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

[Daztur]

What level did you run Horror on the Hill for, BTW? I ran it with 2nd-3rd level 3.5e PCs who had been through B7 Rahasia, while keeping the BECMI stats mostly unaltered, and they *still* found it very, very hard. In the final battle in the throneroom, amongst a sea of bodies the last PC standing, the Cleric, was out of spells and grappling the last hobgoblin royal guard, they were reduced to stabbing each other with daggers! With some lucky rolls the STR 10 Cleric somehow managed to stab the last hobgoblin to death, then dragged out the body of the only other surviving PC. It was epic, but it was really nasty!

We played the B5 module with 0 XP 1ed AD&D characters with DMG rules about negative hit points in effect and 4d6 drop the lowest rolled in order. It took us many many sessions to clear it (which is one reason I don’t think that CaW is so high-prep, make the content nasty and random enough and you can string out a limited amount of prep across a whole bunch of sessions). My fighter didn’t gain a level until the end of session four.

Enjoyable thread.

When someone mentioned that D&D is often players' first introduction to the hobby, I wondered whether a CAS or CAW system would be a better introductory point.

I’d say that if you have an experienced DM and newbie players CaW is generally a superior introduction. In order to appreciate CaS you have to understand the tactical rules and how to use them, which is hard to get across to new players, while you can play a fun CaW game with players who don’t have a clue how the game works (in my view a key advantage of CaW play, there’ll always be players who NEVER learn who the rules work well enough to understand how to use them tactically, but they can still come up with clever CaW plans).

For a newbie DM with players who know the rules, I’d go with CaS for the reasons you state. For a game in which neither the players nor the DM have played before; I’d go with CaW with a well-written module with clear and specific DM instructions that provides a small sandbox with high walls.

Well, I can't of course know how any given person runs their campaign...

That being said, I think if you were to closely examine what you do in enough depth you'd find that there are a structure of conventions that are a bit like arms limitation treaties. The DM and the players abide within certain 'boxes' and if they don't then things can break down.

Even the finest sandbox can't be detailed enough to tell you exactly, without any DM adjudication, exactly what the members of the thieves guild can and can't get up to when someone messes with them. You may have a list of how many thieves and whatnot of what levels and what items they have, and etc. but in a real living society there are so many other factors. How much time and energy do they have to put into a vendetta? Which officials exactly can they bribe and how often and at what cost? Which of the various secrets of the city do they know exactly? Will they torch a whole block of the town to get back at you or is that really beyond what they're willing to do?

Yet these are exactly the sort of questions that "full war" will bring up. The DM will have to rule on these things, even if those rulings are made rather subconsciously and not explicitly. We choose what tables to roll on, and when, and how to interpret the results. We decide when and how the bad guys will come up with and execute plans, etc. It is my thesis that FAR MORE of what actually happens, even in the most structured sandbox, is a reflection of the DM's will and unspoken and unacknowledged conventions about the boundaries of what will and will not work in play.

So in the end 'CaW' is really more of a limited sort of 'brushfire' between the players and the DM than an all-out war. Each side knows (or soon learns) that there is some 'territory' within the whole space of possible game play where the 'fun part' is. Several things bound this, but one of the primary ones is that the players need a significant degree of agency in order to stay interested in the game. If all they do is react constantly to almost unanticipateable attacks from enemies that have no precise limits on what they can do then they'll tend to lose that agency, so the PCs are generally far more the 'active' participants in the story by convention. Other bounds are things like propriety, there are generally certain sorts of acts and imagery that are 'not fun' in a game, and it is VERY uncommon for those bounds to be exceeded (though I know of a few groups who's limits are less strict than others).

You bring up some good points here. It’s impossible to remove DM partiality entirely, but to make CaW work the players always have to feel like they won it was because they were lucky and smart (not because of the DM let them) and when they lost it was because they were dumb and unlucky (not because the DM is a bastard). So there’s tension here.

As for as how to relieve it keeping the sandbox small (at least to start out) so the DM has to fiat less in play can help as do random tables, as has already been mentioned and rule systems like Adventurer Conqueror King has (which answer a lot of questions about “what can an angry thieves guild do?”). Another trick I learned from my current DM is when you have to decide something out of the blue, don’t decide it, decide the range of options and then roll randomly. It’s still fiat, but the fiat is blunted a bit. If you do that, have random tables/notes to fall back on and make sure to only make decisions that really screw the PCs over if they’ve given you enough rope to justify hanging them (for example when, in an old campaign, my character murdered a priest he mistakenly thought was evil he noted a journal lying open in his bedroom, which my character didn’t bother looking at and when the lynch mob was on my character’s heels all I could do was be angry at myself for not reading the journal rather than the DM for tricking me) it’ll hold together, but the illusion that they’re interacting with the world rather than with the DM’s brain will always be to some extent an illusion, but it’s an illusion that’s important to roleplaying.

 

[Kynn]

I agree with Abdul. There is definitely a point where a ruthless CaW DM could go to far.

Adventurers meet for the first time in an inn.

Inn explodes.

I'm usually a CaS GM, but I may steal this for my next campaign start.

 

[Hassassin]

I'm usually a CaS GM, but I may steal this for my next campaign start.

Me too. That's only going too far if they all die.

 

[S'mon]

I'm not trying to imply that "all out war" doesn't exist as a THEME, but I am stating it really isn't viable for a game to actually do it. There are always limits, even if they're rather implicit and now and then violated. The DM always limits the capabilities of the bad guys and does so in ways that tend to put the initiative in the hands of the players.

I think limiting the bad guys to give PCs a chance is a pretty common approach, but looking back on my high-school 1e AD&D campaign (the one where several PCs became gods), it was a 'pure' CAW campaign - it would never have occurred to me to limit the bad guys in any way. They were just as vicious as the PCs and used all resources available to them. The only protection the PCs had was what was inherent to the AD&D rules system - high level PCs are extremely robust. In extremis NPCs would even 'cheat' - when PC Thrin became god of swords and had a ward-pact against sword special powers, the Scarlet Brotherhood sent an assassin after him armed with a vorpal battle axe.
And I think my NPCs used scry-buff-teleport more often than the PCs did!

I remember being disappointed with 3e when we got to the kind of levels where unrestricted CAW really got going in 1e, and I realised the 3e rules made it unplayable, so that I had to arbitrarily nerf bad guy tactics.

 

[S'mon]

I once decided to run a little "lets ignore gamist conventions" adventure, basically because of this very sort of debate we once had at our table. Suffice it to say it got ugly pretty fast. It was interesting for a bit, but pretty soon things began to break down. For one thing an omniscient and effectively omnipotent DM (but especially omniscient) is a very unfair adversary. You can SAY you will not meta-game, but for the DM there's no clear distinction since he's got roles in play that require exactly that. Nor IMHO is it possible for anyone to be an 'impartial' DM. There's simply no such thing as a sandbox so elaborately detailed or a rule system so thorough that this is really possible. Even if the DM BELIEVES he or she is impartial good luck getting the players to believe that after a few brutal murder downs.

I've never had any problem playing my antagonists impartially, within their capabilities. And in my 1e AD&D game I never had a player dispute my impartiality - their PCs might die like flies, but they could see that it was an emergent result of play. I did have a player, a good friend, in a 4e game a fortnight ago who seemed to think it was unfair that a demon focused on his relatively fragile character rather than the Defender, then used an attack to finish off his already-dying PC. This was after the PC had already been felled & healed earlier in the fight, so the demon knew that 'dying' =/= 'out'.

IME it's in CAS, not CAW, that players talk about 'playing fair' as a constraint on the GM. 4e supports this by telling DMS NOT to target dying PCs, even though the easy-revival rules make that tactically optimal.

 

[S'mon]

Interesting example, because one of the AD&D books (the DMG, I think, in its discussion of poison in the game) goes to great lengths to explain why this wouldn't be viable in-game (because the Assassin's Guild would object) but also concedes that ultimately the goal is to keep the game fun, and mass poisoning doesn't fit with that aim. The class description entries in the PHB on poison use played a similar role, I think.

I think that was more a recognition that the poison save-or-die rules were broken and therefore needed to be limited in application. IMO EGG created an unfair, unrealistic system - poison SoD - to screw over players, then realised it had to be kept out of players' hands. True CAW IMO requires a more realistic baseline - eg it might be relatively easy to poison the well and cause the enemy to fall sick over several days, but they aren't all going to drop dead from one taste. Likewise with a lot of PC and NPC tactics - not every roof is so fragile it will collapse when damaged, for instance. A good CAW DM requires a good sense of a plausible universe.

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION], that sounds plausible.

 

[S'mon]

For me at least, a lot of the OSR isn't "I want to game like I did when I was 12 and never change" so much as "Damn did I do a lot of dumb things when I DMed at age 12, it's great to be able to read about how to run the old rules that I screwed up so badly as a kid in a way that actually WORKS."

Heh, yeah.

My 12-year-old GMing was great , but it's definitely very interesting to return to 1e AD&D with the benefit of 27 years of experience.

 

[S'mon]

Yet these are exactly the sort of questions that "full war" will bring up. The DM will have to rule on these things...

Well, yeah. Making rulings is the essence of being a DM. If you're afraid to make rulings you should not be DMing. And if your players don't trust you to make rulings then they should not be playing with you.

 

[Hassassin]

What if they were player-initiative quests (which is what 4e play aims at - DMG p 103)?

I think running together player initiative and combat-as-war is conflating two (or more) things. Combat-as-war seems to be more concerned with scene-framing conventions and action resolution mechanics.

The whole concept of a "quest" is rather artificial, but player initiative isn't particular to either style. I don't think the CAW/CAS distinction actually works very well for NPC actions, which is what the quote originally referred to, but player-initiative quests are usually more about goals than strategies.

What I meant is that a plot arc where the party cuts an enemy's supply route, for example, is possible in CAS play, but it's probably a background to the encounters the PCs find themselves in rather than their way to overcome an encounter or other challenge.