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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Xetheral" data-source="post: 8242134" data-attributes="member: 6802765">I tend to find that in most Combat-as-War games (defined as the expectation that players use pre-initiative strategy to engineer encounters to be lopsided in their favor) tanking works better than it does in Combat-as-Sport games (defined as the expectation that characters use post-initiative tactics to win encounters as they are presented by the DM). This is because in a CaW game, the outcome is often decided before initiative is even rolled, so there is less cost in RPing target choices during the actual battle based on a character's immediate circumstances (i.e. not ignoring the opponent in your face with a sword), rather than strictly optimizing target selection based on the game mechanics.In a CaS game, however, since the difficulty of the encounters is determined by the DM and largely static, there is usually more pressure to resolve the fight "optimally" either to ensure victory (for a DM-planned climactic encounter) or to minimize resource expenditure (for a DM-planned resource-draining encounter).For the same reason, I tend to see retreats and outright routs much more often in CaW games, whereas CaS tends to lead to more fights to the finish as the encounter difficulty was calibrated by the CaS DM on that basis. (The "sport" analogy here is particularly apt, as the expectation in most sports is that the losing team still continues to play to the end of the game, rather than fleeing the stadium when things look grim. War, by contrast, has no such expectations.)</blockquote>

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