Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8265124" data-attributes="member: 82106">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.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.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.</blockquote>

Verification