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

[Neonchameleon]

(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.

I'm not sure whether it's a case of they don't work in CAS or they don't work in 4e. I do think 4e is short of a quick resolution system for combat.

People who have had bad DMs often want to shackle the DM with more rules, but it misses the point. The rules were not the problem - the bad DM was. The answer should be to change the DM, not the rules, but it's easier to change books than it is to change people.

Part of the purpose of rules is to guide the DM into being a good DM. A DM who always throws balanced encounters in 4e is going to be tedious - but nothing like as bad as one who delights in the cursed magic items in AD&D. The tools lead to different levels of badness.

 

[billd91]

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.

How is unfair to the other players if one player comes up with an encounter-ending idea? Can't the other ones do so as well?

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.

For me, it's rarely the knockdown drag out fights of attrition that I remember. It's the flashy ones in which unusual and different things happen that stand out in the long run. It's one reason I think 4e may not be doing so well. You fight lots of grindy fights, and what stands out years later?

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.

That suggests, to me, that you put too much of your own ego into your creations as a GM. You can't really choose what elements of your game the players will remember and think well about in years to come. You can't expect your players to not mess up the encounters you set up without railroading them away from doing so. If faced with a similar issue, I would simply tell the players that they outsmarted the BBEG, who are always built with the recognition that they are one guy who can't possibly account for everything the PCs can do, and then graciously congratulate them for having a cunning plan. As I see it, that's part of DM's job. It's like being the Washington Generals to the Harlem Globetrotters.

 

[StarFyre]

I use creatures as they probably would be if they were real.

For example: orcs, goblins, unless specifically trained (and scared to do so) by a very good leader, probably won't have teh best tactics, while regiments of Dark Sun Gladiators would be freakin awesome as a fighting force in terms of their 1 on 1 skills and their bravery.

In 1 of my current campaigns, players engaged a massive red dragon... in the fight, I had the dragon grab one of the chars that was beating on his leg and bash him into the ground several times and then side to side into the walls. (the way a kid would beat around a rag doll) Then throw him at one of the wizards who was flying around the giant cavern (hitting him, and both of them tumbling to the ground). While most players were almost in shock from teh whole thing (yet thought it was awesome), a pro-4e styled player (just saying; not to be derogatory) said that's not in the dragon's stat block (he's also a DM). I said that any creature that smart, that big, and that strong can easily do stuff like that. It 'makes sense' for an intelligent creature of that much power.

Demons, in the same way, will go absolutely ape$^% on you to kill you as they are ...basically Pshychotic Evil as my friends say. Not necessarily the best plans, but due to winning wars by attrition (we use the 2e style of demons, devils, etc even though we play 3.5e/pathfinder), while devils will be more organized and try actual tactics.

Drow, expect assassins, crossbowmen firing at the group, etc.

The end result is; not doing the same thing every time, but whenever they face the same type of enemies; they can expect certain logical behaviour. Big stuff will toss you guys around (watch the "Prepare to Die" trailer for Dark Souls), smaller/smart guys will sneak and try to hit you when you sleep, etc, brute force enemies will attack en masse unless led by a good leader, etc.

Seems to make combat more fun as you never know how a battle will turn out. I find that more fun as well as the DM and players seem to like it.

Not as boring as a typical combat...

Sanjay

 

[Nagol]

Eh, but truthfully, how often are the bad guys coming after the good guys and using CaW tactics to do it? There's a big fat convention there. Once in a great while a DM will do it, but you really cannot run a game where the bad guys wait until the good guys are sleeping or in the john or whatever and take them. It gets old fast.

Again, I have no idea what your DM was doing with monsters. I find it fairly trivial to challenge PCs. I've got any arbitrary resources I need to have in order to do that. The very concept that the DM cannot challenge the players is IMHO ridiculous. In fact this is the very essence of the reason that CaW can't work against the PCs except in a very restricted and limited way. The DM cannot lose.

As a DM, I do it all the time. Intelligent foes are freaking dangerous. Sneaky intelligent foes even more so. If they don't believe a frontal assault will win, they'll explore other options.

In my last campaign, one campaign opponent was highly intelligent, had decent resources, and a hate on for a particular PC. He made the group's lives miserable again and again until they brokered a peace. Not once did he face them on a battlefield even though the group tried to force him on more than one occasion.

As a foe, he had all the resources he had and no more. Although he was controlled by me (the DM), he didn't get any form of infinite capability.

 

[Mokona]

Monsters in 'Combat as War' fights are scaled differently than they are in 'Combat as Sport' fights which seems to be forgotten in some of the discussion.

If the enemies are too powerful to just go toe to toe with, that is what makes the players stop, think, and use 'Combat as War' tactics. They're not creating a cake-walk but rather they're bringing an unfair fight (where they are at a disadvantage) down to a level where they are able to win.

In 'Combat as Sport' the difficulty of the encounter needs to be such that it's a fair fight to start with before the application of any 'Combat as War' tactics. If players bring 'Combat as War' tactics to a 'Combat as Sport' game then the DM would need to scale up the monsters in order to keep things interesting.

Both methods allow for some fights, after you apply 'War' tactics, to be easy and some fights to be challenging. It's not fun if all fights are easy and I don't think it's fun if every fight is so hard you die 33% of the time.

If you allow the enemies to use 'Combat as War' tactics then you need to scale them differently to the PCs. Enemies that are weaker than the PCs should definitely use 'Combat as War' tactics 100% of the time so that they bring their challenge level UP to the level where they can actually threaten the PCs at all. This makes supposedly wimpy monster fun and exciting by being clever rather than using the illusion of math and just "leveling those weaklings up to the PC's level".

Food for thought.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

@Abdul

In the event the world is more fully sketched out -say running Ptolus or you're just somebody who enjoys world building and has a lot of free time due to insomnia- would you feel that method of play is more possible?

Well, it is nice to have a detailed setting. OTOH just how detailed really IS any given setting? I've been using the same homebrew for 30 years for the majority of my D&D campaigns. I have 8 3-ring binders of material and a pretty hefty TWiki. It is still in most respects a fairly sketchily defined world. There are areas where a good bit of detail exists. OTOH you can go down the road a bit and the map is pretty blank.

They'll only get mercilessly hounded if they do nothing about it - and my players are usually very quick to react. It's not like the enemy would just take it either.

Kidnapping relatives etc. has come into play (mostly when the party aren't exactly shining paragons of Good). If the players want their characters to find out about these things, I'll invent them.

Sure. The point is the DM doesn't have to be 'clever', he just has to invent some circumstance that inconveniences or wrong-foots the PCs if he wants to do that. Of course he can do the same thing in favor of the players. The thing is AT SOME LEVEL the DM must be thinking about what will make a good game and present interesting challenges to the players that their PCs can hope to overcome. Thus my assertion that there aren't really two entirely different sorts of play going on here.

Any such model of categorizing people is much more black and white than the reality. Yet the fact is that we're on the 20th page and there have been some very strong comments in support of either CAS or CAW. I think it has some truth to it, maybe even more than some other models like GSN.

Eh. I am not saying there's no worth in making these kinds of contrasts. I'm more saying that there are more things common about various styles of play than there are things that separate them, at least in this case. Either way the DM will construct circumstances where interesting challenges exist that require some sort of effort to overcome. The differences are more about the scope of the challenge within the story and less about whether it is a 'fair fight' or not.

 

[jodyjohnson]

I use creatures as they probably would be if they were real.... in the fight, I had the dragon grab one of the chars that was beating on his leg and bash him into the ground several times and then side to side into the walls. (the way a kid would beat around a rag doll) Then throw him at one of the wizards who was flying around the giant cavern (hitting him, and both of them tumbling to the ground).

I let my players do this too. Whenever they want I let them tumble away from an attack and then plunge their greatsword through the dragon's skull. Insta-kill.

The one provision is that the insta-killed creature had 0 hit points at the end of the attack.

 

[Nagol]

Monsters in 'Combat as War' fights are scaled differently than they are in 'Combat as Sport' fights which seems to be forgotten in some of the discussion.

If the enemies are too powerful to just go toe to toe with, that is what makes the players stop, think, and use 'Combat as War' tactics. They're not creating a cake-walk but rather they're bringing an unfair fight (where they are at a disadvantage) down to a level where they are able to win.

In 'Combat as Sport' the difficulty of the encounter needs to be such that it's a fair fight to start with before the application of any 'Combat as War' tactics. If players bring 'Combat as War' tactics to a 'Combat as Sport' game then the DM would need to scale up the monsters in order to keep things interesting.

Both methods allow for some fights, after you apply 'War' tactics, to be easy and some fights to be challenging. It's not fun if all fights are easy and I don't think it's fun if every fight is so hard you die 33% of the time.

If you allow the enemies to use 'Combat as War' tactics then you need to scale them differently to the PCs. Enemies that are weaker than the PCs should definitely use 'Combat as War' tactics 100% of the time so that they bring their challenge level UP to the level where they can actually threaten the PCs at all. This makes supposedly wimpy monster fun and exciting by being clever rather than using the illusion of math and just "leveling those weaklings up to the PC's level".

Food for thought.

Kobolds are a terrific example of a low-level critter that strongly benefits from CaW uplift. There are a lot of stories about dealing with 'wimpy' kobolds that (nearly) end with TPKs because of their sneaky CaW ways.

 

[S'mon]

Eh, but truthfully, how often are the bad guys coming after the good guys and using CaW tactics to do it? There's a big fat convention there. Once in a great while a DM will do it, but you really cannot run a game where the bad guys wait until the good guys are sleeping or in the john or whatever and take them. It gets old fast.

In 1e I did it all the time - my monsters were just as proactive as the PCs. Loads of scry-teleport and assassination attempts. Worked great. I had to stop doing it in 3e because it would mean certain death for the PCs, due to the broken nature of high level 3e.

 

[haakon1]

Eh, but truthfully, how often are the bad guys coming after the good guys and using CaW tactics to do it?

Very often in my email campaign, less often in my "live" at a table campaign. Probably because I have more time to cogitate in the email campaign, and do more customized adventures (versus running commercial adventures as written).

The monsters always use CaW tactics (fight to win) and often go on the offensive or use sneaky tactics if it's helpful for them.

Some recent CaW actions by enemies in the email campaign:
-- Slowly building up a plot to take over a city that the PC's haven't noticed yet.
-- Gathering hobgoblins and some giants to obviously threaten a town, with the real goal being to ambush the reaction force (and distract them from the city that's the strategic target). Foiled by PC's!
-- Infilrating the town and getting their people into jobs as bodyguards for the ruler. Foiled by PC's!
-- Attacking a village to slaughter people and cause internal disruption, keeping nobles in the center of the country from moving their feudal hosts to the front. Oh yeah, and infect some survivors with lycantrophy. Pretty much a draw, though the PC's tracked down all the werewolves.
-- Assaulting a noble's tower from the front, while the assassin attempted to swim up, climb a wall, and break into the chapel -- their plan before the fight, and they got super lucky that the PC's put the guy they were guarding there! The enemy got super unlucky though, when the NPC Aristocrat target desparately tried a Bull Rush and succeeded in knocking the Boss Monster/Assassin out the window and back into the river! PC's win!

Recently in the "live" campaign:
-- During a fight, the enemy pulled in everyone from several rooms that they could alert, for what became a very tough fight.

Note that a lot of these plots would be pretty similar to what I did in running RECON (Vietnam War Long Range Recon Patrol RPG), so nor just CaW but "Fantasy Vietnam", though I suspect other people mean other things by that!