossible, to defeat an ogre by themselves." And then all those different ways of cashing it out--a solo, an elite, a minion, whatever--are all recognizing the fact that it isn't a 6th-level character, and thus it shouldn't be identical in threat.Again: threat is a relative assessment. Why should we make it absolute? It's quite easy to set absolute non-combat attributes (since, if we're being quite honest, those rarely matter--and when they do matter, you know better than any designer could what they should be if you disagree with what's written down).But that's the thing. The entity's inherent nature isn't what is relevant for a threat assessment. The entity's relative power is what is relevant.Opportunistic infections--such as Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus or candidiasis--are mostly harmless to everyday folks, but potentially lethal to anyone immuno-compromised. Instead of rating it in absolute terms, it is much, much more useful to rate it in relative terms. Relative to a healthy adult immune system, they're almost never dangerous and can usually be disregarded as a cause of illness. Relative to patients with weak or undeveloped immune systems, however, they need to be considered. (I got an oral candidiasis infection as a child, for example.) Same exact pathogens; it's not like we can alter their physical makeup IRL. But we assess them differently, depending on different circumstances.A teen with a two-by-four is dangerous to an ordinary unarmed citizen and no threat to a trained soldier because of what the unarmed citizen and trained soldier are, not because of what the teen is.Why? Do you regularly play the entire setting all at once?Also, technically, they aren't even being measured against your PCs. They're being measured against idealized "standard" PCs. Actual PCs--and their ploys and foibles--will always meaningfully differ. The goal of designing the system so it works is to make it so a reasonable level of "expected unexpectables" are accounted for without distorting the utility of the system.Being perfectly honest? There are a few bits in the 4e DMG that...aren't great. I'd have to see the specific section you're referring to. I know that it suggests that you keep the party at the same level--and that's advice I generally agree is a good idea!--but it's not necessary, because the system is very resilient. Early 4e tended to play things far too safe (e.g. enemies tended to not do a lot of damage, but have high health).In my experience, it is the opposite. Or, rather, the swingier things become, the wider its "allegedly viable but actually deadly" range becomes.It is perfectly viable--and I know this is actually in the 4e DMG--to use combats up to +/- 4 levels of the party. The very extreme ends, especially at low levels (e.g. average party level >4) can be too swingy because that sort of thing tends to happen ANY time you're at extremes, but at most party levels, a -4 fight will be quick but still potentially dangerous (especially if you use smart tactics/ambush or get lucky) while a +4 fight will be VERY dangerous but still within the realm of winnable. And you very explicitly SHOULD provide a mix of encounters at, above, and below the party's level--both to create variety, and to let the party have a sense of progression. That, too, I know is present in the 4e DMG.Though I laugh embarrassingly easy (I have a reputation for being debilitated by laughter at random things), I fear I take most things very seriously. It's why I write these wall of text posts!Yeah, I'm not here for real. I'm here for fantasy. I get enough of the soul-crushing realism away from the gaming table.Alright, so my numbers were slightly high. But, in my (admittedly limited) experience of OSR play....having the whole party die every 3-4 sessions really isn't that weird. Maybe a little more lethal than usual, but "the whole party survived an adventure" is, as I understood it, something to genuinely celebrate because it doesn't happen plenty often.I was trying for fairness on those, yeah. As Imaculata pointed out, C-as-X may be incomplete, but I'm glad it worked for you. I like C-as-A because...well, adventure is what a lot of people sign up for, regardless of what they like, and because it feels a bit like the "Brighthammer" tagline I love so much: "In the noble brightness of the far future, there is only HIGH ADVENTURE!"Well...okay, but that's sort of what I'm getting at. Being so eager to go over that line--and making it hard to pull back from it--is the opposite of volatility. Because it means that a definite answer, death, is quite common. Combat-as-adventure EXPECTS that you will have setbacks to start with, and then rally and recover--though sometimes the rally-and-recovery fails to be enough and you have to retreat. Combat-as-war (or extermination, or whatever term you prefer) makes pretty much any setback at least potentially immediately lethal--and that's even after you've done your level best to do something about setbacks ahead of time.</blockquote>

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