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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6862966" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, that at least tells me how you are using the term, though I still find it non-descriptive.As best as I can tell, by "Combat as Sport" he means, "Combat is played out and won at the tactical level."  And by "Combat as War" he means, "Combat is played out and won at the operational/strategic level."And I can't really see how either concept is useful to describing an RPG or describing war.  War is fought at both the operational and tactical levels.  It's true that amateurs tend to talk more about tactics than logistics, but its not like professional soldiers aren't taught tactics. If anything, I think he gets the terms backwards.  What he calls, "Combat as war", I would call combat as sport.  What he calls, "Combat as sport", I would call combat as war.   The basic problem with what he calls, "Combat as war", is that it sounds pretty darn zany and breezy.  It seems to involve overly elaborate plans that are implemented and adjudicated with little more than a handwave, or which at least the party expects to be implemented with just a handwave.  A big clue is that essay declares that the "Combat as War" crowd expects combat to be shorter than the "Combat as Sport" people.  But elaborate plans like he discusses would take longer to implement than the combat itself, and then take probably take longer to play out than pitched combat itself.  He declares the intention of "Combat as War" is to bring overwhelming force to a battle, so that it can be turned into a walkover.  But then he describes a plan which at no point looks like something that is going to be over in a single round, but actually play out over the course of maybe 10 minutes (100 rounds!).It's not that I'm opposed to oblique planning, using the terrain, and asymmetrical combat.  It's that in any realistically drawn world, such plans aren't easy to implement and not readily available in all cases.  And to the extent that they are, they often can be things you pivot to right in the middle of combat.  "Instead of fighting these zombies, lets lure them to the edge and push them off the cliff." or "Forget this, lets just set the house on fire and run." or "Why don't we just turn the pillar to mud and let the whole thing collapse", can show up in the middle of what he calls "Combat as Sport".  Indeed, even the "tl;dr" version of the essay shows that what he calls "Combat as War" is actually the one more like "Combat as Sport".  All those zany plans only make sense in the context of something played out as a sport, because in the context of war there wouldn't be any of the predicates necessary for those sort of plans to work - you don't know when or where fights will start, there is no referee, and so forth.  In other words, those plans only make sense if there are rules to break in the first place - which war does not have.  But having tactical roles - the medic, the heavy, the scout, etc. - makes sense in describing any contest, including war.Consider the thing with the bees.  Right now my PC's are 48 days from their last port of call - 38 days by boat, and 10 days of hiking through monster infested jungle.  And they are racing a BBEG to find an ancient artifact.  So if they come upon giant bees, it's utterly ludicrous to come up with a plan where they go back to town and buy a bunch of barrels of oil, trek back through the jungle with these barrels of oil (presumably buying mules and porters to carry all this stuff) in order to soak bushes with oil.  By the time they get back in 3 months, assuming that they get back alive given the rigors they've already endured, whose to say what would happen or how much time it would take to find this particular hive again?  Would the bees even be there? And is keeping the mules and porters alive in the journey not an extra complication?  Then once they get there, they've got to dig up several cubic feet of mud, haul it up into a tree in something that doesn't leak, keep it moist, and arrange to be able to dump the couple hundred pounds of goop on a charging animal that may or may not be chasing a monk at this point.  That too will take a lot of time to implement, and let's hope that they got their shopping list for this right and didn't forget key tools for the plan.  And then, how much AC and DR does wet mud actually generate?  Presumably not much, and I'm not sure why the players would think that it would - otherwise running around in wet mud would be a thing to do in the dungeon.  What it probably does add is encumbrance, and hence an armor check penalty, making the owl bear perhaps ever so slightly clumsier if that should ever come up.  And remember, this whole plan is being implemented right next to the very bee hive that the PC's fled in terror from a few months before, and somehow the PC's have to implement it without disturbing the bees.  And somehow the Owl Bear is supposed to chase the monk for miles without tiring of the chase, and this chase is apparently occurring in the minds of the player, not in a jungle or a forest with roots and briars and tickets and brambles and poison ivy and other beasts, but on a empty field.  And for some reason the bees are supposed to be instantly agitated by the owlbear in a way that they weren't by this entire encampment of people.  It's all a bunch of stuff that only makes sense if the whole thing is some elaborate game, whereas my PC's - who are engaged in a war - would eschew such pranks as more fitting a feud between rival children.  They are engaged in a deadly serious business with the future of the world on the line.The actual division in my mind is between direct attacks, which most RPGs will cover in the rules, and "stunts" which are creative attacks that usually fall into areas lying outside the rules.  And combat as it plays out is usually a mixture of these two things, mostly attacks, interspersed with stunts when opportunity allows or necessity demands.  There may be styles that affirm "stunts" to different degrees, but this isn't really a nice neat way to divide and discuss gaming styles.</blockquote>

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