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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Riley37" data-source="post: 7594203" data-attributes="member: 6786839">You hold yourself (sometimes stubbornly) to a standard of rigor, in the search for precise understandings of the relationships between preparation and play, between process and narrative, and so forth, which exceeds anything I could impose on you; so IMO it matters less whether *I think* my examples of Pandemic and basketball actually overturn your claim, and more whether you find yourself usefully nudged towards your goals. I figured that when you said "game", you meant the scope of TRPGs, not including boardgames such as Pandemic nor games of basketball, and not the wider scope which includes Kipling's "Great Game" and Roosh V's "game".That said, I've or twice been briefly close to armed close-quarters combat with a slight prospect of ending in death or major injury (fortunately averted), and the memories remain vivid. IMO it's fundamentally different from basketball in that I don't get the shakes after playing basketball. I dunno how much other TRPGers *want* fight scenes to even suggest any feeling close to what I felt... I mean, we don't see Aragorn getting the shakes after he fights off Nazgul with a sword and a torch, we don't see Luke Skywalker getting the shakes after he almost fails and dies in the attack on the Death Star, maybe we don't want our PCs to feel that way either. I'm inclined to maintain, either way, that combat has unique aspects, which influence its role in TRPG.As for a theoretical example of a game which centers on basketball, and how it would compare to TRPGs which center on fight scenes, perhaps video games and computer games have useful points of comparison. I've rarely enjoyed sports-simulation computer games; the only one I remember strongly from my quarters-in-the-video-arcade days is CyberBall, which was more violent than most sports simulations, though it lacked buttons labelled "punch" or "kick", in contrast to Fighters of Fighting and so forth.I am thinking, however, of the parallels between a fast short fight scene, a one-round boxing match, and a swiftly decisive point in Ultimate Frisbee; versus a protracted TRPG fight scene, a ten-round boxing match, and a point of Ultimate in which possession changes several times before one team finally scores, by some combination of a defensive error leaving an exploitable gap, with offense rising to the opportunity. Hm, those tended to happen on windy days, which kinda relates to your point about circumstances, environmental factors, fighting on terrain other than an endless flat plain. Fatigue played an increasing role (since that game allows reinforcements only between points). I once tried to use the "fight defensively and let the opponent tire himself out, THEN go all-out and win" tactic in a TRPG duel. We were using Hero System, which has an endurance stat, but the GM wasn't using those rules for the NPC foe, so the fight was both tediously slow and narratively a failure on the axis I intended. The fight scene was also intended to advance the narrative by someone else, in the stands of the arena, watching the fight, to notice a plot-relevant detail, and it succeeded on that axis, so not a total loss. I'd still like to someday play a scene, in which that's an appropriate tactic for the hero AND the system supports it mechanically.</blockquote>

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