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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6863018" data-attributes="member: 4937">But the convoluted strategies he describes as fun involve more risk than a simple plan like, "Everyone uses missile attacks and ranged spells to destroy the bees before they can get close to us."  Or even a plan like, "Lets follow the bees on their harvest runs and start depleting the hives workers.  Then after a day of killing isolated worker bees, when the number of bees is reduced, we can attack the hive."  Those are strategies that involve leveraging the fact that bees don't have ranged attacks and have only limited intelligence and planning ability.  Those are military strategies.  "Lets dump muds on their heads" is combat as loony tunes or combat as childish feud.  It's viewing combat through the lens of something like "Home Alone", where your prep the battlefield and a largely mindless enemy falls into traps that never fail to work.  It's combat as imagined by someone whose never endured it, and doesn't really know its speed and ferocity.  It's combat as something other than war.  How dangerous combat would be is on a whole separate axis than how affirming a DM is of player plans and declarations that fall outside of the rules.  A DM can be both affirming of player plans, and run a low challenge game with few player deaths.  A DM can run a deadly game and not be affirming of player plans that fall outside of the rules or which have many moving parts.Besides that, system matters here.  And D&D's ablative hit points make combat predictable and avoiding death comparatively easy.  Wound based systems on the other hand basically guarantee in the long run the PC will take an instantly mortal wound.  In those systems, direct combat is to be avoided because it involves risk of random unavoidable death.  But barring running up against save or die monsters, most of which can be mitigated by spell use, D&D doesn't play like that.  D&D's system encourages combat by making it predictable.  A player knows when his PC is running out of hit points and is facing lethal threat, and can adopt tactics at that point to avoid it - quaffing potions, fighting defensively, moving off the front line, etc.UPDATE:Honestly, I found the thread to be one of the biggest bits of nonsense I'd ever read at Enworld.  It was basically defining a badwrongfun synonym that meant different things to different readers, but pretty much everyone knew which side they wanted to be counted on.  It was occurring right in the middle of a bunch of edition warring, and seemed to mostly be an excuse to bash 4e (and I don't even like 4e and I was the original edition warrior, so you'd think I'd be sympathetic to that).  It whole description was incoherent, and that's even before everyone started piping up with what they wanted the term to mean.  And above all, it conflated a bunch of completely independent analog variables in play style, into one largely useless binary distinction.  So instead of talking about lethality, granularity, agency, rules as physics versus rules as resolution aid, high magic versus low magic, character skill versus player skill, simulation versus game, linearity, and so forth leading to some useful discussion of a whole range play styles and their utility and how different ideas and approaches can be combined in different ways to create different experiences - even within the same campaign - it mostly stayed an ego stroking whine fest where people celebrated how they weren't like those other badwrongfun tables.   No one seemed to notice how they were bundling unrelated things under a single heading, or how other people in the same thread had bundled a completely different set of things under the same heading.UPDATE2: It's my lunch break, so I'm trying to read the thread, and its just so bad it makes my eyes bleed.  Thankfully, the usually reliable Tony Vargas has stepped in to point out some of the obvious, but even from a popcorn eating perspective, I just can't take it anymore.   I didn't think it was possible to have a less descriptive term than "old school"; I guess I was wrong.</blockquote>

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