[Very Long] Combat as Sport vs. Combat as War: a Key Difference in D&D Play Styles...

[billd91]

I'll go to Champions for an example. If I want my character to be immortal and breathe in outer space, I have to pay 13 character points. If another player tries to tell the GM that his character is immortal, and doesn't need to breathe, based solely on the justification that "he's a robot", and the GM allows this, then I've just paid 13 points for something he got for free. I could have spent my 13 points on something else that makes my character more effective in another area.

I don't think that's a very good comparison. For one thing, most GMs would make a robotic character who wanted to have life support pay for it. I think a better related case would be:

There are two supers. One has life support and can survive in an environment with no atmosphere (cheap). The other has paid for an attack that causes his opponents to suffocate (expensive). It sounds to me like Majoru Oakheart would find it unfair for the character with life support to sucker an opponent into a low-pressure area and let the lack of atmosphere do in his opponent. He didn't pay for that attack but he used the environment around him (maybe he suckered his opponent into an airlock on the satellite base and got them both blown out) to achieve an effect that someone else paid (a lot) for.

I totally disagree that's unfair. In fact, as a GM, I'd be congratulating the player on his clever maneuver just like I'd be congratulating Ellen Ripley for blowing the alien out the airlock in Alien. Or congratulating Sprite for using the Blackbird's jets to burn the N'Gari when it attacks her in X-Men 143. Or Roy when he gets the spiked chain wielding ogre to back off a cliff in Order of the Stick. Etc.

 

[Savage Wombat]

I don't know if I'd say that's what he's saying, but I think that's a PERFECT example (by comparison to mine) of where the dividing line falls. So kudos.

Compare it to Guild Wars (a MMORPG I play) vs. D&D - if you want to build a trap (a snare, let's say) in Guild Wars you have to learn the skill, put it on your skill bar, and be a ranger to use it. In D&D, depending on the system and DM, you'd either (a) just describe to the DM what you're doing, (b) have to roll against a general Survival or Wilderness Lore skill, (c) roll against a highly specific Trapbuilding skill, or even (d) use the crafting rules or even a power to "pay" for the trap.

Closer?

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Why worry about a baseline?

You've got a monster charging at you that wants to eat you for lunch, and it ain't gonna play by the Marquis of Queensbury rules. Why should you? Your only goal is to avoid/kill/pacify it in the safest-for-you manner possible - right?

Savage Wombat says what I was going to say, but to add to that slightly:

Sure, it's the goal of the PCs to take out their enemies any way they can...I'm thinking of it more from the DM's point of view. Using clever ideas shouldn't immediately allow you to win against any enemy no matter how powerful they are. Not because you want to be fair to the enemies but you want to be "fair" to the other players and the DM.

I can't tell you the number of times as the DM I've been disappointed by what I thought was going to be an epic, drag out, tough fight against nearly impossible odds that would have the players talking for years about how they nearly died facing an enemy that was extremely powerful and difficult to defeat but finally persevered by using every ability they had to defeat it. Only to have one player come up with a "clever" plan that worked around the entire combat rules to defeat the enemy in one round without using any of the abilities on his character sheet.

To the player who thought of it, it was awesome. To some of the other players, they were disappointed that they didn't get to have a battle like they wanted. I was disappointed because the players spent the next couple of years not talking about how awesome the battle was, but how they outsmarted ME and how the super powerful BBEG turned out to be such a wuss even though I built him up as being so powerful.

It's also a matter of fairness in the character creation system, as Savage Wombat describes. If it costs resources(a spell slot, feats, skill points) to do something then other people shouldn't be able to do it for free simply because they had a "clever" idea.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I totally disagree that's unfair. In fact, as a GM, I'd be congratulating the player on his clever maneuver just like I'd be congratulating Ellen Ripley for blowing the alien out the airlock in Alien. Or congratulating Sprite for using the Blackbird's jets to burn the N'Gari when it attacks her in X-Men 143. Or Roy when he gets the spiked chain wielding ogre to back off a cliff in Order of the Stick. Etc.

That kind of thing works well in a story because you can wait until the exact right moment to write it in, so that there is an epic build up to the conclusion.

You can have a battle where the alien chases the hero around, the hero always dodging its attacks, though just barely as the hero leads it down the corridor towards the airlock. Then have the hero pinned to the floor and unable to reach the airlock as it stretches, just inches away from clutching the lever. Until the second hero, thought dead until now, revives and distracts the alien just long enough for the hero to get away an pull the lever.

It's great story telling. But when you allow player abilities, rules, and dice to dictate the results instead of an all powerful author who can write it any way they want, what you normally end up with is the hero running head first down the corridor, hitting the switch and beating the enemy before the enemy gets an attack off. It's not very epic and when it's done nearly every battle, not very special either. It gets to the point where PCs look at their character sheet and say "I've got a blaster rifle that does 3d6 damage. But the airlock of the ship does infinite damage. Let's just do that."

Plus, that kind of story technique works better in sci-fi/super hero games which far more often invoke the "unbeatable monster which needs a clever plan to defeat" trope. But sometimes this works in a fantasy campaign for the big, nasty, world destroying creature. If you are invoking that trope though, the answer shouldn't just be something nearby. It should be something the PCs have quested to find.

Most of the time in Fantasy stories the average enemy is defeated with "Parry, parry, thrust, parry, thrust, slash, hack, decapitate". I want the average fight to go like that. The only real way to do that is to make sure that techniques like "I set up a trap" be the same or less powerful than abilities on a character sheet.

 

[S'mon]

Aha!

Now I understand why many old-school grognards hate "story-telling" adventures.

It's because the CaW strategies work best on a static or reactionary force. Such as a dungeon, or an approaching army. A situation where the PCs are the ones determining when an engagement occurs.

In a story-focused adventure, where you have actions occuring on a villain's timetable, the encounters tend more towards the "fight me now or lose the game" type (not to mention the famous "the module assumes you do this" type) and don't allow for strategies such as regrouping, or coming back with better weapons and more exp.

CaW players benefit from dungeons, not event sequences. (I was going to say time pressure, and then thought that they probably think of time pressure as a challenge, not a frustration.) CaS players are OK with DM-driven plots, and even railroads, because they don't risk a single encounter overwhelming them.

CAWers dislike strong scene-framing, yes. They believe that they should be the ones who get to frame the scene, barring a disastrous failure of tactics or extreme bad luck that results in eg their party being ambushed.

Personally, I don't mind scene-framing so much, but I do hate 4e WoTC adventures' attempts to impose scene-framing in static, dungeon-crawl adventures. You know the sort - this room will always have this encounter, monsters start in these positions, nothing the PCs do before the fight can affect its start conditions.

 

[Argyle King]

It's also a matter of fairness in the character creation system, as Savage Wombat describes. If it costs resources(a spell slot, feats, skill points) to do something then other people shouldn't be able to do it for free simply because they had a "clever" idea.

Personally, I feel that paying for the ability has the benefit of knowing you can do it all the time; rely on it as a tactic or a tool. Someone else may be able to do it using terrain and a clever plan, but they cannot count on the terrain and/or situation allowing it to be possible all the time. I believe -if the game is built in a way that provides for a consistent game world- there usually won't be a problem.


I do understand where you are coming from though. It's one of the issues I have with page 42 in the DMG. I think it's great that there is a way to allow a player to try something which isn't hard set in the rules. However, because 4th Edition (in my opinion) is based on the idea of powers, feats, items, and all manner of other things being character resources, there's a tight line to walk in allowing someone to do something, but not allowing it to be so good that it makes a power obsolete.

Consistency is an issue also. I've said elsewhere that one of the things which jars me out of the game is the inconsistent ways in which monsters interact with the math of 4th Edition's game world versus how the PCs interact with it. I'm perfectly 100% fine with monsters and PCs being built differently. However, it's a bit anticlimactic when I slap dimensional shackles on a monster, and it has virtually zero chance of escaping.

Likewise, it's a little strange when the monsters struggle to do things like break through doors or jump over chasms while the PCs are simultaneously breezing right through the same challenges. It only gets worse at the higher levels when (personally I do) asking how some of the most feared creatures in the land are defeated by not being able to do something simple like climb out of a pit or jump high enough to hit a flying PC. Meanwhile, I once had a halfling character who was capable to make a standing jump from the ground and leap high enough to land on a dragon and kill it with a rake.

Yes - a rake; I was challenging myself to see how far I could push my boundaries* as a PC and still be stronger than the monsters. Also, I seemed to roll insanely well while wielding the rake as an improvised weapon. It's still a joke among the group to this day.

(*It's not normally my preferred style of play, but it seemed to bother my brain less -at the time- to engage the system in this way than it did if I held as tightly onto concepts of character and verisimilitude as I normally like to. I'm currently at a place where I'm more at piece with the system, but -at the time- I struggled to reconcile my ideals with what I felt the ideals the system was founded upon were.)

 

[S'mon]

Sandboxing may be at least a little unfriendly to CaS

My 4e Wilderlands Southlands campaign has developed as pretty much sandbox-CAS, with some Dramatist themes. Sandbox-CAS works by keying encounter level off PC level & capabilities, rather than the status-quo sandboxing which suits CaW.

I don't do that strictly, but I do tend to create enemy encounter groups after the players tell me where they're going, and these pretty much follow 4e DMG guidelines on encounter building, so in practice it tends to work out that way: within the normal range of careful-heroic play, the PCs will tend to encounter enemy forces in the EL-1 to EL+4 or +5 range. They could choose to throw themselves into the middle of the 300-strong enemy horde and face EL+16, or be cowardly and get EL-6, but if they act sane-but-heroic like the heroes of a fantasy novel/movie, they will tend to face 'appropriate' level encounters.

 

[S'mon]

Why take a Fireball spell that does 10d6 points of damage to an enemy with 100 HP when the Rogue in the group can rig a trap that causes instant death to the same enemy(with no monetary cost since he improvised it with nearby items) when he walks through a door?

Because the Rogue had to actually come up with a viable plan, whereas you just say: "I cast fireball". There's nothing stopping you from both taking 'fireball' and also coming up with viable plans.
Unless you're saying that lazy 'fireballing' play should be equally as effective as creative 'MacGuyer' play, in which case I'm not impressed.

 

[S'mon]

Combat as war is trivial in a combat as sport system. Multiply the size of the enemy by an order of magnitude and let the PCs know the rewards for failure are ... bad. .

(1) In a CAS game like 4e you can have potentially overwhelming encounter groups that need to be avoided and/or attrited. I agree that works fine. In my Southlands game the PCs have been/are facing orc and human/undead armies numbering several hundred, the PCs use strategy & avoidance to be able to engage the enemy on reasonable terms, leading to a CAS-encounter at the point of contact.

(2) But what you can't do effectively in 4e IME is the trivial or trivialised encounter. I remember GMing Forge of Fury 4e conversion for you, there's a trivial encounter with a lone ooze, I remember you being unhappy because it was not a significant threat in 4e, but still took quite a long time to kill - you suggested it should have been a minion. I think maybe treating it as a trap could have worked, but I'm unsure about the mechanics. Anyway, trivial encounters are the bread and butter of CAW, and in a CAS system they just don't work.

 

[S'mon]

I was disappointed because the players spent the next couple of years not talking about how awesome the battle was, but how they outsmarted ME and how the super powerful BBEG turned out to be such a wuss even though I built him up as being so powerful.

I suggest either running a CAS game (eg 4e D&D), or else if you do want to keep a CAW element, then run a much lower-magic game with fewer variables for you to be outsmarted by. Your earlier example of a 20th level Wizard who drowns in rock-to-mud would seem to indicate that it doesn't exactly take brilliant tactics to outsmart your BBEGs, or you. If you regard something as trivial as that as 'unfair' on you and the other players I think your tactical ability is well below what CAW-D&D (any edition pre-4e) expects from a DM.