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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The-Magic-Sword" data-source="post: 8250239" data-attributes="member: 6801252">City adventures don't seem as interesting as Dungeons in my experience, usually they're bereft of spacial context in a way that renders the point moot, i can say that i'm walking east in a city, but what does that actually mean? Either there's a point of interest for me to interact with, or I'm just going to be meandering around in search of adventure. I've actually tried to run them, but cities and wilderness are just these massive places that can be monotonous to go through, unless you use something like a point crawl procedure, but then they just become dungeons with the serial numbers filed off-- individual areas become rooms, or sub-areas in the dungeon, you don't have hallways so you can go in any direction, but the directions are so abstract, thats not especially more meaningful, its like having four to eight hallways off of each area, based off what the GM has prepped, or is willing to improvise in that direction.I feel that Combat as Sport gets a bad rap, and I find Combat as War largely boring because of the way that it emphasizes more arbitrary solutions to problems-- there's less room for the individual abilities of the players, and the individual abilities of the monsters to make a meaningful impact. Any party can create a fire to smoke creatures out of a room, any party can collapse a hallway, and once you've done those kinds of solutions once or twice, they begin to feel somewhat rote. Being able to alter or avoid fights, and solve problems in unique ways is still a key part of play, as far as I'm concerned, but squaring up and taking your foes using the character abilities you chose, expressing yourself in that way, and being able to engage in moment to moment combat tactics is just as important. In that sense OSR games traditionally feel anemic to us, like they're made for people who don't like combat, or who are obsessed with green text style stories, where the ridiculousness is the point. They deny us fun fights in the name of encouraging creative thinking, whereas we do enjoy taking confrontations head on, much of the time. The OSR style is fine and all, but not really for me-- they also tend to to disrupt the narrative by demanding that you be weak enough to always have to game the situation somehow, even when not every good story is about gaming the situation, not every hero is a macguyver, or a guerilla. I also feel like its easier to add combat as war elements to combat as sport, since it just means allowing players to disrupt or split up harder encounters though the use of their environment, and making some areas hard enough for them to want to consider that, than to add combat as sport elements to combat as war, since combat as war traditionally asserts itself by making combat as sport a doomed proposition on a systemic level. For an example of this, we ended up picking Starfinder over Stars Without Number, because after reading a combat example, my players noticed exactly how few hit points the player characters actually have, there's fundamentally no way to have a fight where the players can take it head on and be 'playing well' which just throws out so much narrative space we enjoy in our PF2e/5e/4e games.</blockquote>

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