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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Libramarian" data-source="post: 7121521" data-attributes="member: 6688858">I think you're making the same mistake many people made in interpreting Daztur's <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?317715-Very-Long-Combat-as-Sport-vs-Combat-as-War-a-Key-Difference-in-D-amp-D-Play-Styles" target="_blank">War vs Sport thread</a>. The metaphor is not about the consequences for losing (death vs temporary defeat), but the scope the players have for pre-battle strategy. It's closely related to sandbox vs. scene framing. With combat-as-war/sandbox, the players make more decisions, so on the face of it the outcome is a fairer representation of their playing ability. However the import of each decision is more diffuse, so play is less consistently intense than a combat-as-sport/scene-framed game. In the thread Daztur uses many exclamation points when describing the CaW bee scenario to ensure it seems exciting but in reality 30 min of pre-encounter planning can be kind of boring sometimes.I don't associate CaW with adversarial DMing at all; in fact it's really important not to have that mindset when you're making tons of subtle judgement calls about the players' pre-battle schemes. One of the advantages of CaS is DMs don't have to make many of these calls so they actually can take more of an adversarial mindset if they want and play their monsters hard (many people like this about 4e).</blockquote>