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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aenghus" data-source="post: 5898141" data-attributes="member: 2656">"Combat as sport" is friendly to encounter-based games, and much easier to balance. "Combat as war" is about victory by any means necessary, and is not encounter-friendly as the whole point is to allow the players to shortcut, mangle, spindle and mutilate encounters, or simply avoid them, which is anticlimatic and missing the point in some styles of play.One problem I have with "combat as war" games is that they are to a great extent about finding the weakest points in the setting and rules and exploiting it to the maximum, which I call "breaking the box". It's very difficult to design for, as many "CaW" tactics are emergent and not envisaged by the designers at all. The style of game that emerges, because it hasn't been designed as such, can quite possibly not be at all fun for a significant section of the player base e.g. scry and fry.Another is that games where "combat as war" is being used and the bad guys take the gloves off can result in an unfun scorched earth world, where the PCs are likely to lose without a hope, and ultimately can't win due to enemy WMDs.Limits and or social contracts are needed to to take tactics off the table for all sides which while effective on paper, just aren't acceptable to some or all of the people in the group.To those who say they don't have any limits in their game, they don't have their BBEGs teleport in high level assassins to kill the party at 1st level in their sleep, do they?  That's a potential world setup, though horrible for actual games involving people.</blockquote>

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