RPG Combat: Sport or War?

lewpuls · Oct 15, 2017

Shidaku, there's a big difference between "harder" and "let's kill some people" in old D&D. I never used nor played in those "meat-grinder" modules. I don't believe in human sacrifice.

The problem isn't whether combat is nasty or nice, it's more practical: if the players lose at anything like the rate you'd expect from a fair fight, they'd never get anywhere, unless (perhaps) they rise in levels very quickly. Even the best NBA, NFL, MLB teams lose 25-33% of the time. Those teams are playing as smart as they can within the fair-play system, and still lose that often.

Yes, even in successful war, soldiers die. Did I say they shouldn't?

Notice also, I don't advocate players as "overwhelming force that cannot be denied." No, you don't need to stack the game *heavily* in favor of the other side, IF your players take "combat as war" to heart. That means things like gathering intelligence (taking prisoners!?), scouting, even reconnaissance in force (scouts try hard not to engage the enemy, recon may involve engagement). And an unwillingness to fight unless there's no alternative, combined with a willingness to flee when things go badly.

In summary, you're setting up a straw man and then criticizing me for advocating what I did not advocate. I am definitely not of a "coddle the players" mentality, though I know many players now *expect* to be coddled and looked after, not only in RPGs but in a great many video game genres. They automatically blame the GM (or the game) if they fail. (And often expect the game to be "all about ME".) Anyone beginning a campaign nowadays who wants to avoid coddling players would be wise to describe the adventuring group as military based, in a war of sorts, before anything gets started.

EthanSental, I have no idea who shidaku is, no past history that I know of.

Saelorn, quite true.

Yes, 3e arranged combats that certainly weren't fair fights, but had the potential to harm if the players screwed up too much instead of only a little. The 5e method seems to be to make it really hard for any PC to get killed.

Aenghus, yes, creativity is subjective. I think of it as finding unconventional ways to solve problems. Many people seem to think of it as a kind of "brain fever," a profusion of wild ideas, that somehow turns out well.

Derren · Oct 15, 2017

Aenghus said:
IMO it's important to realise that people apply their creativity in different ways, and it really isn't the case that one matter of taste is strictly and objectively superior. You are entitled to your opinions as is everyone else, but Onetruewayism is the death of the hobby. Recognise diversity.

If you want to bring onetruewayism into this then you should realize that combat is sport is a lot more guilty of this than combat as war. In a combat as war system nothing prevents you to have sport like fights with all that entails. A combat as sport system prevents anyone from playing comvat as war though, thus enforcing its way upon the players.

Lanefan · Oct 15, 2017

shidaku said:
I guess I can agree with that, provided the human beings at the table all keep it clean.

Agreed. Advantage of gaming with friends, I guess: what happens at the table stays at the table.

Maybe. The idea that the base game is "safe" is a pretty reasonable approach in gaming to garner interest from people new to the hobby. I still find the sentiments of the author odd given he's written several editorials about how he dislikes how things have become soft. I mean, what's the point of things being hard if you're plot-protected?

I'm not entirely sure the author is saying what you think he's saying. I interpret it more as his having just discovered that CaW vs. CaS thread from a few years ago (one of the best threads ever, IMO) and putting his take on it, saying that CaW is in fact good even though his DM wife disagrees.

See now we're talking about something we can talk about.

I don't know why but I find this to be an excellent line, and it makes me laugh.

Is the game designed to make the players win? That's a pretty clear-cut answer: YES.
I personally like to keep things in the Party vs Monsters range of 60/40 or 40/60. I like the idea that victory (not necessarily death) is really never a guarantee. If it is, I won't roll the dice, there's no point, and frankly it's a little depressing.

I'll always roll the dice even if the combat looks on paper to be a pushover for the PCs. Why? A few reasons:
- sometimes pushovers on paper don't turn out that way in play: dice can be fickle things
- resources used/broken/cast in an easy fight aren't there if needed later in a harder fight
- even in a so-called 'easy' fight significant things can happen - looting the fallen provides a key clue to the adventure, for example - and I don't want to telegraph those 'important' easy fights by running only those and not the other easy fights along the way

I don't know if that means the game has moved more towards combat as a sport, I think it just means it's moved towards the designers putting extra odds in favor of the PCs to start with. They cast "Protection from Noobs" on the later editions.

OK, this phrases it better. Same end result, either way.

4E definitely favored combat as a sport (in their encounter balancing design). The CR system from 3.X and now 5E sort of lets you do your own thing.

To some extent. The big difference between 3e and 5e is that 5e seems able to handle a wider range - things don't scale as steeply as they did in 3e - which makes 5e more flexible for a DM. Which is good.

I'll be honest, I don't think I've ever played with total noobs. I'm curious if the default difficulties outlined in 5E are actually fitting for newcomers.

I've had an occasional brand-new-to-RPGs player in my games but never a whole table of them. Closest I've ever had is one brand new player, one player who had watched a lot but never played, and one experienced player make up a table of three in a start-from-scratch 1e game. They did OK - better than some all-experienced tables I've seen.

I somewhat suspect 5e would be easier to learn from scratch than to come into from another system/edition.

Lanefan

The Crimson Binome · Oct 16, 2017

Derren said:
Combat as war does not take anything away compared to combat as sport. You still can do all the tactical maneuvering you can do with combat as sport.

Combat as War takes away the meta-game certainty that your round-by-round decisions during combat will determine whether you win or lose. If you have the option of cleverly diverting a river to wipe out half of the opposing forces, then that becomes the determining factor over who wins combat, and your decision of whether to cleave or whirlwind attack is effectively meaningless.

It's kind of like how introducing a class that gets all of the fighter stuff and all of the wizard stuff would reduce the total number of class options available, because it removes two valid choices while only introducing one. It's not quite the same thing, but it's the same basic principle that increasing the number of theoretical options can effectively reduce the number of options in practice.

Sunseeker · Oct 16, 2017

Lanefan said:
I'm not entirely sure the author is saying what you think he's saying. I interpret it more as his having just discovered that CaW vs. CaS thread from a few years ago (one of the best threads ever, IMO) and putting his take on it, saying that CaW is in fact good even though his DM wife disagrees.

I find that a difficult pill to swallow that the author, being who he is, has never come across this subject before.

I don't know why but I find this to be an excellent line, and it makes me laugh.

Well, I always find it a bit silly to try talking about preferences and opinions. We can both say "Yeah I like this, or yeah I like that." and never really get anywhere, regardless of if we see or don't see each other's POV. BUT! We can talk about game design, maybe not what we prefer but what exist. We can talk about if D&D has gotten softer or not because we have a starting point, and an ending point for comparison. It's one of the reasons I can react rather strongly to heavily opinion-based editorials, of which Lew has no end of.

I'll always roll the dice even if the combat looks on paper to be a pushover for the PCs. Why? A few reasons:
- sometimes pushovers on paper don't turn out that way in play: dice can be fickle things
- resources used/broken/cast in an easy fight aren't there if needed later in a harder fight
- even in a so-called 'easy' fight significant things can happen - looting the fallen provides a key clue to the adventure, for example - and I don't want to telegraph those 'important' easy fights by running only those and not the other easy fights along the way.

I do the same in some situations. If the fight is important to the campaign or relevant to the current endeavors. If it is against a foe the party has been tracking but has significantly out-powered for whatever reason. But the point is no longer to provide a challenge, it's to tie up plot points, so I wouldn't really include such things in a discussion on if that's a sport or a war type fight, it just is. Defeat the boss, find the McGuffin, reach the goalpost, whatever. This is "something else".

To some extent. The big difference between 3e and 5e is that 5e seems able to handle a wider range - things don't scale as steeply as they did in 3e - which makes 5e more flexible for a DM. Which is good.

I'll definitely agree there. Even through 3E had a greater diversity, it became unwieldy a lot faster. The "sweet spot" in 3X was a fairly narrow range between 3rd and 9th level. The "sweet spot" in 5E is MUCH wider, arguably 3rd through 12th, and it's why most of the official campaigns end between 15th and 17th level. That's the area where the game starts to break down. So, there's that, at least they learned something from 4E. I can't say that system ever broke down, though it did grow to pretty absurd levels.

I somewhat suspect 5e would be easier to learn from scratch than to come into from another system/edition.

I hope so, that was certainly a design goal.

pemerton · Oct 16, 2017

I think it can lead to confusion if what we are trying to talk about is game design and/or game play, but the conceptual framing we use is all drawn from the fictional "reality" of the ingame context.

In 4e, for instance, there is no difficulty in having a combat resolved by (infiction) strategic rather than tactical considerations (like, say, diverting a river). That would generally be resolved using skill challenge mechanics.

When someone says that 4e is "combat as sport", I think what they are trying to get at is that 4e's resolution system is mechanically "closed" - with considerations of the fiction being used to establish or inform mechanical elements of the closed resolution. This is true of its combat mechanics, and true of skill challenges, and is something that 4e derives from "indie" RPG design.

Conversely, when someone says that AD&D is "combat as war", I think what they are trying to get it is that AD&D's resolution system involves much more direct adjudication of the fiction without that having to be mediated via mechanics, or expressed in mechanical terms.

So in 4e, if I divert a river to flood an enemy encampment, that probably allows a Nature check in the context of a skill challenge that has as its goal the routing or destruction of enemy forces. Success on that check increases the prospects of said routing/destruction; failure indicates that something has gone wrong in my planning (which could be anything from miscalculating the hydraulics of the situation, through to Poseidon showing up to protect the enemy forces from the raging waters, depending on how the GM wants to adjudicate the failure given the broader context of established fiction, tier of play, etc).

Whereas in AD&D, if I divert a river onto the enemy forces there is unlikely to be any mechanically structured process used to adjudicate the consequences, and its more likely that the GM will do his/her best to determine the prospects of success of the actual techniques I describe my character using (perhaps setting a % chance of success) and then directly adjudicating, within the fiction, the effect on the enemy camp of having floodwater pour through it.

Neither approach demands more or less cleverness per se. The 4e approach is, I think, more rewarding for people who have imaginative ideas (perhaps drawn from familiarity with genre fiction) about how a problem might be resolved. The AD&D approach is, I think, more rewarding for people who want to work out in detail the effects that flooding river waters will have on pre-modern military encampments. I'm guessing a good number of wargamers fall into the second category, but I imagine a good number of non-wargamer RPGers might fall into the first category.

Garthanos said:
RPG combat is story.

This is certainly something that 4e-type/"indie"-type mechanics are meant to facilitate.

Aenghus said:
Combat as War can devolve into "if you can convince the DM you win you win, otherwise your PC loses" paradigm, which sucks for players who hate the "convince the DM" subgame.

And this is what the AD&D-type approach can degrade into, if the GM's unmediated adjudication of the fiction ends up turning on idiosyncratic judgements of plausibility rather than resting on a sound and shared understanding of the fictional situation (such as the hydraulics of diverted rivers).

But I think the real merit of the 4e/"indie" approach isn't about avoiding this degraded version of an AD&D approach, but about achieving the affirmative benefits of mechanically closed resolution, which is primarily its tendency to yield something that is recognisable as a story (rising action, climax, denouement, etc) in a reliable fashion.

The Crimson Binome · Oct 16, 2017

pemerton said:
When someone says that 4e is "combat as sport", I think what they are trying to get at is that 4e's resolution system is mechanically "closed" - with considerations of the fiction being used to establish or inform mechanical elements of the closed resolution. This is true of its combat mechanics, and true of skill challenges, and is something that 4e derives from "indie" RPG design.

Conversely, when someone says that AD&D is "combat as war", I think what they are trying to get it is that AD&D's resolution system involves much more direct adjudication of the fiction without that having to be mediated via mechanics, or expressed in mechanical terms.

The problem with 4E, in this context, is that it tried to put the mechanics ahead of the narrative instead of deriving the mechanics from the narrative.

In 4E, dropping a boulder on your enemy will do roughly as much damage as hitting them with an encounter power, because that is the extent to which the mechanics will permit clever ideas to disrupt the balance of combat. In any other edition, dropping a boulder on your enemy will deal damage proportional to how heavy the boulder is.

It's not that other editions let you adjudicate things without translating them into mechanical terms. It's that other editions don't artificially restrict how those things are translated because of balance. It's also what they mean when they say that 4E was a slave to balance.

Aenghus · Oct 16, 2017

Saelorn said:
The problem with 4E, in this context, is that it tried to put the mechanics ahead of the narrative instead of deriving the mechanics from the narrative.

In 4E, dropping a boulder on your enemy will do roughly as much damage as hitting them with an encounter power, because that is the extent to which the mechanics will permit clever ideas to disrupt the balance of combat. In any other edition, dropping a boulder on your enemy will deal damage proportional to how heavy the boulder is.

It's not that other editions let you adjudicate things without translating them into mechanical terms. It's that other editions don't artificially restrict how those things are translated because of balance. It's also what they mean when they say that 4E was a slave to balance.

The hidden assumption here include that there's a narrative superior to the mechanics that doesn't need to agree with them, and that it's desirable that PCs e.g. drop boulders on enemies to kill them easily.

Some people enjoy the core game activity and don't see extensions and variants as necessarily superior. I don't think chess players see chess variants as superior or more clever just because the happen to have more options.

To players who enjoy interacting primarily with the core mechanics provided by the game, lethal boulder dropping and their ilk isn't necessarily an improvement of anything, it potentially involves skipping the part of the game that some players enjoy.

Obviously some players enjoy effective boulder dropping and such activities, making an end run around the rules, but other players want to interact with the rules for their enjoyment and opportunities to bypass them aren't universally desirable.

pemerton · Oct 16, 2017

Saelorn said:
The problem with 4E, in this context, is that it tried to put the mechanics ahead of the narrative instead of deriving the mechanics from the narrative.

In 4E, dropping a boulder on your enemy will do roughly as much damage as hitting them with an encounter power, because that is the extent to which the mechanics will permit clever ideas to disrupt the balance of combat. In any other edition, dropping a boulder on your enemy will deal damage proportional to how heavy the boulder is.

It's not that other editions let you adjudicate things without translating them into mechanical terms. It's that other editions don't artificially restrict how those things are translated because of balance. It's also what they mean when they say that 4E was a slave to balance.

Aenghus said:
The hidden assumption here include that there's a narrative superior to the mechanics that doesn't need to agree with them, and that it's desirable that PCs e.g. drop boulders on enemies to kill them easily.

<snip>

To players who enjoy interacting primarily with the core mechanics provided by the game, lethal boulder dropping and their ilk isn't necessarily an improvement of anything, it potentially involves skipping the part of the game that some players enjoy.

Obviously some players enjoy effective boulder dropping and such activities, making an end run around the rules, but other players want to interact with the rules for their enjoyment and opportunities to bypass them aren't universally desirable.

I generally agree with what Aenghus says here.

A further complication is this: what is the *true* damage dealt by a boulder dropped on a D&D character or monster? D&D protagonists and antagonists are (frequently) larger-than-life characters of the sort typical to genre fiction, adventure stories, myths and legends, etc.

Why is it more dangerous to such characters to have a boulder dropped on them than to be stabbed by a sword wielded by a Conan-like figure, or to be shot by an arrow loosed by a Bard-like figure?

Making boulders more dangerous than swords and arrows just seems a recipe for making the game depart from the genres it seeks to emulate, to a rather silly sort of genre, where Conan would prefer to throw stones than to wield a sword.

mykesfree · Oct 16, 2017

To help with this, has anyone tried playing the Adventures in Middle-earth 5E OGL? Some of the adventures in the first module Wilderland Adventures help showcase this very topic.