RPG Combat: Sport or War?

There are two different extremes in arranging fights. One is like war and the other is like a sporting event. Sporting events are supposed to be fair contests between roughly equal forces. On the other hand, war is the epitome of unfair competition.

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Jeffro Johnson introduced me to this topic, which was discussed in an ENWorld forum. If your game doesn't involve much combat this discussion may not mean a lot to you.

Strategem: a plan or scheme, especially one used to outwit an opponent or achieve an end

Any GAME implies fairness, equality of opportunity. Knightly jousting tournaments were combat as sport. We don't have semi-pro soccer teams playing in the Premier League, we don't have college basketball teams playing the NBA, because it would be boringly one-sided. People want to see a contest where it appears that both sides can win. And occasionally the weaker side, the underdog if there is one, wins even when they're not supposed to.

An obvious problem with combat as sport, with a fair fight, is that a significant part of the time your players will lose the fight. Unless they're really adept at recognizing when they're losing, and at fleeing the scene, this means somebody will get dead. Frequent death is going to be a tough hurdle in most campaigns.

The objective in war is to get such an overwhelming advantage that the other side surrenders rather than fight, and if they choose not to surrender then a "boring" one-sided massacre is OK. Stratagems are favored in war, not frowned upon. Trickery (e.g. with the inflation of the football) is frowned upon in sports in general, it's not fair, it's cheating.

Yet "All's fair in love and war." Read Glen Cook's fantasy Black Company series or think about mercenaries in general, they don't want a fair fight. They don't want to risk their lives. They want a surrender or massacre. The Black Company was great at using stratagems. I think of D&D adventurers as much like the Black Company, finding ways to win without giving the other side much chance.

When my wife used to GM first edition D&D, she'd get frustrated if we came up with good stratagems and strategies and wiped out the opposition without too much trouble. She felt she wasn't "holding up the side." She didn't understand that it's not supposed to be fair to the bad guys.

Think also that RPG adventures are much like adventure novels: we have to arrange that the players succeed despite the odds, much as the protagonists in a typical novel. In the novel the good guys are often fabulously lucky; in RPGs we can arrange that the players encounter opposition that should not be a big threat if the players treat combat as war rather than as a sport.

I'm not saying you need to stack the game in favor of the players, I'm saying that if the players do well at whatever they're supposed to do - presumably, in combat, out-thinking the other side -then they should succeed, and perhaps succeed easily. Just like Cook's Black Company.

contributed by Lewis Pulsipher
Photo © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.5

 

[pemerton]

Almost? You're way too charitable.

Or too literal. After all, I did offer some words.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Where are these rules stated? And where is it stated that the GM is not allowed to exercise authorship powers (rather than just move pre-existing or randomly-generated pieces around a pre-existing or randomly-generated board)?

It also never says that you can't require every player to wear a pancake on their head, and you can't turn their characters into bananas on a whim. The lack of expressed forbiddance should not be taken as permission, especially since meta-gaming is declared off-limits.

This is almost too consdescending for words.

I am leaving open the possibility that you may not understand how egregiously offensive the concept of meta-gaming is when it comes to role-playing, which is why I'm still talking to you instead of just blocking you along with the rest of the trolls. It is literally the worst possible thing you could ever do, from a role-playing perspective. Promoting meta-gaming as some sort of valid tactic for GMs is tantamount to slandering the integrity of every honest GM out there. If you spread the lie that good GMs are contriving things behind the scenes, then some players may believe you, and then they'll never trust a GM again.

What characterises a game as an RPG? (1) The players play individual characters rather than units, and so the personal perspective/experiences of those characters becomes important to play; and (2) the fiction of the ingame situation matters to resolution. Anything beyond that is about taste and style.

An RPG is a game where you play a role. You pretend to be a character, and make decisions from their perspective. Anything beyond that is about taste and style, unless it directly invalidates the process of role-playing through the heinous and despicable act of meta-gaming.

 

[pemerton]

It also never says that you can't require every player to wear a pancake on their head, and you can't turn their characters into bananas on a whim. The lack of expressed forbiddance should not be taken as permission

Those things would have no bearing on the object of play. Whereas the GM exercising the sorts of powers I describe is obviously and tightly relevant to what the 5e Basic PDF describes as the goals of playing D&D (p 2):

Together, the DM and the players create an exciting story of bold adventurers who confront deadly perils.​

Deciding that there is a dragon rather than an ogre in the room, if that will be more interesting, actively contributes to that goal of play.

meta-gaming is declared off-limits.

Where?

I've already quoted text from 4e and 5e that indicates otherwise (in its description of the role of the GM).

Here is more from 4e (PHB p 258; DMG pp 102, 125):

You [the player] can also, with your DM’s approval, create a quest for your character. Such a quest can tie into your character’s background. . . . Individual quests give you a stake in a campaign’s unfolding story and give your DM ingredients to help develop that story.

You [the GM] should allow and even encourage players to come up with their own quests that are tied to their individual goals or specific circumstances in the adventure. . . .

The trickiest part of awarding treasure is determining what magic items to give out. Tailor these items to your party of characters. Remember that these are supposed to be items that excite the characters, items they want to use rather than sell or disenchant. If none of the characters in your 6th-level party uses a longbow, don’t put a 10th-level longbow in your dungeon as treasure.

A great way to make sure you give players magic items they’ll be excited about is to ask them for wish lists. At the start of each level, have each player write down a list of three to five items that they are intrigued by that are no more than four levels above
their own level. You can choose treasure from those lists . . .​

Those passages make it very clear that the GM is expected to author story elements having regard to the degree of interest they will have for the players.

Here is a passage from the AD&D DMG (pp 9, 110):

[T]he rules call for wandering monsters, but these can be not only irritating - if not deadly - but the appearance of such can actually spoil a game by interfering with an orderly expedition. You have set up an area full of clever tricks and traps, populated it with wellthought-out creature complexes, given clues about it to pique players’ interest, and the group has worked hard to supply themselves with everything by way of information and equipment they will need to face and overcome the imagined perils. They are gathered together and eager to spend an enjoyable evening playing their favorite game, with the expectation of going to a new, strange area and doing their best to triumph. They are willing to accept the hazards of the dice, be it loss of items, wounding, insanity, disease, death, as long as the process is exciting. But lo!, everytime you throw the ”monster die” a wandering nasty is indicated, and the party’s strength is spent trying to fight their way into the area. Spells expended, battered and wounded, the characters trek back to their base. Expectations have been dashed, and probably interest too, by random chance. Rather than spoil such an otherwise enjoyable time, omit the wandering monsters indicated by the die. No, don’t allow the party to kill them easily or escape unnaturally, for that goes contrary to the major precepts of the game. Wandering monsters, however, are included for two reasons, as is explained in the section about them. If a party deserves to have these beasties inflicted upon them, that is another matter, but in the example above it is assumed that they are doing everything possible to travel quickly and quietly to their planned destination. If your work as a DM has been sufficient, the players will have all they can handle upon arrival, so let them get there, give them a chance. The game is the thing, and certain rules can be distorted or disregarded altogether in favor of play.

t is your right to control the dice at any time and to roll dice for the players. You might wish to do this to . . . give them an edge in finding a particular clue, eg a secret door that leads to a complex of monsters and treasures that will be especially entertaining.​

Gygax's advice shows some tension between his mechanical design - which calls for a large amount of random determination of content introduction (by way of random encounter checks, searching checks, etc) - and the goals of play: he recognises that, in a RPG, random content introduction may not always produce an interesting gaming experience. Whatever the merits of his solution - to suspend rather than revisit the mechanics - he makes it clear that the GM is enttiled, and even expected, to manage content introduction having regard to what will be interesting for the players. (He is als, very clearly, aware of the difference between managing content introduction - which he encourages - and managing action resolution, which he discourages as "contrary to the major precepts of the game." Ignoring this distinction is fundamental to the "fudging"/"golden rule" ethos of 2nd ed AD&D and other late-80s/90s RPGing; and recovering it is fundamental to the "indie" revolution in RPGing.)

The two systems that have been most discussed in this thread are AD&D and 4e. Although different in many ways, both have rulebooks and GM advice that clearly contradicts your claim that the GM is not allowed to make decisions having regard to metagame considerations (ie what will be of interest to the players).

And, as promised upthread, here is an example from a different RPG (Classic Traveller, Book 3: Worlds and Adventures, p 19):

The referee is always free to impose encounters to further the cause of the adventure being played; in many cases, he actually has a responsibility to do so.​

And this is is one of the most hardcore simulationist RPGs ever written!

An RPG is a game where you play a role. You pretend to be a character, and make decisions from their perspective.

You seem to be projecting one significant aspect of the "player" role onto the gamemaster/referee. The GM is not in general pretending to be a character, and is not in general pretending to make decisions from a character's perspective. To quote from the 5e Basic PDF again (p 2):

One player, however, takes on the role of the Dungeon Master (DM), the game’s lead storyteller and referee. The
DM creates adventures for the characters, who navigate its hazards and decide which paths to explore. The DM might describe the entrance to Castle Ravenloft, and the players decide what they want their adventurers to do. Will they walk across the dangerously weathered drawbridge? Tie themselves together with rope to minimize the chance that someone will fall if the drawbridge gives way? Or cast a spell to carry them over the chasm?

Then the DM determines the results of the adventurers’ actions and narrates what they experience.​

The GM establishes the nature of the ingame situation, and adjudicates the action declarations that the players make for their PCs in response to that situation. These are the fundamental roles of the GM in all mainstream RPGs, from the early days of D&D through to indie RPGs like Over the Edge or Burning Wheel.

How the GM establishes the nature of the ingame situation; and what techniques the GM uses to adjudicate action declarations; are things on which preferences differ. And have done since 1974.

I am leaving open the possibility that you may not understand how egregiously offensive the concept of meta-gaming is when it comes to role-playing

<snip>

It is literally the worst possible thing you could ever do, from a role-playing perspective. Promoting meta-gaming as some sort of valid tactic for GMs is tantamount to slandering the integrity of every honest GM out there. If you spread the lie that good GMs are contriving things behind the scenes, then some players may believe you, and then they'll never trust a GM again.

Never trust a GM to do what?

You seem to be equating meta-gaming with lying; to be imagining that a GM who places a dragon rather than an ogre pretends to the players that it was written in advance, or that it was rolled on a table, when in fact it was made up by the GM on the spot. Do you know how my players know the basis on which I make decisions about content introduction? Because I tell them. The players know that if they fail checks, I will introduce content into the fictional situation that runs against the interests of their PCs. And when this happens, I taunt them about it!

What you call "egregiously offensive" I just call refereeing the game.

 

[Arilyn]

The GM creates the world, the npcs, monsters, cities, etc. And, we can assume, that lots of changes are being made during this process before the players show up. I don't believe there is a line, where the GM must now be "hands off" because the campaign has started. It's the GM's job to make the world feel consistent, but deciding that there isn't an ogre in the tower, when there was one in the notes, is not a sin. It's not going to make players feel cheated or betrayed. If the players have been having the dice roll against them all day, it is okay to reduce the numbers in a fight, or remove some encounters altogether, especially if battle fatigue has set in. If the GM decides in middle of a session, that the innkeeper has a son, because that would be useful to the story, does it matter if the GM decided this before or during play? As pemerton says, "that's just refereeing the game."

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Never trust a GM to do what?

Trust a GM to play honestly, without cheating. Meta-gaming is a form of cheating, in a role-playing game.

You seem to be equating meta-gaming with lying; to be imagining that a GM who places a dragon rather than an ogre pretends to the players that it was written in advance, or that it was rolled on a table, when in fact it was made up by the GM on the spot. Do you know how my players know the basis on which I make decisions about content introduction? Because I tell them. The players know that if they fail checks, I will introduce content into the fictional situation that runs against the interests of their PCs. And when this happens, I taunt them about it!

It's cheating in any role-playing game, where the players expect the GM to present the world honestly and play NPCs with integrity. That it is not against the code of conduct at your table is only proof that you are not playing a role-playing game. You seem to be playing some sort of collaborative story-telling game, or perhaps one of the other independent deviations from role-playing which have become popular of late, and which have mis-appropriated the title of RPG for (what I assume to be) marketing purposes.

 

[cmad1977]

Trust a GM to play honestly, without cheating. Meta-gaming is a form of cheating, in a role-playing game.
It's cheating in any role-playing game, where the players expect the GM to present the world honestly and play NPCs with integrity. That it is not against the code of conduct at your table is only proof that you are not playing a role-playing game. You seem to be playing some sort of collaborative story-telling game, or perhaps one of the other independent deviations from role-playing which have become popular of late, and which have mis-appropriated the title of RPG for (what I assume to be) marketing purposes.

I’d be ashamed of myself if I posted something this silly.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Arilyn]

Trust a GM to play honestly, without cheating. Meta-gaming is a form of cheating, in a role-playing game.
It's cheating in any role-playing game, where the players expect the GM to present the world honestly and play NPCs with integrity. That it is not against the code of conduct at your table is only proof that you are not playing a role-playing game. You seem to be playing some sort of collaborative story-telling game, or perhaps one of the other independent deviations from role-playing which have become popular of late, and which have mis-appropriated the title of RPG for (what I assume to be) marketing purposes.

RPGs play differently from story-telling games. Games like FATE, which you presumably consider a story-telling game, are definitely in the RPG category. Mechanics in story-telling games revolve more around ways players can add to the story, not character abilities. Sometimes the end goal is already in place, and the participants frame scenes to build the events which lead to the ending. For example, the game might be about the fall of a city, and therefore, the participants build scenes leading to this final result. In some story-telling games, characters can be swapped around, and bouncing around in time is more common. Results of conflict are often resolved through consensus, or by whoever has gained the narrator's chair, for example.

Now, many RPGs have borrowed some aspects of story telling, but this doesn't destroy their RPG status. Board games, RPGs, and story-telling games have all borrowed mechanics from each other. Descent, for example, is a board game, with RPG elements. Gloom is a card game with story telling elements.

RPGs include a wide variety of games and styles. Your narrow view would remove FATE, 13th Age, all the many games coming off the Appocalypse Engine, Cortex Plus, and what else? Star Wars? Icons? 7th Sea? The exciting thing about our hobby is the sheer variety of styles and number of games available now which, nevertheless, have enough common elements to all share the RPG label.

 

[Lanefan]

Gary stopped contributing before Second Edition. If he has ever given any indication of understanding his characters as living people within the game world, and making decisions from their perspective, then it is not known to me.

Er...right in the first bit of the 1e PH - e.g. "...you become Falstaffe the Fighter..." - he's pushing for immersion into one's character.

 

[Lanefan]

Looking over all this, a few thoughts:

As a player one needs to be able to trust one's DM to consistently do two things:

1. Play in good faith via giving both the PCs and the opponents an even break and fairly adjudicating and narrating the results of dice rolls and-or PC actions
2. Present an internally and mechanically consistent game world that will, if care is not taken by the PCs during their adventures, kill them dead.

This issue of trust clouds these discussions, as some prominent posters have shown in the past a fairly serious unwillingness or inability to trust their DMs; either through prior bad experiences or through projecting their own inability to be a trustworthy DM onto all other DMs.

As for making things up on the fly as a DM, sometimes it happens. Not everything is (or even can be, in some circumstances) prepared in advance; and "winging it" is a feature of every decent DM's toolbox. Where winging it falls apart is when it intentionally or otherwise violates either of my points 1 and 2 above, and this is unfortunately easy to do if a DM doesn't pay close attention to her p's and q's. But I don't in the least subscribe to the Burning Wheel style, which amounts in essence to Schroedinger's Gameworld; as both player and DM I assume/expect most things to be set in place beforehand and that winging it will be at most an occasional exception.

I don't like meta-gaming on the whole; and though I realize there's a certain degree of it baked right into the game and its assumptions (e.g. vaguely level-appropriate challenges and-or adventures, characters somehow knowing when they've levelled up, etc.) I prefer meta-gaming be reduced or eliminated wherever there's reasonable means to do so. Character knowledge = player knowledge. Where the DM is deciding what adventures to run such decision is made without reference to projected party makeup, other than vague level. DM secretly rolls whenever there's uncertainy as to why a character's declared action might have failed (e.g. did you not find the secret door due to a bad roll or due to looking in the wrong place - this should not be player-side info). And so on, at considerable length.

And I don't want to feel strait-jacketed by the rules, and nor (I think) does anyone else I game with. I far prefer the 0-1-2e - and 5e to some extent - unwritten ethos of you can try it unless a rule says you can't (this plays into combat-as-war, where potentially anything goes and to hell with the Geneva convention) over the 3-4e unwritten ethos of you can't try it unless a rule says you can (which makes it combat-as-sport in which both you and your opponents have to fight fair).

Lan-"but also note that trying something doesn't automatically mean succeding at it"-efan

 

[pemerton]

You seem to be playing some sort of collaborative story-telling game, or perhaps one of the other independent deviations from role-playing which have become popular of late, and which have mis-appropriated the title of RPG for (what I assume to be) marketing purposes.

Classic Traveller and AD&D are not recent games. I suspect they're both older than you! (1977 is the origin year for both.)

RPGs include a wide variety of games and styles. Your narrow view would remove FATE, 13th Age, all the many games coming off the Appocalypse Engine, Cortex Plus, and what else? Star Wars? Icons? 7th Sea?

Also Gygax's AD&D and Classic Traveller.

Plus about 10 billion others.

EDIT:

Meta-gaming is a form of cheating, in a role-playing game.

<snip>

where the players expect the GM to present the world honestly and play NPCs with integrity.

I thought I may as well respond to this too.

I present the world honestly. I play NPCs with integrity. I just do it differently from you. Here is an extract from my most recent actual play post:

Given that all the players had submitted to the randomness that is Traveller - and had got a pretty interesting set of characters out of it - I had to put myself through the same rigour as GM. So I rolled up a random starting world:

Class A Starport, 1000 mi D, near-vaccuum, with a pop in the 1000s, no government and law level 2 (ie everything allowed except carrying portable laser and energy weapons) - and TL 16, one of the highest possible!​

So what did all that mean, and what were the PCs doing there?

I christened the world Ardour-3, and we agreed that it was a moon orbiting a gas giant, with nothing but a starport (with a casino) and a series of hotels/hostels adjoining the starport (the housing for the 6,000 inhabitants). The high tech level meant that most routine tasks were performed by robots.

<snip>

I then rolled for a patron on the random patron table, and got a "marine officer" result. Given the PC backgrounds, it made sense that Lieutenant Li - as I dubbed her - would be making contact with Roland. The first thing I told the players was that a Scout ship had landed at the starport, although there it has no Scout base and there is no apparent need to do any survey work in the system; and that the principal passenger seemed to be an officer of the Imperial Marines. I then explained that, while doing the rounds at the hospital, Roland received a message from his old comrade Li inviting him to meet her at the casino, and to feel free to bring along any friends he might have in the place.

In preparation for the session I had generated a few worlds - one with a pop in the millions and a corrosive atmosphere; a high-pop but very low-tech world with a tainited atmosphere (which I had decided meant disease, given that the world lacked the technological capacity to generate pollution); and a pop 1 (ie population in the 10s) world with no government or law level with a high tech level - clearly some sort of waystation with a research outpost attached.

<snip>

Given that I had these worlds ready-to hand, and given that the players had a ship, I needed to come up with some situation from Lt Li that would put them into play: so when Roland and Vincenzo (just discharged from medical care) met up with her she told the following story - which Methwit couldn't help but overhear before joining them!

Lt Li wondered whether Vincenzo would be able to take 3 tons of cargo to Byron for her. (With his excellent education, Roland knew that Byron was a planet with a large (pop in the millions) city under a serious of domes, but without the technical capabilities to maintain the domes into the long term.) When the PCs arrived on Byron contact would be made by those expecting the goods. And payment would be 100,000 for the master of the ship, plus 10,000 for each other crew member.

Some quick maths confirmed that 100,000 would more than cover the fuel costs of the trip, and so Vincenzo (taking advice from Roland - he knows nothing about running a ship) agreed to the request.

Methwit thought all this sounded a bit odd - why would a high-class (Soc A) marine lieutenant be smuggling goods into a dead-end world like Byron - and so asked Li back to his hotel room to talk further. With his Liaison-1 and Carousing-1 and a good reaction roll she agreed, and with his Interrogation-1 he was able to obtain some additional information (although he did have to share some details about his own background to persuade her to share).

The real situation, she explained, was that Byron was itself just a stop-over point. The real action was on another world - Enlil - which is technologically backwards and has a disease-ridden atmosphere to which there is no resistance or immunity other than in Enlil's native population. So the goods to be shipped from Ardour-3 were high-tech medical gear for extracting and concentrating pathogens from the atmosphere on Enlil, to be shipped back to support a secret bio-weapons program. The reason a new team was needed for this mission was because Vincenzo had won the yacht from the original team - who were being dealt with "appropriately" for their incompetence in disrupting the operation.

(I had been planning to leave the real backstory to the mission pretty loose, to be fleshed out as needed - including the possibility that Li was actually going to betray the PCs in some fashion - but the move from Methwit's player forced my hand, and I had to come up with some more plausible backstory to explain the otherwise absurd situation I'd come up with. And it had to relate to the worlds I'd come up with in my prep.)

Where's the lack of honesty or integrity?